The Lame Boar tavern on the evening of that day did not resemble itself. Eight customers sat at its four tables—a record Hilda had not seen since last harvest season—and the three oil lanterns swung above the heads trailing their sticky black smoke, which mixed with the steam of hot food and the smell of beer spilled on old wood, forming a low cloud beneath the ceiling that refused to thin no matter how many times Hilda propped open the back door.
Jary sat in his usual seat—the corner farthest from the door, back to the stone wall—but this time he did not sit with the hunch of a debtor in shame. He sat upright, the posture of a man who had paid what he owed: ten coppers to Hilda for the old tavern debt, three coppers for the meal her daughter had delivered on day five, and seven silvers and ten coppers to Olaf—placed one by one onto the old man's massive palm while Jary watched him count with black-nailed fingers twice over without raising his clouded eyes, then give a single dry nod that meant "account closed" and nothing more.
What remained in Jary's pocket after full settlement: seven silver coins and twenty coppers—a real surplus he could not have dreamed of ten days ago, when he had mortgaged the roof over his head for a pick, a mattock, and a rope.
---
At the same table sat Rigg, Marten, and Little Paul—the three miners Jary had not expected to see in the tavern, but they had come down from Clay Valley that afternoon for reasons that had nothing to do with celebration. The horned wolves had moved closer.
Rigg tilted his beer mug to his lips, wiped the foam from his thin mustache, and spoke in the tone of a man reporting news he did not want to believe himself.
"Three times this week. First time, we spotted them on the eastern ridge above the mine—four horned wolves standing on the skyline, looking down at the entrance, then gone. Second time, we found paw prints and claw marks around Marten's cart in the morning. Nothing was touched, but they'd been there—circled it in the night."
Marten nodded hard and added: "The donkey knows. Refused to eat for two days straight. Won't stop trembling from dawn to dusk. Animals smell what we can't."
Little Paul—who rarely spoke—opened his mouth this time and said a single heavy sentence: "Third time, we heard them howling at noon. Wolves don't howl at noon. That's not hunting. That's expansion. The pack is widening its range."
Silence fell on the table like a hammer on a cold anvil. Jary took a pull from his beer and remembered the alpha's orange eyes with their vertical pupils, and felt a muscle in his left thigh twitch involuntarily—a body memory that no amount of silver or celebration could erase.
Hilda passed the table carrying a tray with four fresh mugs, a plate of meat roasted with onions, and two hot loaves. She glanced at Jary—a quick look that carried no smile but carried the absence of hostility, which meant more to her than any smile—then moved on to the next table.
Jary reached for the meat, cut a thick slice with the blunt table knife, and sank his teeth into it with honest pleasure—the first meal he had paid for in cash with no debt hanging over it. And in that exact moment, between the bite and the swallow, he noticed someone who did not belong at this table, or in this tavern, or in this village at all.
---
A girl sitting between Rigg and Little Paul. Not "sitting" in any modest sense—leaning on one elbow, chin in her palm, legs crossed on the edge of the bench in a way that occupied twice the space her small body required.
And the body was small indeed: a frame no taller than a hundred and fifty centimeters, a round face with childlike features, and wide eyes the color of pale amber with a gleam that did not match their size—the gleam of someone who had seen things small eyes do not normally see. Her hair was a deep pink—not a faint blush but a saturated, rich pink that leaned toward crimson red at the roots and lightened toward tips that flew in every direction—cut in a haphazard style that suggested she had done it herself with a knife, not scissors.
Her clothing made Jary blink twice: a short sleeveless leather vest that exposed thin arms wrapped from wrist to bicep in twin bands of braided cloth, and tight dark trousers disappearing into tall leather boots with silver buckles—field adventurer's gear designed for movement, not for modesty, and not for village taverns.
"When did she sit down?" Jary asked Rigg in a low voice. Rigg looked at the girl, then at Jary, with a confused expression that said *I thought you knew her*.
The girl caught the question with ears that did not miss whispers in the middle of noise. Rather than answer, she reached toward the meat plate, pulled an entire slice free with bare fingers, pushed it into her mouth, chewed with a rapid double motion of the jaw, swallowed, then picked up Jary's mug—his personal mug—drank half of it in one pull, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and said in a voice louder than the moment required:
"Since you sat down. But you were busy with your food and the wolf stories, so you didn't notice."
Jary stared at her for three full seconds. "And who exactly are you?"
The girl smiled a very wide smile that showed small white teeth and one upper-left canine a single millimeter longer than the rest—a detail Jary noticed because a blacksmith's eyes catch millimeter-scale irregularities by habit.
"Esman," she said in the tone of someone announcing her name on a stage, not in a tavern. "Adventurer. Rank…" She tilted her head and pretended to think, though the answer was already loaded on her tongue. "…distinguished enough, because my age exceeds yours by a factor. Maybe two factors. Time moves slowly when you kill the right things."
Jary raised his eyebrows, looked at her childlike face and short stature, and said with a sarcasm he did not try to hide: "Twice my age. That makes you forty-six, then. Of course."
Esman laughed—a sudden, loud laugh that made Hilda turn from behind the counter with a warning look and made Little Paul slide his chair half a handspan away from her on instinct.
"I like you, blacksmith," Esman said between laughs. "You mock people you don't know. A rare courage in a man ranked E."
---
The last sentence hung in the air. Rigg looked at Jary with widened eyes—he had not known Jary was a former adventurer. Marten stopped chewing. Jary felt a cold prick in his chest—the sting of exposure he knew well from his years in Agu—but he smothered it quickly and said in a flat tone:
"Retired. The rank doesn't matter. What do you want, Esman? And add the cost of the meat and beer you've eaten from my tab to whatever request you're about to make."
Esman tilted her head to the other side and looked at him with those wide amber eyes and said: "I need a blacksmith. I heard Garon the dwarf's grandson reopened the workshop. I came from far away."
"How far?"
"Far enough that I'm hungry—thanks for the meat, by the way."
Then, without preamble or warning or any preparatory signal, Esman reached her right hand behind her back—behind her back where there was nothing but wall and air, no pack and no harness—and pulled.
The thing she pulled did not appear all at once. The grip emerged first—a handle wrapped in cracked black leather, over thirty centimeters long—then a circular metal hand guard wider than the table, and then the blade began to slide out of the empty space behind her, centimeter by centimeter. With every fraction that appeared, the eyes of those seated widened and the distance between Jary's jaws narrowed.
The blade kept coming. One meter. A meter and a half. Two meters. It did not stop. Jary counted in stunned silence: Esman's height did not exceed a hundred and fifty centimeters, and the sword had already passed three meters and was still emerging—four meters—five—six—seven times the full length of her body.
A massive, broad blade forty centimeters wide at the base, tapering slowly toward a distant pointed tip. Its surface was a dark metal the color of wet charcoal, threaded with faint red veins that resembled extinguished arteries in a dead iron body. And along both sides of the blade ran cracks. Not surface scratches—deep fissures, some extending ten centimeters into the metal's thickness, some branching like the roots of a dying tree, and some pulsing with a faint red glow that came and went like the heartbeat of a wound that had never healed.
Esman set the blade on the table.
The table did not hold. It did not break gradually—did not groan, did not bow. It collapsed. All four legs split in the same instant like dry sticks under a giant's foot, and the oak surface cracked down the middle with a resonant wooden report. The sword struck the stone floor and the entire tavern shook. Mugs and plates scattered. Rigg's beer spilled into his lap. Marten leaped from his seat. Little Paul retreated three steps with eyes open to their fullest—and Hilda's scream from behind the counter pierced the ceiling itself.
---
What followed required neither negotiation nor discussion. Hilda came out from behind the counter with a speed remarkable for a woman of her size, seized a wooden broom in her right hand, and raised it toward Jary—not toward Esman but toward Jary, because he held the open tab and everyone seated at his table was his responsibility under tavern law—and shouted in a voice that could cut iron:
"Out! All of you! You and your friends and the short lunatic and that thing! Out before I break this broom over your heads and add the cost of the table to your bill!"
Jary raised both hands in surrender and looked at Esman, who stood beside the sword lying on the cracked floor wearing a childlike, innocent expression that bore no relation to the scale of destruction she had caused—a small, unapologetic smile and a shrug that said *what did you expect?*
---
Outside the tavern. The night was cold and the sky was clear and the sword lay stretched across the dirt road in front of the door like a streetlamp fallen from a great height. Rigg, Marten, and Little Paul stood at a safe distance, looking at the blade with expressions ranging from awe to the desire to flee.
Jary knelt on his right knee beside the blade and extended his hand slowly—not to touch but to examine—and activated his enhanced appraisal skill.
The numbers struck him like a fist to the temple. The translucent red screen appeared and filled with information at a density he had never seen—lines racing past at a speed that took his mind ten seconds to process:
**"Unnamed Cursed Sword — Class: giant heavy weapon — Classification: Legendary Corrupted. Hardness: (+217). Current Durability: 14/340 — critical condition. Base Damage: unreadable at current level. Active Cracks: 23 fissures of varying depth — 7 structural, threatening total collapse upon next use. Weight: 487 kilograms. System Note: current appraisal level insufficient to read full magical properties — requires 'Advanced Blacksmith' rank at minimum."**
Four hundred and eighty-seven kilograms. Jary looked at Esman, who had pulled this weight from behind her back with one hand and laid it on a wooden table with the expression of someone setting down a fruit basket. Hardness exceeding two hundred—the highest number Jary had ever seen in his entire life, including his years in Agu and the dungeon floors. And durability at fourteen out of three hundred forty meant this sword was on the edge of death: one more blow and the blade would shatter like glass under a hammer.
*Legendary Corrupted*—a title he had never encountered in guild classifications, shop weapon listings, or adventurer talk.
Esman squatted across from him on the other side of the sword, rested her chin on her knees, and looked at him with those amber eyes. She said, with a calm that contradicted everything she had done in the last several minutes:
"Can you fix it?"
---
Jary looked at the sword. Then at his hands. Then at the sword again. Twenty-three cracks—seven structural. Hardness above two hundred meant any ordinary hammer would break before leaving a mark on its surface. A weight approaching half a ton meant he could not even shift the blade onto the anvil with his hands, no matter how much the System enhanced them. And durability at fourteen meant that any mistake in hammering—a blow too hard, heat above the tolerance threshold—would turn the legendary sword into a pile of shards.
"Ten silver coins," Jary said in a voice steadier than it should have been for a man who understood the impossibility of what he was agreeing to. "Ten silvers for the attempt—not for success. If the blade breaks during the work, I bear no responsibility. The seven structural cracks mean the probability of collapse during repair exceeds fifty percent by my personal estimate, and I will not guarantee a result. Those are my terms."
Esman did not negotiate. She gave a single quick nod and said: "Accepted. What do you need?"
Jary stood and brushed the road dust from his knees and began counting on his fingers.
"First—a real forging hammer, not this farm hammer I've been using. A heavy hammer with a long neck and a crowned head of hardened steel. There's no toolsmith in Fil who makes one, and the nearest shop in Agu is two days away. Second—a larger, heavier anvil that can absorb the rebound from metal at this hardness. My current anvil weighs eighty kilograms; this blade needs at least two hundred. Third—and most important—"
He paused and looked at the pulsing red cracks on the blade's surface through his appraisal skill and said: "These cracks aren't mechanical. They weren't caused by ordinary impacts. The red pulse indicates magical damage to the metal's structure itself—like an open wound in a living body that won't heal because something is preventing it from healing. To repair this kind of damage I need a magical bonding compound to fill the cracks and fuse with the original structure: teeth from a Gray Cluster Dragon—four at minimum, ground and mixed with high-carbon pure metal to form a restoration paste that gets smelted into the fissures at no less than sixteen hundred degrees. I'll also need magical engravings to stabilize the paste after it sets—binding runes of at least the third order. I don't possess the engraving skill yet, which means I'll need a pre-drawn rune plate that I can thermally transfer onto the surface."
Esman listened with a silence unusual for her character—her ears catching every syllable with a focus that contradicted her permanent smile. When Jary finished, she looked at the sword and ran her fingers along one of the pulsing cracks without flinching—no burn, no sting—and said:
"Gray Cluster Dragon. Teeth. Four." Then she looked at him and added: "And pure metal and a rune plate."
Jary nodded, then added in a testing, offhand tone: "There's another option. You sell me the sword. I melt it down—if I can melt it—and forge it into smaller weapons with extraordinary hardness and sell them for a fortune that would last us both ten years."
The smile vanished from Esman's face. Not slowly, not by degrees—it vanished the way a flame goes out when struck by water. Her amber eyes locked onto his with a look that made Jary suddenly and without logical reason remember the alpha wolf's orange eyes on the Bald—the same steadiness, the same depth, the same silent promise that the present calm was only the second before the strike.
"This sword is not for sale," Esman said in a low voice stripped of play and stripped of cheer and stripped of everything that had made her Esman for the past hour. "This sword is not for melting. This sword gets repaired—and returned to my hand—or nothing."
Jary raised his hands in a surrender that came faster than he expected of himself: "Understood. Repair only. Forget what I said."
The smile returned to Esman's face at the same speed it had vanished—like a cloud that had crossed the sun and then passed—and she stood in a single fluid motion and said with renewed cheer:
"Gray Cluster Dragon teeth. Four. Pure metal. Rune plate. I'll be back before dawn."
Jary stared at her in open disbelief. "Before dawn. Dawn is six hours away. And the nearest Gray Cluster Dragon habitat is in the Northern Edge Forest, two days' walk from here—and its threat level is C-rank at minimum—"
But Esman did not hear the rest of the sentence, because she disappeared. Not in the sense that she ran fast and he lost sight of her—but in the sense that she moved with something that exceeded running without quite reaching literal vanishing: one step into the darkness behind the tavern, and then the distance swallowed her like a stone sinking into black water, leaving no trace.
---
Jary stood alone on the dirt road in the moonlight beside a sword that weighed half a ton. Rigg, Marten, and Little Paul had vanished during the conversation—slipped away with the wisdom of working men who know when their presence is neither necessary nor desired.
Jary looked at the sword. Looked at the dark road. Looked at his hands. Then said aloud, to himself alone:
"Lunatic."
Then he sighed, bent down, gripped the sword's handle with both hands, and pulled.
It did not move. Four hundred eighty-seven kilograms on a dirt road—the friction alone demanded a pulling force that exceeded his body's capacity by orders of magnitude. He hauled with his shoulders and his back and his legs until the veins in his temples throbbed and the muscles in his thighs trembled and a sound left his throat that did not resemble speech—a primal noise from somewhere deeper than the vocal cords—and the sword moved. One centimeter. Then two.
Jary dragged it down the dirt road twenty meters to the workshop door—twenty meters that took twenty-five minutes of continuous hauling, four rest stops, and enough sweat to fill one of Hilda's mugs. Then he lowered the door threshold by gouging a trench in the dirt beneath it with the heel of his boot, dropping the entrance level by two centimeters, and pulled the blade through the trench into the workshop, where it came to rest on the stone floor beside the anvil like a giant iron corpse awaiting resurrection.
Jary shut the door and collapsed on his back beside the sword and stared at the low timber ceiling, his muscles pulsing with exhaustion, his breath filling the workshop with hot vapor. He looked at the pulsing cracks with their faint red glow, which lit a portion of his face in the darkness and extinguished it in a slow rhythm—a sick light that resembled a moan without sound. He thought about Esman and her impossible strength and the moment her smile disappeared and the speed with which the darkness had swallowed her and the fact that she had promised to bring dragon teeth from a C+ species in six hours across a two-day distance.
Then he stopped thinking, because sleep took him with the same force it had claimed him on the night he finished Marcel's order—the sleep of unconsciousness, not of rest.
---
A knock at the door woke him. Not a knock—a drumming. A rapid patter from two small fists in a rhythm that resembled an excited heartbeat, not a frightened one.
Jary opened his eyes. The workshop was still dark, but a thin crack of gray light seeped from under the door, indicating that dawn was about to break but had not broken yet. He crawled to the door and pulled it open with its usual screech, and the gray light hit him—and wi
th it, the sight.
Esman stood on the threshold. The same wide, childlike smile was drawn on her round face. But the rest of her body told a very different story.
Her deep pink hair was plastered to her forehead and neck, soaked not with sweat but with a dark red fluid threaded with translucent viscous mucus that did not come from a human body—beast blood. Her short leather vest was torn at the right shoulder, and beneath it the skin was intact without a single scratch—the blow had ripped the dead leather and failed to reach the living flesh. Her thin arms were coated from fingers to elbows in a layer of dark, half-clotted blood like liquid gloves that had dried halfway through their making.
And in her right hand—extended toward Jary's face at a distance of one handspan—an open leather pouch containing four conical shapes, white shading to gray, roughly the length of an index finger: teeth. Gray Cluster Dragon teeth—he recognized them from the illustrations in the beast compendium at the Agu guild library—pointed at the tip, flat at the base, with a ridged surface like a fine metal rasp.
In her left hand, two objects: a small ingot with a white-silver sheen—high-grade pure metal identifiable by its steady luster, unclouded by any impurity—and a flat wooden plate the size of a palm, carved with interlocking circular patterns in blue phosphorescent ink that glowed faintly in the pre-dawn light: a third-order binding rune plate.
"Before dawn," Esman said in the tone of someone reminding another of an appointment made for tea, not for dragon-slaying. "Teeth. Four. Metal. Plate. Did I forget anything?"
Jary looked at the components in her hands, then at the blood on her face, then at the smile that belonged to neither this blood nor this dawn nor any logical world in which killing a C+-rank dragon required a full party and two days of planning rather than one short girl with pink hair and six hours.
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and said the only thing he could formulate:
"Come in. And wash your hands—the quench trough is to the right of the anvil."