(Lyze POV)
Moonlight.
A precious metal that honestly wasn't too special in the realm of the Transcendental. It was in the lower echelons of the greater metals but out here in the shadow realms, it would have been priceless for a few reasons.
One being its magical capacity. Unlike the steel daggers I'd imbued with spells that had to be activated on command, it naturally absorbed magical energy from its surroundings and stored it within itself until its reached its limit. How high the limit was depended on the mass of Moonlight itself. More than that, if a person knew how, they could engrave runes upon a weapon made of the metal to make it cast a certain spell.
And it did not draw from the wielder's own mana pool but from the magical store of energy it had accumulated inside of itself as a fuel for the spell. And as implied by it's name, it was actually created from moonlight through a special process that Nekros had told me he'd discovered in his younger days.
Through a combination of certain magical tools (which was locked away in one of the various chests in my room), one could literally turn the light of the moon itself into a precious metal that had a myriad of practical uses in both combat and magic. And because of its pearl coloured appearance, it also served as a good material for jewellery as well.
I'd considered it to be the perfect metal for me to try and create a sacred treasure of my own. But that had not gone so well. The most I could manage was the small dagger I'd showed the two blacksmiths. To make bigger and grander weapons, I still needed training in melding high quality materials into the shapes I desired. And then there was the inscription of the particular runes as another hurdle, but fortunately magic was a stronger point of mine than my smithing.
Even so, Cupid was not impressive in itself. That was the name I'd given to the dagger and not because it made my opponent fall in love with me (ugh, hell no!). Rather it received its name because of how ineffective it was.
There were these giant caterpillar monsters back in the jungles of Valaron and I'd attempted to make a sacred treasure to combat them with due to the fact that normal weapons had no effect on them. It was during a time where I was not often allowed to take Libur on an excursion.
Cupid was enchanted so that it increased the gravity in it's own immediate area, so when it sank into the flesh of an opponent, the magic would activate and drive it deeper. The problem was though that manipulating something as abstract as gravity can cost a lot of magical energy, and it had completely wiped the Moonlight blade of its store of magical energy.
This resulted in the spell lasting only for a mere moment as the dagger sank only a few inches deeper into the caterpillar's thick hide before the spell deactivated. The damage it had caused was little more painful than a love-bite to the creature, hence how Cupid got its name. Needless to say, it was one of my most frustrating and embarrassing moments after how much I hyped it up.
Plus it barely qualified as a sacred treasure anyway as it did little as a magical focus. Sacred treasures were meant to amplify one's own magic but Cupid couldn't manage that. So in reality, it was just a magical item. Still though, even if it was ineffective against large monsters, I didn't doubt that it would be another story for another person. A weapon was a weapon.
There was just one other problem, and that was the difficulty in actually forging with it. You had to heat it up to insane levels before you could actually shape it. More than that, if you heated it too much, it would revert back to moonlight which in this case was just motes of pale light.
I demonstrated this to them with a few small ingots I had brought in the bag. The coals in Tsubaki's forge burned white hot as they were licked by my blue flames. The blue flames served as a cheat for time, but if the two wanted to work with it further in the future, then they would have to spend quite a bit of time at the bellows before taking it out.
Another annoyance was that it was quick to cool as well. So the window for shaping it was quite small too. Hephaestus and Tsubaki were fixated upon what was going on between my hands as I created a replica of Cupid right before their eyes. I then offered them an ingot each for them to try.
Tsubaki failed right away as she spent too long at the bellows, heating it up too much and causing the ingot to disappear. Hephaestus was a different matter altogether though. I gawked at her as she used the tongs to quench the newly formed dagger in a barrel of water. She held it up before me in smug triumph.
"How...did you do that?" I asked her dumbly.
"I'm not a goddess of smithing for nothing, silly boy." She winked at me. "I merely had to see you do it once to learn and then just copied you right after."
I shook my head as reality sunk into me as I mentally facepalmed. What was to say that all the gods in Genkai hadn't brought down some sort of perk with them from heaven. If a goddess of beauty possessed a Charm by which they could entrance those that looked upon them, then it was safe to assume that a goddess of smithing had a perk related to that very subject.
Or maybe it was just my personal pride trying to forget that she had hundred of millions of years of practice behind her fingers, and it was merely her experience that let her pretty much insta-learn the forging method after seeing me do it once.
I shook it off though as regardless whether or not she'd managed to learn how to process Moonlight into a weapon, I still retained the actual knowledge of how Moonlight was made in the first place.
I hadn't spent all of the last three weeks just grinding in the dungeon as people around me assumed I did. I had been up to other, 'personal' things as well. And that included creating a new batch of Moonlight Metal under my bedroom window.
"So, are we agreed on the arrangements?" I asked the two of them as Hephaestus marvelled at the pearl white dagger in her hand.
"Yes." She replied and nodded to the half-elf who pushed a contract towards.
"A discount to 3 times worth it's weight in mythril for every shipment you send to us." Tsubaki said. "In exchange for that discount, you will apprentice under us until you are skilled enough and able to make the type of magical weapon you are aiming for. That's the gist of it. The more complex details are written down as well including transport fees, processing fees, so on and so forth."
I read through the contract to make sure there were not any holes in it for them to exploit or cheat me with. Not that I would expect anything of the sort from either of them. They were the heads of the most renowned smithing Familia in the entire freaking world. On top of that, they were honest people even if shrewd businesswomen. Still though, you could never be too careful. I signed my name down on both copies and they took one while I took the other.
"I never would have thought there would come a day where I would haggle on a deal with a child over a precious magical metal never seen before." Hephaestus said while smiling wryly as she put the dagger down. "Just how many more surprises do you intend on throwing on top of Orario?"
"Enough that this is only the beginning." I said honestly. I wasn't a complete muscle head. Who knew how long I would have to stay in this world before I could go home? So it made perfect sense to go into different business ventures. Even now I was aiming for something else that included monster cores but I would have to come to that a bit later.
"Now the only thing left to do is for you to place me under a smith I can train with." I stated as I rolled up my copy of the contract.
"Oh that's easy." Tsubaki said as she leaned forwards in her chair. "You'll be going under me."
"..."
Wut.
'What!?' I screamed in my head, both at the unintentional double meaning and what she actually meant.
"Did I hear that right?"
"Yep." She said, popping the 'p' at the end. "You'll train under me for the duration of your apprenticeship."
"But why?" I reasoned. "You are the captain of a Familia. Not to mention it took you weeks to clear yourself of your orders before you could make time to see me. So why would you take me on?"
"Well for a few reasons actually." Hephaestus said as she left the newly made dagger to cool a little more on the side. "One is that we actually underestimated the level of skill you are already at, yourself included."
"What do you mean?"
Tsubaki fixed me with a stare from her one visible eye.
"What we're saying is that you're capable of already making magical weapons." She said. "Doing something like that is rare even in our Familia."
"Huh?" I said, confused. "But how? You're the top smithing Familia in the world. How are you telling me that there are not that many magical weapon smiths in your Familia?"
"Because doing that is extremely hard to achieve. You need to possess remarkable talent as a blacksmith with the according developmental ability as well to be able to confidently attempt at making a magical weapon." Hephaestus said as she folded her arms. "More than that, you often need very good quality materials to make one." She picked up one of the steel daggers of the table. "Yet without all those things, you still managed to make a magical weapon somehow."
"The problem is not that you can't make the magical weapon is it?" Tsubaki asked me. "Rather you actually need to be trained to work with material of greater quality like monster drop items, right?"
"Yes. That is the case." I responded, while still dwelling on something that confused me. There should have been plenty of smiths able to craft magical weapons by now, particularly a certain red-head boy of a famous family of blacksmiths.
But then it dawned on me. Welf Crozzo had not even left Rakia at this point. He left the warlord state run by Ares to join Hephaestus in the year of the Great Conflict, after all the drama was over. So Crozzo blood had still not yet entered the Hephaestus Familia. I wondered though if the Elven forests had been destroyed yet.
Secretly I was hoping they were. Those patriotic supremacists needed a bit of a kicking.
"And if you're worried about me being bogged down with orders, don't worry. I just do them because I like forging. Whatever orders coincide with your lessons, I'll just delegate them to my underlings." Tsubaki smiled.
"The point is that you are actually already skilled enough to make a magical weapon. We would be the ones that would personally like to see how far you can push this talent of yours." Hephaestus said.
'And perhaps preserve your own image too.' I thought dryly. 'To take credit for teaching an outsider how to make proper magical weapons so people don't go and start learning for themselves instead of turning you for help with those things.'
Not that it would make difference anyway. Sacred treasures were quite different to the magical weapons of this world. For one, they utilised my own personal magic, the magic of Britannia in that sense. Something nobody in this world would be able to do, so that line of business was secure.
"Fine." I shrugged as I leant back. "Learning from the experts is something that I would be a fool to say no to."
"Too right." They both said, smiling along with me. Tsubaki placed a hand on my shoulder and gripped me firmly.
"Welcome to the crew, apprentice Lyze."
...Was that the best you could do?
There had been something I'd wanted to check for the longest time though. For that, I turned to Hephaestus.
"Hephaestus?" I called to her. She looked at me in surprise, which kind of shocked me a little as well as I couldn't understand why she reacted like that. "What? What did I say?"
"Are you a wiseman? Or a pupil of one or something?" She asked me. I blinked, my confusion intensifying.
"No. Why are you asking?"
"Because..." the eye-patch goddess pursed her lips. "...you just called me by an older name."
"...What?" I asked, still not understanding.
"We call her Hephaistos." Tsubaki explained, her single eye narrowed in surprise as well. "Hephaestus was a much older name of hers."
"Oooooooooh." I said as I had a double realization. I could never understand why people referred to her as Hephaistos back in my world, but now I knew it had been intentional on Oomori's part.
Shit...did I just fumble here?
Hang on, didn't Hestia once say that Vesta was another name of hers? Vesta was the Roman counterpart of the Greek goddess Hestia. If I remembered correctly, the god Hephaestus also had a Roman counterpart, one that was called...
I managed to catch myself from saying it just in time. It was literally on the edge of my lips before I caught myself. I had no idea if it was something that other people knew too. I didn't believe that Hephaestus shared her other name with people often down in this realm.
I'd narrowly avoided another blunder.
"So? How did you know that name? It isn't commonly known." Hephaestus, or rather Hephaistos asked me.
"...I learnt it from my teacher." I said appearing as if I conceded the truth.
"So you did learn under a wiseman or something?" Tsubaki said.
"You could say that." I replied. I mean...could Nekros be considered a wiseman? For a moment, I thought I heard his annoying chuckle echoing in my head but I assumed it was my imagination.
"Fine. We'll put that topic aside for now." Hephaistos sighed.
"Do you mind if I call you Hephaestus? I'm kind of used to referring to you like that by this point. Or would you like me to stop?" I asked her.
Her single visible eye flickered over me before she shook her head.
"It's okay if you want to. For some reason when you say it, it doesn't feel odd...but rather...quite nice." She smiled a little, feeling odd herself. I shrugged my shoulders.
"Well then Hephaestus. Back to my original question, I would like you to quickly give me your insight on something."
She raised any eyebrow.
"Oh, and what might that be?"
I paused, momentarily reluctant to draw the thing back out after having not even seen it for three weeks before sighing again and pulling it out of my hammer space. Their eyes widened for a moment as they saw the odd magic but I gave them no time to question it as I held the item before the goddess of smithing.
"This is called Libur. And I want you to tell me what you see of it."
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