Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

“Leana are you in?” the blacksmith asked, opening the door to her office. He had just appeared out of thin air only moments before. It was early evening when he finished, so his question was rather rhetorical.

“Seth? Did you finish early?” she asked slightly surprised, looking up from her papers. The bard always felt surprised when he saw her flawless appearance despite working really hard. Not to devalue Mary, but despite becoming the Chosen of Hestia, the scribe was still unable to make it look as easy as Leana did.

Right now, he could hardly see a difference between the Leana sitting before him now and the chiqué princess he met for the first time when Yulecat’s Fur still used to be her bodyguards. If anything, she became even more fancy, now wearing tailormade stuff from Neeco Boos, instead of the stuff that could be bought in a boutique.

“Yeah, I just finished the last item made from the stuff we got from Y-City. Look it’s a staff that-” What followed was a short, very quick monologue during which the blacksmith described and at times demonstrated the powers of the new weapon

Leana watched and listened in mild wonder. She was slowly getting used to Seth waving around national treasures like they were a new toy. Even as one of the many royal offspring of Chrona, she only ever got the chance to see legendary items during big festivities, usually at the waist of heroes or great generals.

The exposure to legendary items saw a dramatic rise after she truly joined Minas Mar and was made privy to the secrets of the group. Even though her heart still jumped a little, with every new item, she had gotten much calmer over the past months.

“But enough of that, Wedan said you wanted to speak to me?” the bard finally ended his monologue and put away the weapon of mass destruction.

“Right, I need your okay on this,” Leana said as she pushed a small stack of papers across the table, for the Tower Master to read. Sitting down, Seth gave the document a once over.

While Seth had made himself seem busy pumping out legendary items, other people also did their work independently. Mary and Leana, together with the representative from Chrona, were in the thick of negotiations with Arget Nore to have them release any slaves they still owned.

Naturally, the undead were not all too willing to let go of their juicy vital slaves easily. It was a heated back and forth between the chosen representatives, a debate Seth had heard next to nothing of except that it was happening.

The stack of paper she had placed before him was the newest draft of their agreement, including concessions they were willing to make if Arget Nore released the slaves. After reading the paper for a quarter-hour, he realized why she asked him for his okay.

Seth had not expected that the undead would be so stubborn that Leana had to go this far. One of the key offers in the draft was that Minas Mar would grant them a discount of 10% on Golems, for every one ori huma released from their custody.

That meant the undead would be able to exchange 10 people for 1 free golem. Since Seth was not just the Tower Master, but also the guy who would be making the golems, although through an automatized process, he was the first instance she had to ask, before actually making such an offer.

Suddenly, he had a great idea. Grabbing a pen and paper, the blacksmith started writing down a list.

“We will go with your proposal, but restrict it to the lowest-tier stone golems. In exchange, they have to give at least three of these in advance and they have to open their borders for trade. Tell them, that we will also exchange golems for natural resources such as <Necronite> and the contents of the list,” Seth said after a moment of pondering.

"You couldn't ask Chrona for these, so you trade them with Arget Nore. Not bad, " Leana commented with a chuckle. It was a list of master-tier enchantments Seth learned about but had been unable to get his hands on.

"This is good, actually.."

The stone golems were almost free to make, so there was only minimal loss of time when they gave some away for free. Still, they couldn’t risk looking like pushovers by offering too good of a deal. There were various ways they could juggle discounts and conditions in this matter, but the enchantments were a clear price. The two brainstormed this for a while until Leana had to leave. Unlike Seth, the poor woman had appointments.

“Maybe I should take stock on our current storage...” Seth mused. Since the staff was finished, the blacksmith decided to check on the golem forge, which had been put on a new floor below his workshop.

Here, the room was filled by the incessant mechanical sound of the golem forge at work. At minute intervals, new stone golems kept leaving the Golem Forge, they were still the basic models equipped with Forgebrand’s original Golem ego circuit.

After seeing the reactions of Arget Nores Envoys, Seth had postponed his idea to integrate the automaton circuits of Hephaestus in these. Since they were already hyped about these versions, why make a better one the base model? Obviously, they would have to pay extra for that.

Seth stepped to the golem forge and checked the crafting station's own inventory, to see that it had almost run out of materials again. Sometimes, he felt like someone shoveling coal into a steam engine, just that he was pushing all of the bedrock and debris the drones had amassed when making the new floors, into the machine.

Using ordinary stone as the materials, production cost him virtually nothing. On the other hand, the Golem Forge kept producing rather powerful golems from it. Looking at the back, where the room kept expanding into the darkness below the mountains of Delta, he saw rows upon rows of uniform stone warriors.

The blacksmith had started producing these the moment he offered the deal to Arget Nore and the result was several thousand low-grade stone golems that could keep their own against a lv.50 dungeon boss of similar size.

Although this did not seem very strong, compared to Seth’s current power level, it still meant that it would take a lv.50 party of adventurers to take one Golem down with moderate difficulty. And the adventurers in question were ori humas, not ordinary adventurers.

One golem was equivalent to a party of ori humas and there were already thousands of golems. Seth was really starting to get curious about how much power the Golem Forge actually had. At times he had been using it without pause, constantly running, but it never stopped or ran out of power.

Did the materials he had been giving it simply not put any strain on the machine? What was the limit of things the forge would be able to do? Maybe it was worth a try to put better quality materials into the golem forge and see what the auto-generation was able to come up with.

But that would have to wait until he was able to make Arget Nore pay for his experiments. On that note, Seth held no fear that the undead would be able to use the golems against him, or the people of Urth. Apart from his <Fail Safe> skill that was automatically added during the production, he added another nifty little feature which was the only modification he did.

The Cores of the golem, currently precious stones, gems, and monster cores that had started piling up in their storages because only a few of their new blacksmiths and alchemists actively used them were rigged to self-destruct if a non-hostile tried to get a peek at the inner workings of his golems.

Yes, Seth already predicted that the undead would try and reverse engineer his golems. He was quite good when it came to not trusting people, or corpses in this case. Most of them were heartless and cold, literally, in this case.

Although these were Forgebrand’s secrets, they now also belonged to Seth, and he had no intention of sharing his technology with some rotten undead. Although the explosion would not be too powerful, simply because the core materials were all pretty low-grade, it would still stop anyone from gleaming useful information from his creations.

A high-ranking lich would at best get a scare from the stone golem suddenly going up in smoke, but things would be different if they tried the same with one of the higher tiers Seth was planning to offer them.

Simple golem knights on golem steeds, animal-shaped golems for quicker fighting, there were many things Seth wanted to try later on, once he secured their funding, Stone and Iron Golems were only the bottom of the barrel.

When he reached that point, he would obviously be using better materials, making one of the more expensive golem’s self-destruction an attack even a high-ranking Lich wouldn’t be able to get away from unscathed.

With a scheming smile, Seth thought of the second business practice this modification would enable. Once a Golem was damaged in battle, Arget Nore wouldn’t be able to repair it themselves since it would blow up if they got near it, depending on the degree of damage.

This fortunate circumstance would enable Minas Mar to offer a repair service and charge them again! The stone golems wouldn’t be worth repairing, but Golem Knights? Or Golem beasts? The higher price tier would really hurt their pockets if they were out of order after getting severely damaged once.

Then he would offer them a horrendous price to repair them, reached the limits of decent business practices, but just low enough that the bone piles would pay up, while grinding their rotten, dry, and broken teeth. This was Seth’s revenge for what he had to experience back in Deltan when he barely managed to get away with his life.

“Since this is cleared, I will return now. It has already gotten late,” Seth finally said when their conversation came to an end.

“Alright. Don’t forget, Gallwell will arrive tomorrow in the morning. We had already prepared a press conference at 10.”

Seth twitched at the mentioning of a press conference, but nodded as he left the office. Although he would have preferred to confer the legendary hammer during a private meeting, he was clear that this was needed, as they would officially announce the date for the tournament tomorrow, too.

It was all necessary to gather power of Existence.