The tavern called "The Lame Boar" in the village of Fil did not deserve the title of tavern by any city standard—a wide room with a low timber ceiling from which three oil lanterns hung, leaking sticky black smoke, and four oak tables carved with rough hands bearing the scars of knives, cups, and cigarette burns accumulated over twenty years, and a single beer barrel behind the counter managed by Hilda with her thick arms and narrow eyes that tracked every hand reaching for a mug without a hand reaching afterward for a coin purse.
Jary sat in the corner farthest from the door, his back pressed against the cold stone wall, a half-empty beer mug before him, his index finger tracing its rim in a slow, absent circle. The man sharing his table—a farmer named Tod with a sun-scorched face and yellowed teeth—listened with half an ear while the other half followed Hilda slicing dried meat behind the counter.
"The problem isn't the craft," Jary said in a low voice carrying the tone of a man trying to convince himself before his listener. "The problem is the raw material. The iron I'm smelting is dead iron—worn-out swords recycled at least three times before they ever reached my grandfather's workshop. Every smelting cycle strips the metal of carbon and introduces new impurities from forge ash and rust residue. The result is a blade that looks solid but is brittle inside, like a stale loaf of bread."
Tod nodded—a nod that meant less understanding than a wish to avoid argument—and opened his mouth to say something, but a third voice cut him off: Hilda's sharp call launched from behind the counter like a spear through the tavern's low murmur.
"Jary, grandson of Garon!" The shout was measured with a tradesman's precision that never missed its mark. "Three nights in a row you sit at my table and drink from my barrel and I haven't seen a single coin from your hand since Tuesday. Ten coppers, Mister Blacksmith—ten coppers accumulated—and I will not accept new promises."
Jary felt a flush of heat climb from his neck to his ears—the same heat he knew from the forge mouth, but crueler here because it was the heat of humiliation, not fire. He turned toward her with a strained smile and said: "Next week, Hilda. I'll finish a new order and settle everything." Hilda fixed him with her narrow eyes for three full seconds, then returned to her dried meat without answering—a silence more eloquent than any spoken threat.
---
At that moment, the translucent red screen flickered at the right edge of his vision—a brief flash no one could see but him. He lowered his head toward his mug and pretended to drink while his eyes read the ember-colored letters forming in the air before him.
**"Task Update — System of the Great Ascetic Blacksmith: Task One: Extract virgin raw ore from a mountain source not industrially depleted. Task Two: Locate three rare virgin mineral stones untouched by any smelter. Task Three: Sustained hammering practice — minimum two thousand strikes daily for seven days. Pending Reward: revealed upon completion of all three tasks. Time Limit: fourteen days."**
Jary swallowed slowly. Virgin raw ore meant his recycled iron would not suffice. Stones untouched by any smelter meant he would need to dig somewhere human tools had never reached. Two thousand strikes a day meant eight hours of continuous hammering at minimum, assuming one blow every fifteen seconds. All of this with no money in his pocket, no mining equipment in his workshop, and not enough food for three days.
He finished the beer in one long pull, rose from the table, patted Tod on the shoulder—Tod raised both eyebrows with a bewildered expression—and walked out of the tavern into the pale morning light.
Fil in the morning looked like a painting done by a lazy artist: gray stone rooftops, ancient oak trees, a dirt road crossed by two roosters and a single goat chewing the rope that tethered it to a fence. Jary walked down the dirt road toward the southern edge of the village where Olaf's storehouse stood—a small stone building that resembled a cellar more than a shop, its heavy iron door permanently locked even when its owner was inside.
---
Olaf was a man who had passed sixty by two decades, perhaps three—no one in Fil knew his true age and no one dared ask. His face was wide and square, covered in thick, furrowed skin that resembled the bark of an old tree. His shoulders were broad in a way that did not match his short legs, and his hands were massive, ending in thick fingers with black, cracked nails from decades of handling iron, dirt, and stone. Olaf owned the only mining equipment within a ten-kilometer radius: pointed picks, heavy mattocks, rock chisels, sturdy rope, a single-wheeled iron handcart, and a leather helmet with a metal guard—equipment he rented to seasonal mine workers at prices determined more by his mood than by the market.
Jary knocked four times on the iron door. Silence. Four more knocks. A coarse cough from inside, then the scrape of a lock, and the door opened a single handspan. Olaf's right eye appeared—gray, clouded, ringed by deep creases—and scanned the visitor from head to toe in a slow, deliberate sweep.
"What do you want, Garon's boy." Not a question. Olaf did not ask questions; he issued preliminary verdicts and left the other party to confirm or deny them.
"I need mining equipment," Jary said, trying to keep his voice steady. "A pick, a mattock, a chisel, rope, and the handcart."
Olaf opened the door one more handspan—enough now to see half his face and the dense web of broken capillaries across his large nose—and said: "Daily rental is one silver coin. In advance. With a deposit worth triple the equipment value in case of damage."
Jary did the math quickly. One silver coin a day meant a seven-day trip would cost seven silvers, and he currently owned three coppers in his pocket and two more hidden beneath a stone in the workshop floor. The deposit required a sum he could not afford even in his dreams.
"I don't have silver right now," Jary said, and before Olaf could shut the door in his face he added quickly: "But I have the workshop."
Olaf's hand stopped on the door's edge. The workshop—a solid stone building with its oak door, its anchored anvil, and its wide chimney—was worth at least twenty silver coins as village property, and Olaf was a man who understood the value of real estate far better than he understood the value of people. He opened the door fully for the first time and stood in the frame at his full short, broad stature, arms folded across his chest.
"You want to mortgage Garon's workshop—your grandfather's workshop—for a pick, a mattock, and a rope?"
Something like contempt lived in his voice, but it was laced with sharp commercial curiosity. Jary swallowed and said: "The workshop and the house above it. Collateral for the full equipment set, ten days. I come back with raw ore, sell it, and pay your rental and Hilda's tab and next season's coal in one lump sum."
He was not confident in his own words—every sentence that left his mouth tasted of reckless gambling and smelled of bankruptcy—but the red screen at the edge of his vision flickered once, a passing reminder that the three tasks were not optional if he wanted to advance the System.
Olaf stared at him for thirty full seconds with those gray, clouded eyes, unblinking. Then he extended his massive right hand and said in a dry voice: "The workshop and the house. Ten days. If you don't return with the full amount—six silver coins for rental and insurance—I become the owner of the workshop. I have no time for your sentimental attachment to your dwarf grandfather's memory."
Jary shook his hand and felt Olaf's fingers press down on the bones of his palm with deliberate force that crossed the line from handshake to warning.
---
Jary loaded the handcart with the rented equipment—the pointed pick weighed four and a half kilograms with an iron head fixed by a wooden wedge into an elm-wood neck; the mattock was a full kilo heavier with a broader blade suited for splitting layered rock; the rock chisel was a flat steel bar thirty centimeters long with a wide striking head; and the rope was twenty meters of braided hemp fiber, thumb-thick—and pushed it down the dirt road toward the mine at Clay Valley, two hours' walk north of the village. The road climbed gradually between barren rocky hills covered in thorn bushes and dry yellow grass, and the single iron wheel bounced over every stone and slid into every rut, forcing Jary to lift the cart handles with the full strength of both arms to correct its course. Sweat seeped from his back and soaked his wool shirt until it clung to his skin like a second, damp layer.
He reached the mine before noon. Clay Valley was not a mine in the industrial sense—a natural crack in the side of a rocky hill that local workers had widened over the years with mattocks and chisels until it became a shallow tunnel thirty meters deep with a ceiling low enough to force a man of average height to stoop. At the tunnel mouth: two empty carts, a donkey tied to a dead tree trunk, and three workers sitting on flat rocks eating their meal—hard gray bread, dry white cheese, and raw onion. A mine meal, not a table meal.
One of them raised his head as Jary approached—a lean man with a dust-coated face and bare arms covered in scratches—and said: "Little Garon's blacksmith. Digging on your own or buying?"
"Digging," Jary said.
The worker raised his eyebrows and smiled a smile that held warmth mixed with pity: "Sit down. Eat with us first. The rock isn't going anywhere."
Jary sat on a nearby boulder and took the bread the worker offered. He bit into it and found it so hard that his jaw needed three attempts to break the first mouthful, but hunger made the taste of tough grain tolerable. The three workers—Rigg, Marten, and Little Paul, who was not little at all but massive and broad, nicknamed so out of mockery—talked about the season and the price of raw iron at the regional market and the late rains and about Marten's donkey, which had refused to enter the tunnel for a week without any obvious reason.
Jary listened and ate, then asked: "What can I pull out of here?"
Rigg wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said: "Poor iron, high impurity content. Sometimes we find thin copper veins, but they're not worth the effort. The good ore was mined out ten years ago. We're scraping what's left."
Poor, depleted iron. Exactly what Jary had expected, and exactly what the System would not accept—it had demanded "virgin raw ore from a mountain source not industrially depleted."
---
Jary spent the rest of the day inside the tunnel striking the rock face with pick and mattock, collecting chunks of iron-bearing stone streaked with orange rust veins, and filled a quarter of the cart with the yield of four straight hours of work. When he emerged into the open air—shoulders trembling from exhaustion, both palms covered in fluid blisters from the friction of the mattock handle—he examined his haul with his enhanced appraisal skill and found that the pure iron content in this ore did not exceed thirty percent. The rest was silica, sand, and phosphoric impurities that would make any blade forged from it as brittle as cheap pottery.
He looked at the red screen that appeared at the edge of his vision in a calm line: **"Task One: not fulfilled. Extracted metal does not meet the required virgin purity standard."**
---
At sunset, he sat with the three workers around a small fire in front of the tunnel mouth. Rigg sliced jerky with a rusty knife, Little Paul grilled onion slices on a hot flat stone, and Marten tried to coax his donkey into drinking from a tin bucket. Jary looked north, where a nameless peak rose against the darkening sky—the workers called it "the Bald" because its summit was smooth bare rock without a single tree—and asked in a casual tone:
"Has anyone ever mined the Bald?"
Sudden silence. Rigg stopped slicing. Marten left the donkey and turned. Even Little Paul raised his head from the grilled onion.
"No," Rigg said slowly. "No one has mined the Bald. Not because it's empty—the ore veins on its western face are visible to the naked eye. Clean iron with a silver color that hasn't oxidized, which means it's virgin ore, never extracted. But the Bald is haunted."
Jary raised his eyebrows. "Haunted by what? Ghosts?"
Rigg shook his head slowly. "Steppe wolves. A full pack uses the northern face as their seasonal den. These are not ordinary wolves—horned wolves, the mutant breed that lives near dungeon zones. The alpha alone is at least D-rank. No one in Fil has the combat ability to face it, and no one is foolish enough to try."
Jary stared at the fire and watched the flames dance across the kindling and said nothing for two full minutes. A D-rank alpha wolf and a retired E-rank adventurer with no sword, no shield, and no party—the arithmetic was clear and fatal. But the other arithmetic was equally clear: a mortgaged workshop, mounting debts, and a System demanding virgin ore within fourteen days, with no virgin source within a day's walk except the Bald.
He swallowed the last piece of dry bread and said in a voice far too calm for the madness of what he intended: "Former adventurer. I'll manage."
Rigg looked at him with a long gaze empty of admiration and full of the pity of a man who had seen enough folly in his life to recognize its shape when it walked on two legs. But he did not object. Marten said only: "If you're not back by tomorrow, no one will come looking." Little Paul said nothing. He reached out, placed an extra slice of grilled onion in Jary's palm, and returned to his silence.
---
Jary set out an hour before dawn. He left the handcart at the mine entrance and carried the pick, mattock, and chisel on his back in a leather pack lashed to his shoulders and chest with the rope. He walked north across a flat grassy plain broken by black basalt rocks jutting from the earth like broken teeth in a giant's jaw. Moving in darkness was slower than he had expected—every twenty steps he stumbled on a root or a buried stone—but the moon in its last quarter gave him enough pale light to make out the larger shapes. After three hours of walking, the plain began to rise and the summit of the Bald appeared before him: a massive rock formation rising two hundred meters above the plain, its western face sloping at roughly forty-five degrees and covered in fractured sedimentary rock that revealed, between its layers, gleaming metallic veins Jary could see even in the dim light—silver and dark gray lines running horizontally across the rock face like veins in the arm of a stone giant.
He reached the base of the western slope with the first thread of orange light on the eastern horizon. He lowered the pack from his back, untied the rope, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and breathed deep. The air here was cleaner and colder, carrying a faint metallic smell like old blood—a geological marker confirming a high concentration of iron oxides in the surface soil.
He examined the rock with his appraisal-enhanced eyes and felt the familiar cold clarity pour into his perception. The nearest metallic vein contained iron at a purity exceeding seventy-five percent—an excellent figure by manual extraction standards—with trace amounts of nickel that would give the metal added resistance to rust. And deeper in the rock, at a point half a meter from the surface, his skill detected three luminous points buried in a mass of clear quartz: small mineral stones roughly the size of walnuts, dark blue with silver cores. He did not know their type, but his appraisal skill described them in his mind with a single cold phrase: **"Virgin stones — untouched by any smelter. Purity: high. Classification: unknown — requires advanced analysis."**
He raised the pick and began to strike. The rock here was far harder than anything in Clay Valley—each blow chipped off a flake no larger than a fingernail and sent a vibration up through the pick head, along the wooden neck, into his palms and from there into his elbows, shoulders, and spine. After one continuous hour he had carved a groove ten centimeters deep and twenty wide—barely enough to seat the chisel head. He wedged the chisel into the crack and struck it three measured blows with the mattock. The rock split along a clean horizontal line and a head-sized chunk fell at his feet. He examined it: good raw iron, but the three stones were deeper still. He reset the chisel and struck again.
Two more hours. The sun climbed and poured its heat onto his hunched back. The blisters on his palms had burst and he was now striking with raw, exposed fingers that left red smears on the mattock handle. But he did not stop. The pain was familiar—workshop pain and mine pain and the pain of four years in the dungeon floors with nothing to show for it. Pain whose shape and smell he knew, pain he could swallow like a bitter pill.
In the fourth hour, the quartz mass broke. It shattered under the final mattock blow into three large pieces and four smaller shards, and among the debris the three blue stones with their silver cores gleamed—small and unexpectedly dense, each stone weighing twice what its size suggested, its surface smooth with an oily, cold luster unlike any metal Jary had ever handled. He picked them up with trembling fingers, placed them in a small cloth pouch, and tied it tight. The moment the last stone touched his palm, the red screen flashed:
**"Task Two: complete. Three virgin stones — verified. Task One: partial progress — extracted ore quantity meets forty percent of the minimum requirement. Task Three: pending. Immediate partial reward: Health (+1) — current total (+6). Free personal points: (+3) — usage: locked until Novice Blacksmith rank is reached."**
Jary stared at the last line. Three free points he could not use yet. Points suspended like coins in a locked pocket for which he held no key. He felt a mix of triumph and frustration—triumph at completing the task, frustration at the opaque reward—but the extra health point was tangible: the exhaustion that had been crushing him through hours of mining retreated slightly, not because it vanished but because his body now bore it with a fractionally higher efficiency.
---
He gathered as much raw iron as he could carry—roughly fifteen kilograms in the leather pack—and began descending the slope as the sun tilted west. The simple plan: return to the handcart at Clay Valley before dark, then back to the village by morning.
But simple plans in a world that contained dungeon floors, dragons, and horned wolves did not stay simple for long.
He heard them before he saw them. A low, sustained howl—not one wolf but the synchronized chorus of three or four throats howling in staggered succession, creating a continuous sound wave that bounced off the rock face and surrounded the listener from every direction, making the source impossible to pinpoint.
Jary stopped where he stood. He lowered the pack from his back slowly and reached for the pick and drew it out—not a real weapon by any combat standard, but heavier and sharper than his bare fists. The light was failing fast and shadows stretched from the rocks like black fingers crawling across the ground, and between two shadows he saw the first pair of eyes: two luminous yellow orbs a
meter off the ground, steady as lanterns hung in a black void. Then a second pair to his left. A third behind him. A fourth.
The first wolf stepped from the shadow: a body the size of a small calf covered in coarse dark-gray fur like metal wire, and on its forehead two short horns curving forward, the color of dirty ivory—not decorative but stabbing weapons tipped with points capable of puncturing leather armor with ease. The first was followed by a second, a third, until Jary counted six wolves forming a half circle around him at a distance of twenty meters, all watching him with steady eyes showing no visible aggression—only the patience of predators that knew the prey had no escape and saw no need to rush.
Then he heard heavier footsteps behind the front rank. A single set, slow and confident. And the alpha appeared.
A wolf the size of a short horse—its shoulders level with Jary's chest—its fur entirely black except for a silver line running from the crown of its head to the base of its tail like a luminous crack in a mass of darkness. Its horns were twice the length of the others', curving at a wider angle that gave them greater stabbing range, and its eyes were not yellow but orange with narrow vertical pupils like slits in a sealed iron door through which fire leaked.
Jary looked at it through his enhanced appraisal and the information surfaced in his mind with terrifying clarity: "Horned Alpha Wolf — Rank D+ — Threat Level: lethal for combatants below C-rank."
Below C-rank. And Jary was E-rank. Retired. No sword, no shield. Carrying a mining pick and Level-Three fire magic boosted by only two points.
Jary moved on survival instinct, not on any plan. He ignited his right palm with a fireball and hurled it at the nearest wolf—it struck the side of its head and the beast recoiled two steps and shook its skull in annoyance, but it did not truly burn. The coarse fur and thick hide absorbed the heat like a cushion. He ignited a second fireball and threw it at the ground in front of his own feet. A short flame rose and created a temporary fire barrier two meters wide and half a meter tall—a feeble partition that bought seconds, not minutes.
He retreated two steps and raised the pick with both hands and tried to recall any combat maneuver from his adventuring years. He found only one—a rule Kailo had taught him during a cold morning drill: "If you can't fight, make yourself more expensive than you're worth." He swung the pick in a half circle before him and screamed a shapeless scream, hoping the loud noise and violent motion would keep the wolves at bay.
The alpha was not impressed. It took one calm step toward the fire barrier, lowered its head, and drove its horns through the flame. The barrier split like a paper curtain. It roared once—a single, deep sound that vibrated inside Jary's chest and knocked his balance loose. He dropped to his left knee and the pick slipped from his right hand.
In that second—the second of falling, the alpha's pupils widening, its body coiling to lunge—Jary heard a sound that belonged neither to wolves nor to stone: a thin, high-pitched whistle cutting the air like an invisible blade, followed by a ringing metallic impact against the alpha's right horn. An arrow? No—not an arrow. Something smaller, faster, and far more precise. A second one struck the alpha's left shoulder. Dark blood flowed. The beast staggered back three quick steps, snarled in pain and fury, and swung its head toward the source.
From the gathering dark behind the rocks, moving shadows appeared—not wolves but humans. Three. Four. Five. A party of adventurers in tight combat formation: at the front, a vanguard fighter in a steel breastplate with a long spear blocking the gap between two boulders; on his right flank, an archer with a short bow loosing arrows at a steady three-second rhythm; behind them both, a mage with a wooden staff sending white orbs of light that burst on contact with the ground and created blinding flashes against the wolves' dark-adapted eyes.
And the fifth—she moved at a different speed from the rest, closer to the ground and more evasive, sliding between the rocks like liquid shaping itself around obstacles rather than colliding with them. In her right hand, a familiar blade gleamed: a blade thirty centimeters long, four centimeters wide at the base tapering to one at the tip, with a leather-wrapped handle fastened by two small copper pins.
The dagger Jary had made.
Roa surged from the flank while the alpha was occupied with the archer and the front fighter, and in a single low motion she drove the long dagger into the soft gap beneath the wolf's right foreleg where the fur was thinnest and the muscle exposed—the same technique Kailo had used against the dragon, a single thrust into the weak point. She pulled the blade free before the alpha could turn and slash with its horns at the place where she had stood a second before. Blood poured freely, and the alpha howled—a different howl this time, retreat rather than attack. It turned, leaped once over the rocks in a long arc, and vanished into the dark. The six wolves followed one after another like shadows withdrawing before a sudden light.
Silence. Jary was still on his left knee, mouth open, panting, his heart hammering against his ribs with a force he could feel in his teeth. He raised his head and found Roa standing three meters away—her chestnut hair half-loosened from the run, her gray eyes regarding him with the same cool tone she had worn when she bought the dagger. In her right hand the blade was smeared with the alpha's dark blood, dripping slowly from the tip onto the dirt.
She said, without a trace of breathlessness despite having just sprinted, stabbed, and dodged seconds before: "Garon's blacksmith. What are you doing in steppe-wolf territory with a mining pick and no weapon?"
Before Jary could answer, the fighter in the breastplate stepped closer and said in a rough voice: "Roa, do you know him?"
She gave a curt nod. "The new blacksmith in Fil. He made me this." She raised the blood-stained dagger. The fighter looked at the dagger, then at Jary collapsed on one knee, and shook his head with an expression that blended relief and disdain.
From behind the group, the fifth figure stepped forward—a younger girl in a white robe, hands clasped before her chest, a faint green glow emanating from her palms: a healer. She knelt beside Jary and placed her glowing hands on his right shoulder, and warmth flowed into his cramped muscles like lukewarm water seeping into the cracks of parched earth. He felt the pain in his knee and blistered palms recede slowly—not vanishing, but shrinking to a bearable threshold. Then she drew a small glass vial from her belt containing a clear blue liquid—a magical healing potion Jary knew sold for three silver coins per vial at the Agu market—and offered it to him.
He drank half in a single swallow and felt a coolness stream down his throat and stomach and spread toward his limbs. His knee straightened, he regained the strength to stand, and part of the raw skin on his palms sealed over, the blisters drying into thin crusts.
Jary rose to his feet and bowed deeply—perhaps deeper than the moment required, the bow of a man who knew he had nearly died and that five strangers had prevented it.
"Thank you," he said, his voice raw. "Thank you, all of you. If you hadn't arrived—"
Roa cut him off, her tone dry: "If we hadn't arrived, you'd have been the alpha's dinner before your body cooled. Do not enter zones beyond your combat classification again. This is not the city dungeon where you can run to the gate. Out here, there are no gates."
The words stung worse than the alpha's horns because they were precise and honest and carried field experience that did not belong to an ordinary village girl—and for the second time, Jary noticed that Roa's movements, the way she held the dagger, and the tone of her voice did not match her self-description as a local resident of Fil.
But Jary—despite the embarrassment, the pain, and the lingering terror—did what a broke blacksmith does when he finds himself standing before a group of adventurers carrying weapons that need maintenance. He straightened up, smoothed his filthy, torn shirt, cleared his throat, and said in a showman's tone that did not match his wrecked appearance in any conceivable way:
"If you ever need handcrafted weapons or equipment repairs, my workshop is on the western edge of Fil. The workshop of Garon—the legendary dwarf blacksmith—now personally operated by his grandson. Fair prices and quality…"
He glanced at the blood-stained dagger in Roa's hand and added: "…field-tested quality, as you've just witnessed."
A short, awkward silence. The breastplate fighter stared at him with an expression that could only be described as compassionate bewilderment. The archer lowered his bow and wiped his face with his hand to hide a grin. The healer covered her mouth with her palm. Even Roa—the cold one with the gray eyes—felt the left corner of her lip twitch with what might have been half a smile, smothered before it could be born.
She said: "Go home, blacksmith."