Chapter 17: The Dead Man's Forge
The next day came the same way the previous ones had — Zangika woke him up before he was ready.
Karn lay on his back and stared at the ceiling for a moment, doing the math.
"How long have we been here?"
"Approximately seven days," Zangika said.
"A whole week."
He sat up, ran a hand through his hair, and started getting ready. Zangika ran through the day's agenda while he moved — two priorities: find a solution to the suit's vulnerability against mana-based attacks, and figure out what had actually hit them in that dungeon encounter that the Shadow Nexus hadn't handled the way it should have.and not to mention the fight at the guild
He had no idea that by tomorrow, everything would look different.
He just kept walking.
* * *
The Hidden Workshop"Take the narrow street to your left," Zangika said.
Karn looked at it. The gap between the two buildings was barely wide enough for his shoulders. "Are you sure?"
"Go."
He went. The passage was old stone, damp, the kind of alley that existed not because anyone planned it but because two buildings had been built slightly too close together and nobody had ever bothered to fix it. Zangika told him to stop about halfway through.
There was a wooden door set into the wall on the right. Old. Weathered. The hinges had gone dark with age and the frame had settled into the stone like it had grown there. Nothing about it announced itself.
"How did you even find this?" Karn said.
"Drone patrols. I've been mapping the city since we arrived — building accurate layouts, tracking foot traffic patterns. This alley got four visitors in a week. All of them came in empty-handed and left carrying something. Usually a weapon shape, sometimes something smaller that still scanned as metallic and dense." She paused. "Whatever's on the other side of that door, someone is making things. And they're good enough that people are going out of their way to find them and keeping very quiet about it afterward."
"And you want us to just walk in."
"Have some confidence in yourself."
"I have confidence in myself. I have less confidence in your judgment after the guild incident."
"I thought you said we weren't talking about that."
"I said you said that. I didn't agree."
He pushed the door.
It opened slowly, dragging against the stone floor with a long low groan. Beyond it: darkness. Complete darkness, the kind that had been sitting undisturbed for some time.
"Enhanced vision," Zangika said.
The HUD shifted — shadows resolved into shapes. It was a workshop. A large one, wider and taller than the alley outside had any right to contain, which meant it extended into the building foundations. A heavy stone table dominated the center, and on it sat a hammer that Karn stared at for a long moment.
"How big is that hammer?"
"Head to handle, roughly the length from your fingertips to your elbow. Approximate weight: seventy kilograms."
Karn looked at it. Then at the racks of metal along the walls — dozens of different grades and colours, some hanging in raw sheets, some already cut into shapes, some rods that had been drawn to a specific diameter and coiled like rope. Between them, swords. Finished ones and failed ones both, and the failed ones were more interesting — he could see the points where each one had given up, the stress fractures and splits and warps that marked every attempt before the maker had gotten it right.
"Whoever works here is serious," Zangika said. "The failure pieces alone show a level of iteration that most smiths never bother with."
Then Karn noticed the light — faint, coming from somewhere in the floor. He moved toward it and looked down. Through a gap in the stone, something glowed three kilometres below.
"There's something alive down there," Zangika said.
"Should we go?"
"We came this far."
Karn's hand brushed a panel in the wall as he turned — he felt the click before he registered what he'd touched. Every glowing stone mounted along the walls came to life at once, filling the workshop with warm amber light.
In the proper light, it was something else. The workshop wasn't just functional — it was the workspace of someone who had spent their entire life here. The tools were arranged with the precision. The metals on the walls weren't stored randomly — they were sorted by property, by grade, by intended use, in an order that only made sense to the person who built it. And along the far wall, half-hidden behind a rack of finished blades, was a secondary bench covered in papers covered in calculations.
"Someone put their whole life into this place," Karn said.
Zangika didn't answer immediately.
"Go down," she said. "Now."
* * *
RomosThe descent took time. The passage down was cut into the bedrock, narrow and steep, the glowing stones embedded every few meters providing just enough light to see the next turn. Three kilometres of it. Karn used air walk for the steeper sections, the suit absorbing the pressure silently.
When the passage opened out into a lower chamber, he stopped.
The man — if man was the right word — was sitting against the far wall. Short, even seated. Broad as a doorframe across the chest and shoulders, the kind of build that came from decades of physical work rather than any deliberate effort toward it. Like a professional bodybuilder Brownish-red hair, long-bearded, a moustache that had grown athe beard somewhere along the way. His hands were in his lap and he was still holding the hammer — fingers loosely wrapped around the handle the way a person holds something familiar even when they're no longer aware of holding it.
His eyes were open. The skin had gone the colour of old parchment.pale And running from his neck down both arms, branching at the wrists and spreading across the backs of his hands, the veins were black. Not bruised — black. Like something had replaced whatever normally moved through them.
"Scan," Karn said.
"Body is deceased. Blood flow stopped approximately twenty-four hours ago. Signs of struggle over the preceding forty-eight hours." Zangika paused. "The black substance in the veins — it's not blood. It's an external liquid. It carries a mana signature, but the signature isn't his. It's foreign. And the density of it — whatever this was, it was significantly more powerful than anything this man could have produced himself."
"So someone killed him with it."
"Or something. The mana type is — I've encountered something adjacent to this before, but I can't place it precisely yet. It's familiar in a way I don't have a clean reference for."
Karn looked at the man's face. The expression on it wasn't pain — it was concentration. Whatever happened at the end, he'd been focused on something.
"Look around," Zangika said. "There should be something down here beyond just the body."
The lower chamber was larger than the passage implied. It extended in two directions — one side was clearly a second forge, older than the one upstairs, the hearthstone cracked and scorched black at the center. Most of what had been on the workbenches here had been destroyed — burned or broken, the damage recent enough that the edges of the scorch marks hadn't fully cooled to grey yet. Someone had come through looking for something specific and had made sure anything adjacent to it wouldn't be usable.
Against the opposite wall, largely hidden behind a collapsed rack: thousands of small metal pieces. Karn crouched and looked at them. Each one was shaped like a nail — narrow shaft, flat head, pointed tip — but the metal they were made from wasn't any single thing. Each one looked subtly different from the others. Different grain, different colour at the point, different weight when he picked a few up.
"All different elements," Zangika said. "I'm absorbing samples. These were made to specification — each one a different alloy or composite. This wasn't random production. Someone ordered a large number of specifically varied versions of the same shape."
"For what?"
"Unknown. But the variety suggests testing — finding out which combination of material and mana-response produces the best result in the same shape."
Near the remains of the burned bench, half a page of paper had survived — the fire had taken the bottom and most of the right side, leaving a rough triangle of legible writing. It was a commission note. Numbers, measurements, a material specification that Zangika flagged as referencing high-grade alloys. And at the top, before the name of whoever had ordered it had been burned away, a partial line describing the recipient:
For delivery to the — and then nothing.
"The document scrap mentions a Duke family arrangement," Zangika said. "Exclusive work contract. Protection provided in exchange for the smith's services — weapons maintenance, upgrades, custom forging. The Duke provides cover, the smith provides access to skills that money alone can't easily buy."
"If he was under a Duke's protection, why hasn't anyone come to check on him?"
"Either they don't know yet, or they're coming and we haven't waited long enough." Zangika paused. "Karn — I'm picking up movement. Two streets over. Multiple people, changing clothes, moving in this direction."
He stood up. Looked one more time at the man against the wall — the hammer still in his hands, the open eyes, the black veins.
"We should bury him," Karn said.
"If we don't leave now, the Duke's people will bury us. Move."
He moved. As they went, Zangika guided him through the upper workshop — they took the cretanium stock from the storage vault (a significant amount, more than Karn had expected), the remaining cores, the nail samples, and what usable documents survived. When they came back up through the alley and out onto the main street, Karn crossed to a building with a clear view of the passage entrance and went up.
Two minutes later, a group of four in unmarked clothes came down the alley and went through the door without hesitating. Professionals. They knew exactly where they were going.
"We should go," Zangika said.
"I know." Karn dropped from the rooftop and kept walking. "What was his name?"
"One of the delivery letters was addressed to him. Romos."
Karn repeated it once, quietly, and didn't say anything else.
* * *
The LibraryThey found the city library after wandering for twenty minutes through streets that all looked slightly similar. It was larger than Karn expected — a stone building three floors tall, the kind of institution that had been added to repeatedly over time until it had no consistent architectural style and a layout that only made sense to people who worked there.
He quickly discovered that knowledge here worked the same way most things worked — it was stratified. The ground floor held general records, common history, basic trade references. The higher you went, the more restricted it became. Some of the upper sections required rank verification to enter.
"Find whatever we have on dwarves and metal properties," Zangika said. "Ground floor should have enough."
It did. Zangika flagged five books — Karn pulled them from their shelves, found a table away from the other researchers, and read while she processed faster than he could turn pages.
The metals here were familiar in structure — gold, silver, bronze, copper, iron — but the properties weren't quite the same as home. The ground here was so saturated with mana that iron absorbed it over time, which changed its behaviour in ways that pure chemistry didn't account for. A blade forged from iron that had been in a mana-rich vein for decades would hold an edge differently, respond to enchantment differently, fracture differently under stress.
And then there was cretanium.
The books described it with the reverence that this world reserved for things that were both rare and genuinely irreplaceable — the strongest metal available, the lightest at its grade, and the most responsive to mana of anything that could be worked by hand. Noble families built their best weapons from it. Adventurers who reached a high enough rank to access it treated it as a lifetime investment. The properties of a cretanium blade could be enhanced permanently by embedding the refined cores of powerful creatures into it — the stone absorbing into the metal over time and transferring something of the defeated creature's nature into the weapon itself.
"Do we have any of it?" Karn asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.
"We looted a dead dwarf's vault," Zangika said. "A dwarf who worked exclusively for a Duke's family and had apparently been doing so for long enough to accumulate a private stock. Yes, Karn. We have a significant amount of it. Along with several high-grade stones I haven't fully catalogued yet."
Karn was quiet for a moment.
"We robbed a dead man's house," he said.
"Let's not dwell on that."
"You brought it up."
"I said let's not dwell on it. I didn't say I wasn't thinking about it. There's a difference."
He put the last book back and stood. Through the library window, the street outside was louder than it had been when they'd arrived — voices carrying a particular pitch that meant something had happened.
* * *
The AnnouncementA crowd had gathered in the avenue outside the guild association. Karn moved to the edge of it and listened.
A royal envoy stood on the steps, reading from a prepared document in the flat measured tone of someone who had read it several times already today.
"This morning, at his private residence, our Royal Blacksmith was found dead. His body showed signs of an assault of a serious nature. The Royal Family is conducting a full investigation and has already engaged the guild association to assist. Any adventurer with relevant information is requested to come forward. A bounty will be posted. Additionally — it has come to our attention that the workshop was entered and items of significant value were removed. Anyone found to be in possession of materials taken from the premises will be considered a person of interest in both the theft and the investigation."
The crowd murmured. Someone near Karn said something about black veins. Someone else said: that means a cultist. Or a devil.
Karn's expression didn't change.
"We're rich," he said, very quietly.
"The cretanium alone is worth millions in their currency," Zangika confirmed. "The high-grade stones on top of that, and several items I haven't valued yet. Yes. We're extremely rich." A beat. "We're also now persons of interest in a murder investigation if anyone finds the cretanium on us. The family will be doing inventory checks. Belongings searches. The investigation is serious."
Karn watched the envoy finish reading and roll up the document.
"We go into the dungeon," Zangika said. "Stock up on food and supplies first — we should plan for four to five days down there. Out here, we're exposed. Someone scans us wrong or a search gets thorough enough and we're standing in front of people we know nothing about with stolen goods from a murder victim. The dungeon gives us time for the immediate attention to pass and gives me time to work."
"Work on what?"
"The cretanium. I have an idea."
* * *
The UpgradeThey provisioned quickly and entered the dungeon before the afternoon crowd made it busy.
At the entrance to the third floor, Karn stopped and waited while Zangika did what she'd been thinking about since the library.
"Bad news first," she said.
"Go ahead."
"I burned through a significant portion of the cretanium in the experiments. The alloy behaviour is different from anything in my reference database — I had to run a lot of failed tests before I understood how it wanted to be worked. A lot of the material went into those failures."
"And the good news."
"The failures told me exactly what I needed to know. The cretanium will bond with nexnium. Not fully — the molecular structures are different in ways I can't fully bridge — but partially and stably. I've integrated a cretanium layer into the outer surface of the Shadow Nexus. It won't change the weight or the movement profile in any way you'll notice." She paused. "It will change how the suit handles mana-based attacks significantly. The cretanium channels it rather than absorbing it — redistributes the impact instead of taking it directly. That's the thing the suit couldn't do before."
Karn was quiet for a moment, processing that.
"The white dragon fight," he said.
"Yes. What hit us in that encounter — the suit took it because it had no way to redirect it. With cretanium in the surface, that should change."
"And the Galaxy Nexus?"
"Not enough material left for that. The cybernetic alloys in that system are still being repaired separately. One thing at a time." A pause. "The spear has also been upgraded. I embedded some of the lower-grade stones we collected — the ones I was confident enough to work with without risk. It now has cretanium in the shaft and a stable embedded mana-response. The output will be cleaner."
"What does that mean in practice?"
"The water jet will carry a mana signature now without needing the Griffin stone as a catalyst. Not at the same power level — the stone was exceptional — but consistently and on demand. The pressure control will also be more precise. Less waste, more efficiency per output." She paused. "It's a surprise. You'll feel the difference when you use it."
"You're proud of yourself."
"I am exceptionally proud of myself, yes."
"The high-grade stones from Romos's vault — what are those worth?"
"I haven't finished cataloguing all of them. But the ones I've scanned so far — I don't have a precise figure. The analysis is ongoing." A beat. "What I can say is that a dwarf working exclusively for a Duke family's weapons program for what appears to have been decades would have accumulated stones from the Duke's own dungeon operations. The highest-tier dungeon drops from the highest-floor creatures. So."
"So a lot."
"I used the least powerful ones on the weapons. Yes. A lot."
Karn exhaled. He turned it over in his head — what they'd found, what they'd taken, what the envoy's announcement meant for their position in this city now. Romos had been killed by something with a foreign mana signature that Zangika couldn't fully identify. Someone had wanted the workshop contents badly enough to kill for them and then burn the records. And that same someone hadn't gotten to the vault before Karn and Zangika had.
Which meant whoever had killed Romos didn't know they'd missed it. Or didn't know it existed.
Either way, that question was still open.
"Update complete," Zangika said. "Shadow Nexus integration finished."
The suit shifted slightly under Karn's skin — not in weight, not in movement, but in texture. Something in the surface had changed. A faint neon blue glow moved across the Shadow Nexus, running from shoulder to wrist and down the chest plate, pulsing once and then settling into a steady low light threaded through the suit like circuitry.
Then the red joined it — the suit's standard operational colour — weaving between the blue, the two lights running parallel down every surface.
Karn flexed his right hand. Then his left. Shifted his weight. Rolled his shoulder.
Different. He couldn't have quantified it yet but something was different — the suit felt less like a layer over his body and more like a second skin that had decided to start cooperating.
He started bouncing lightly on both feet, the way he always did before a fight — left, right, hands loose at his sides, weight moving through the balls of his feet. The glow moved with him.
"Let's find out how much we improved," he said.
The third floor waited in the dark ahead of them.
End of Chapter 17