Fuller Sword?

Even after another hour the time in the tutorial did not change at all and I could not help but wonder how long the game's AI would drag out my tutorial. Normally, you drop the rescue off at home and then you move on with your life. Now, though, I broke the tutorial and instead of leaving the girl in a temporary server to disappear forever I am taking her into the rest of the game with me.

Once she was cleaned up and in fresh clothes, though, the girl was every bit as pretty as I expected her to be but I did not change the amount of distance between us at all. Regardless of how nice she looked I did not intend to get involved with an NPC and the memory of her previous underwear was permanently scarred into my mind. There was no getting over that.

However, I still walked with her through the town to one of the businesses by the road. This one was a not small one-story house next to an open-walled smithy. In this smithy there was a middle aged man and a guy around my age hard at work pumping bellows and hammering on anvils. At least the tutorial was still going to give me my life skill lessons.

"Lana!" The boy who was my age calls out when he notices Lana and I walking up from the back of their property. Raising his hand and smiling brightly like THAT kind of childhood friend as the adult turns at looks at us curiously. However, it seemed to take the boy a second to notice I was there and when he finally did his smile was cut in half in an almost comical fashion.

"Bitro," Lana calls out in kind, raising her hand in greeting while smiling for the first time since I had met her. Apparently, they were THOSE kind of childhood friends. "Rocar," she adds to the actual smith, "I… we… can we talk?"

As that brief moment of happy left her face, the blacksmith seemed to understand that something was wrong and hurried over while barking orders at his son. Then the two of them walked a short distance away and I found myself left alone with a very suspicious Bitro. "I don't know you and you don't know me so keep looking at me like that and we're fighting," I warn the boy who would look over at me with unpleasantly narrowed eyes.

It was not that I felt particularly bothered by his behavior or attitude but the free experience of winning a duel was always welcome. The boy, though, cowed and just stopped looking at me until his father and Lana came back. Before I knew it, the big and burly blacksmith had walked up and thrown his arms around me in a giant bear hug with glistening eyes.

"You, boy, should be a hero," the blacksmith says, much to the shock and horror of his son who had stopped all work to watch me be hugged. "It doesn't matter when you showed up, all that matters is that you showed up and you saved Lana. If there's ever anything you need, boy, don't hesitate to ask me."

"If you could show me how to use the equipment around your smithy and let me use some of your materials, that would be nice," I say blankly once I was finally put down, receiving a strange look from everybody but Lana.

"Hack is… different," Lana suddenly mumbles, for some reason feeling as if she needed to explain something on my behalf or even defend me while being looked at like I was an emotionless bug. "But he's a good person, I promise."

I did not plan on making any such promises nor did I plan to point out that I would have killed the girl had she ruined my perfect tutorial ratings. Instead I just kept the same bland expression on my face and say, "You said ask, I asked. I'm sorry if I asked too much."

"Are you sure it's safe for you to be around someone like… that?" Rocar asks while giving me a newly appraising look that seemed like I had lost respect. Just shut up and teach me how to smack metal with a hammer so I can get the Blacksmith title already!

Twenty minutes later, while Lana went inside with Bitro to handle some business or something with the blacksmith's wife, I was outside in the smithy with Rocar learning about the different equipment, tools, and basic materials. I already had plenty of experience with this stuff through other games and a couple of months spent studying up on smithing in reality, but it was still useful.

Some games would try to make modernized improvements on old techniques and equipment for the convenience of players, other games would have a sabotaged system that made it hard as hell for players to craft on their own. This game, though, kept everything as simple as it was natural and traditional. What was strange, though, was that they had a large grinding box for recycling old metal items and weapons beside their smelting furnace.

When Rocar was done showing me around and how to work the equipment I asked where I would go to exchange goblin trophies for cash. Surprisingly, the inn here doubled as a mercenary guild outpost but Rocar himself exchanged my hobgoblin and goblin ears for fifty coins himself. He was a good man and I liked him, but I did not care because everything here but Lana and the dog would disappear when we left.

After receiving my equipment lessons and then being shown how to forge a simple iron dagger I was granted the Blacksmith title with the passive perk that all of my blacksmithing creations would be ten-percent more effective.

When I showed Rocar my goblin and vermin skins, he took me down the road to a tannery and asked the tanner there to teach me how to both treat my hides both with simple brains or salts or by curing it in a vat with what ingredients like simmered oak bark for brown and red coloring.

Once my hides were all finished I was shown how to craft them into several simple pieces of armor like a boiled hardened leather vest woven with softer hide for padding or a pair of carefully creased and waxed leggings also woven with padding. Thanks to the fact that goblins had a demonic ancestry, the goblin skin armor augmented with tree vermin hide granted me three-percent resistance to fire per piece and two-percent resistance to magic.

Because my sweater was full of important pockets I wore my extra eight defense from the vest under my sweater but kept the extra eight defense from the chaps on the outside of my quilted trousers. Because I had already learned everything necessary for making armor and weapons so far I let Rocar take me back to his place and asked if he r his wife could show me how to cook properly.

With a Cook or Chef title, one of which had to be earned through professional means, the food a player made no longer just satisfied the character but could also heal the character and even grant some buffs at greater levels or when one had the Chef title.

After cooking a big meal for Rocar's small household I went back out to the forge with the materials Rocar had given me to play with. While I was given several pounds of both iron and steel I decided to just hold onto these proper materials for now and instead tossed the One Reliable Rapier and Dead Man's Dirk into the grinding box. In the box were several sets of large metal rollers with differently shaped teeth for gripping metal objects and crushing them to pieces.

Usually a player would need a Strength of at least twenty to comfortably work a machine like this but even with sixteen I was able to struggle away for ten or so minutes before grinding the weapons into scrap. Taking the casting pot under the grinder's hopper that now contained broken metal pieces and some bits of wood or leather from the handles, I carefully open a large earthen dome smelting furnace and shove the pot inside before closing it up and working the bellows. Half an hour later I had an eight-pound pot of molten steel.

Retrieving the pot with a set of very large metal tongs, I carefully pour its contents into a large stone mold for a long bar of steel. The mold space was about two feet long and over an inch deep but comfortably complain the near ten pounds of molten steel. When the bar of steel finally cooled and solidified it was only a little shallower than the actual mold, making the bare about an inch thick.

Contemplating the level of effort that I should put into my first proper weapon that will be replaced pretty much as soon as I find better materials, I take the bar of recycled steel over to a low sitting brick well surrounded by bellows and full of burning coals to start heating.

Having curiously watched me work in silence so far, Rocar walks up and remarks, "I don't remember showing you how to hammer steel, just how to cast a dagger."

"I don remember asking to be shown how to cast a dagger, just how to use your equipment," I replied with my first real expression to this guy, glancing over with a wink and a grin.

"I see…" Rocar says slowly, watching me watch the bar heat up. "If you would like, I could hold the iron for you so the process is easier and faster. I'm interested to see the quality of what you make, there's already some form of mana involved that has me curious. What are you making?"

Watching the steel begin to glow with a dim red heat throughout the half of the bar lying in the forge well, I say, "I must not be strong enough to have a sense for mana, yet. I don't see or feel anything and I only intended to make a more reliable sword than the weapons it was made from. It won't be long before my trench knife breaks, anyway."

Nodding his head slowly, almost in time with the rise and fall of the bellows I was slowly pumping with my foot, Rocar remains silent for a while until the bar was finally a bright orange-yellow in color that meant it was heated to the point of being soft. Using a pair of tongs to remove the steel from the fire, Rocar brings the steel to a nearby anvil with a small table bearing a few different hammers near the forge well.

Picking up a short handled hammer with a flat and square faced four-unit, kilogram, head and took up position across the anvil from Rocar. "On its side, I'm making an octagonal tang," I say briefly to inform the man that I would be starting from the bottom up with this sword so he held it with the thin side on the anvil. Then, I started carefully raising the hammer up to about chin height and started aiming my heavy downward blows.

Like with working the grinding box scrapper it was recommended to have twenty or more Strength but since I was still in the tutorial I was able to compensate for this with being almost level seven. With each hammer blow that slightly shrank the side of the bar in toward the middle from four inches behind the very end, a combo counter appeared in the corner of my view.

After five careful and heavy blows I suddenly did not have to work so hard to get as much affect and after eight swings I was ready to start on the opposite side. While the steel was still hot the sides of the bar were being mushed into the middle, extending those four inches into a rough square that was now six inches in length. Then it went back into the fire.

By the time the steel was back on the anvil my combo counter was gone but now I did not need to use the same amount of strength. For this step, Rocar was holding the bar so that the corner of the square tang was touching the mostly smooth surface of the high-carbon steel, black anvil and I was lightly extending the tang to a little over eight inches while turning the four corners into four new sides.

"Now," I say to fill the working silence as the other end of the sword goes into the fire, "I'm going to make what I like to call a fuller sword. I'm going to make the blade octagonal like the tang but then the upper and lower faces will be hammered down until the side faces squeeze out and can be hammered into the edges of the sword. Two fullers per face gives twelve fullers of weight reduction and minimal integral damage. Kind of the opposite of making a sword that is fuller, but its a sword design for weight as well as speed paradox and shock resistance with multiple parrying faces."

"It sounds good in principle, and you can certainly forge a tang so far," is all Rocar says, keeping the rest of his thoughts to himself while partially acknowledging both the design and my abilities. He was a fairly reserved man which was a credit to how smart he was. If he was a smith in a city in the actual game, I would not have minded a working relationship with him.

Working from more an an inch above the tang, I work quickly to hammer most of the remaining foot-and-a-half of blade steel into a square before it can cool. Once it was heated again, I only finished squaring the bar back to two feet in length from the untouched guard portion above eight inches of octagonal tang.

The cast bar that had originally been two inches wide by one-and-a-half in depth or thickness by two feet long was now almost three feet in length with a tang roughly half an inch thick and a square 'blade' just over an inch thick from one side to the next.

When I finally finished hammering the corners into sides the blade length was roughly twenty-eight inches from its rounded point to the untouched guard. By the time the seventh and eights sides on the exact left and right had mushroomed enough mass for me the hammer on, the blade had reached thirty inches in length with a slightly sharper rounded point. But, after hammering the blade sides out and adjusting the slopes of the upper and lower sides, the blade was done.

For the guard I simply heated the hilt of the sword again and had Rocar stand the weapon next to the anvil with the untouched steel held on the side of the anvil for hammering. The once one-inch long by one-and-a-half inch square thickness soon became five inches of half-inch thick bars stretching out from below either cutting edge of the sword with some angling from the blade to the guard for redirecting attacks.

Before the sword was ready to start grinding and filing, though, I had Rocar hold the sword back on top of the anvil by either side so that I can hammer the stretched guards down over the side of the anvil and curl them around the front and back of the sword. From a simple cross block to a full hand guard in two easy steps.

Rocar offered to handle the light work of grinding and balancing the sword for me but I had to turn him down. Because of how little work I had done in the process of casting a dagger the dagger did not apply to my Craftier perk. I wanted this sword to be applicable and for that I had to finish what I started.

By now Lana was done with her business in the house and came out to watch with Bitro from the side while I sat at a grinding wheel working its pedal with one foot. First I just gently ground away the carburization on the surface of the steel from carbons escaping into the air while it was hot and soft and then I started slowly reducing the overall mass of the weapon until the blade was reduced to twenty-eight inches in length with five inches of narrowing point above a blade that was a uniform two-and-a-half inches from edge to edge from guard to point base.

Then, using a fuller chisel, I start carving a pair of long beveled groove down the length of the blade's three flats. Only heating the sword occasionally to reduce the amount of grinding I would have to do once again, carving the fullers in the sword took over half an hour by itself. When the weapon was done, though, Rocar set up some kind of tempering tube for me that was a tall and fat metal pipe he filled with chunky lard oil.

I knew that in modern reality it was a preference of blacksmiths to use crude oils or different car oils for quenching and people just used to use water. The use of a thicker substance like oil, though, came as a surprise. I simply painted a thin layer of wet clay onto the blade proper's sides to slow the time it takes to heat up before putting the entire sword on the fire, regardless of the quenching fluid.

When the top face of the sword was glowing as bright as I wanted while the lower angled side faces were glowing bright, I take the sword from the fire with a pair of tongs and slowly lower it into the pipe of lard. The smithy quickly filled with the smell of burning animal oils and my stomach growled, threatening to overwhelm the possible 'tink' or 'ding' noise of a fissure or fracture in the steel.

No sounds thankfully came from the pipe after the sword was fully submerged, allowing me to relax as some notifications started appearing.