Fire was waiting in his smithy, it had been more than a few minutes since the time he and Ambigious had agreed on. In the center of the square room was a pit with burning blaze powder inside. A basin of water was embedded into a wall, evaporating water was constantly refilled from a spout. Various smithing tools were lined up on tool racks along the wall. A wooden door in one wall went back to the rest of the base. On the opposite side was another door, this one was made from firesteel.

The wooden door opened and in came Ambigious.

Fire said: "You do know that you are late, right?"

Ambigious replied: "Not until now. In my defense, we don't actually have clocks down here and my sense of time isn't that good so 'in an hour' was a very vague statement."

Fire chuckled and said: "It's fine Ambigious."

Ambigious looked around and noted: "It is quite hot in here. I mean… what did I expect?"

Fire said: "Today I'll give you a brief overview over the materials we will be using. After that I will teach you different techniques you need when working metal. A large part of smithing is practice, which is also where some books from the library will come in handy."

Ambigious said: "I assume that the metals here are somewhat limited since we only have what Minecraft provides."

"Next to the normal Minecraft metals we also have silver as a counterpart to gold. While gold attracts magic, silver repels it. In theory a set of silver armor would keep you safe from most spells. In practice this isn't a good idea since it would be susceptible to conventional weapons. The only use of silver in combat is disabling mages or killing elemental creatures. Daggers, arrowheads and crossbow bolts made from silver greatly inhibit a mage's abilities as long as they remain stuck. You would be surprised how well silver weapons sell."

"Makes sense. But from what I have seen from freeZe, a determined mage will still kill you."

Fire nodded. "They are mainly used for what some call 'self-defense' in reality some are just a bit too paranoid or want to outright attack a mage. A lot of the more expensive mercenaries also have silver weapons in their arsenal, for obvious reasons. But the biggest buyers of silver weapons are still monster hunters." After a short pause Fire said: "There is a reason why almost nobody knows what I will tell you next. It is one of the most defended secrets of the Mencur-Besh."

Ambigious asked: "Which is?"

Fire replied: "Mencur-Besh are normally able to withstand huge amounts of damage. The exception to that are wounds caused by silver weapons. If silver comes in contact with the flesh of a Mencur-Besh, a paralysis will spread through their entire body. This effect stays even if the silver is removed and can only be cured by timely treatment, otherwise it leads to death. It isn't pretty."

"Yeah, I can see why you want nobody to know about this. You can touch silver normally but a small wound is fatal. Nasty."

Fire continued: "That's enough about silver. Gold is mostly used for decorative purposes since it is too soft for anything else. If a weapon or piece of armor is made to be enchanted, gold ornaments can go a long way in making said enchantment more effective though. Iron and steel are quite self-explanatory. Firesteel is different however. It is created in specialized forges, known as hellfire forges. One of them is behind that firesteel door, which is enchanted since it would melt otherwise. Instead of heating the metal in blaze powder, an entire room is heated up to extreme temperatures. That way the metal can be woven into the desired form. Firesteel armor uses a loose weave since it needs to be flexible, firesteel weapons use a tight weave."

Ambigious asked: "So… how do you weave metal?"

"Firesteel is created by first melting down high quality steel and adding obsidian and blaze powder, this mixture is then heated even more until the ingredients become an alloy. If one were to let it cool it would be next to useless, it would be too heavy and too brittle to be of any use. This is why the metal is pressed through thin diamond-glass tubes, creating strings. Those strings assume a state between liquid and solid, making them very malleable. Using a set of specialized tools you can then use the molten strings to weave the metal into a rough form. After that you can work the piece of metal into the final product. In a normal forge this would be impossible because the firesteel would cool off too quickly, which is why the entire room needs to be heated."

"I assume that we would need Fire Resistance potions to go into that room, right?"

"Exactly. But right now, I'll show you some of the basics of normal smithing. To be able work firesteel you must know how to work regular steel first. Here, I'll show you."

After supplying Ambigious with leather gloves and an apron Fire pulled a piece of hot metal out of the central blaze powder pit and instructed Ambigious to take another piece for himself. Fire took a hammer and started working the glowing metal on an anvil, while he did this he explained to Ambigious what exactly he was doing and told him to try to mimic it.

Over the next few hours Fire and Ambigious repeated this exercise several more times with more pieces of metal. Fire's metal pieces became various pieces of tableware. Ambigious' metal pieces became deformed metal pieces with some semblance of tableware.

Ambigious was audibly frustrated. "Man, this is hard! TehLulz already made orange tasting stuff, freeZe is setting rooms on fire and I'm sitting here making… this."

Fire explained: "It seems that way because there are few trivial tasks in smithing, I'm pretty sure you could have also brewed that potion, or anyone for that matter. As I said earlier, a large part of smithing is practice and experience and you simply don't have that yet."

"Yeah, makes sense. I guess."

"You can quit for today. Go eat something, read a book about smithing. You will be surprised."

Ambigious got up from the stool by his anvil and stretched. He put his tools back onto the tool racks, threw his gloves and apron to the ground and then left the smithy.

Fire knew better than to immediately follow Ambigious. He had known him for long enough to know that if he ever showed this kind of behavior he did not want to be disturbed under any circumstances. It once almost resulted in a pickaxe to the face for another slave in the mine who didn't know this. Ambigious didn't like it when others did better than him, but instead of being angry at others, he got angry at himself. If left undisturbed this would cause him to try to improve, if not the anger could quickly shift to an outside target.

Fire took his mind off his friend and started pacing around the smithy and inspected everything once again, the demons had kept it clean despite him not being there for a year. He had a lot of work ahead of him, after checking the potion supplies he had found out that next to the demon tongue potions a fair amount of others had run low or run out entirely, one of them being Fire Resistance. Fire remembered having used up the last bit shortly before being taken to the mine by the hackers. He had used that potion to finish work on the final piece of a new set of armor he had made for himself. He would also have to order a new shipment of supplies from Drandin when they were there. Ambigious would like Drandin, he would fit right in with the people there.

Fire decided that by now Ambigious was far enough away. He opened the wooden door and went down the corridor. He had a lot of work to do.