My Master and His Master (8)

I cut off some thigh meat from the Lava Frog, roasted it, and ate it, but it was even more delicious than I expected.

It had a mild flavor, close to chicken, yet was unmistakably delicious.

Still, whether it was worth the trouble to hunt that troublesome Lava Frog just to eat it was questionable.

But setting that aside, I hunted the Lava Frog, obtained its hide, and brought it back to the dwarven country.

Azvaldo wore a complicated expression, a mixture of relief, exasperation, and joy,

"I knew you'd be all right, but I never expected you to come back this quickly. That thing is difficult enough that several dwarf warriors could barely bring it down... But ah, that's precisely why you've done me such a great favor this time. Thank you."

He thanked me.

Well, that Lava Frog had indeed been a troublesome monster that caught me off guard, but if I could hear words of gratitude from my smithing master, all that trouble had been worthwhile.

Then, a few weeks later, using the Lava Frog's hide—the final material—the long-awaited furnace was completed.

"Then let's get started."

With that, Azvaldo lit the newly completed furnace.

While he did, I asked the fire spirit dwelling in the old furnace to agree to move.

A different fire spirit would soon take up residence in the new furnace if we kept using it, but throwing away a relationship that had already been built would be far too wasteful.

It was said that a furnace and a smith had to be compatible, but in truth, it was the compatibility between the smith and the fire spirit dwelling in the furnace.

Even though Azvaldo couldn't see or sense spirits, he knew that the fire burning in the furnace had a mood of its own, and he had always treated it with sincerity.

Thus, the fire spirit dwelling in the furnace that Azvaldo had carefully used for more than twenty years had developed a strong affection for him, and the two of them were an excellent match.

To waste that simply because a new furnace had been completed would be far too wasteful—and far too sad.

But now I was here, able to see spirits, so the fire spirit readily nodded at my words, took up residence in a burning lump of charcoal, and was carried by Azvaldo into the new furnace.

After that, we kept the fire roaring inside the furnace so the fire spirit could grow accustomed to its new home... The move would probably be complete in three days.

During that time, of course, Azvaldo and I took turns keeping watch over the furnace without a break.

At first, we burned charcoal, but partway through, we switched fuels.

According to Azvaldo, it was a fuel passed down through dwarven tradition, but... it looked like stone to me, so perhaps it was coke.

It might have been some fuel that burned at a high temperature and existed only in this world, which I knew so little about, but either way, it didn't really matter.

Compared with the heat in the forge now, such matters were utterly trivial.

Hot.

Not hot as in the weather—hot as in burning.

I had been a smith for a very long time and thought I was accustomed to the heat of a forge, but the heat now exceeded my limits.

Nothing went wrong with the furnace, and the fire spirit was in a splendid mood.

My damn dwarf master calmly operated the enormous bellows, forcing oxygen into the furnace.

No, seriously, it was already unbearably hot, and for the first time in a while, I was thinking of Azvaldo from the bottom of my heart as this damn dwarf.

Wasn't it just unfair for a heat-resistant race to have that kind of advantage?

And on top of that, I had to ask the fire spirit to summon every last bit of its strength and raise the furnace's temperature even further.

Without taking precautions, I could easily die.

I told Azvaldo I was stepping out of the forge, poured water over my head to cool myself down, and then asked the wind spirit for help.

Please circle around me.

Please blow away the heat coming from the furnace.

If you could lower the temperature around me even a little, I could endure the rest somehow.

After the three days it took for the fire spirit to grow accustomed to the new furnace had passed, we were finally ready to process mithril.

What Azvaldo brought into the forge was a metal ingot that appeared to have already been refined.

Apparently, mithril was not extracted from naturally occurring ore; it was obtained as metal that had already been refined from the outset.

The details were the dwarves' innermost secret, and they apparently wouldn't reveal them to other races—at least not until Azvaldo became king.

That was because it could put me in danger.

Yes, well, I could still make a rough guess. It was probably obtained in a manner similar to Fairy Silver, with monsters somehow involved.

Since mithril could only be obtained and forged in the dwarven country, this would be my only involvement with it, so I had no particular need to learn the details.

Mithril was an incredibly hard metal, regarded as a symbol of immutability and indestructibility.

Yet when exposed to extremely hot flames, it softened for a short time, allowing it to be worked with a hammer.

However, once the mithril cooled and hardened again, softening it the next time required flames even hotter than before.

Each time mithril was heated by flame and then cooled, it became harder, stronger, and more difficult to work.

That was why processing this metal required all of the following without exception: a means of generating intense heat, a way to manage it correctly in stages, and the smithing skill to finish the work quickly.

My job was to control the furnace's temperature.

I had no time even to give Azvaldo a response; I kept my eyes on the furnace and the fire spirit dancing inside it, constantly gauging the situation.

The furnace's heat output had limits, so I had to raise the temperature gradually and give Azvaldo as much time as possible to work the mithril.

But I also knew that alone would never be enough, so once the furnace reached the limit of what it could normally produce, I borrowed the fire spirit's power and pushed beyond the furnace's performance limits.

...How long had we been doing that?

Mithril processing was not something that could be interrupted halfway through, so we worked without stopping.

"This is the last one! Give it everything you've got!"

Azvaldo put the final piece of mithril—the nearly completed sword—into the furnace, and I called on the fire spirit.

Burn with all your strength and raise the furnace's temperature.

Pour all of the furnace's heat into this mithril.

The fire spirit understood that we were in the middle of a great undertaking, so it burned with all its strength and poured every bit of the furnace's heat into the mithril sword, exactly as ordered.

At that moment, the mithril sword shone pure white.

Azvaldo quickly pulled it from the furnace, ground it, sharpened its edge, and polished it until the mithril sword was complete.

Then the two of us simultaneously let out long, deep breaths.

The tension that had held us taut had finally snapped.

"Ahh, we did it. We really did it."

Azvaldo then let out a low, stifled chuckle.

He slowly savored the joy of forging mithril, a special metal to the dwarves, with his own hands.

Fighting off my fatigue, I turned my gaze to the newly completed sword... Ah, it really was a magnificent piece of work.

Azvaldo—my master in smithing—possessed such extraordinary skill that I couldn't even bring myself to resent him.

If the processing of mithril hadn't become part of the competition for the throne, he surely would have won it all by himself.

But even so, I had unquestionably been able to help Azvaldo.

That made me so happy that I couldn't suppress my smile.

"I'd like to toast—with some excellent liquor, on your tab, Azvaldo."

Win and I were currently relying on Azvaldo for everything—food, clothing, and lodging—so there was no real sense in calling it his treat, but I laughed as I said it.

Azvaldo nodded at my words,

"Ah, not bad. But if we're going to toast, we might as well do it here. Eating and drinking in the forge is bad manners, but just drinking should be fine. The other one is right there, isn't it?"

Then he looked at the furnace and laughed again.

By then, neither of us could stop laughing.

From inside the furnace, the fire spirit watched our strange excitement with a puzzled but amused expression.