Oliver set his chisel with finality, carefully lining it up with the cleaves he wanted to make in its structure, set his mallet, and…

No, that's not right.

There was too much risk of the stone just chipping instead of breaking in a controlled way, and he couldn't accept that. It wasn't right. He needed to get this right. It needed to be right.

Another adjustment, but Oliver frowned and whispered a divination. No, that just made it worse. He adjusted back again and recast the divination, but the results were still getting worse. He gripped the hammer tightly, and…

Ah.

He was getting upset.

Oliver set down the hammer and chisel on the flat-topped rock he was currently preparing to serve as a workbench-slash-anvil. Then, he sat down next to it and centered himself.

As he meditated, Oliver's worries faded away, reorganized to a corner of his mind where they wouldn't bother him or interrupt his craft, and left him with perfect serenity. His mind thereby tamed, Oliver retrieved his chisel and mallet and began lining up his strike once again. Now, he had no issues keeping the grip on his tools light and easy, and his prognostication was substantially more positive. He just needed to…

There.

He cast a quick spell as wood struck copper struck stone, and stone gave way. It was just a tiny fleck of stone, but Oliver didn't want anything more. This needed to be perfect, because he needed his foundry to be good if they were ever going to get this working.

"Smith," a voice pulled him out of his thoughts and Oliver nearly dropped his tools in shock before spinning around to see who had spoken.

"Commander," he greeted, getting his heart rate under control. Losing control of your body was a rookie mistake for a mage, a spiking heart rate could be very bad news in certain rituals.

"What are you doing?"

Was that aggressive? Oliver was doing a great many things, how many of them were likely to get him in trouble with Commander Inq? He was just doing what she'd told him to do, getting prepared to replace the inkling currently tied up with crafting ward-wands. He just needed to make a foundry good enough to serve as a brand, and then a way to make that brand automatically apply itself to a bunch of same-sized sticks. Those would both be very hard, and as such he needed an absolutely top-notch workspace to make it. But he could make it so… he should answer Henrietta's question.

"I'm making an anvil. Workbench. Both."

"You've barely carved a handful of runes since before I went to sleep. Is something wrong?"

Oliver shook his head, "No, there's nothing wrong. It's just hard, so I need to be careful and take my time."

Henrietta looked at him.

Oliver nervously tried to read Henrietta's face, seriously missing his social skill. Communication was so much harder without being able to assess what the other person was thinking. How anyone managed without a social skill, he had no idea.

"I see. And you're not capable of making a good staff without this?"

"Well. No? But even with this, I wouldn't be able to make a good staff. But it will certainly be less bad. If I make this, then I can make myself better tools so that I can create the more specialized tools needed to make a not intolerably bad staff. And then with that staff, I can more easily create a System node." he reminded her, "Which is exactly what you asked me to do."

There. People usually didn't get mad if you reminded them that you were just doing what they told you to do. Well, sometimes they got mad, but they couldn't really do anything about that madness.

Henrietta… sighed. That was a sigh. "You're not wrong."

She looked off into the distance, and Oliver subtly turned slightly to get a peek at what she was staring at. He didn't notice anything obvious, which left him at a bit of a loss.

"If you were to make a staff right now, would you be able to make a Node with it?"

Oliver hesitated, "No?"

"You don't sound certain."

"I'm not certain I could make a node with any level of tools I can make on my own. But the better the staff, the better my chances. Right now, I don't think my chances are good. They'll never be good, but they're really bad right now."

Henrietta paused. "We'll see what we can do, then. What's your current limiter?"

"My tools," Oliver easily answered. "That's what I've been saying."

"Other than that. What is your strongest material limitation right now? If you could use more of anything, what would it be?"

"Time?"

"We have as much as you could need. What would more time get you?"

"More time to make better tools."

Henrietta sighed. "And making the Node, that will improve your tools a lot, right?"

"Yeah, but to do that I need better tools," Oliver really didn't understand what Henrietta was trying to get at. The answer was always going to be tools, because that was his biggest limiter.

"And why can't you make better tools already? You don't need to make this fancy carved rock to make something slightly better, do you?"

"Well, I don't have enough copper to make a more traditional anvil. And even an anvil will need to be enchanted to work properly."

"Okay, copper. That's something we can work on. You don't have enough?"

"Well no, I have enough copper to make my staff. And the enchantments I'll need to make that."

"But you just said you don't have enough to make an anvil," Henrietta replied. "Alright. I don't think this is getting anywhere."

Henrietta looked off into the distance, then called out, "Ride!"

Alyssa, previously standing at attention for another attack from the vinebeasts – they'd started attacking roughly daily, and it was getting close to when they'd be due for another attack – looked over at him and Henrietta, then came over as she was waved to approach.

"Yes, Commander?"

"What do you currently need most?"

"A better weapon," she said immediately. "Sharpened sticks aren't doing anything for me. Am I finally getting an axe?"

Oliver instinctively felt protective, and clutched his chisel more tightly. He needed that copper! Metal was so incomparably valuable for technological advancement, and without enough there was no way they'd ever be able to properly advance.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"Bronze would be better," Oliver pointed out, "Pure copper doesn't do very well in high-force applications. And we don't have any tin to make bronze, so I can't make weapons with my copper yet."

"It's too soft?" Alyssa asked, dangerously pointing at Oliver's chisel. "Weren't you just chiseling stone with that thing?"

"That's because I'm using it as a spell focus of sorts," he tried to think about how best to explain it. "It's magically harder."

"Just do that then? Not that anything around here has hides that tough anyway."

"No, it wouldn't work." It only worked as-is because he was in the Shelter, and so had an abundance of Technology to actively work with. It wasn't an enchantment he could just apply, let alone one that would work anywhere.

"So what can you do?" Henrietta prompted, and Oliver glowered at getting pulled out of his thoughts.

"I'd need tin. But tin is pretty rare. You'd need…" he tried to remember, but came up blank. He knew it was something he knew, but he just couldn't recall at the moment. "Something."

"I don't care," Alyssa said. "Do whatever your nerd heart desires, but I need a weapon. So that I can fight things. Or hunt things, because this," she brandished her current spear, "Is basically doing nothing for me."

"Copper is a really bad metal for weapons. It's better used for magic."

"I don't care. We're not fighting a war here, I just need something that will make a creature bleed if I stab it."

"I need my copper," Oliver countered.

Alyssa pointed at his brazier.

"What?"

"It's covered in copper. You have so much, I need some too you know. Or do you want vinebeasts to kill you?"

"Ride," Henrietta interjected.

"What? He's off here playing by himself but he's not willing to do his job and you're just planning on letting him get away with it?"

"I'll handle it from here. You can go."

Alyssa lingered for a few more moments, but returned to her sentry post not long after.

"Okay, so do you need more copper?"

"I have plenty of copper," Oliver muttered, "And didn't she take my fang-knife anyway?"

"Do you have enough copper to outfit all of us with weapons and armor?"

"...No," he admitted. He didn't like where this was going.

"Do you have just enough copper to make your staff?"

"Yes," he replied in a whisper.

"Sorry, I didn't catch that."

"Yes," he said a bit louder.

"Okay. So, you need all the copper you have right now, yes?" Henrietta asked, prompting a hesitant nod from Oliver.

"Then there you go. You need more copper. If you needed to right now make Ride a metal weapon, would you still have enough to make your staff here and now?"

"No, probably not." Well maybe. But neither would be as good as they could be if he did that.

"Why can't you make more copper?"

"It takes so much time to refine it. And you wanted me to do things more quickly."

"New orders then," Henrietta said, and Oliver cringed. He hated it when goals changed under him.

"Make something that can refine copper without you constantly attending to it. We have plenty of skeleton left, and no doubt plenty more droopnoses that we can hunt."

"Yes," Oliver agreed. That was basically just a… well, a smelter. A self-contained, magically powered one. "I don't know how much more copper I'll get out of those bones, though."

"Leave that particular problem to me," Henrietta declared. "But you need more time and more copper, this is the best way to get them both."

Oliver reluctantly agreed. He was doing well with this, though. He just needed it to be perfect.

But it will be easier to get it perfect if I've got a lot more metal tools.

Not that it mattered one way or another. He had a new goal, and his thinking realigned to reach that goal.

He could do this.

Smelters were fairly basic tech – literally prehistoric. Fundamentally, they were just kilns with a hole cut in them to let anything liquid drip out. And a kiln was just a box made out of something good at keeping heat in, that was good at making things very hot. High-tech kilns utilized Fire magic to directly heat up everything within them in an instant, providing hyper-even heating to exceptionally precise temperatures. Actually, if he thought about it, the really advanced ones could selectively expose items within them to different levels of heat and fire based on the desired outcome, but they were usually thought of as selective autoclaves rather than selective kilns.

The difference was academic, and basically pointless to Oliver, whose kiln would be…. Much less advanced.

Fortunately, he didn't need to go all the way back to fully primitive. Fully primitive would have been setting up a wood fireplace on one side of a box and a chimney on the other end, requiring constant tending-to of the fire and very inefficient usage of heat as new air needed to be constantly brought up to temperature, rather than just keeping a contained volume of air steady.

But he had copper! And copper meant Fire enchantments.

And I probably shouldn't have celebrated that early, Oliver realized, tapping his chin. I can't really do heat enchantments, just flame enchantments.

It was pretty much the same as his brazier. He momentarily considered just using his brazier for the purpose, but discarded that particular idea after just a moment's consideration. He still wanted to use it for his First Flame plan, because keeping the campfire going at all times was slowly becoming harder and harder to justify both between the amount of time it took from him, and how much wood it required. Integrating that into a kiln... well, it wouldn't make it impossible, but it would make it much harder.

No, far better to just create a new circle designed to do only a single thing – make the hottest flames it could sustain – and install that into the smelter.

That just raised the question of how he'd get the melted copper out. More primitive smelters would make a bowl or container of some kind that they could catch the copper in, then remove that container afterwards, probably by breaking the smelter open entirely and rebuilding it each time… but that didn't really suit Oliver.

For one, that wouldn't save time. That would be just as much work as he was doing now if not more. But perhaps more importantly, if he created the smelter as a singular thing, he could enchant it and make it into a proper tool. Something that could magically refine the copper at the same time it was chemically refined.

Oliver wracked his brain, but kept coming up blank. He knew how to make advanced smelters and primitive ones, but the middle ground just wasn't something he knew much about.

So as he thought, he started preparing for the one thing he knew he would need – clay. He'd avoided it earlier, because clay could be tricky to use at times, and he'd only needed a very basic mold to cast his chisel, but if he was going to make a kiln there truly was no getting around it. He didn't have any way to make concrete, which was his first choice for obvious reasons, and it was unlikely he'd get there without any infrastructure leading to it.

"Do you need help?" an annoying voice asked.

Oliver looked up and sat back on his haunches to make eye contact with Clark, to tell him to go away… but he did have a couple of oddly-shaped flat stones with him that would clearly work as shovels.

"Yeah, sure," Oliver waved him on, which only seemed to encourage the nobleborn.

"Awesome. So can we use the shovels?"

"Yes we… why couldn't we use the shovels?"

"Well, you were digging with your hands and I was always told to not interrupt a mage when working and I once disrupted one of the gardeners and found myself stuck in the middle of a-"

"Just… hand me the other shovel and start digging," Oliver said. "No, not there… Dig there. Dig where I show you. And you really don't need to talk to keep me company, I'm fine with silence."

"Oh, you don't need to worry on my behalf, I am entirely capable of speaking without tiring myself! Even with such physical labor, I can maintain a certain level of decorum within my speech."

Oh, I know. Believe me, I know.

Clark continued undaunted, shoveling piles of red soil in every direction, "All the better to impress people with, you know. Working among the commoners is a surefire way to ingratiate them with you! It may not be as reliable as slaying a giant monster, naturally, which was what I was most anticipating, but I wanted to make sure I was ready for anything that this Expedition provided!"

Oliver could already feel the headache approaching, and they'd barely started.

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