Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

The place had grown quiet with the announcement of the World Quest. Most figures that had come to watch the adventures of the joint champion had left. Many were too busy looking for a chosen of their own, to leave a clone in the pay-per-view dimension.

In the first row, Apollo, Persephone, and Hermes still sat with Hades, Seth and Hephaestus. Aside from them, there was also the Dungeon God in the row behind them and some other hidden figures further behind.

“Aren’t you going to look for a champion?” the dungeon god asked the Olympians from the row behind them.

“Who says I’m not looking right now?” Apollo asked, his eyes fixed on an invisible list.

The god of sunlight was currently skimming over the rankings. The lists accessible to the gods were a lot more in-depth than the simple ranking the player could see. It was a whole database that could be searched based on tags like player classes, titles, and personality traits.

“There currently isn’t anyone that picks my fancy. There is that one guy in Y-City I found, but he is too ambitious for my taste. He lacks respect for the craft, despite his talent,” Hephaestus lamented.

“I have one or two candidates, but I’m just observing for now;” Hades said vaguely.

Persephone only smiled, while Hermes seemed to be in thought. Seth was the only one with a dark face. The question reminded him of the fact, that he had lost his special right to choose a second champion besides Seth.

He became a little grumpy hearing the others talk since he didn’t even get the chance to look at the ranking and observe other players, as they did. This was because he counted as a god who had chosen their champion. He could only observe his chosen and nobody else.

As much as he appreciated the blacksmith when he went all out, he only got so much enjoyment from watching him craft some day in and day out. He would have wanted to choose a dedicated warrior as his second champion, but couldn’t because of his little misstep when he pushed the blacksmith toward the bard class as his second class.

“No need to be so down, Seth. We are in the same boat.” the dungeon god smiled.

Since he was the god of dungeons, he was something like a competitor and business partner of the system god. Their interest overlapped in some areas, which was why they had a specific agreement. This also pertained that the dungeon god couldn’t choose a player as his champion.

Although he liked his beasts and monsters, they were seldom as interesting to watch as players. Even the very intelligent ones.

“Oh, shut up. You are still better off than me,” Seth barked.

The dungeon god could still see anything that happened in the dungeons, and let other gods see this, too. He could still observe the players through the eyes of the beasts. It was much different from Seth, whose only personal interface to Urth was now Seth. He would have to pay for anything else.

“No need to be so grumpy, Seth. Didn’t we agree that you can watch our champions too, once we chose them,” Hephaestus tried to calm the moody god of chaos.

Seth’s face became even darker, but he didn’t say anything. What was he supposed to expect? Hephaestus was a crafting nut, so his champion would be even worse to watch than little Seth and Hades…

The god of chaos had seen enough of the Underworld, all of them were more or less the same. He didn’t have huge expectations for the Chosen of Hades. It would probably be some dreary necromancer that played with the souls of the dead. Again, not too different from little Seth.

While the others were bickering, Hermes suddenly had a mischievous smile on his face.

“I think I found someone who can do great things with my blessing, and we all will have something from it,” he suddenly exclaimed.

“Oh, did you find some mighty thief already?” Seth scoffed.

“No need to be so snarky, to my little brother, Seth. Who is it?” Apollo turned to Hermes.

“No need to hurry. You will soon find out.” Hermes said mysteriously.

…

Over the next week, Seth made himself busy working on Faer. Although nothing happened right away in the world, it was like the calm before the storm. A lot of things had suddenly changed and been introduced. People needed time to adjust, but everyone thought it was just a matter of time for something to happen.

In the meantime, the recruitment of people went smoothly from what Seth heard. Their demonstration of power during the live event was quite effective. Although Seth had only thought of it mostly to make their trade route profitable again.

With all the changes happening lately, the Tree Route was going to offer many ways of income in the future. Since Minas Mar was providing housing now, Mary obviously implemented a rent system. A whole city paying rent to them, on top of their tax revenue from their right on the Trade Route. Even if they made the rent cheap, they would earn big.

Having the government make a move concerning the leaderboards had also worked, somewhat. Just a few days after the introduction of the rankings, there was an official announcement that explained everything about the leaderboards and their rules. They would have liked to keep some things hidden, but anyone could have gone to ask the church and find out the details.

Instead, random duels and challenges were prohibited for the time being. Players from fighting classes that wished to announce challenges had to do so openly in the arena and they could only challenge a person once a day. It didn’t matter whether their guess was right or not in the end.

This bought some time for the people that didn’t reveal their names and the blacksmith could concentrate on his own project. Although he was creating life, he left most of the heavy lifting to the golem forge.

For the bigger souls, he had gotten from Tano’Mol, Seth chose a different route, apart from the core technology. He had not wanted to water down the smaller souls, in case it would become harder to find themselves with the introduction of foreign memories through fusion.

This was not necessary for the bigger medium and above-sized souls. He chose the same method he had used for Ceres for them. He would infuse their souls into the base material, before letting the golem forge turn it into the metal frame for their resurrection.

By infusing the soul directly into the material, the frame could be made much simpler since it would not need all kinds of complicated connection formations that allowed the soul to control the frame. Not only did it make it simpler, it also offered the option to make it more complicated as there was more place for other enchantments.

Since the frame didn’t need enchantments for control, why not use this space for enchantments to improve the base attributes of the Faer-to-be. In theory, Seth could have even forgone the movement enchantments at the joints to make even more space for enchantment, but he decided against it. Leaving out the movement enchantments would have created a weakness.

Currently, the fleshly body was a mostly cosmetic add-on. The Faer could gain additional power through the system for their movement and have a better life with it, but they were not dependent on the flesh like humans were.

Were he to leave out the movement enchantments, the Faer would become susceptible to all kinds of effects like poisons that could stun them, by harming or paralyzing the body. His technological advancement, his decisions, and the improvement of his skills only allowed these new Faer to start off even more powerful than the original Faer.

This was in part only possible because Seth came to trust the magical precision of the golem forge. Even though his skills had grown magnificently, even a master was prone to mistakes. But once the soul was infused into the material, there was no easy way of going back. If he messed up and lost some of it, it would hurt the soul itself. (it would also take much longer to do everything himself)

The only drawback of this method was that the only crafting skills that gained proficiency from doing this were and to a smaller extent . Just working the material and leaving the enchantments to the forge was not enough to really gain experience with or . Even the rank one bonus could not make any kind of change to the proficiency bar visible.

He would have liked to use the bonus of being ranked one to quickly improve his crafting skills, but he judged this was more important for now. The only consolation was that it went a lot quicker than he expected.

This was thanks to his optimized workflow. Instead of finishing the Faer one by one, he spent the first four days only concentrating on infusing the souls into the materials and leaving the building of the frames to the golem forge.

It was like assembly-line work and much less of a headache than the legendary armor. It was almost like a break for the blacksmith as he enjoyed working at leisure like this.

The only differentiation he had to worry about was between the frames made for magic-related classes and those made for physical classes. This was only a rough differentiation. One was made of with enchantments that would improve Intelligence, Willpower, and Mana Regeneration.

The other was made of with enchantments that improved the different physical attributes like Endurance, Strength, Agility, Dexterity, and /or Health Regeneration. However, there were always some variations based on the talents of the soul.

With 4-5 kilograms of metal per frame, he burned through more than a full metric ton of epic material in four days to make the frames. The next three days, he spent serenading the metal skeletons, suspended in his magic formation, one by one.

At least this allowed him to gain some proficiency to a visible extent in and . While the former had quickly become lv.5 of the Journeyman rank, the latter was Adept lv.9, but slowly creeping up to the Journeyman rank.

On the sixth day, when he was on the last stretch, an unexpected skill also finally had a level up. became level 7 and not much later his became Journeyman lv.1.

Although he had done this literally several hundred times now, even when the lest Faer stepped out from the waters of Styx on the 7th day, and opened his eyes, he still felt wonder. Maybe because of the contract, or them being his creation, he felt a connection to each of them.

It was different from the golems, and more similar to how his connection with Tatzel and Puffles felt, albeit weaker. Was it because they had egos? Would he feel this kind of connection with all his creations if they became sentient enough?

Others may have been frightened or felt manipulated, however, Seth enjoyed this. It really felt like the family of Minas Mar was growing.