The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1)

by Jonathan Brooks

  As she waited for her Mana to refill as it was funneled from her constructs, Sandra finally had time to think about the lack of variety in her resources. Sure, she had plenty of metal for making weapons, but she didn’t have wood, clay, sand, herbs, hides, or any other materials she would need to craft other items. It appeared as if she was going to need to visit the surface soon in order to find some other material sources somewhere.

  She just wasn’t looking forward to having to defend against those Bearlings…

  Chapter 21

  Kelerim Hafanorc pounded on the red-hot metal bar, wincing slightly as his hammer strike missed his target – again – and the very tip of the sword he was forging broke and flew off. A *clink* sounded as the super-heated iron rebounded off the crude stone construction of his forge, falling to the dirt below. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time he had made a mistake like that over the last year, which was why he didn’t have anything flammable anywhere near his workstation.

  He set his hammer down and placed the half-finished sword on the anvil so that it wouldn’t fall on the floor as well, then he used his tongs to pick up the quickly cooling metal shard up and put it in a small stone box he had nearby for his scraps. Kelerim didn’t care if it was still hot – it wouldn’t hurt anything in there, and it wasn’t like he could use it again.

  Oh, he had tried to fix or reattach some of the mistakes he had made over the last few months but was met with very limited success. If it was a minor error on his part, reheating the metal and hammering it out was more than possible; for things like the piece of sword that had broken off, there wasn’t any way to put it back on without melting down the metal and creating it all anew. At least, he didn’t know of a way – but it wasn’t like he had much training in the first place.

  I guess they’ll just have to live with a shorter sword. He had already spent more than an hour hammering and shaping his current project, which made him hesitate to start over. He still had over a dozen of the iron weapons to make before the warband was back tomorrow night, and he was likely only going to finish them all if he managed to cut his sleep down to a couple of hours as it was.

  Those stupid brutes probably won’t even notice, anyway. That wasn’t fair of him, he knew; they were raised to look down on the weak and unaccomplished, and for a half-blood like him, it was doubly worse. Half Orc and half Dwarf, he was relegated to the bottom of Orcish society, and given jobs like his current one that no self-respecting Orc Warrior would ever stoop so low as to do.

  It was only fair, he supposed. Kelerim was a mixture of the two races; stuck height-wise halfway between the 7-foot Orcish people and the 4-foot Dwarvenfolk, he wasn’t really accepted with open arms in either society with his 5-and-a-half-foot frame. The Dwarves didn’t trust foreigners to the point of chasing them off, and the Orcs didn’t respect his “small” size; fortunately, the Orcs could marginally overlook his birth and make use of him to do menial jobs like blacksmithing.

  He finished up with the sword he was working on – amazingly with no more major mistakes – and he placed it in the water-filled quenching tub to cool it down that much quicker. Clouds of steam rose into the air for nearly a minute before it stopped, the metal cool enough for him to physically pick up and place on the rack next to the ones he had made earlier.

  I need a break, he thought, wiping the sweat from his brow. It was extremely hot even in the open-sided smithy, and he needed to sit down before he passed out. Before he did anything else, though, he made sure to place all of his tools back on the workbench nearby. He arranged them exactly where he needed them and would be able to instantly see if anything was missing – the Orcish children in the small border village would often mess with him by hiding or moving the tools he needed.

  Scooping out some water with a small iron ladle – that he made himself – from the quenching tub near the forge, Kelerim drank deeply, grimacing a little from the highly metallic taste. When he was done drinking his fill, he put the ladle back and dunked his whole head inside the tub. The water was refreshing as it helped him to scrub away a bit of the soot and sweat that his whole body felt covered with. He grabbed a relatively clean rag from nearby and dried his face off, before looking in the small polished sheet of steel he had nearby.

  It’s no wonder the Orcs look down on me, he thought, as he looked at his reflection in his highly prized possession. While most of the Orcish race had a slightly snubbed noses, bald heads, rough greenish-colored skin, beady black eyes, and short mouth tusks, Kelerim took after his other parentage more. The face that stared back at him had a full head of brown hair – a bit dirty and stringy at the moment – dark russet-colored skin, trimmed beard, and very small nubs where some mouth tusks would be if they ever grew out. In fact, some of the elder Orcs he had met in his short 11 years living in Orcrim – the land of the Orcs – said that he looked more like a “Human” than either one of the races he was spawned from. He wouldn’t know, though, as there hadn’t been any Humans nearby for decades, apparently.

  Kelerim took the small Dwarven steel sheet off the wall and put it in his burnt and holey leather apron’s pocket, as he left the smithy and headed off to get a brief bite to eat. The steel mirror was the only thing he had from his mother, who had apparently died not long after he was born. He didn’t know the complete details of how his mother came to be impregnated by an Orc, but he figured it was probably best that he didn’t know. As it was, he didn’t know who his father was, and he doubted his father even knew about him anyway.

  He was raised by his mother’s family in relative secrecy until he was about 8 years old, when he was revealed to be obviously not fully Dwarven because he had already shot up in height so that he was taller than anyone else under the mountain. When his ancestry was made public, he was forced out by the community and eventually made his way to Orcrim, where he was eventually taken in and made to work menial tasks even as a child. There was no actual slavery in the Orcish lands, but to Kelerim his situation was close enough that he could barely tell a difference.

  Regardless of the rough life he had led, the half-blood Orc/Dwarf had survived. Shunned by his mother’s family and held in high disregard from his father’s people, he nevertheless showed them that he was able to work hard, even if they didn’t consider him to be fully one of them. Which, unfortunately, was how he got the Blacksmithing position he now held.

  Kelerim went to the communal fire in the middle of the village of Grongbak, where the Orcish cooks kept what little food there was available. At first, his arrival a year ago had led to a few hungry days when they refused to serve “Hafanorc”; the word was a derogatory term for a half-blood that had stuck with him over the years – but now he embraced it so that it wasn’t as hurtful as it used to be. Despite their blatant disgust for him, though, they soon learned that, as the only Blacksmith within 50 miles, he was too valuable to let starve to death. Now, they barely blinked an eye at his presence, as they were accustomed to seeing him around.

  “Food” was a bit of an over-exaggeration for the meal he received. Meat would probably be more accurate, as normal Orcish cuisine consisted primarily of whatever the hunters could locate nearby, and any vegetables other than natural root-based selections like potatoes were hard to come by. Mainly because there were very few Orcs that degraded themselves enough to become farmers.

  Stringy as the meat was, the small meal easily filled Kelerim up as he sat on one of the nearby logs, and when he was finished, he headed back to his forge to continue his work. When he got there, however, he could see that he had a visitor – and an unpleasant one at that.

  “There’s the lazy half-blood now! What are you doing, Hafanorc? Why aren’t our weapons done yet?” the tallest of the three Orcs inside his smithy unnecessarily shouted at Kelerim when he was within eyesight. The gruff, scratchy voice of the local warband’s leader always grated on his nerves when he heard it, and this time was no exception.

  “Your order isn’t due until tomorrow, Razoc
hek. Come back then and I’ll have them ready,” Kelerim responded with a little more heat in his voice than he should’ve had. He was annoyed that the warband leader was bothering him today, when it was common knowledge that the shipments always went out at the end of the week.

  The little village of Grongbak was one of the few places in Orcrim where iron was plentiful; it was near the edge of a relatively easy dungeon – or so he was told – that supplied them with loads of the precious ore. While more than half of what was collected was sent back to the major towns and cities in the interior of their land, Kelerim turned quite a few the small dungeon loot orbs into weapons. Some of the swords stayed in town to help arm the local warbands, while most went back with the shipments of the raw ore.

  “Well, we need them today, you worthless weakling! We have more reinforcements coming in later this evening, and they need swords to kill things – not that you would know anything about that,” Razochek sneered at him, the derision that he – and almost every other member of the Orcish race – showed toward those they thought weaker than them obvious on his face. Though, for some reason he didn’t fully understand, the warband leader seemed to hate him rather than just look down on him.

  More reinforcements? I wonder if something happened that I don’t know about. Regardless of what was going on, Kelerim didn’t have the swords ready yet. “I’m not done yet, but you can take the few that I’ve finished already—”

  “What, like this junk?” Razochek interrupted him, as he picked up the sword that Kelerim had just finished before he took a break. “This worthless piece of crap is shorter than all the rest, not that those others are any better. These things will barely be able to cut a potato, let alone hold up against some of the monsters that real Orcs face in the dungeon,” the warband leader continued, as he tossed the sword to the ground as if to emphasize his point.

  “That’s because those haven’t been sharpened yet. I do have about a dozen that are—” Kelerim began, before he was interrupted again.

  “Not good enough. In fact, nothing you do is good enough; I don’t know why they didn’t strangle you as an infant, like we do with all the other deformed brats that are born,” the warband leader said seriously, with an intense look upon his face.

  Kelerim had heard the same thing many times over the years, so after a while it didn’t bother him; however, the sheer hatred and restrained violence on the Orc’s face was a bit unnerving. While insults and hurtful words had haunted him for the many years that he had spent inside the land of Orcrim, this was the first time he felt as though it could be backed up by a physical threat.

  But the half-blood Blacksmith was tired of all of it. “Look, Razochek, what do you want me to say or do? There was no one to train me how to do this, and it’s not like the work that other Orcish Blacksmiths do is any better – I’ve seen the hunks of metal they pass off as weapons—”

  Before he knew what was going on, Kelerim was on the ground, reeling from a backhand from the giant warband leader that he didn’t even see coming. “Don’t you dare speak of your betters like that, half-blood. Those ‘Blacksmiths’ are better than you’ll ever be, because they are proud, full-blooded Orcs – unlike your tainted trash blood. You’ll never become anything and never accomplish anything, for one reason: you don’t have the heart of a Warrior inside of you. You’re worthless,” Razochek practically snarled as he stared at Kelerim on the ground, still recovering from the unexpected blow.

  Before the Blacksmith could retort in any way, the warband leader continued. “I’m done with you. There’s another who can work the metal that arrived with the new reinforcements, so you’re out. Your ‘services’ are no longer needed.” When Kelerim didn’t move, as the shock of the backhand and the statement were still trying to process in his mind, Razochek kicked him hard in the side. The Blacksmith was flung bodily out of the smithy, landing nearly 20 feet away in a jumble of limbs. “You are no longer needed here; leave and never come back, half-blood. You have until the count of ten to get out of my sight, or I’ll hunt you down and I’ll see what you’re really made of. Like, your insides and stuff.”

  As articulate as always, Kelerim couldn’t help but think – at least before the import of what the warband leader said hit him. He scrambled to his feet, and instantly doubled over as what was sure to be a massive bruise to his side made itself known. He groaned in pain, glad that his sturdy frame made it likely that he wouldn’t have to worry too much about broken bones from the impact of the Orc’s foot.

  It still hurt though.

  “Three!” The pain of his injury must’ve deafened him to the first two numbers, because the third number was the first that he actually heard. Either that, or Razochek was being a bastard and started the count at the advanced number.

  “Four!”

  Kelerim took off at a shambling run, holding his side as every step shot pain through his body. He ran blindly, knowing that he had better get out of sight before the warband leader or his cronies decided they needed to hunt him down; it wasn’t an idle threat, either – he’d seen full-blooded Orcs killed out of hand for seemingly minor infractions before in other cities and towns. It didn’t happen much out on the border – as they needed nearly every member of their small village to operate properly – but since there was already a “replacement” for him, he wouldn’t be missed.

  Which was sad, when he thought about it; there wasn’t a single person, Orc or Dwarf, that would miss him if he died. He thought his mother’s family might have at least cared for him at one time, but they had abandoned him to the wild as soon as any type of dissention happened in their community. True, they gave him a pack that contained some extra clothes and enough food to last for a couple of weeks, but he thought that family shouldn’t abandon children like that. He wasn’t sure what they could’ve done, but something would’ve been better than what they did; as a result, he lost all respect that he had for them – as he was sure they had lost all love or caring for him.

  But that was neither here nor there – he needed to get away as fast as he could.

  “Five!”

  Kelerim could hear the next count a little further away, but not as far as he was expecting. They must be following me. Regardless, he kept running, knowing that if he stopped, he would definitely be killed; this way, at least, he had a chance of getting away. By the time he heard, “Six!” ring out behind him, he was passing through the last of the mostly stone-made buildings of the village. He exhaled explosively in relief – which pained his side even more – and ran another 100 feet before he looked around for the first time and realized he was going the wrong way.

  Grongbak was located on the border of the wastelands, an area of dirt, rocks, and more dirt that stretched as far as the eye could see. He knew firsthand that it didn’t go on forever, as the Dwarven lands where he was born were to the east, and he had traveled through the wastelands by himself and somehow survived long enough to be picked up by a passing Orc warband. Rumor said that the Elven lands were located somewhere to the south, and that Gnomes lived to the southeast – but no one had seen nor heard from them in years, if not decades.

  And it was in this wasteland that Kelerim now found himself.

  Chapter 22

  Kelerim immediately turned around to see if he could circle around the village and head back into Orcrim. He briefly thought about trying to ply his new Blacksmithing trade in another town or village; he realized that it would be an uphill battle getting another place to accept him into their community, but at least he had a skill of sorts to offer. He wasn’t great at it by any means, but he had gotten incrementally better over the last year of constant practice.

  Those hopes were dashed as he saw Razochek and his two subordinates spread out on the edge of the village. The warband leader had stopped counting, but he had drawn his sword and held it out, pointing directly towards Kelerim.

  “We better not find you trying to sneak back in here, or any of my warband will kill you without he
sitation. And—” Razochek said loudly, signaling the rest of his warband that had been previously out of sight to make an appearance along the outskirts of the village— “don’t even think about circling the village and making your way deeper into Orcrim. You aren’t wanted here anymore, so it’s time for you to go back to where you belong. From the wasteland you came, so to it you return.”

  That was surprisingly…well-spoken. I have to give it to him – he knows how to make a scene. The rest of the Orcish warband looked on threateningly, fingering their weapons if not outright drawing them. “Why…why are you doing this?” Kelerim managed to wheeze out between the slowly lessening pain in his side.

  “I told you already, Hafanorc. You’re worthless and don’t belong here. I should just kill you, but I don’t want to soil my blade with your filthy half-blood. But I will do it if I catch you anywhere near here.”

  And that was all Razochek would say as he and the others stared at him, daring him to try anything. Why didn’t he just kill me, if he hates me that much? I doubt anyone would’ve lifted a finger to stop him, and he probably wouldn’t even get in trouble.

  Kelerim didn’t have an answer for that – and he wasn’t about to ask. He still had his life and wanted to grasp the small chance of prolonging that life a little longer. Though, faced with the prospect of starving to death in the wasteland, he briefly considered a quick death to be a better alternative – but abandoned that line of thought as it would be akin to giving up. And despite everything that life had thrown at him in his 19 years on this world, he wasn’t a quitter.

  So he turned around and headed farther into the wasteland, the spot between his shoulder blades tingling at the thought of an attack from behind. It wasn’t likely, as any type of ranged weapon in Orcish society was frowned upon as something only a coward would use, but he wouldn’t put it past one of them to throw their sword at him from a distance. Smartly – for once – they didn’t throw their weapons away and he was able to escape without harm. Well, more harm; his side injury was still painful, but he knew it would heal eventually.