Chapter 318

Fifteen minutes earlier.

Clang!

Clang!

The smithy in Reidan was hot enough to make the air shimmer above the anvil. Grid gripped the hammer in his hand, held his breath, and brought it down one last time with everything he had.

Clang!

The glowing iron cooled into the shape of a hoe. A clean edge. A perfect curve. A handle socket so precise that a farmer would never feel it wobble.

[You have successfully created the normal-rated item 'Well Made Hoe'!]

Grid stared at the window.

Then his knees gave out, and he sank slowly onto the soot-covered floor.

"...Why?"

Khan looked up from his bench.

"WHY?!" Grid threw both arms toward the ceiling. "I am a Legendary Blacksmith! I put my whole heart into that! I counted every single strike! And it's NORMAL?! A normal hoe?! I spent 8 hours on that!" He grabbed the hoe off the anvil and shook it at the ceiling. "Why is my luck so bad! No , It's them. It's those dev. I know you're watching, S.A. Group! S.A group you $%^^$%#^&!!"

His voice cracked. There were actual tears in his eyes.

"Grid," Khan said gently, setting down the sickle he'd been polishing. "It's a very well-made good hoe."

"It's NORMAL, old man."

"It's a normal hoe that a farmer will use for twenty years without it once breaking. I can see the edge from here." The old blacksmith smiled kindly.

Grid sniffed loudly and wiped his face with his sleeve, leaving a black streak across his cheek. "...The farmer doesn't pay me, either."

"He pays you by farming."

"Their farming doesn't raise my skill level," Grid muttered. But he got up, set the hoe on the pile by the door with surprising care, and reached for the next ingot.

Khan watched him with quiet fondness. There were days when he still couldn't believe this crying, shouting young man was the same person who had dragged him back to the forge after he'd thrown his hammer away for good.

The door opened.

Lauel stood in the doorway with a thick bundle of papers under his left arm. His right hand rose slowly and spread across half his face, fingers framing one eye.

"Grid," he said in a low voice. "My right arm aches today. The black flame dragon sealed within it has sensed a disturbance in the world."

"Close the door. The heat's getting out."

Lauel lowered his hand. So insensitive, he thought, and closed the door. Then he marched over and laid the bundle down beside the pile of hoes. They were ranking sheets, dozens of them, names circled in red ink.

"The unified ranking," Lauel said, tapping the top page. "Look at the top ten."

Grid glanced at it without stopping his hammer. "...So?"

"Red moved from fifth to fourth. He pushed Chris down to fifth."

The hammer paused for half a second. Chris had held his place for a long time.

"And Hurent," Lauel went on, turning the page, "jumped from eighth to sixth. He passed Yura."

That got Grid to look up. "...Yura got passed?"

"Yura got passed. And it's not only those two." Lauel flipped through the sheets. Name after name was circled. "Half of these players weren't even in the top hundred six months ago. They're all climbing at the same time, and every one of them belongs to the same guild. The Genesis Guild." He paused. "Its guildmaster is Rudra."

Clang!

The hammer came down much harder than the metal needed. Sparks jumped across the anvil.

Lauel noticed. He filed it away and said nothing.

The door banged open again, and a bald man about the size of a wardrobe ducked under the frame.

"Grid! I could hear you screaming from the street. Did something die?" Vanter looked at the pile of hoes, at Grid's soot-streaked face, at the papers, and then at Lauel. "Uh-oh. Lauel's got the serious face. What happened? Somebody steal our hunting ground again?"

"A guild is climbing faster than anything I've ever tracked," Lauel said. "Genesis."

Vanter picked up a sheet, held it upside down, then turned it around. "So the guildmaster's rich and he's buying rankers. People do that."

"That was my first thought. It doesn't fit." Lauel tapped Hurent's name. "Hurent has turned down every big guild that ever tried to recruit him. Money doesn't move him. Something else made him join."

"Power-leveling."

The voice came from right beside the furnace. Vanter jumped and hit his head on the ceiling beam. Lauel didn't even turn around. Faker had been appearing out of nowhere for so long that Lauel had stopped reacting to it.

"Strong players drag weak ones through hard dungeons," Faker said, looking at the sheets with half-closed eyes. "Levels go up fast if they were power-leveled by Rudra."

"That would explain the unknown names," Lauel said. "It doesn't explain Red and Hurent. You don't pass Chris and Yura by being dragged through a dungeon even if with the support of 1st Ranker. Those two are getting stronger, not just higher."

Vanter rubbed his head. "Maybe Kraugel's helping them. The two strongest players teaming up. That'd be scary."

"Rudra took first place from Kraugel," Faker said. "You don't help the guy who just knocked you off the top."

"Kraugel might. He's weird."

"He's not that weird. Besides Kraguel is a solo player."

"Then it's a territory," Lauel said, half to himself. "Some facility that buffs his members. Every strong guild has land. But I can't find his. Nobody can. He is too quite." He let out a breath. "The only thing everyone agrees on is that he's probably the Staff Saint from the world message. But he hasn't confirmed that."

Clang!

"...He is."

Clang!

Grid said it without looking up, in the voice of a man admitting to a debt.

The smithy went quiet.

"Grid," Lauel said slowly. "How do you know that?"

"...Because I made his staff."

Vanter's mouth fell open. Faker's mouth opened all the way, which almost never happened.

"You made the first-ranked player's weapon," Lauel said.

"I didn't have a choice!" Grid slammed the hammer down on the anvil, not even on the metal. "Back at the Vatican, he shows up holding three Pavranium ores. Pavranium! He waves them in front of my face, and the ores are literally trying to fly into my arms, and he says he'll trade them for a staff. What was I supposed to do? Say no to Pavranium? Nobody says no to Pavranium!"

"So you made it," Faker said.

"I made it so heavy that no human being could ever lift it. I made sure it has impossible usage conditions. I even named it Extortion so he'd have to remember how he got it." Grid's eye twitched. "And then he just picked it up and used without batting an eye. It was all because of his damn class." He breathed out hard through his nose. "So yes. He's the Staff Saint. I know, because I'm the idiot who made his staff."

Lauel stared at him. Then at the ceiling. Then back at him. "That was more than a year ago."

"You never asked."

"Why would I ever think to ask you that?"

Grid didn't answer. He was glaring at the glowing ingot like it owed him money. Khan, who had known him longer than anyone in the room, set his sickle down and watched him with gentle curiosity.

"That isn't everything, is it?" Khan asked.

"...No."

"Grid," Lauel said. His voice had gone very careful. "What else?"

Grid put the hammer down. His face crumpled.

"At the Vatican, I got a Legendary armor set. The Holy Light set that i wear now. He and his two partners could have taken it, but they let me keep it." He rubbed his face with both hands, spreading the soot further. "On one condition. I owe each of them one custom item. Whatever they want. Made to order." His voice dropped to a whisper. "For free."

Vanter stared. "Free? No blacksmith fee?"

"NO FEE!" Grid grabbed his own hair. "Three Legendary-level commissions! Do you know what I could charge for those? I just lost millions of gold due to this ?! And every time I think about it, I imagine his face, smiling, saying 'Thanks, Grid' like I'm his personal blacksmith—" He stopped and took a shaky breath. "I'll make them. A deal's a deal. But I'll make them crying."

For a moment, nobody said anything. Even Faker looked faintly sympathetic.

Lauel recovered first. Something sharp had come into his eyes. "His two partners. Who are they?"

"A swordsman and a mage."

"Wait," Vanter said, snapping his fingers. "The swordsman. Is he the one who tagged along with Rudra during the Malacus Raid?" Vanter frowned. "But that beggar was the one who figured out Grid was Pagma's Successor. Just from watching him fight."

"That's him," Grid said. "Piaro."

"A beggar who can read a legendary sword dance by eye," Lauel murmured, writing the name in the margin of a ranking sheet. "So he's a Named NPC. A strong swordsman, huh?."

"Stronger than that." Grid crossed his arms. "He's the Sword Saint."

The furnace crackled. Somewhere outside, a cart rattled past.

"The Sword Saint," Lauel repeated. He said the words as if he were checking whether they were real. "Grid. Do you understand what you're saying? There hasn't been a Sword Saint since Muller. The only recent world message that even mentioned one was the Dual Legend's." He stopped. His pen stopped. "A Sword Saint and a Legendary Farmer, both at once."

Grid blinked. "...Farmer?"

"That was the message. A Sword Saint. And a Legendary Farmer."

"I don't know anything about farming," Grid said. "I just know he's the Sword Saint. He told me. And I've seen what he can do."

"That's not possible," Lauel said. "The Dual Legend has never been found. Every major guild has looked. The common theory is that he's an old hermit hiding deep in the Saharan Empire."

"I heard he was a dragon pretending to be human," Vanter offered.

"That's a forum joke, Vanter."

"I thought it seemed realistic."

"Maybe Rudra lied to you," Faker said to Grid. "Easiest way to keep people away. Tell everyone your bodyguard's a Saint."

"He didn't lie." Grid shuddered. "At the Vatican, I watched him fight with a sword. Besides he helped me out as well in improving my control as well."

Lauel pressed his fingers against his temples.

"Grid," he said. "I need proof. Something that isn't you."

Khan had been listening quietly the whole time. Now he tilted his head.

"Piaro?" he said. "The farmer?"

Everyone turned.

"You know him, old man?" Grid asked.

"I know the name. The farmers here still talk about him." Khan smiled at the confused faces around him. "One of them should be coming for these tools any minute now. Ask him yourselves."

Almost as he said it, there was a knock. A broad-shouldered farmer with sun-dark skin and soil under his nails stepped inside. The moment he saw Grid, he pulled his straw hat off and bowed deeply.

"Your Grace. Forgive me, I didn't know you'd be at the forge yourself today." He straightened, looking a little starstruck. "The new hoes are wonderful. My son swung one this morning and wouldn't give it back."

Grid, who had been crying over that same batch of hoes ten minutes earlier, coughed and looked away. "...Good. Use them well."

Lauel stepped forward before the farmer could reach the pile. To his credit, he didn't cover his face. "Pete. Forgive me for asking. Did you know a man named Piaro?"

The farmer brightened at once. "Piaro? Of course! He worked our fields with us for more than a month. He taught us how to break the desert soil. Nobody believed anything would grow out there, and then the wheat came up so thick you could hardly walk through it."

"Did anything unusual happen while he was here?"

The farmer's smile faded into something quieter. He turned his hat around in his hands.

"There was one night. Out past the last field, the whole desert lit up, bright as noon, and the ground shook. We hid in our houses until morning." He shook his head. "When we came out, Piaro was standing in the field like nothing had happened. A few days later, he left with the young lord."

"The young lord?" Vanter asked.

"The young lord who cooked for all of us with a giant pot." The farmer's face softened. "When Reidan was starving, he walked into the city with a pot taller than a man and cooked until every one of us had eaten. Twenty thousand people. He wouldn't take a single coin. We owe him our lives." Then he turned to Grid and bowed again, just as deeply. "And we owe you our future, Your Grace. He fed us for a day. You gave us a home to stay in."

Grid opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded stiffly. His ears had gone red.

The farmer loaded the hoes and sickles onto his cart with Khan's help, bowed to the room one last time, and left. The door swung shut behind him.

Nobody spoke for a while.

Then Grid frowned. He stared at the empty spot where the hoe pile had been.

"...Wait."

Everyone looked at him.

"He always carried that hoe," Grid said slowly. "Everywhere. Even at the Vatican. And every time we walked past a garden, he'd stop and stare at the dirt. I thought he was just weird." His eyes widened. "He was checking the soil. He's actually a farmer. The farmer part is real."

"So it's confirmed," Lauel said quietly. "Sword Saint and Legendary Farmer. Piaro is the Dual Legend." He set his pen down. "The first-ranked player is the Staff Saint, and the Dual Legend travels with him. Two Legends in one guild."

"Two!" Vanter said. "That's insane!"

"That's dangerous," Faker said his eyes sharpening.

Lauel lifted his right hand toward his face, seemed to think better of it, and lowered it again. "Grid. You said two partners. A swordsman, and a mage." He looked up. "Tell me about the mage."

Grid opened his mouth. Then he closed it, frowned, and rubbed his chin, leaving a fresh black smear of soot behind.

"...Skinny guy," he said. "Silver hair. Kind of... dead."