Chapter 712: Dealing With Dwarves

Solenne straightened instantly with cheeks flushing pink.

She smoothed down her messy silver hair, tucked her ears back with a nervous twitch, and adjusted the strap of her satchel.

"Of course, Lord Vespera! Forgive my lack of discipline!"

She stepped up to the battered oak door.

It was held together by scrap iron bands and square hand-forged nails, though the iron was pitted with rust.

Solenne raised a small, soot-stained fist and knocked in a distinct rhythm.

’This is how to summon them...’

...Two quick raps, a pause, and one heavy thump.

THUMP-THUMP... THUD!

From inside the low-ceilinged shack came the sudden scrape of heavy iron stools on packed dirt and a chorus of low curses in the dwarven tongue.

"Keep your boots on, ye debt-collecting dogs!" a gruff, gravelly voice barked from the other side of the timber. "We paid the street tax to the wardens yesterday! If you’re here for the guild dues, you can tell the Iron Compass masters to choke on their own gold-plated tongs!"

The sliding bar rattled back with a violent clatter.

"Please let her not hit me with the hammer..." Solenne whispered.

"I’ll take the hammer," Kara murmured. "You take the door."

The door creaked inward on leather hinges and a broad squat figure stood in the doorway.

The dwarf barely cleared four feet, but she was built like a stone watchtower.

Her shoulders were as wide as a blacksmith’s anvil, and her skin was a deep weathered copper that had spent decades over an open forge hearth.

A wild mane of auburn hair was tied back with greasy strips of leather with a few braids held together by crude iron rings.

In one thick, scarred hand she gripped a double-faced ball-peen hammer, and her sharp hazel eyes glared upward with raw hostility then her gaze landed on Solenne as the hammer dipped.

The hostility in her brow melted into deep puzzled surprise.

"Solenne?" the dwarf grunted with her heavy brows knitting together. "What in the hells are you doing back here, girl? We heard Master Goyle came down to your cellar the other day with three hired brutes to tear out your lathe... We were just putting our boots on to go crack a few kneecaps for you!"

"B-Borna! Wait! Put the hammer down!" Solenne waved both hands frantically, her tails fanning out behind her. "Master Goyle is gone! He ran off screaming! But more importantly... look! Look who I brought!"

She stepped aside and bowed with theatrical reverence toward the tall, black-haired woman standing in the muddy alley.

Borna blinked her hazel eyes, once then twice.

"H-huh...?"

Her gaze climbed the pristine fabric of the three-piece suit, over the silver filigree along the cuffs, to a pair of cold violet eyes looking down at her from under a cascade of ink-black bangs.

The breath caught in her stocky chest.

Down in the lower gutters, where mercenaries died for scrap copper, rumors traveled faster than carriage wheels.

...Every dwarf who’d spent an hour in a tavern this week had heard about the untouchable woman who dominated the Leaderboards.

"L-Lord... Vespera...?" Borna croaked, her gravelly voice cracking in the middle.

"Greetings," Kara said smoothly, with effortless poise. "I’m told this roof shelters craftsmen whose talents exceed their fortunes... May we step inside?"

"Inside?! A-Aye! In the name of the Ancestors, yes!" Borna shouted, nearly dropping the hammer on her own steel-toed boot as she scrambled backward and kicked a bucket of slag-water out of the path. "Out of the way, you louts! Clear the benches! Put out the tallow candles and light the mana lamps! We’ve got the Lord of Blessed Land standing in the doorway!"

"Light the good lamps!" someone yelled from inside.

"We don’t have good lamps!"

"Then borrow some!"

Kara ducked her head to clear the low lintel and stepped across the threshold.

The shack was cramped, dim, and heavy with the comforting musk of charcoal, sulfur, hot iron, and stale oat-beer.

It ran twenty paces deep with its earthen floor packed hard as stone by decades of boots.

Crude three-tiered bunks cobbled together from shipping pallets lined the walls, each piled with coarse wool blankets.

In the middle, over a pit of cold coals, sat a huge circular brazier ringed by four portable anvils and several low worktables littered with drafting paper, copper wire, and stone-carving chisels.

Roughly twenty-five dwarves stood in the room.

In the center, blinking in stunned silence at the arrival of an aristocratic Lord, stood about fifteen female dwarves.

...Like Borna, they were broad, stout, and heavily muscled, their forearms corded from years of hammer swings.

Their hair ran from deep copper and ash-gray to midnight black, all of it woven into thick working braids.

Over by the cold shadows of the rear storage racks stood ten male dwarves, equally stocky, thick square-cut beards tucked into leather aprons, calloused hands resting on the pommels of iron mining picks and sledges.

"Lord Vespera has come to offer us a path," Solenne announced, stepping into the middle of the floor with trembling pride. "She already gave me my workshop and made me Chief Artificer of Blessed Land... She needs master smiths, stone-shapers, and mechanists to build the foundation of the territory! She wants to bring you home!"

A collective gasp rippled through the room.

Several of the younger dwarves dropped their iron tongs, and the metal clattered on the packed dirt with a dull ring.

"Blessed Land...?" a younger dwarf with soot-dusted blond braids whispered, stepping forward with shaking hands. "The one in the Umbral Basin?"

"That’s the one," Solenne said, nodding hard. "She really did."

Borna wiped her calloused palms on her apron. Her hazel eyes were wet with something between desperate hope and plain disbelief.

"My Lord..." She dipped her head until her braids brushed her leather collar. "We’ve been rotting in this gutter for two years... Ever since the Iron Compass Guild bought out the western mining concessions, they’ve blacklisted every independent forge-clan... They told us our methods were obsolete... They wanted us to break our ancestral hammers and work their assembly tracks for three copper bits a day... If you truly have use for us... we’d lay down our blood for your anvil."

"I have no use for your blood," Kara replied coolly, sweeping her violet gaze across the assembled smiths. "Blood doesn’t clean gears and it doesn’t pour ingots, I have use for your skill but Blessed Land doesn’t hire on desperation alone... I don’t buy blindly from the gutter."

She stopped before the central worktable.

"Show me what your hands can do," Kara said. "Smithing, runic engraving, engineering, masonry... Show me the craft you hold."

The room exploded into movement!

The shock on their faces vanished, replaced at once by the fierce stubborn pride of artisans who’d finally been handed a chance to prove their ancestors’ blood wasn’t a lie.

"Get the test-plates from the bottom chest!" Borna barked over the noise. "Dagna! Fetch the runic stylus and the brass plates! Move, you stone-headed lot! The Lord is watching!"

"Who dropped the plates behind the bunk?!"

"Not me!"

"It was you!"

"It was the tall one!"

"We’re all the same height!" a voice snapped from the back. "And I’ll hit you with the plates!"

Kara’s lips twitched, and she turned the almost-smile into a polite cough.

A stocky woman with graying black hair stepped up first and set a thick slab of dark river-iron onto an anvil.

Next to her, a younger girl pumped a small set of leather bellows and fed a narrow jet of blue flame into a portable crucible.

"I shape cold iron without thermal fracture," the graying dwarf said, in a voice rough as sandstone.

She picked up a three-pound cross-peen hammer in her scarred left hand.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Her hammer fell in a relentless blur.

No magic crackled around it as the dwarf was working with only terrifying mechanical instinct.

With every blow she caught the grain of the metal and pressed the iron crystals tighter, until the dull gray surface took on the polished sheen of mirror-steel.

In under two minutes she’d turned a crude lump of slag into a razor-sharp timber wedge with its bevel straight to within a hair’s breadth.

Kara lifted the wedge and ran her thumb along the cold edge... The metal was dense, tightly packed, and free of internal stress.

"Good density," she said softly. "A fine hammer."

The graying smith let out a breath she’d been holding for what looked like an hour, then pretended she hadn’t.

"Th-thank you... Lord Vespera!"

Next stepped forward a girl who was slender for a dwarf, with copper-rimmed spectacles perched on her broad nose.

She laid a thin brass plate over a bed of pitch and drew out a hardened carbide chisel no thicker than a sewing needle.

"Dagna," she muttered nervously. "Runic compression engraving..."

Her thick fingers were astonishingly delicate as she tapped the chisel with a wooden mallet.

Tink-tink-tink-tink!

The chisel danced across the brass in a hypnotic spiral, cutting tiny geometric channels at forty-five degrees.

When she fed a faint ember of earth mana into the plate, the channels caught the current and spread it evenly across the surface until the brass hummed with a stable vibrating shield.

It was nothing like a high tiered artifact... It was a simple, reliable enchantment built to keep a mining drill from overheating under friction, and the geometry was pristine.

Another pair of women stepped forward to show their masonry joints.

They fit two blocks of dense volcanic basalt together without a drop of mortar.

The tongue-and-groove cuts were so tight that the air hissed out between the stones as they slid home, and the seam closed so cleanly that Kara couldn’t catch the line with a fingernail.

One by one, the female dwarves presented their trades.

...There was a master of tempering oils who could tell the carbon content of a bath by its smell, an engineer who’d designed a modular pneumatic valve that stopped steam boilers from exploding, and a smith who could braze brittle brass to ductile iron without a hint of galvanic corrosion.

None of it was world-shattering as nobody was forging star-cleaving swords.

’Not that I care about any of that right now...’

It was plain relentless industrial skill, the sort of foundation Blessed Land needed to carry Solenne’s wild blueprints all the way to Thora’s forge and beyond.

Behind Kara’s calm face, Silas felt a deep quiet satisfaction hum through his Gold Core.

’Fifteen master craftswomen,’ he thought, violet eyes gleaming. ’Solenne’s intelligence, Thora’s heat, and a crew like this... we could have a production line running in the Basin in a while.’

Kara nodded slowly and stepped back from the central anvil.

"Your hands are true," she announced, her voice carrying clearly off the rough timber walls. "The masters who cast you out were fools who wouldn’t know honest craftsmanship if it cracked their skulls... Blessed Land will claim you."

The fifteen dwarves cheered. Several laughed through tears of relief, thick arms wrapping around each other in bone-crushing hugs and Kara paused.

’Wait a second.’ Behind the black bangs, Silas’s brow twitched. ’How do I actually register them as Troops? I recruited Solenne in her own cellar but I haven’t actually made her an official one... Especially since I don’t want to send her back.’

He turned his focus inward and called up the System.

’Inquiry... How do I formally take an independent clan of artisans into Blessed Land as Troops?’

A translucent tab flickered to life before his spiritual eyes.

[System Response: Query regarding Troop Binding.]

[The Lord of Blessed Land has once again failed to read Chapter 4, Section 2 of the Beginner manual... Typical behavior for an adolescent Lord who prefers swinging swords to administrative literacy.]

[It is also noted that the Lord has been in command of a territory for almost months, please enjoy your tenure!]

’Shut up and give me the instructions, you useless system.’

[Suggestion: Read the manual.]

’I said give me the instructions.’

[Suggestion: Read the manual, in the interest of future dignity.]

’I’m not going to give you UP~’

[Noted... Retrieving text.]

The text shifted and displayed the official procedure.

[Troop Recruitment for Non-Hero Entities]

[1. The Lord must initiate physical contact via an official handshake with the prospective recruit.]

[2. The candidate must harbor genuine uncoerced desire to join Blessed Land.]

[3. Upon contact and verbal declaration, the territorial bond will formalize.]

[4. The recruit will be cataloged in the territorial registry and relocated at once to Blessed Land.]

[CRITICAL RESTRICTION: The laws of Blessed Land prohibit male entities from binding as registered Troops... Attempting to bind an ineligible male will result in immediate rejection.]

Silas absorbed the instructions and closed the tab with an internal sigh.

’A handshake and an honest wish. That’s it, also, why are you telling me about the males?! It’s my territory and I know it doesn’t.’

Kara cleared her throat and stepped up to the sturdy auburn-haired smith.

"To formalize your place in Blessed Land," she said, extending a slender manicured hand, "take my hand, speak your name, and say you wish to join us. Say it only if you mean it."

Borna scrubbed her palm furiously on her leather apron, horrified at the idea of leaving a smear of grease on the Lord’s immaculate skin.

Then, with deep trembling reverence, she reached out as her thick scarred fingers closed around Kara’s pale hand.

"I’m Borna of the Greyrock Clan," the dwarf boomed, her voice shaking the small shack with pure sincerity. "I swear my hammer, my tongs, and my breath to Blessed Land! I want to join your halls, Lord Vespera!"

FLASH!

A radiant crest of silver and emerald light detonated around their joined hands!

A translucent notification popped up before Kara’s eyes:

[New Troop Registered!]

[Unit: Borna Greyrock (Master Blacksmith / Cold-Forging Specialist)]

[Affiliation: Blessed Land]

[Relocating unit to Blessed Land...]

VUUUUUM!

The light wrapped around Borna’s stocky frame, and in the blink of an eye the master blacksmith was simply gone, leaving a faint scent of pine smoke and cold mountain wind.

Her hammer clattered onto the floor where she’d been standing.

[Author’s Note]

Mass Release Tomorrow...