The Blacksmith’s Village was a place with architecture, unlike anything Klaus Park had ever seen in his life.

Each building had detailed ornaments and symbols, which resembled hieroglyphics from Ancient Egypt, which are not uncommon to find. Still, these unusual designs were more geometric, just like some straight lines, not actual illustrations, and were so often arranged that they resembled some form of language.

As Kaizen followed Therkara, she explained that these symbols were nothing less than runes, a type of language inherited from dwarves from one branch of the Ironstones family tree. It had been so long since Kaizen had last seen Norse runes that he had completely forgotten about their existence, but now he could remember that runes were frequent artistic elements in many games.

In any case, the current aesthetic of the Blacksmith Village only further stressed Kaizen’s internal questioning of where the other blacksmiths were.

“Therkara, what it was like, I mean… living here?” Klaus asked and then jumped to the next rock on the path.

The blacksmith lady was tall and robust. Her brown hair swayed quite a bit with each jump, which didn’t stop her from being much faster at walking that terrain than Kaizen. So, she was a few meters ahead but stopped to answer her mission companion’s question.

“It was a lot of fun! We were just over fifty people in the whole village, if I’m not mistaken, but we had parties that would make the big city festivals envious! There was no shortage of food and drink. After all, people from all corners of the world came to this cave to look for us. There was not even a single blacksmith in this kingdom with hands as skillful and talented as ours.” She replied, looking at the ruins around her with a closed smile stamped on her face.

Kaizen almost caught up with her as she replied. “Eh? Were you guys that good?”

“Have no doubt about it! I didn’t tell you before, but my father was a famous blacksmith master that even the most famous nobles came to our door to buy weapons from him! He… He was the best blacksmith I’ve ever seen with my eyes.” Therkara’s face of excitement finally withered at the end of her sentence.𝑶𝓋𝗅𝒩xt.𝗇𝓔t

“Is your father dead? We don’t need to talk about that if you don’t want to.”

Initially, Therkara flickered to answer; however, she answered after a few seconds. “He got a disease that created black blisters on his skin and died a few weeks later. Since my mother died when she gave birth to me, I was left for a few days feeling alone, not even able to touch a hammer.”

Therkara Ironstone remembered those days of mourning with great bitterness and shame. She knew that her father was not the only one with that disease in the village, and that the sick needed proper care, especially from experienced people like her. Still, she chose to lock herself in the house for a long time, perhaps out of fear, guilt, or even remorse. But when she finally came out, she went straight to her father’s forge, the Medullar Forge, where the best blacksmith worked and the best weapons in this kingdom were forged.

“When I finally got up the courage to leave home, I decided that, in honor of my father, I would make the finest sword this world has ever seen, a sword whose metal blade would be sharper than the purest obsidian.” She continued.

“And what happened after that? Did you succeed in creating such a weapon?”

“Whether I did, I don’t know either. The last thing I can remember is hammering non-stop on a steel bar, and after that, darkness.” Therkara explained, crossing her arms once again.

The lines of the woman-merchant proved to Kaizen that there was profound lore to this mission and also that it was not a mission of the type that one should just accomplish the main objective without caring about the rest. Suppose the mission was so much more complex than Kaizen expected. In that case, it could also mean that the possible rewards, informed in the mission proposal, were not about a single final reward that he would randomly earn upon completing the mission, as Kaizen initially thought, but instead that he could find those rewards or not, depending on the paths he would choose in the mission.

“Hey, Therkara. What do you think about us investigating some of the other buildings as well? We might not find people; however, we might find clues as to why everything has changed so much.” Kaizen proposed before moving down that colossal cave’s stone path.

Therkara Ironstone raised her eyebrows, surprised at the boy’s idea, and nodded. “That’s a great idea. Let’s do it.”

“All right. You’ll go check in that place, and I’ll check around here. Don’t hesitate to yell for me if you hear or see anything different.” He said with a damned smile.

The NPC reacted well to his teasing, smiled too, raised her right arm, and flexed that. “Don’t underestimate the strength of a blacksmith!”

Therkara then headed to the right, towards a building with thick columns in the front and a triangular roof. Meanwhile, Klaus headed left, eyeing a more distant construction that looked like a cluster of houses due to the nearly a dozen wooden doors and windows.

Luckily for Kaizen, from the moment he reached this more residential region of the colossal cave, he no longer had to balance on stone paths since the floor was free of stalactites.

Looking around, Kaizen noticed that these houses embedded in the rock wall were made like this, sprouted, precisely to take advantage of the rigidity and firmness of the region, because at least five minutes’ walk back, there were mining spots. In this region of the houses, there was not even a hint of it, indicating that it was safe to say there was no risk of flooding or landslides.

This cluster of houses was a little higher compared to the rest of the cave, and from this height, Kaizen could see how vast and frightening the whole place was. Still, even this high up, Klaus could not even know where the Medullar Forge mentioned by Therkara was, which probably meant that this place was in the region where the vast cave narrowed into a ravine.

In any case, Kaizen knew that his objective at the moment was not to find the Medullar Forge yet. He really wanted to see the information about what had happened in that village and, for that, he had to investigate.

Facing the stone wall crowded with rotting doors and windows, Kaizen’s attentive eyes quickly fixed on a sign that was on the only house with a door.

“Ironstone Family Residence.” Kaizen read aloud to himself while putting his hands on the doorknobs of the double door and finally turning them, opening the door.

…

Edited by: DrHitsuji

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