Wizard of the Abyss - Chapter 272

Chapter 272: The Ark (3)

TL/ED – Miso

“You’re better off watching the process for yourself. Come, take a look.”

The Dwarves took me along to their forge.

I called it a forge, but it was really just an ordinary house. Though inside that house there were bellows and a hearth, hammers, and ores of every kind piled high.

For Dwarves who were supposed to be unrivaled at smelting, the place seemed less professional than even the Empire’s forges, in that the living quarters and the workspace weren’t separated at all.

Of course, that thought vanished without a trace the moment they casually plunged their hands into the furnace.

“?”

“Hmm…”

As I doubted my own eyes at the sight of one of them handling the molten metal with his bare hands, that Dwarf scrunched up his face.

It wasn’t so much that the heat pained him; his expression looked more like dissatisfaction. He shot a sidelong glare at a companion nearby and griped at him.

“You melted something weird again, didn’t you? Why is the temperature so low?”

“Why’s it always me? I haven’t even come in today!”

Without another word, they naturally began dividing up the work.

That speed – it was closer to a factory churning out ready-made goods, each step calculated down to the second, than to anything resembling craftsmanship.

“If a Human’s going to use it, we can’t go with too heavy an alloy…”

“Oi, keep the edge reasonably sharp. Sheathe it wrong and it’ll lop someone’s leg off.”

“You idiot, at this rate it couldn’t even cut bamboo.”

-Tssssss!

Metal melted, was hammered, was ground and refined.

The lump of steel I had brought took on the shape of a sword in an instant, in less than ten minutes.

At an Imperial forge, the quenching alone would have taken over an hour. These true masters dipped the sword a few times into something resembling oil, then wrapped leather around the hilt with practiced ease and handed it to me.

“For a Human, this is more than fitting.”

“…Is the quality all right?”

“Heh.”

At my question, the Dwarves curled their lips as if they found me adorable and gestured with their chins for me to see for myself.

“The truth is, I haven’t had much occasion to examine swords…”

“Then you’ll find out soon enough.”

“…?”

Not understanding what he meant, I picked up the short sword that gave off a strangely reddish glow, and the moment I lifted it- I was forced to understand.

“…”

“Well?”

I forgot the words I was supposed to say and marveled at its precision.

No matter how many times I scanned it with Current Sense, I couldn’t find the slightest flaw, not the smallest misalignment.

Its weight was balanced left to right and top to bottom with a perfection that was almost obscene, a masterpiece for the ages. Enough that I could swear every Knight in the world would pay any fortune to get their hands on this sword.

After turning the sword this way and that for a while, I soon came to my senses and forced a smile.

“Mm, thank you.”

“…Your face doesn’t look too pleased, though?”

The Dwarves cocked their heads at my halfhearted smile.

One of them came over wearing a kindly smile, smacking the others on the backs of their heads.

“You fools, he said he doesn’t know much about swords. He’s just a kid, so of course he might not understand.”

“Is that so?”

“Child, what you’re holding right now is a masterpiece of the age that no Human has ever made or could ever own. What I’m saying is, take this to your king and he’ll surely reward you handsomely.”

I nodded along as I listened, and replied-

“Ah, so this is what counts as a masterpiece.”

“…”

The kindly Dwarf’s expression crumpled in an instant.

He seemed to be demanding an explanation, so I bowed my head in turn and handed the sword back, holding it in both hands.

“I’m sorry. Swords of this caliber are scattered all over the country where I live, so a product of this quality probably wouldn’t be enough to convince His Majesty.”

“P-product?!”

The Dwarves’ eyes went wide with shock at the word “product”, of all words, and then they glared at me.

“What we make are not products, they are works of art! And Humans cannot create works of art! We can accept that you don’t know any better, but we will not let an insult slide!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I had not the slightest intention of staining your honor. But I can prove that this falls within the realm of products.”

“What?”

“Would you all step out of here for a moment?”

Holding a piece of raw steel ore that lay scattered nearby, I spoke flatly.

“Even if I’ve never had an eye for swords, I have secretly watched the Empire’s craftsmen at work and picked up their skill from behind their backs. Give me just ten minutes and I’ll make you a ‘product’ far superior to the sword you just made.”

When I stressed the word “product”, the Dwarves, who had been stunned into silence, soon began to laugh it off as if it were absurd.

“Do you even know what you’re saying? A brat who’s barely seen a sword can make a finer work than us, who’ve bathed in molten metal our whole lives?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I was saying.”

“-Up to now we could have let it pass as the whining of a clueless child, but that remark we cannot overlook.”

One of the Dwarves, his face thick with beard, stepped forward and met my gaze, glaring with vicious eyes.

“From this moment on, every word out of your mouth had better be heavier than any metal. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

I nodded, then answered with a faint smile.

“It seems you’ve been trapped beneath this desert for so very long that you’ve lost your touch entirely.”

“……….”

As their expressions twisted ever more menacingly, I quickly went on.

“Since you don’t believe me, let’s make a wager. That steel my country gifted you is, in fact, ore mined from a new mine.”

“We know that. We who have dug through every land in the entire world have never heard of or seen metal with such bizarre properties.”

“You haven’t seen it because you only dug through land. That mine lies beneath the sea.”

“Th-the sea?”

At that, the Dwarves began murmuring among themselves.

“Beneath the sea? It’s true we’ve never dug anywhere like that…”

“Couldn’t it be under a lake too?”

“Idiot, under a lake is just underground.”

“They must have used that magic Humans wield to reach somewhere so deep. Strange creatures, the lot of them.”

-Clap. Clapping my hands once to gather their attention, I brought up exactly what they would most want to hear.

“But here’s the thing: all we’ve done is scrape a little ore from the very mouth of the mine. The mining hasn’t even begun- and our surveys have revealed that it’s brimming with minerals never seen or heard of before.”

“…Never?”

“Yes. If the sword you made turns out to be of higher quality than the one I make- I’ll hand the ownership of this mine over to you.”

The Dwarves’ faces lit up with interest.

But the foul-tempered-looking ones weren’t so easily won over.

“It couldn’t possibly happen, but what if your quality is the higher one?”

“Hm.”

I tilted my head as if I hadn’t expected such a question.

“Then just make it again.”

“…What?”

“As I said before, I need to prove that I met you. So you simply have to make another sword of a quality that satisfies me. I want nothing else beyond that.”

“Has this kid lost his mind? Do you really hold the ownership of this mine?”

“I’m a fairly high-ranking figure in my own right. If my words were lies, how could I have brought a vicious criminal like that here, bound in chains?”

“W-well, I suppose. Fair enough.”

The fact that I had captured Brimdal and brought him along convinced the Dwarves at once.

“What are the terms?”

“The same amount of time. In other words, I’ll forge a sword in here over ten minutes. We strike them together with equal force, and whichever one gets scratched or breaks first is the loser. How does that sound?”

“Let me say this in advance: no matter what trick you use, no matter what sorcery you work on the metal, you can never beat our work of art. A sword we forged out of copper has sliced a steel ingot like it was pudding.”

“In that case, you may as well start getting ready to mine the new ore.”

At those words, the Dwarves, their eyes now glistening not with anger but with greed, left the forge one by one.

“Don’t go back on your word!”

“What an idiot of a Human…”

“He’s overconfident because in his own mind he’s got the skill. Humans are a race that lives off their own self-regard to begin with, aren’t they.”

“They’re just ugly, short-lived Elves. Not a single redeeming trait.”

…That last remark stung a fair bit more than I’d expected.

The bushy-bearded Dwarf who had stayed behind watched the others go, let out a raspy groan as if displeased, and then fixed on me with another glare.

“What are you plotting?”

“Sorry?”

“You arrest Brimdal, you bring us ore that we Dwarves are laying eyes on for the first time, and you pick faults with a flawless sword- I can’t see it as anything but you having some scheme up your sleeve.”

“If that were the case, then surely there’d be some catch buried in the terms I proposed, wouldn’t there?”

I spread my arms wide as though I’d been wronged.

“It’s not as if I asked you to grant any wish I please if I win, I only asked for a new sword. If you win, you get the mine; if you lose, you’ll just have to spend another ten minutes. Is there a problem with that?”

“Hmm…”

The Dwarf kept looking at me as if something still didn’t sit right with him, then reluctantly left the forge.

-Thud. The door shut, and I was left alone in the forge.

“…This is killing me.”

I let out a sigh and headed for the furnace.

For now, I had succeeded in provoking the Dwarves.

The next step was to beat them on the pure quality of the sword.

Was it possible?

‘Absolutely not.’

It was the finest sword in quality I had ever laid eyes on.

How was I, who had barely even touched solid iron, let alone molten metal, supposed to beat them?

And even so, using Sea Water to secretly cut their blade the instant the swords met would be tricky too. They’d find it suspicious for a sword that was clearly the inferior of the two to somehow come out on top against the superior one.

I had to forge a masterwork convincing enough to satisfy them, then win a genuine duel of blades by cutting clean through their own masterwork.

This was possible.

Because my material was nothing as crude as metal.

“…What is it?”

I grabbed Nightchase by the scruff of the neck and dragged her out of the cup.

She must have read something in my blank expression, because she dangled from my fingers with an uneasy look on her face.

“You can get into anywhere, can’t you?”

“You yank me out all of a sudden and that’s what you ask? I can’t get into just anywhere.”

“Anyway, that form of yours is just a fake Linmel pulled out of my memories. Which means you can imitate other things too.”

“…I’m not an Outer God anymore. That’s nothing but a tiny scrap of what’s left of me. I have no idea what you’re thinking, but you’d be better off dropping it.”

“I’m not very good at forging swords. So I’m going to use a slightly better material.”

I seized Nightchase with the Authority of Creation.

When she thrashed her body about with a panicked face, trying to resist, I moved her in front of the molten metal this time.

“If you’d rather become the Emille Bell, then so be it.” [TL: The Emille Bell is a legendary Korean bell said to have been cast by sacrificing a living child in the molten metal; the threat is to forge her into the sword the same way.]

“…”

The Dwarves had had no chance of winning from the very moment they accepted the wager.

It was only natural.

After all, there was no way ignorant Dwarves would know of such an advanced marvel as the Ego Sword.