With that, dinner proceeded as usual after handing in their tools. Brian sat as far as he could away from James, but James didn’t exactly want to be close to Brian either. After dinner, James returned to the smelter, working through more of the backlog. By the end of the night, his ingots from the broken tools had cooled. [Material Identification] returned [Iron Ingots] upon inspection, just like his other iron ingots, but he still kept them separate in case there was a quality difference he just couldn’t detect at his level of experience. In the end, James had worked through a little over a third of the backlog.

  The next morning, after clearing out the rubble from the mine with the rest of the slaves, James asked the slaver Coin for a bucket.

  “What do you need a bucket for?”

  “Quenching, for forging the tools.”

  With a hmph, Coin produced a bucket from his bag, the same way he did with the mining tools. James took it, filled it with water, and got to work at his personal forge. He started with the pick-axe head, which had a simpler design than the shovel. Keeping an eye on the example pick-axe he had set aside, he heated one of his iron ingots from the night before until it glowed red-orange. Then, holding it in place against his anvil with his tongs, he raised his hammer.

  [Technique: Hammer Strike]

  Over and over he struck the iron with his hammer, slowly beating the iron ingot into the correct shape. At first the crashing sound of metal striking metal drew attention from the slavers around the mining camp, but eventually they grew accustomed to it. Every so often James would reheat the iron as it cooled, until eventually the iron was mostly in the correct shape, with a narrow pick on one end and a broad flat edge on the other. At this point James’ hammer strikes were softer and softer, but trying to do delicate strikes with his only hammer only got him so far.

  Finally James judged that any further work without proper tools would not improve the pick-axe and he gripped the red hot piece of metal with his tongs and quenched it in the bucket. A burst of steam rose from the bucket as the hot metal flash boiled a small amount of water. After a moment to let heat bleed from the metal into the water, James pulled out the pick-axe and gave it a closer look.

  [Material Identification: Forged Iron]

  Smith Class Skill: [Appraisal] acquired.

  [Appraisal]: Pick-axe, Quality: Very Low, Durability: 10/10

  James was surprised to see that he had learned another new skill, and immediately that surprise transitioned to annoyance at the quality of pick-axe he had produced. It certainly wasn’t smooth, with some parts thicker and some parts thinner. And the curve of the metal from the broad flat end to the narrow pick portion was less of a curve and more like a wave, likely caused by the large size of the hammer and the irregular shape of his anvil.

  Still, it was a pick-axe.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Just a bad one.

  James set it aside and prepared another iron ingot for forging, heating it in the fire. This time he would work on a shovel. At first he thought this would be easier, since the shape was somewhat more simple, but he quickly realized his error. Using heavy strikes to flatten out the ingot, he managed to break the ingot clean in two as he struck a particularly thin part of the metal a little too hard. He took the broken pieces, heated them up as much as he could in the forge, almost to the point of melting, and then hammered them back together. After several cycles of this, the ingot was basically back in one piece and basically in the shape of a shovel head, but even before quenching Jason could see that the edge was much thicker than his example piece, and that there were parts of the shovel that were too thin. Still, he quenched the piece and attempted to appraise it.

  [Material Identification: Forged Iron]

  Appraisal returned nothing at all, the skill not recognizing the product as a tool of any kind.

  James set it aside, pulled out another iron ingot, and tried again. After several rounds of trial and error he settled on a design slightly different from the example shovel he had. His design used twice as much iron and was overall thicker, but he was able to taper the shovel from thicker where it attached to the handle to narrower on the edge. He got the edge as narrow as he could with his hammer, then attempted to sharpen it against the edge of a flattish piece of stone he found lying around near the rubble pile. It worked, somewhat, with his [Sharpening] skill doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and eventually his appraisal skill recognized what he had as a shovel.

  [Appraisal]: Shovel, Quality: Very Low, Durability: 15/15

  There was still time before lunch, and James was annoyed with trying to forge with only one size of hammer, so he spent the rest of the morning making molds for several smaller hammers.

  A little before lunch, the slaver Coin and the spear wielding slaver came up to him. “Well, let’s see what you made, Smith.” said Coin.

  James handed him the two tools he had produced, and Coin inspected them.

  “Tsk tsk, shoddy shoddy work, Smith. These are barely even tools.”

  James flushed with embarrassment.

  “Still, good enough for you lot. Finish the rest of them tomorrow.” Coin then passed them over to the spear wielding slaver.

  “Hmph” he grunted. “Better than I’d expect from such a primitive forge, but he’s not nearly good enough to work on weapons yet.”

  “’Yet?’ You think he’s gonna get good enough to work on weapons?” Coin asked.

  “Perhaps. These are the first attempts, no? They’re already as good as the crap you pick up secondhand.”

  James blinked. He was not sure that meant his work was better than he thought, or if Coin was just buying the absolute worst tools he could find.

  The slaver tossed the tools at James, who scrambled to catch them, and then both slavers walked away from the James arguing about quality and durability.

  After lunch, James worked in the mines with the rest of the slaves. Again, everyone kept their distance from him and refused to meet his eye. He quickly reached his quota of iron ore, thanks to his [Mining] skill, then spent the rest of the time looking for more green iron ore. He wanted some to smelt and cast new smaller hammers with. This took almost no time at all with his [Ore Identification] skill, and then he spent the rest of the afternoon expanding the tunnel in the hardest sections so as to produce less rubble that would need to be cleared out. The grey-eyed boy had nothing to say about it, and neither did any of the other boys.

  That evening James started by smelting the green iron ore he had mined earlier, and cast himself two smaller hammers. Then, making full use of his [Smelting] skill, he smelted the rest of the original backlog of iron ore. Now he only had the iron ore that had been mined in the last two days to smelt and he would be caught up.

  That night James was in the lean-to shelter with the rest of the boys, under his little pile of leaves, when a cold wind blew. He shivered.

  Autumn was fading, and winter was approaching.