Rise of the Living Forge-Chapter 421: An unlikely teacher

“Soulmancy?” Wallace repeated, his eyes thinning to slits. He squinted at Arwin for nearly a second before he continued. “You have Soulmancy? Why am I somehow unsurprised? I knew you were acting far too normal. A student as irksome as you never would have managed to find a normal path. Did you go and turn yourself into a Lich?”

The dwarf’s words dripped with sarcasm, but there was something sharper beneath them. This wasn’t just a random question made merely for conversation. Wallace was watching very carefully to see what Arwin’s reaction would be.

“No,” Arwin said firmly. “Nor have I done any of the typical atrocities associated with Soulmancy. The Mesh gave me the skill on its own, when I evolved my class.”

“I believe he has found a new path to utilizing Soulmancy. Perhaps the originally intended one, rather than the brute forced method which Liches use to acquire the ability,” Koyu said.

“And you, then?” Wallace asked. “A Soulmancer? One that’s been hiding since the last of them were purged from this world?”

“No. I never had the desire to learn,” Koyu said. “My eyes grew weary of this world long before the possibility arrived. My only knowledge of Soulmancy is from stories and observing the one who taught me.”

Wallace blew out a sharp sigh. “Well, thank the gods for the small favors. I’ve spent a fair bit of time with your guild in the past days, Arwin. Lillia especially has been working on driving the point into my thick skull that I need to open my mind. And I say, I’ve been trying. But accepting a Soulmancer is more akin to shoving a damn cannonball in there. Give me something to work with, lad. Tell me I wasn’t wrong about you.”

“Depends on what you thought about me,” Arwin replied with a wry smile. “But I have never — and will never — forcibly bent the will of something to become my slave. I believe I unintentionally used Soulmancy to form functional contracts between myself and some of my weapons, but it was nothing like the vision that Koyu showed me of his master utilizing the skill.”

Wallace ran a hand through his hair and sucked on the ends of his moustache for a second before he responded. “Then you have my attention. Tell me more. I get the feeling I’m going to want to know where this is going.”

***

It took a surprisingly short amount of time to fill Wallace in. Arwin had fully expected the conversation to somehow take an hour, but the dwarf just sat silently and nodded along until he had finished telling him about how the visions he got when making some weapons were likely related to Soulmancy.

Arwin took him through everything that he and Koyu had gone over, including his revelations from watching Shade work and how the crystal infused into his bow was somehow part of an ancient weapon.

Wallace didn’t say a single word until Arwin had finished. Then the three of them had stood in silence for several long seconds. The dwarf finally broke it with a long, thoughtful hum.

“One thing is for certain. You never fail to somehow catch me off guard,” Wallace said. “First you go around eating lava—”

“What now?” Koyu asked, blinking.

“It felt like the right idea at the time,” Arwin said. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “And I still stand by it. It works. Has a good chew to it as well. I’m going to blame the Mesh for that.”

“The Mesh didn’t spoon the lava into your mouth,” Wallace said.

“But it did decide to make me eat magical items. If you give someone the affinity for snacking on magic metal, you can’t be mad when they start trying to eat other weird things too.”

Wallace blinked. “You… eat metal?”

Ah. Did I ever mention that to him? I suppose it wasn’t really pertinent to any of the conversations we had. Whoopsie.

“Magic, actually,” Arwin corrected. “And it’s not a weird hobby. I need to eat it to survive. This is a bit off topic, though.”

“You’re not glossing over this,” Koyu said. “What do you mean, you eat magic?”

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“I want to know the answer to that as well. You can’t say something like that and expect me to ignore it!”

Lovely. I’ve managed to get the overly righteous dwarf to side with a Lich within minutes. I almost feel like the Mesh should have given me some sort of achievement for that. But if we’re going to be working together, I’d rather not keep this secret. There’s no point. They might even be able to help me figure out how to master the Hungering Maw before its growth ends up getting to the point where I can’t contain it.

“It’s a really long story,” Arwin said. “But to condense it, after I lost my Hero class and became a smith, I gained the ability to consume magic. The need to consume magic.”

“Fascinating,” Wallace breathed. “Any magic?”

“Haven’t found one I couldn’t eat yet. Really, this is kind of Necrohammer’s fault. Direct your questions at him. He’s the one that—”

“Necrohammer?” Wallace exclaimed, his eyes going wide as saucers. “What does he have to do with anything?”

Oh, shit. Didn’t Necrohammer say something about coming to odds with the Dwarven council? The dwarves as a whole probably have a pretty negative view of him.

“Another long story,” Arwin said, pinching the bridge of his nose. They were going to forget the reason he’d gathered them here at this rate. “He’s an asshole. Was an asshole. Kind of still is. But he’s an enemy of the Adventurer’s Guild and doesn’t approve of the way things have been going. He pulled me and Lillia out from under their thumb and is partially responsible for us getting new classes. But if we get caught on every single surprising bit of my story, we’re never going to make any progress.”

“There are more?” Koyu asked.

Arwin sighed. “If I said no, would you believe me?”

“No,” Koyu and Wallace said at the same time.

“Well, no,” Arwin said. “There aren’t.”

“I don’t believe you,” Wallace said.

“Good,” Arwin replied. “I was lying. Feel free to swing by for drinks after this and I’ll happily bring you up to speed… provided you swear to never breathe a word of it to another soul. Now, we’ve gotten past the preliminary bits.”

“We really haven’t,” Wallace said.

“Anyway, since we’ve gotten past them,” Arwin continued, narrowing his eyes and barging past Wallace’s words without even missing a beat, “I want to get to the reason I asked you to come here. I am planning to study Soulmancy in order to improve my abilities as a smith, but I don’t want to do it the way I’ve done things before.”

“Seems like it’s worked well enough so far,” Koyu said.

“It may have, but I’m fed up running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” Arwin said. “I’m half a smith. Half a warrior. Half a Lich, if you believe some people.”

“That’s three halves,” Wallace pointed out.

“You’re not too short to punt,” Arwin threatened. “I’ll do it. I have no respect for my elders. Especially when they’re half my height.”

“That,” Wallace said, crossing his arms in front of his chest, “was low.”

Could be lower. A whole lot lower.

“Good. Now are you going to hear me out or not?”

Wallace gestured for Arwin to continue.

“Thank you. I want to do things the right way for once. You both have far more experience than I do in your respective fields. Sure, Koyu isn’t a master of Soulmancy, but I’d wager he knows more about it than most. Between him and you, Wallace, I have a very good base of knowledge to draw from. I want you to teach me everything you can. About the parts of Dwarven Smithing I’m missing. About Soulmancy. About everything. And I want to do it fast.”

Koyu and Wallace exchanged a glance.

“You’re asking for a lot,” Wallace said. “And that goes twice if you want to do this quickly. You were a quick study… but there’s a big difference between teaching for a bit and dedicating weeks or months to it. I have tasks of my own that need to be done. This isn’t just some light favor. It’s a huge commitment. Not to act like a greedy — well, dwarf — but I can’t just spend that much time for no reason. Teaching is hardly my passion.”

Arwin thought for a moment. There were a number of ways he could probably convince Wallace. Access to Lillia’s drinks was foremost among them. But trying to make deals by opening with threats was rarely a wise choice when you wanted your coworkers to like you.

He’d offered Koyu a new body… but Arwin doubted there was anything he could make Wallace that the dwarf would want. Wallace was, after all, a smith. He’d probably be offended more than anything else if Arwin insinuated the reward for helping him would be getting a weapon of some sort.

No, Arwin had something far more appealing in mind.

“I don’t know how closely you’ve kept up with the Proving Grounds, but my teams performed exceptionally well. We’ve already got more people lining up on the street than we know what to do with,” Arwin said with a sly smile. “And my new policy is that I won’t be making anything for anyone that doesn’t bring me interesting materials to work with.”

“Where are you taking this?” Wallace asked, his eyes narrowing.

“I think you know,” Arwin replied. “You can’t tell me that there isn’t some material you’ve been dying to get your hands on. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t get the feeling you get out much. You’re quite busy, after all. I’d imagine there might be a material that you’d very much like to have find its way into your pockets. I have the perfect opportunity to put the word out.”

Wallace was quiet for a moment.

Then his lips split into a grin.

“Maybe teaching ain’t so bad,” Wallace said, reaching up to clap Arwin on the shoulder. “Always rather liked it. Fostering the new generation and all that. Let’s get to it, shall we? Time’s a’ wasting.”