A Blacksmith in a the Countryside

To Leon and Tomoe, this question was a very valid one as Tecia was nowhere near the bush or them. However, if any of them were able to peek into Arwin's mind, they would be able to hear Arwin saying his one desire at the moment.

'I just want to stay like this for a little bit longer.'

As Arwin was still being held by Tomoe, Leon stood up and looked around the entire forest with his hands covering his eyes from the shine the sun managed to squeeze through the dense trees and leaves.

That's when he saw it, next to the hobgoblin who was face down in a decent-sized puddle of its blood was Tecia who was yelling at it.

The moment the fight ended, while her two friends went to help Arwin. She instead chose to walk closer to the now-dead hobgoblin and vent her anger of being struck by the hobgoblin.

"Stupid stupid stupid monster!"

She proceeded to kick the hobgoblin, however, instead of making her anger dissipate it only brought her pain. Even though she had huge beefy metal gauntlets, due to being low leveled and wasting money on booze, her boots weren't armored at all and were made of thin leather. This combined with the fact that even though the hobgoblin was dead, its skin was like sheet metal, only caused her to bruise her toes and maybe crack a few toenails.

Tecia clutched her foot as she hopped around on one foot and cursed at the corpse once again. Meanwhile, the other three were staring at Tecia during the whole thing with perplexity, the moment she hurt her foot and started cursing the three just starting to laugh like someone had made a funny joke.

Tecia at that moment, to the three, seemed like a child who accidentally tripped and when getting back up hit her head on a chair.

After that whole fiesta, the four of them made sure to find the cores of the goblins and hobgoblins. The only real difference between the cores at first glance was that the goblin cores were about the size of a marble while the hobgoblin cores were about the size of a baseball. However even with the size difference the hobgoblin core still wouldn't be worth too much, this was due to the fact that hobgoblins pretty much never used magic, so even though their core and potential ability to manipulate mana were greater than their goblin counterparts.

The hobgoblin core suffered the fate of all cheap cores like goblins did, due to the fact that humans used cores mainly for their ability to transmit and conduct magic power. Cores like goblins who were small and were almost ineffective in conducting magic power, as regular goblins never used magic, made them practically worthless. While hobgoblin cores were bigger, the fact that they also didn't use magic at all made their cores horrendously underdeveloped and barely able to conduct a sliver of magic power, despite having the potential to.

In fact, these cores previously have been worthless besides maybe decoration or for cheap jewelry, however advancements in tinkering with cores to find better ways to store magic power and more allowed some people to discover that these previously "worthless" cores could be processed to improve their ability to function magic.

This made these types of cores sellable, however since the process took a lot of worthless cores to even make a small amount of decent material. For example, all these cores combined most likely would only be able to produce a couple of micrograms or even worse depending on how advanced the processors were. The price for selling one wasn't sky high due to this. However, to E-Tier adventurers who couldn't fight anything with a potent core, these cores and the small quest and job rewards were the backbone of their income. This was the same with the four here, although they weren't as bad financially as some of their fellow E-Tier adventurers.

After the group had collected the cores and anything else valuable, they headed towards the nearest village instead of Verin due to the fact that Arwin was pretty much paralyzed for now as he had exerted too much mana at one time that his body was not ready to handle or release. When they got there, they talked to the sparse villagers who lived in the extremely small village.

The group eventually found out the quest/job they had just completed was originally brought to attention by the village they were at. Apparently, it was first discovered that the goblins were nearby when the few children playing along the roadside saw the goblins hunting for food and ran to their parents to report it. Eventually, they contacted the local authorities and the Bureau issued the quest.

Visitors were very rare for such a small and remote village that even the village head came out and greeted them. Eventually, the four of them found out from the village head that such a small village actually had a blacksmith.

Leading them close to the center of their small village, the village head was quite old and used a cane to support himself as he walked.

"Although we are quite small, we do in fact have our own blacksmith. He is my son and actually studied in the same city you fine folks are from."

Leon, who was at the front of the four-man group as Tecia and Tomoe helped Arwin walk, spoke up, while continuing to follow the village head.

"Your son apprenticed blacksmithing in Verin?"

The old village head eventually came to a small cobble building which emitted clanging sounds that sounded like a hammer battering a piece of metal.

"He did, in fact, he's our little village's pride as he even was supposed to go be an assistant for some blacksmith in the capital. However, before he left, he came back to spend time with his family and friends back here at the village."

While saying that, the village head puffed out his chest as he was very proud that his son had a brighter future than most from the countryside.

The group was quite surprised to hear this, although it was hard for people to have the opportunity to work as a craft or trade person in the capital for anyone living in a small city like Verin. Anyone given an opportunity to work in the capital, who came from the countryside and especially the smallest of villages like the one they were in had to be a prodigy blessed with good fortune at least as it was exponentially harder than being from a small city like Verin.

The village head knocked on the door with his cane and a burly and deep voice that told its listeners of the size of its owner shouted back over the sound of fire and clanging.

"YES POPS?!"