Morning light crept through the crack beneath the oak door and drew a thin white line across the workshop floor until it touched the edge of the giant sword's blade, where it reflected back as a faint red—the cracks still pulsing at their slow, sick rhythm in daylight exactly as they pulsed in darkness, making no distinction between night and day because disease does not know the hour.
Jary opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was Esman's face—her round, childlike face two handspans from his own, her amber eyes fully open, her wide smile drawn with surgical precision and not a trace of wavering. She had washed her hands and face in the quench trough, but her pink hair was still matted in spots where the dried blood had escaped the water, and the metallic, animal smell clung to her with a stubborn permanence.
"Good morning, blacksmith," she said in the tone of someone who had been awake for hours and exhausted her patience waiting. "When do you start?"
Jary rolled away from her and sat on the cold floor and scrubbed his face with both palms and looked around: the sword still lay where he had left it—ten meters of cracked metal occupying two-thirds of the workshop floor, leaving barely enough space to stand let alone work—and the leather pouch with the four dragon teeth, the pure ingot, and the rune plate were lined up on the anvil's edge where he had placed them before sleep.
"I need time to prepare," he said, his voice rough from sleep and the residual smoke in his lungs. "And I need you to step back. Ten steps back. The heat I'll need to smelt those dragon teeth will exceed sixteen hundred degrees and the forge vents in every direction."
Esman did not step back. Instead she crouched beside the sword and ran her fingers along one of the structural cracks—the deepest, extending fifteen centimeters from the right edge toward the center of the blade—and said in a low voice stripped of its usual play:
"This crack wasn't there three months ago. It appeared in a single battle. A single strike."
She did not say a strike from what, and Jary did not ask, because her face carried an expression he had not seen on it before—a weight that did not match her childlike features. Then the expression vanished at the same speed it had appeared, the smile returned, and she said: "When do you start?" For the second time in two minutes.
"I need tools from the market first," Jary said, rising with difficulty—his knees grinding from having dragged half a ton the night before. "Stay here and don't touch anything on the anvil."
He turned toward the door and heard a sound he did not expect: a yawn. A deep, long yawn with a jaw opening to its fullest, producing a noise like the mewl of a lazy cat. He turned and found Esman stretched out on the floor beside the sword—side by side with the massive blade like a child sleeping next to a doll ten times her size—her eyes fully shut, her breathing already settled into a deep, slow rhythm that indicated real sleep had taken hold in a single second.
She mumbled final words before the drowse swallowed her: "Haven't slept… weeks… three maybe… four…" Then silence.
Jary stared at her for three seconds. A girl who kills a C+-rank dragon in six hours, then sleeps on the filthy floor of a workshop beside a cracked sword and drops off like a cat that found a warm patch of sun. He shook his head in a slow motion carrying a mixture of bewilderment and acceptance—the acceptance of a man who had moved past the point of surprise with this creature—then walked out of the workshop and closed the door behind him with a gentleness he did not know he possessed.
---
Fil's morning market—three carts, two wooden tables, a vegetable seller, an egg farmer, and a woman selling wool thread—did not carry what a blacksmith facing the repair of a legendary weapon needed. Jary moved between the carts with quick eyes searching for anything convertible into a tool.
He bought a new clay crucible twice the size of the last from a pottery merchant passing through the village by chance—three silvers. A heavy iron ladle with a long handle suited for scooping molten metal—half a silver. A quantity of high-density mineral coal purchased from Marten, who had come down from the valley with a loaded cart—two silvers. Two strips of tanned leather, one long copper nail, and a tin of pig lard for greasing joints—assorted coppers.
Total: five silvers and twenty coppers. What remained in his pocket: one silver and ten coppers. The comfortable surplus he had celebrated in the tavern the night before had evaporated in a single hour. He looked at the remaining coins in his palm and felt their light weight mock the heavy weight of the task ahead.
---
He returned to the workshop. Esman was still asleep in the same position without a twitch—were it not for the rise and fall of her chest he would have thought her dead. Jary moved around her carefully and began preparations.
He lit the forge with the new coal and pumped the patched bellows until the heat climbed slowly—the high-density coal took longer to catch but reached higher temperatures and held them longer. Then he took the first dragon tooth from the leather pouch and examined it with his appraisal skill: a closed crystalline structure nearly impossible to smelt at ordinary temperatures—requiring at least seventeen hundred degrees to begin softening and nineteen hundred for full melt.
He set the tooth in the new clay crucible and pushed it into the heart of the forge and pressed both palms against the surrounding coals and unleashed his fire magic at full force—eight points of fire streaming from his palms like twin orange rivers coiling around the crucible and compressing the heat inward. One thousand degrees. Twelve hundred. Fourteen hundred—the coals around him turned bluish-white and the air above the forge rippled with thermal distortions that made everything behind it dance and writhe. Sixteen hundred—the dragon tooth in the crucible had not changed. Its ridged gray surface reflected the flame with a cold steadiness that said *not yet*. Jary pushed harder—felt his fire magic draining like a barrel emptied from its base—seventeen hundred—the tip of the tooth began to gleam with a wet luster indicating the onset of softening—eighteen hundred—the surface lost its ridged texture and turned into a semi-viscous mass colored silver-blue.
Jary pulled his hands from the forge with a snap—the skin of his forearms was red and inflamed despite nine points of fire resistance; nine points prevented the burn but did not prevent the pain—and left the crucible in the heart of the white embers to cook.
He repeated the process with the remaining three teeth: one by one, each pushed into the crucible and surrounded by fire magic and concentrated forge heat until it softened and dissolved into a dense silver liquid unlike any molten metal Jary had seen before—heavier, slower to flow, with a pulsing sheen resembling the sword's crack-pulse but in silver rather than red. Then he added the pure ingot to the melt—broke it into three pieces with the chisel and fed them one by one into the crucible, where they dissolved faster than the dragon teeth and merged with the silver liquid, lightening its color and increasing its fluidity.
The restoration paste was ready: a dense silver-blue liquid in a quantity sufficient to fill twenty-three cracks—if he distributed it with millimeter precision and did not waste a single drop.
---
The next problem was not the pouring—it was the hammering. Filling the cracks with paste required heating the sword itself to a temperature at which it would accept fusion with the paste, then hammering the areas surrounding each crack to compress the original metal toward the new material so the two bonded into a single structure. But the sword's hardness of (+217) meant its surface resisted the hammer the way a wall resists a finger—the hammer bounced and the sword did not care.
Jary took the farm hammer—the cheap one with the short neck and wide head that had accompanied him since his first day in the workshop—heated a small section of the sword near one of the surface cracks with direct fire magic, poured a spoonful of paste into the fissure, and struck.
The first blow rebounded with a violence that sent the hammer back toward his face—he tilted his head at the last instant and the handle passed his right ear by two centimeters. The second blow rebounded with equal force but he braced his wrist this time and absorbed the recoil through his shoulder joints, feeling a painful pop in his collarbone. The tenth blow: a slight effect—the silver paste compressed one millimeter deeper into the crack. The twentieth: one more millimeter. The thirtieth: he felt something wrong in the hammer head—a softness that had not been there, a lateral vibration, a hairline crack running from the edge of the striking face toward its center. The forty-fifth blow: the hammer head split. A quarter of it sheared away and flew toward the wall and struck the stone and fell to the floor, the iron fragment ringing a sharp metallic note through the narrow workshop.
Jary looked at the ruined hammer in his hand, then at the crack he had poured the paste into: two and a half millimeters. Two and a half millimeters out of a ten-centimeter depth. And the hammer was dead.
He looked at the remaining twenty-two cracks and said nothing for ten full seconds, then dropped the hammer remains on the ground in a single restrained motion and walked toward the door.
---
The stone storehouse at the southern edge. The iron door. Four knocks. Silence. Four more. The scrape of the lock. Olaf's gray, clouded eye in the gap.
"What do you want, Garon's boy."
Jary did not hesitate this time—need was stronger than pride and pride was weaker than bankruptcy. "I need a hammer. The biggest, heaviest hammer in your storehouse. And additional mining tools if you have them—a heavy chisel and a wide-jaw pair of tongs."
Olaf opened the door and looked at him with a familiar expression—the expression of a man calculating profit before hearing the next sentence—and said: "At what price?"
Jary extended his hand and opened his palm: one silver and ten coppers. Everything he owned in this world.
Olaf looked at the coins, then at Jary's face, then back at the coins. "That won't cover the rental on the smallest pick in my storehouse."
"I know," Jary said. "But I'm working on a piece worth more than everything in your storehouse combined. If I succeed—and I will—ten silvers return to your hand within three days."
Olaf fixed him with those clouded eyes for five seconds, then said in a tone carrying neither mockery nor sympathy but pure arithmetic: "Every time you come to my door you promise what you don't have. Last time you mortgaged your workshop and survived by a miracle. This time you have nothing left to mortgage."
Silence. Then Olaf added in a lower voice that broke his usual pattern: "The oldest hammer in my storehouse—forty years old—its head is cast steel, twelve kilograms, and its neck is oak treated with tar, sixty centimeters long. No one rents it because no one can lift it with one hand. Your grandfather made it for me against an old debt between us that neither of us ever settled."
Jary felt a sharp pulse in his chest at the mention of Garon. Olaf reached out and took the single silver and ten coppers from his palm and said: "Three days. And if you break it—I break you."
---
The hammer was heavy. Not heavy in the sense of "difficult to carry" but heavy in the sense of "it changes the way you walk when you shoulder it"—twelve kilograms in the head and two in the neck pulling his right shoulder downward so his whole body tilted and he limped involuntarily.
He returned to the workshop and pushed the door open and found Esman still asleep—she had not moved a single millimeter. He set the hammer beside the anvil and surveyed the available space: the sword occupied the entire workshop floor, the anvil was in one corner, the forge in the opposite corner, and there was no room to swing a hammer with a sixty-centimeter neck without hitting the low ceiling or the walls.
Quick decision: work outside. He dragged the sword—half an hour of hauling and ten minutes of rest—through the workshop door to the dirt yard behind the building, where the space was open and the sky was his ceiling and the ground was his anvil. He built an open fire on the ground with a large mound of coal, heated the section of the sword where the greatest concentration of cracks lay—seven fissures in a thirty-square-centimeter area—and poured the silver-blue paste into the first structural crack with his long iron ladle. The paste flowed slowly into the fissure like thick blood filling a deep wound—the heat kept it liquid, but it would begin setting within one minute, so hammering had to start immediately before it dried.
He raised Garon's hammer. Twelve kilograms above his head with both arms extended, the long neck providing greater momentum but demanding greater muscular control. He brought it down on the metal beside the crack.
The rebound came—but it was different. The old hammer did not break: the cast steel in its head held, and the tar-treated oak neck absorbed part of the vibration, and the bones of Jary's fingers absorbed the rest—a sharp pain that pierced his joints like electric needles climbing from palms to elbows—but the sword responded. The original metal surrounding the crack compressed one millimeter toward the paste.
Jary struck again. And again. Ten blows and the paste had fused into the upper half of the crack. Twenty blows and the red pulse in that particular fissure dimmed—it did not go out, but it slowed, like the pulse of a patient responding to a weak treatment.
Then he brought out the rune plate. The wooden plate with its interlocking circular patterns in blue phosphorescent ink—third-order binding runes designed to lock restoration materials into the original metal structure and prevent separation under the stress of use. Jary did not possess the magical engraving skill—it was not yet part of the System's skill tree—but he understood the principle of thermal transfer: he heated the rune plate over a separate fire until the phosphorescent ink glowed a bright blue, then pressed the plate against the sword's surface over the repaired crack with both hands and held it for ten seconds. The heat transferred the ink from wood to metal, and the circular patterns appeared on the sword's surface in a faint blue glow. They pulsed twice, then settled and became pale lines integrated into the surface, flush with it rather than raised above it.
The first crack: repaired and inscribed. Twenty-two remaining.
---
Day one ended with only four cracks repaired—the shallowest surface fissures. Jary's hands trembled from accumulated hammer recoil, his fingers were swollen a bruised purple at the joints, and his right wrist produced an audible click with every rotation—a repetitive strain injury progressing toward inflammation. Sleep: three hours on the dirt ground beside the sword under the open sky, because Esman still occupied the workshop floor and had not woken.
Day two: six additional cracks. The silver paste was running low—he had spent a third of it on ten cracks and the remainder had to cover thirteen—which meant reducing the paste quantity per crack and compensating the deficit with more hammering to compress the original metal toward the restoration material. More hammering meant more recoil and more pain and more wear on the hammer head. By the end of the day Jary noticed that the crowned surface of the hammer head had begun to flatten at the point of repeated impact, and a fine hairline crack had appeared on its right edge. Garon's forty-year-old hammer was beginning to surrender.
---
On the morning of day three, Jary woke and found Esman sitting on top of the sword—on top of it literally, cross-legged on the broad blade surface beside one of the unrepaired cracks—eating an apple whose origin he could not account for.
"Slow progress," she said in a tone that was evaluative, not critical. "Ten out of twenty-three."
Jary did not reply. His mouth was dry, his shoulders sloped, and the inflammation in his wrist now prevented him from fully closing his fingers. He looked at his hands—the cracked skin on his palms had turned to dead, peeling hide and the old blisters were covered by new blisters on top of them. He looked at the deteriorating hammer. He looked at the thirteen remaining cracks, of which only two of the seven structural ones had been repaired.
He stood and walked into the workshop. He looked around with new eyes—eyes searching for something whose nature he did not yet know. On the far wall, beneath the legendary shield grip with its silver engravings, hung a small shelf he had never noticed—not a shelf but two iron nails from which something dangled, covered by a thick layer of dust. He reached up and pulled it down: a pair of armored gauntlets. Blacksmith's gauntlets of dwarven make—not ordinary leather gloves but an articulated metal framework covering the fingers, palm, and back of the hand to the wrist, built from small overlapping iron plates like the scales of a fish, mounted on a thick leather base lined with compressed cloth.
The engravings on them—and Jary's heart rate quickened as he noticed this—were the same fine dwarven script carved on the legendary shield grip. Garon's personal gauntlets. Hanging on the wall as ornament or memento, untouched by anyone—neither the thieves nor time had ruined them because the metal beneath the dust carried not a single atom of rust.
Jary put them on. The gauntlets were tight—made for a dwarf's shorter, broader fingers—but his wide palms with their inherited dwarven wrist bones slid into them with a painful snugness, like a foot pushed into a boot one size too small. Tight, but they fit. The metal plates closed over his fingers and covered his swollen, inflamed joints and gave them a rigid external support—like a metal splint wrapping each finger individually—and the cloth lining absorbed the moisture and sweat.
Then the red screen flickered.
**"Inherited Item Discovered: Gauntlets of Garon the Dwarf Blacksmith — Compatibility with current user: 72%. Equip Bonus: Strength (+3) — current total exceeds manual-use threshold for heavy hammers. Magical Weapon Appraisal (+2) — current total (+5). System Note: gauntlets reduce hammer-recoil bone damage to hands by 40%."**
Three points of strength. Jary clenched his fingers inside the gauntlets—the grip was stronger, the pressure higher, and the pain in his joints retreated from sharp to bearable. Forty percent recoil reduction meant he could strike harder without shattering his bones—meant every blow would carry enough additional momentum to leave a deeper impact on the great sword's hardness.
He walked out of the workshop to the yard where the sword and fire and deteriorating hammer waited. Esman raised her head from her apple and looked at the gauntlets with her amber eyes—she did not comment, but her eyebrows lifted in a slight rise carrying a silent appraisal.
Jary raised Garon's hammer—twelve kilograms above his head. The armored gauntlets wrapped his fingers in their metal plates and gave his grip a stability he had never possessed—the long wooden neck did not slip between his fingers or wobble in his palm but settled like an extension of his arm bones. He brought the hammer down on the third structural crack—the deepest, fifteen centimeters into the blade—after pouring the remaining paste with millimeter care.
The rebound came—but the gauntlets absorbed forty percent of it and the additional strength (+3) made the blow's impact deeper. The original metal around the crack compressed three millimeters instead of one. Jary struck again in a savage, steady rhythm—no longer raising the hammer with the caution of a man who measures and calculates but raising it with a force he knew would arrive and bringing it down with a confidence he knew would matter. Each blow left a metallic echo that shuddered through the yard and bounced off the workshop walls and reached the nearest house in the village.
Esman climbed off the sword and retreated five steps and stood watching with her arms folded. Her usual smile contracted slowly toward a different expression—not concern and not admiration but something between the two, a doubt that allowed for wonder and a wonder that allowed for doubt.
The full third day: nine cracks repaired. Day four: the final four cracks—including the last two structural fissures that ran through the blade's full thickness and threatened to split it in half. The silver paste was nearly gone—what remained was enough for two and a half cracks—so Jary was forced into a compensation technique: pour half the required amount into the crack and hammer at double force to drive the original metal into filling the remaining gap. Blows carrying twelve kilograms plus three strength points multiplied by the momentum of arms working far beyond their capacity—each strike shaking the ground, each rebound caught by the gauntlet and partially absorbed, the remainder climbing through the forearm bones to the shoulder, the neck, the skull.
The last crack. The twenty-third. The deepest structural fissure—extending twelve centimeters at an oblique angle through three-quarters of the blade's thickness, its red pulse stronger than all the others. The heart of the disease.
Jary poured the final drop of silver paste—literally the final drop, scraping the crucible with the ladle until it shone empty—and raised the hammer above his head. The moment of pause at the apex of the lift: he saw the crack on the metal before him and the sun behind him and the armored gauntlets gleaming in the light with their dwarven script and Garon's hammer above his head with its widening crack on the right edge that would not survive more than a handful of blows—and he brought it down.
First blow: a clean metallic sound that shuddered through his chest. Second: the paste surged deeper into the crack and a faint red pulse. Third: the crack in the hammer head widened by a centimeter. Fourth: a wooden splitting sound in the neck. Fifth: Jary screamed—a scream that was not from pain and not from effort but from a place that had no name in any language—the scream of a blacksmith striking the last blow he knows is the last because the tool in his hand is dying—and he brought the hammer down with everything left in his body.
The hammer exploded. The cast-steel head split into three fragments that flew in three directions—one struck the workshop wall, one buried itself in the dirt two meters away, and one ricocheted toward Jary's right hand, hit the gauntlet's armored plates, and bounced off with a sharp crack. The gauntlet saved him. The wooden neck in his hand separated from the head and remained trembling between his fingers like a dead, hollow bone. And the armored gauntlets—Garon's gauntlets—slid from his hands in the same moment, like two creatures that had completed their purpose and spent their energy: they fell to the dirt beside the hammer shards with a soft metallic sound like a final sigh.
Jary stood two seconds without moving. Then his knees gave. Then his body followed. Not violently—a quiet withdrawal, like a building whose foundation is pulled away and that settles slowly toward the ground. He lay flat in the dirt beside the sword, face toward the sky, eyes open and blinking slowly.
The red screen appeared at the edge of his vision—final numbers before exhaustion shut down his consciousness:
"Weapon Status — Unnamed Cursed Sword: Active Cracks: 0/23. Repaired Cracks: 23/23. Current Durability: 58/340."
Fifty-eight. From fourteen to fifty-eight—a tangible improvement, but it did not exceed seventeen percent of the original capacity. Three hundred forty was the full durability—and fifty-eight meant the sword would endure limited use before the cracks returned and the structure collapsed again.
Failure. Not total failure—the cracks were sealed—but failure by the standard a legendary weapon needed to regain its function. Jary closed his eyes and the number fifty-eight was burned into the darkness behind his lids like a red mark that would not fade. And he slept.
He did not know how long he slept. Hours—perhaps five, perhaps eight. What woke him was not a sound but a vibration: the ground trembling beneath his back. A rhythmic vibration in a triple pattern—strike, silence, strike, silence, a harder strike, a longer silence.
He opened his eyes.
Esman stood ten meters away in the dirt yard—and the sword was in her hands. In her hands. A sword weighing four hundred eighty-seven kilograms held by two small hands and swung through the air in slow, wide motions tracing full arcs—each arc cutting the air with a heavy exhalation and shaking the dirt beneath her feet.
She was not swinging at random. She was training. Combat movements in a measured rhythm: a horizontal cut, then a vertical thrust, then a full body rotation ending in a diagonal strike from upper right to lower left that drove into the ground and gouged a trench twenty centimeters deep.
"Stop!" Jary shouted, scrambling to his feet at a speed that made his head spin and his knees shake. "The sword can't take it—the durability is only fifty-eight—every blow drains—"
Esman stopped. She lowered the sword and drove its tip into the ground where it stood upright like a giant iron pillar, then tilted her head toward Jary with her full smile—not the smile of challenge, not the smile of joy, but the smile of someone who knows something the other person does not—and said:
"Check it again, blacksmith."
Jary stared at her, then at the sword, then activated his appraisal skill at its new strength—five points after the gauntlet upgrade—and looked.
"Unnamed Cursed Sword — Post-Restoration Status: Repaired Cracks: 23/23 — stable. Current Durability: 145/340."
One hundred forty-five.
Jary blinked. Read the number a second time. One hundred forty-five—not fifty-eight. The durability had jumped from fifty-eight to one hundred forty-five while he slept—multiplied by two and a half.
How—a quick glance at the faint blue runes he had thermally transferred from the binding plate onto the sword's surface: the runes were now pulsing a clearer blue than he had left them. The binding runes had not been merely a fixative—they were a slow self-repair catalyst that continued working after the manual restoration ended, steadily raising durability on its own. His work had not failed. His work had laid a foundation that allowed the runes to finish what his hands could not.
One hundred forty-five out of three hundred forty—forty-two percent of the original capacity. Not a hundred percent, and it never would be. But enough for active use of a legendary weapon. Enough for dozens of battles before it would need restoration again.
Esman watched the expressions cross his face—from shock to understanding to something resembling a guarded pride that exhaustion prevented from becoming open elation. Then she took two steps toward him and stood before him at her short height, head tilted up toward his face, her amber eyes steady.
She said in a different voice—a voice that had lost all play entirely and carried a weight whose age far exceeded her childlike features:
"This sword… was made for me by someone important. Someone who is no longer here. He made it when—"
"Thirty silvers," Jary said.
Esman stopped mid-sentence, mouth open. "…What?"
"The repair cost," Jary said in a cold, professional tone that contradicted the emotional gravity of the moment—but a blacksmith separates the hammer from the heart, or he does not eat. "We agreed on ten silvers, but that was before I destroyed Olaf's hammer and spent every coin I had on tools and materials. The hammer alone is worth ten silvers—a forty-year-old cast-steel hammer I'll never find a replacement for in Fil—and my grandfather's gauntlets gave out after the repair. Their sentimental value is beyond price, but I'll price them at ten more because I'm a blacksmith, not a poet. Ten for the hammer, ten for the gauntlets, ten for the actual work. Thirty silvers. When do you pay?"
Esman did not move. Her smile did not change, but something behind her eyes shifted—something that faltered and tried to hide behind the gleaming amber and failed.
Three seconds of silence. Four. Five.
Then she said, in a voice quieter than anything he had heard from her at any previous moment—quieter even than the moment of this sword is not for sale:
"…I don't have money."
Jary stared at her. A long, steady stare without blinking.
"You don't have money."
"Not a single copper."