***(Harald)
I had taken on this impossible game... But is a matter of life and death really a game? No one would blame me... Someone who is just a normal human... To run away from a conflict between magical girls. After all, they have so much strength that they could turn me into red mist with a single punch. An E grade magical girl alone would be around 10 times as fast as a car, no human should deserve to fight such a being. Not even world class athletes.
Then... What do I do? He only had to ponder for a little bit before he made up his mind. What was his specialty? The one thing that he had done to serve society? What gave him the most benefit from a financial standpoint? His one and only talent, one that he forcibly refined through trial and error. He had learned about the mechanisms and workings behind the processes before The Great Disaster, even as a hobbyist he needed knowledge that pertains to both the intricacies and the grunt work.
The most obvious answer is to create some weapons and start his own hunt, but that would be suicide. He needed someone who could infuse magic into his weapons, making them effective on magical girls. He needed way to allow himself to take action...
There was already a path laid before him to that step. He was a mere hobbyist so he had the knowledge, but knowledge alone was not enough. He needed experience. Someone who he had relied on for the first few months, to hone his craft to the point that it could be commercialised. He had met someone that he could proudly acknowledge as his master in the profession. It was not enough for him to be able to make works with metal, but how long does he need to make them?
Can he handle custom specifications? Does he have the capacity to watch over the entire business? More importantly, how much can people afford? What is the production cost, and the amount of profit he needed to make a living? He obviously couldn't dive into all of these blindly, it was necessary to have a guide that could pull him through the murky darkness of a startup.
There was also the long term effects that he had to consider. Is he going to only sell the same thing for the rest of his life? Or will he expand into newer products and expand his array of saleable goods? What skills did he need for this inevitable expansion and marketing? Even if he had all the skills necessary to work in the background, what about the foreground that drew in the customers?
Fortunately, there were many others like him. Others who had far more under their belt, people who have been through more than he could imagine. They tasted first hand the difficulty of making a living. They faced Dangers in their own ways and made it out. Other such notable tutelage, he applied as an apprentice to learn the ins and outs. It goes to mention that he still required some assistance after starting his own shop, but his pride stood unwavered. He can shamelessly flaunt that he clawed his way out of joblessness and transcended beyond the status of a hobbyist.
He entered the empty smithy, bleak and dark just like the state of its owner. He didn't have the energy to bite his lip or scream out. It has taken all he could muster just to stand up straight and face the furnace. A transient glimpse of the past flashed through his mind, for a moment he thought he saw a vivid red fire burning with lifelike flickers in the now cold furnace.
He had walked past the many rooms that preceded this final smithing place. His master's reputation preceded himself, he was the greatest artisan that he knew, at least in this large swathe of the capital. So the place was big, really big. Absolutely filled with apprentices and dormitories, some of the proceeds arising from the works of his apprentices go back to him.
He made a living by teaching and teaching, giving up the advancement of his own craft for the progression of others. Perhaps he had decided to retire right before The Great Disaster, or perhaps he simply no longer wanted to work on metal. Instead, he forged students. Watched them improve and sent them off into the unknown world of business. He was growing old and considering retirement from his teaching job as well.
His lips trembled and his breath was utterly silent. His usual rough black hair was too short to cover his eyes, they hanged loosely over his forehead like torn curtains. Obstructing his own view would be bad for the forge after all, and he preferred to trim his hair over tying it up. He hadn't drank any water since he came all the way here. His parched throat muscles grinded against each other as he turned around.
The hallway of apprentice rooms and forges were here. A long, dry and cracked trail of blood lined the centre, like a sick rendition of a red carpet. Faces he knew for months, face he hadn't seen before, indiscriminately they were killed in their own rooms.
Some were charred to death by their practice forge, their heads burned off and their headless bodies left at its entrance, their necks cauterized. Others were murdered in their sleep, their bodies impaled by furniture as they were hung on the ceiling by their impalement tool.
There were a few rooms with skinless corpses, their walls filled with scratch marks and random broken pieces of their bodies strewn about. Scraps such as broken teeth and missing limbs chaotically decorate the walls and wooden furniture.
With a surmounting amount of evidence, how could he not predict what he would saw ahead? His hope dragged his body ever forward, his prayer for the slight miraculous chance that his master survived pushed his back. His blameless naivety kept him standing...
With that, he fell to his knees and arms. They smash against the floor with inertia and some fury. The rattling of his crutches falling onto the floor resounded. The suffering in his heart far eclipsed the physical pain of his limbs. His breaths were shallow as his lungs painfully expands to force air in, he hated the smell of that place. It was ridden with corpses and he had only been ignoring it by being hyperfocused on his own objective. A flood of rotting stench permeated his nostrils. His olfaction recoiled in disgust as he begins to bring his body back up.
He placed the balance of his body on his arms and forced his hips off the ground with his leg muscles. Then he drags his crutches nearer. After a lengthy process of 10 minutes, filled with multiple attempts to get up on his feet, he had accomplished it. His clothes were drenched with dirt and sweat, his eyes were too dry to cry, he was simply exhausted.
For a while now, it felt like his heart was constricting on itself. The weight of an entire mountain crushes it down, to the point that he would have hurled the contents of his stomach if it had any.
He continued to walk past the final smiting room, entering his master's living quarters. There were a few other doors that led to various other rooms, the kitchen was visible from the front and it seemed that there were plenty of guest rooms and storage rooms strewn about. To the left of the kitchen was the living room, though it was more akin to a lounge since there were no televisions and the seats were wooden, surrounding a low table that had an empty bottle of wine on it.
In front of the entrance was a horizontal hallway that parted in the very centre to lead to the kitchen and living room, on the left and right side, it stretches on into corridors full of various rooms such as toilets, storage rooms, guest rooms, his bedroom and finally his person workshop at the end of the left corridor. It opens up, an unfamiliar figure walks through. Their footstep presses into the wooden floor as the clicking of the door knob ends.
Short dark grey hair that drapes around the back of her head like a curtain, it barely reaches her neck. The sides of it reach lower, forming a sharp corner in front of her shoulders, her bangs rise over her eyebrows and it's curls show the state of its care. Her modest chest was covered by a smithing apron dye with a dark greyish shade of cyan, under it was a simple white t-shirt that greyed in most of its surface as if it was covered in a layer of soot. She wore black baggy pants and protective durable boots, her belt boasted a single imposing tool, the hammer.
"... Who are you? What are you doing in master's smithy?" (Harald)
"... Master? I haven't seen you before, why should I believe that you're some apprentice of his?" (?)
He wasn't sure if she was a magical girl, or a simple thief putting on what she stole from this workshop for fun. But before his beliefs here, he was willing to brave the danger of questioning her, even if she was a magical girl. He would be ashamed to admit it, but in his current state he wouldn't even be able to take her on if she was a normal girl. He depended on crutches to walk, his strength had also declined after being hospitalised. It would take a while more for him to recover properly. Not to mention the non-ideal diet they have been feeding him.
"I was under master Donyard's care for the first 6 months after The Great Disaster. Compared to that amount of time, I've never seen you step foot in this smithy!" (Harald)
"... I'm Leman. I formed the rival company, LemanWorks. I've been competing with Donyard since the start. Under his superior marketing and arsenal of commonly used products, I couldn't compare.
After all, I'm a magical girl. I make magical weapons, it's a niche that I'm willing to sacrifice business to fulfill. I save magical girls' lives. Who are you? Have you done anything notable? " (Leman)
He was off to a bad start. But honestly, he was barely keeping his composure together. An unbearable smile was going to surface, and it would definitely creep out this potential partner that he found. She was the perfect candidate, a smithing magical girl who could make magical weapons... If he managed to enlist her help, even if he begged for it... He could finally enact his revenge on the rogue magical girl.
"... What's with your face? Are you making fun of me? I asked you to introduce yourself, and gave you time to boast whatever you have!!!" (Leman)
... Reality betrayed his thoughts. In trying to suppress his smile, his face contorted with wrinkles until it was worse than a monster's face. His eyebrows and cheeks were raised with uncontrollable happiness, but his lips bent up like a letter 'n' and his nose scrunched into the middle in an attempt to drag his eyebrows down. His eyes closed in the process and his cheeks feel exhausted and tense from the stress. It really seemed like he was mocking her...
Hearing her response, he noticed his difficulty immediately and hid his face in a rush with both hands. His cheek muscles were sore, and he hid his mouth with his palm and his eyes with his fingers. Now he looked even worse trying to cover it up, his nose was still visible as his nostrils opened and closed.
"Ah! Ahh!! I'm Harald! I made my own shop selling kitchen utensils to the general populace! Travelers regularly come to my shop since it's the only mental utensil place around for a large distance! The unique point is the low price! They're not works of art, but I do carve words into more than half of them!" (Harald)
"... Alright... " (Leman)
He then noticed... After he finished speaking, he realised he might have more achievements than Leman. A self proclaimed rival company? If there was one since the start, he would have heard of it even as an apprentice. But he never once... No, he did remember his master mentioning about her once before. But it was practically a passing remark, and nowhere near the level of attention that one pays to their 'rival'. It was like pointing out the shiny rock on the side of the road.
More importantly, she was from a rival company. What was she doing here? Magical girl or not...
"..." (Harald)
"..." (Leman)
He lets go of his face, his eyes now fixed onto her figure. One would think he finally achieved enlightenment given how stoic he suddenly became. She was shocked by his poker face for a moment, and she clearly realised what he was going to say.
"... What are YOU doing here?" (Harald)
"... Paying my respects?" (Leman)