Chapter 97- Caelum’s sword.

Chapter 97: Chapter 97- Caelum’s sword.

Next morning...

Ironhaven smelled like mortar and wet ash.

Crews of laborers worked under the banner of Town Registrar Idris. The broken cobbles had already been replaced. Scaffolding climbed the chapel walls, and the smell of lime hung thick enough to taste. A child ran past the work site clutching a wooden statue of the Saintess, fresh off a carver’s stall. The carved wooden statues of half the contributors were selling well, and the villagers admired them like relics.

The square was rebuilding itself back into something close to its old shape, only better.

The dragon skull still lay where it had fallen, split into two halves right over the spot the Gate had torn open. Hollow, broken, half-swallowed by the foundation stones — its empty jaw arched open toward the morning light, framing the sky like a monument no one had asked for.

The crater was still there too.

The registrar had considered filling it in, but at nearly seven meters deep, that would have been its own kind of project. In the end, it seemed easier — and more fitting — to build around it instead of over it.

The crater would become the heart of the town. Broad, stepped terraces would descend toward the center, the way seating drops toward a stage, until they reached the crater floor itself — a plaza, open on every side, ringed by the raised terraces above it.

The statue would go down there too. Idris had already sketched out a small pond at the very center, with figures of Leo and the Saintess standing beside the water — a permanent memorial to the two who’d held the line, watching over the plaza from its lowest point.

What had been a wound would become a gathering place. A grand square built out of the same earth that had been torn apart to make room for it.

.....

Meanwhile, in the smithy, Hugh was already working the anvil.

Leo watched him for a moment. Hugh’s Ashen Phoenix forging class had settled into him properly now — he looked like a blacksmith built for the job, broad and steady, his black flame burning low and patient through the forge, almost ethereal against the dark.

Leo was setting up his own station nearby when a ripple of chatter moved through the street outside — talk of the defense, the Devil’s fall, the Saintess’s light, voices still carrying the weight of what they’d all survived. He listened without meaning to, his hand drifting to the two marks on his armor without him quite deciding to touch them.

He opened his quest panel. A pending quest sat there, flickering.

[World Quest — Open]

[Hunt the Devil Worshiper]

[The Church calls upon the faithful and the strong.]

[Hunt down the Devil worshiper and bring them to the light.]

[Saintess-flavored favor awaits completion.]

Let the others hunt, he thought.

Then he accepted it anyway.

Just in case I run into those damn devil worshippers.

He pulled the massive Devil’s Horn out of his inventory — the legendary forging material he’d claimed off the Devil’s corpse — and turned it over in his hands. It was cold. Colder than it should have been. He wasn’t confident enough to work with it yet, so he put it back and let it wait.

Scrolling further, his eyes caught on the Founding Steward Ingot, still wrapped in gray cloth. He didn’t know much about it beyond the fact that it was meant for forging the Defender’s Blade.

He was still turning that thought over when Caelum walked in. His boots made no sound at all on the threshold.

Leo looked up from the forge.

Caelum — second-highest contributor of the whole raid — stood in the doorway with a long, cloth-wrapped bundle slung across his back. It looked, at a glance, like a rib torn from the dragon skeleton outside.

People recognized him instantly. Word must have traveled fast, because by the time Leo noticed the crowd, crafters and carpenters and half the street had already gathered outside the smithy, drawn by the sight of the second-ranked hero standing there with a massive bone on his back.

Leo only remembered why once he saw him.

Right. He wants me to forge a sword.

"You came," Leo said.

"You owe me a sword," Caelum said, shrugging like it was obvious.

Leo glanced at the bone, then back at him. "That’s a debt I don’t remember signing for."

Caelum just shrugged again and dropped the whole bundle onto the bench.

It wasn’t dragon bone, the way everyone outside assumed. Leo felt it the second it landed — the marks on his own armor stirring in response.

It was Devil bone.

Marrow from the very avatar that had tried to drag Hell up through Ironhaven’s foundations. Caelum must have pulled his own personal reward from the fight, same as Leo, who had gotten the horns.

Leo activated Forge Sight.

[Ding~]

[Forge Sight activated.]

[Material: Devil Bone Fragment]

[Condition: Corrupted]

[Warning: Residual Devil energy detected.]

Layers of dense, gray-white matrix stacked over each other, packed impossibly tight. For a moment the air in the smithy itself seemed to shift, heavier somehow.

The bone still carried a trace of the Devil’s power — unstable, hungry, restless. As Leo studied it, the mark on his own armor flared brighter, and for a second he was back in the middle of that fight, mid-Devilization, teeth bared.

"So," Caelum said. "Can you forge it?"

Leo kept his eyes on the bone. "I can try."

...

They ended up hunched over a chalked slate a few minutes later.

"So what kind of sword are you after?" Leo asked.

"Reach that matches my parry rhythm exactly," Caelum said.

Leo just stared at him.

"A weight-forward cut. A springy spine, for deflections. An edge that won’t bind if it catches on a shield. A guard that doesn’t snag when I’m reading a threat at half a second."

"Hey — hey. In English. I have no idea what any of that means."

Caelum sighed like Leo was the one being difficult.

"Longer than my current sword. When I’m anchoring a defensive line, I need to hit the enemy before they reach the people behind me."

Leo nodded, jotting it down. "Long blade. Got it."

"And weight it toward the tip — same shape, just heavier up front. I want the cut to carry through shields and heavy armor without slowing down."

"That’ll make it harder to recover after a swing," Leo pointed out.

"I can handle recovery. Don’t worry about that part."

Leo noted it anyway and kept going.

"The blade needs flex," Caelum added. "If I’m turning aside a heavy strike, it can’t snap on me."

"Strong enough to deflect, flexible enough not to break," Leo repeated, writing.

"And keep the edge clean. If it catches in a shield or another weapon, someone standing behind me pays for the half-second it takes me to pull it free."

By the time Caelum finished, the slate held the outline of a genuinely brutal, genuinely precise weapon.

"Your whole design’s built around control," Leo said, studying it. "Problem is, the material we’re using has none of that in it. This bone wants to swing wild."

He nodded anyway and locked the blueprint in. Then he looked up at Caelum. "When it’s done, you and I are dueling."

Caelum just nodded back, unbothered.

Leo had learned the hard way that gear only got you so far — and Caelum was pure skill, the kind you couldn’t buy or forge. A duel with him would teach Leo more about his own limits than another week of grinding ever would.

He set the bone on the anvil. It still pulsed with wild Devil energy, which meant purification came first.

He raised his palm. Golden eternal flame caught there, and a second fire — silver, colder-looking — rose beside it. Together they wrapped the bone in light.

Black strands peeled away from the white like dead skin sloughing off, the corrupted energy burning away in slow layers. Leo worked through it patiently, thread by thread, until the last stubborn strands fought back — and for a moment his whole body lit up with holy light, forcing the Devil energy into submission before he burned the last of it clean.

[Ding~]

[STEP 1 — PURIFICATION COMPLETE]

Next came the grinding — reducing the bone to fine gray-white powder. Whatever history the bone carried lived in that dust, and turning it to powder meant stripping it down to something neutral. Pure. Exactly what they both wanted from it.

Then he called on his Holy power again.

It didn’t arrive loud this time. It came soft, like opening a door he’d built himself rather than breaking one down. The warmth settled in his chest, ran down his arm, and pooled in his palm, waiting.

He let it pour into the ash.

[Ding~]

[Holy attribute channeled into the work...]

The Holy energy did exactly what it was meant to — burning the last of the Devil’s taint out of the dust so nothing hungry could survive inside the finished blade.

But some of that burned-off energy drifted into his own armor as he worked, and it started pulling at him in return.

Pain lanced through his skull. That same addictive hunger from the Devil’s power began rising in him again, uninvited, and for a moment he felt himself tipping toward the edge of losing control entirely.

He triggered hyperfocus, and the noise dropped away just in time. He held on.

He stood there afterward, breathing hard, hands braced on the bench.

Next: the concentrated ash went into the steel hearth to melt down.