WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Became a Blacksmith the Rankers Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 008

──────

Because I Made It With Care

* * *

Dolores couldn’t help having a lot of questions for me.

After all, I was the guy who’d shown up with Sun Dwarf gear. An Heir of Flame’s, no less.

How had I passed the trial, and where had I even seen the book?

She couldn’t help being curious what kind of person I was.

But she turned out to be more the type to care about the outcome than the process.

“Watch Ruby for me.”

The kind of person who, so long as the result was good, would ask about the process some other time.

Dolores hurriedly packed her things, then dumped the sleeping kid on me entirely.

“Me?”

Why?

No wait, what did she even see in me to trust me with a kid?

“Ruby’s still too young to enter the Tower.”

So what does that have to do with me…

“I’ll be back before today’s out, so don’t worry.”

Then Dolores, hands full with her packed things, stopped and turned back to look at me.

“You’ll take good care of her, won’t you?”

For a moment, Dolores’s eyes locked directly onto mine.

I took the look for a moment and picked out an answer safe enough to cover myself.

“…If she doesn’t listen, would it be all right if I disciplined her a little? I’m not really fond of kids.”

“…”

Dolores didn’t answer.

Instead, she looked into my eyes a little longer, then slowly smiled, looking satisfied.

“First time.”

Hm?

“That you’ve lied to me.”

Had she caught me telling truth from lies again?

That really is a convenient-looking ability. Guess fudging my way through things won’t work from here on out.

In the end, I’d been caught.

“This one’s cute, so I’ll let it slide. Take good care of her.”

- Shff.

Dolores lightly brushed back the sleeping Ruby’s bangs, then

- Peck.

pressed a light kiss to her forehead, and walked straight out the door.

- Click.

The door shut.

The cabin was left with just me and the sleeping kid.

My estimated age: probably thirteen.

Ruby, lying there asleep in front of me: also probably thirteen.

I’d never even had a niece, let alone a daughter.

It was a moment that gave me a headache.

* * *

A headache was a headache, though.

There were still things I needed to do.

Gear that had left Dolores that flustered, that startled.

The Sun Dwarves’ elite smiths, otherwise known as Heirs of Flame.

I figured it’d be good to look more closely into what they made, and into them as well.

Not that I could leave the cabin anyway.

I’d need to look after the kid the moment she woke up.

“Yuna.”

As quietly as I could manage.

“Crawl something for me.”

I’d already looked into this once before, but something about it felt… off.

It seemed like a far more prestigious line of work than I’d realized.

[Keyword -> Heir of Flame / Sun Dwarf Elite Smith]

Good stuff, but…

“Can you lift the access limit again, like last time, and dig deeper?”

[…]

[…]

The search screen on the hologram flickered pretty badly.

She was usually quick as anything, so there must have been a lot to get through.

[Looks like there’s almost nothing left, when it comes to Heirs of Flame.]

“…I see.”

[Also, this is something I scraped from unofficial sources, not the formal records, just so you know?]

[Sixty years ago, one Sun Dwarf wrote something right before dying]

[Seems like it’s one of those things only insiders would know, but the Elite Smiths’ Association apparently logged it in the community somewhere]

Something said right before dying, posted to a community forum?

Then again, considering the Heir of Flame manual is up there too… the community’s whole sense of what belonged where was probably just different from mine.

Text that looked like a scan of yellowed parchment rose up over the hologram.

─────────────────

‘Forget the trials, none of them even swing a hammer with their own hands anymore. They stand in front of Dwarf Company’s mass-production machines, feed in the blueprint, load the ore, and press a button.’

‘What comes out is a sword or a suit of armor stamped with a mass-production emblem.’

‘And people believe that’s ours.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘That belongs to the machine. It isn’t ours.’

‘A real blacksmith… doesn’t exist anymore.’

─────────────────

Guess this world could use a Luddite movement of its own.

Though if there’s one difference, it’s that things got more convenient, from the dwarves’ own point of view, anyway.

So that’s why demand for Heir of Flame gear, rather than mass-produced stuff, went up.

That made sense.

Of course, even with demand that high, there doesn’t seem to be anyone left who can actually make it.

And the difference in quality… apparently the higher an Heir of Flame’s own rank climbs, the more their caliber changes too.

Which meant I could grow too, presumably.

“Open.”

I stretched myself out and opened the Sun Dwarves’ metalworking manual.

Then there was nothing to do but grow.

Reading was never wasted effort, after all…

I calmly worked my way down through the manuals.

* * *

Moving between floors within the Tower’s residential district, as opposed to the climbing zones, wasn’t especially difficult.

Dolores boarded the Tower’s inter-floor transport.

Her destination was the floor the Sun Dwarves ruled: the 88th floor.

Verification for gear could technically be handled at any ordinary dwarf verification office, one of which stood every fifteen floors.

But given what the gear was, and what the engraving was, nothing short of a skilled dwarf at the main office itself would do.

- Whirrr…

The moment the transport’s light faded, heat came pressing in from every direction.

“…Whew.”

No matter how many times she saw it, she never got used to the sight.

First came the overwhelming height of the ceiling, or more precisely, the absence of one.

Looking up, there was no end in sight. Everywhere her eyes landed there were bridges, pulleys, bellows-pipes, and more bridges.

Golden furnaces hung suspended amid that endless framework.

And below, if she looked down past the walkway, a river flowed between the platforms.

It was lava.

The 88th floor’s own artery, what people outside the Tower commonly called the Dwarves’ River.

By rights, the river was meant to flow, branch out into the furnaces scattered across the framework, and merge back together as it went.

…That was how it was supposed to work.

Now, the river flowed toward exactly one place.

A large, ash-gray building visible far in the distance.

Sun Dwarf Company.

Toward it, and only it.

In a forge this size, no sound of anyone actually swinging a hammer could be heard.

Instead, only machine noise rang out from every direction. The thud of presses stamping down on ore, the whir of fabricators turning their gears, the rattle of conveyor belts.

She walked the platform, listening to those machine sounds.

Truth be told, she didn’t dislike this place. Her body, always cold, felt like it thawed a little here, at least.

In that sense, the gloves Lionel had given her, honestly, already…

- Click.

Just then.

Someone was walking toward her from the far edge of the platform.

“…Duchess Dolores.”

“Hello.”

“You came without any word ahead of time? I’m surprised.”

An outfit that didn’t match the backdrop at all: a suit.

Though the build underneath was unmistakably a dwarf’s.

“I’m not here on Dwarf Company business today, so.”

“…I see.”

The Sun Dwarves were a race that prized tradition and held their heads high, someone coming out to greet a visitor, Dolores or otherwise, wasn’t something you’d ever picture from them.

Dwarf Company, though, was different. It meant that for someone who ruled another floor, at least this much of a welcome was in order.

She didn’t know the details, but apparently the dwarves had split into two factions.

The Traditionalists and the Industrialists.

The suit standing in front of her presumably represented the Industrialists.

Not that it was any of her business, really.

“So, might I ask what brings you here?”

“…”

Instead of answering, Dolores simply smiled.

“…I hope you get what you’re after.”

Understanding her meaning, the dwarf gave a light bow and withdrew.

Dolores paid it no more mind and kept walking along the platform.

Her destination was the verification office.

Past the mass-production line was a corner the light barely reached.

That was where the verification office stood.

- Creeeak…

A door of worn, hand-polished wood, nothing like what she’d just passed.

Honestly, this felt a little closer to the Sun Dwarves she knew.

The moment she opened the door, the smell of coal dust hit her.

The scent of things scorched by flame.

“…”

Deep in the room, someone slowly lifted their head toward her.

An old dwarf.

His beard had gone gray, and calluses had built up on every joint of his fingers.

Nothing resembling a suit anywhere on him. A worn apron. And on that apron, a sun engraved into the fabric.

“Who might you be.”

“I’ve come to have something verified.”

“…Mass-production quality control is handled over there…”

The long-bearded dwarf bowed his head and turned his back.

But Dolores added at once.

“It’s for verifying gear made by an Heir of Flame.”

“…”

He froze, mid-turn.

He rose from his chair and looked at Dolores.

His eyes, which only a moment before had looked like a burnt-out wick with all the life gone out of them, now blazed bright.

Dolores took out the glove in answer.

“This is that smith’s gear…”

“It’s a fake.”

The dwarf shook his head the instant he saw the glove.

“The scorch marks on the surface. How broken in the leather is. Whatever work went into this happened a day or two ago, at most. There hasn’t been a new Heir of Flame capable of making a glove like this in decades, so that, without question, is a fake.”

He left no room for rebuttal.

A firm answer that didn’t even seem worth contesting.

Even Dolores felt that answer grate on her, for a moment.

“A shame, after you came all this way.”

The dwarf’s eyes slowly sank back into dullness.

He’d just said his own race’s dying state out loud with his own mouth, twice over, so of course it couldn’t feel good.

The woman in front of him was a well-known figure.

She should have taken the hint by now.

But Dolores herself had no intention of leaving.

“Running a verification isn’t a hard thing to do, after all.”

- Thud.

A pouch full of coins landed on the table.

“The verification office’s job is, by definition, verification. I didn’t ask for your opinion on whether it’s genuine.”

“…Hah.”

‘This is exactly why nobles…’

Translated, her meaning was this.

I came here to have this verified.

So don’t overstep, and just do your job.

Dolores hadn’t exactly had a pleasant temperament to begin with, either.

Whatever sympathy and pity the dwarf had felt vanished in an instant.

‘Good intentions, and they still won’t hear a word of it, damn nobles… Well. At least I’ve earned tonight’s drink money.’

Climbers, that lot, were always like this. Nobles even more so.

The dwarf said nothing more, snatched up the glove, and set it on the workbench.

Appraising gear was simple.

It was run through an appraisal machine that carried the wisdom of the ancestors.

The intricate mechanisms and specialized magic built into it recognized the engraving and told genuine from fake.

- Whirrr…

The machine came to life.

He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d run it.

No reason to bother with a machine just to sort out fakes. These days, one touch of the hand was all it took to know.

So this too was just a formality. A formality to humor some noble.

Right up until then.

The old dwarf, Puram, hadn’t spared the glove a single glance.

Thinking as much, the moment his eyes fell idly on the glove.

“…?”

A gray-engraved sun pattern caught his eye.

Something felt off.

‘…The most basic form.’

The starting point of every pattern. The very first one anyone ever engraved: the apprentice’s mark.

Puram’s brow furrowed. It was strange.

Anything that dared pass itself off as an Heir of Flame fake always, without exception, imitated some flashy, famous artisan’s mark.

An artisan’s mark was, in effect, a luxury brand’s logo.

But who. What kind of lunatic. Would engrave a counterfeit with the shabbiest, most lowly apprentice’s mark there was?

What good would that even do?

The machine began to run.

The magic circuitry etched into the appraisal machine glowed blue,

projecting the glove and forming an image.

And the appraisal result, soon after,

printed onto the paper set in the printer beside it.

- Vzzzzt…

- Thump.

Puram realized, perhaps, that his own heart was pounding.

Something was different. A heart that had never once had reason to race, all the years he’d spent growing old in this cramped room, staring only at fakes.

- Vzzt.

The printer pushed the paper out.

Puram couldn’t wait any longer, and snatched it up.

And the result was.

[Match Rate 100/100]

[Heir of Flame]

─────────────────

『To the heir who’s taken their first step.』

『Clumsy, yes. But unmistakably burning.』

『Please, don’t let it go cold.』

『If you ever lose your way, come find Boldr’s Workshop-』

- Maker of the Appraisal Machine, 7th-Generation Sage Artisan Boldr -

─────────────────

Match Rate: 100. The glove in front of him was genuine.

Puram’s vision blurred at once.

This appraisal machine had been made by a Sage Artisan of a past generation, a great figure who’d stood at the very pinnacle of the Heirs of Flame.

Centuries ago, he’d wired the circuits himself, carved the engraving himself, and finished even the last hammer strike with his own two hands.

And yet this was the first time he’d ever seen a message like this, a contingency like this, hidden inside it.

In all his decades, he’d never once had the chance to identify a genuine piece.

Genuine gear from a real Heir of Flame.

had come to rest on this machine for the first time in decades.

“Ngh…”

It was a perfect, genuine article.

“…Waaaaaaaugh!!!”

Puram cried out the instant he saw the results sheet.

The moment Dolores saw that reaction, she felt she already knew what the results must be.

- Thump.

Her own heart was pounding too.

She couldn’t say for certain, but that kid might genuinely, actually, have pulled off a miracle.

And just then.

- Vzzt.

After the verification result,

the appraisal result printed out as well.

“Waaaaaugh!!”

Leaving Puram behind, still carrying on like that, Dolores alone picked up the printed appraisal certificate.

Behind her, Puram kept groaning, but it no longer reached her ears.

Feeling the fresh-printed paper slowly cool in her hand, Dolores turned the appraisal certificate over.

And then.

─────────────────

[the Apprentice Blacksmith’s Warming Gloves][★☆☆☆☆][Unique Equipment]

─────────────────

『Because I made it with care, thinking of Dolores…』

- Apprentice Blacksmith L -

─────────────────

In one corner of the paper,

a single line, quietly written.

“…?”

Apprentice Blacksmith L. Lionel.

That Lionel… me.

Had thought of me, and made this with care.

“Pfft…”

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand and laughed, elegant even now.

‘What did I even do for him…’

How long had it been since she’d received a gift someone made “with care”?

And without asking anything in return, at that.

She could hardly even remember. The phrase itself felt strange on her tongue.

“Pfft, heh heh…”

Her cheeks warmed, just faintly.

“…Thank you.”

Just a little.

It felt almost like receiving a confession.

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