The Cauldron filled to its full hundred thousand seats three days later, tier upon tier of stone benches rising in a horseshoe around a forge floor big enough to hold sixteen separate smithing stations at once, the whole amphitheater humming with the particular electric noise of a crowd that had bet real coin on the outcome and fully intended to make its opinions heard about the judges' every decision. Remus stood in the contestants' row wearing borrowed leathers that still smelled faintly of the last man who'd worn them, and felt, for the first time since he'd arrived in this body, something close to genuine stage fright: a cold-palmed dread, the kind that belongs to a man about to be watched by more people at once than he'd interacted with in his entire previous life combined.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for His Majesty, the Queen-Mother, and the Ruling Council," the host called, and a hundred thousand people rose as one long rolling wave of sound.
King Belsarius the Third was twelve years old, blond and blue-eyed like his mother, and looked, from Remus's vantage on the forge floor, roughly the size of the ceremonial throne's own left armrest, a boy dressed in robes clearly tailored for a man his father's size and never properly taken in. The Queen-Mother stood at his shoulder rather than beside him, close enough that the arrangement read less as courtesy than as custody, and Remus noted, filing it away the same way he filed everything, that not once in the whole seating ceremony did the boy glance up at her for permission before he sat down.
The King's fiancée came next, announced to a fresh wave of noise from the crowd, and Remus's stomach dropped clean through the forge floor when he recognized, beneath a flowing white garment and a discreet bandage wrapped at her left shoulder, the same dark-haired thief who'd bled on the armory's stone floor two nights before. She waved to the crowd with a warmth that didn't reach anywhere near her eyes, and for one long, unbearable second her gaze crossed his and held there, some private, dangerous recognition passing between them that neither of them let show on their face for anyone else to catch.
"Sixteen contestants," the host announced, once the last of the Ruling Council had taken their seats, Pompey among them looking thoroughly unimpressed by the pageantry, Raasmus of the Drowned Faith seated a careful few chairs down looking as though he'd rather be anywhere underwater than here. "Five rounds. The first: pure offensive power. Contestants, to your forges."
Remus's opponent for the first round was Albert, the two-time defending champion, grey-haired and thick through the shoulders the way a man gets after thirty years at a forge, never once needing to be clever about it because raw skill had always been enough before now. He didn't so much as glance at Remus while the forges lit.
"Fire's the easiest answer here," Remus murmured to himself, opening the floating command window rather than reaching for hammer and tongs the way every other contestant on the floor was already doing. "And no fire enchantment in that vault back at the palace burns hotter or spreads faster than Scorch."
Craft: Orc Steel Sword, Scorch Enchantment.
Materials Used: 2 x Orc Steel, 1 x Scorch Rune (Acquired).
Item Created: Magic Orc Steel Sword (Scorch)!
Lucan, the Gilded Vanguard's own leader, tested each finished blade personally against a wall built specifically to survive testing, tall and auburn-bearded and moving with the unhurried calm of a man who'd already seen every trick the Cauldron's floor had to offer at least once before. He came to Remus's blade last, took it without ceremony, and fired the enchantment directly into the reinforced stone.
Three separate craters bloomed molten across the wall's face, cracking the whole structure clean through its center, and the crowd's roar this time had a different texture to it entirely, less delight than disbelief.
"I'll be keeping an eye on you," Lucan said, quiet, handing the blade back.
Eight bladesmiths left the floor in the first round's wake, Albert loudest and angriest among them, his own blade having barely scorched the testing wall's surface at all.
"You'll regret this, boy," he said, low, on his way past, and something in the flat certainty of it settled into Remus's stomach like a stone he'd remember carrying long after the words themselves had faded.
Among the eight who remained, Remus noticed a slim, dark-eyed man working two stations down, methodical in a way that stood out even among a floor full of professionals, never wasting a single motion at his own forge, checking every measurement twice before he committed steel to fire. The host, passing by with his ledger, murmured the name for the benefit of the nearer benches: Nikola, a smith out of the Eastlands' own hill towns, here on his own coin rather than any patron's, with nothing riding on the day but his own reputation. Remus filed the name away without quite knowing yet why it mattered, the way he filed most things, on the theory that everything eventually turned out to matter to somebody.
The second round asked for defense instead, and while the seven remaining smiths hammered new blades into new shapes, Remus stayed at his own station and worked the problem the same way he'd worked every problem since he'd first learned there was a limit to how much Modify could stretch a single piece of steel.
"Invulnerability alone won't hold long enough," he said, to nobody, tallying enchantments against each other in his head the way he'd once have tallied load ratings against a chassis's tolerance. "Ten minutes and a twenty-minute cooldown. Layer Death Ward under it to catch anything that slips through on a critical strike. Truth Zone against illusion. Anti-Life to blunt anything living that gets past both. Mirror Image to confuse whatever's still coming. Shield of Faith for anything undead or necromantic, because I have absolutely no way to know what I'm actually going to be fighting six months from now."
Craft: Reinforced Plate, Six-Layer Warding.
Materials Used: 3 x Steel Plate, 6 x Enchantment Rune (Acquired). Note: layered enchantment complexity nearing the material's structural limit. Further stacking beyond this point risks the plate rejecting the design entirely.
He read the note twice, filing the ceiling it implied away with the same careful attention he gave every rule the System had ever handed him, and stopped exactly there rather than pushing for a seventh layer purely out of curiosity.
Merlin, the Red Maelstrom's own grey-bearded leader, tattoos of strange, looping symbols winding down both forearms, tested this round himself, and when he reached Remus's finished armor he simply said, "Check attributes," to the plate directly rather than to Remus.
Skill Activated: Check!
Whatever the skill showed him widened Merlin's eyes considerably.
"If you don't come find me after this," he said, low, "I'll come find you."
The third round narrowed the field to four, Nikola among them, moving through his own bracket with the same unhurried, checked-twice precision Remus had noticed from across the floor, and the test this time asked for a skill enchantment rather than raw destructive or defensive power, something a blade did on its own initiative rather than something it merely survived or dealt out. Remus worked a bow rather than a sword for this one, reasoning that Andrea's own habits had taught him more about a missed shot's actual cost than any sword ever had, and layered an enchantment onto the string itself that corrected its own flight mid-air toward whatever the archer's eye had actually settled on a half-second before release.
"Impossible," Lucan said, testing it personally against a moving target rig none of the other three bows had come close to hitting. "Or it should be. Fetch me three more targets."
It hit every one of them.
The fourth round, beast-taming, thinned the field to two: Remus and Nikola, the Eastlands smith having quietly, methodically out-crafted everyone else on the floor without once raising his own voice about it. Remus built a collar meant to bind a captured troll to obedience without breaking its spirit entirely, testing it live against a snarling, chained specimen the Cauldron kept on hand for exactly this purpose, and watched the enormous creature go still and calm the instant the collar closed, its own eyes clearing of the wild, cornered panic that had been in them a moment before.
"You could have simply broken it," Nikola said afterward, the first words he'd spoken to Remus all day, studying the collar with a craftsman's open curiosity rather than any resentment at having lost the round. "Most contestants do. Why bother with the harder version?"
"Because a broken thing only ever does one thing well," Remus said, "and I've never once met a problem that stayed simple long enough to make that trade worth it."
The judges conferred for the better part of an hour once both final pieces sat side by side on the same table, and the wait stretched long enough that Remus barely had time to process that the crowd's roar, when it finally broke, was aimed at him specifically, before Andrea's hand landed hard on his shoulder from behind, steadying him.
"The unanimous winner and Forge Master for this year," the host bellowed, "is Remus Draymoor of the Southlands!"
The applause that followed felt, from inside it, less like triumph and more like weather, something that simply happened around him regardless of what he personally wanted from it, and it took him the better part of an hour to work his way back through the adoring crowd toward DiNolfo's shop with his prize purse still clutched against his chest.
The shop wasn't there anymore. Where it had stood that morning, five generations of a bladesmith's life reduced overnight to a black, smoking scar in the street, DiNolfo himself stood staring at the ruin with an expression Remus recognized instantly: hollowed out, the look of a man watching something irreplaceable finish burning down to nothing.
"Someone burned it," DiNolfo said, voice gone flat with shock. "Five generations. Gone in five minutes."
Across the gathering crowd of onlookers, Remus found Albert's face, and the smug, satisfied set of it told him everything the man hadn't quite dared to burn along with the shop.
"We have no proof," Remus said, quiet, mostly to himself. "But I have a better answer than proof. We rebuild bigger than he could ever burn down twice."
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