Autumn was turning cold, though the skies were kinder than last year's.
Isagi still remembered how, around this time last year, it had rained every single day — that thin, endless drizzle, the light so dull it seemed the sun had never once existed, nothing overhead but heavy, sagging cloud.
Cold. Damp. The kind of weather that made a person want to sleep standing up.
This year was different. The air had that crisp autumn clarity to it, and although the sky was still grey, a small sun hung faintly at the far edge of vision, half-buried in the cloud curtain. A slow breeze came and went. It put a person in a decent mood.
Isagi and Ais had agreed to meet outside the Twilight Manor on North Main Street.
The girl must have left home ridiculously early, because by the time he arrived she was already standing out on the long street, craning her neck toward his side of the city — the direction of the Astrea Familia's home — while nibbling at a potato puff in small bites.
"Here!"
Ais hadn't forgotten to buy him a portion of his own. The trouble was that she liked the red bean cream flavor, which was sweet enough to coat the roof of your mouth, and Isagi had never quite been able to understand it.
Potato puffs were meant to be curry, or dusted with chili powder. Obviously.
The two of them were carrying a good deal of luggage besides — big cloth bundles slung across their backs, stuffed with priceless, rare materials hauled up out of the Dungeon.
Today's plan was set.
They were going to the Goibniu Familia, to see whether the [Sword of Despair] could be repaired. If it couldn't, then there was nothing for it but to forge a new blade from scratch.
In this city, the Goibniu Familia stood shoulder to shoulder with Hephaestus's when it came to smithing.
The difference lay elsewhere.
The goddess Hephaestus rarely swung a hammer herself; that work went to the members of her Familia, and her Familia had an enormous number of smiths. Their shops occupied huge stretches of floor space in both Babel and the adventurers' district, and it was hardly an exaggeration to say they supplied nearly all the weapons and armor in the City of Adventurers.
In that respect they resembled Solingen a little. In fact, the City of Swords and the Hephaestus Familia were on excellent terms; a great many smiths from Solingen had joined her Familia at one point or another, coming to the city to study.
Cecil had been one of them.
When the girl set out to obtain the [Forging] Development Ability, the very first thing she thought of — and acted on — was to seek out the goddess Hephaestus and declare her intention to join. It simply hadn't worked out.
The Goibniu Familia, by contrast, was the small-and-exquisite sort.
They forged almost nothing but high-grade second-tier armaments and first-tier armaments, accepted commissions only from high-ranking adventurers, and staked everything on quality.
And more than that.
The god Goibniu often took up the hammer personally.
No small number of the Loki Familia's weapons and armor had come from the god's own hands — the [Sword of Despair] among them.
Isagi had originally suggested asking Cecil to do the forging.
But the girl felt that Cecil had been working herself ragged lately and deserved a proper rest — and besides, the [Sword of Despair] had been the god Goibniu's work from the beginning, so returning it to him seemed only right.
"You've got to have faith in the gods!"
"I suppose so—"
Isagi was curious too, honestly. A weapon shaped by a god of the forge, using the special materials he'd dragged back out of the Dungeon — what sort of strange miracle might come of that?
Soon enough, soon enough.
Following North Main Street, they reached the Three Hammers Foundry in the Eighth District.
It sat deep among the back lanes: a perfectly ordinary-looking single-story courtyard house. Morning was still young, and the scattered ring of hammer on metal drifted through the air in twos and threes.
Isagi and Ais stepped into the yard.
The first thing they saw was the old god — bare-chested even in weather this cold, wearing nothing but a pair of loose grey cloth trousers, seated squarely in the middle of the courtyard, sweeping a severe gaze over everything the younger smiths were doing.
This was the god Goibniu.
Compared with the "elderly deities" of Isagi's previous acquaintance, who always seemed a touch less than serious about anything—
Goibniu was a far graver article.
He wasn't tall, and he was very thin; you could make out the sharp ridges of the ribs across his chest.
But there was something undeniably capable about him.
And as he watched the two of them arrive, the first place his eyes went was the girl's waist — to the [Sword of Despair] hanging there, of which nothing remained but a broken hilt.
The corner of the old god's eye twitched.
Every weapon Ais had ever carried had been forged by this deity.
He had made the [Sword of Despair] with the "unbreakable" property built into it, so naturally he knew all about her talent for destroying her own equipment.
The [Sword of Despair] had been damaged before. Never this catastrophically.
"Can't be fixed."
The god of the forge said it flatly, before Ais had even opened with a word.
"Make a new one."
"Mm…"
She'd known it would come to this.
Ais's shoulders sank a little. It wasn't the money; the subjugation of the Corrupted Spirit had counted as fulfilling a Guild commission, and the reward had been enormous, leaving the Loki Familia's finances more than comfortable.
It was that… well. A weapon that had stayed at her side for so long had just been formally pronounced dead. That stung, however small the sting.
Next came the part where the two of them hauled out every last material they'd brought and dumped it all at once in front of him.
Even the god Goibniu seemed not to have anticipated this, staring at the chaotic heap spread before him.
There were the precious materials taken from all the dragon-kin Monsters they'd slain while completing the [Visiting Dragon] commission;
there were the weapon fragments they'd stripped from the various hunters they'd cut down in the deep floors these past weeks, and the "pieces of body" harvested from every sort of prey they'd killed;
and there was even, buried among it all—
something from a long, long time ago. Last year, roughly.
From the first time — or perhaps the second — that he had returned to the Dungeon of a thousand years past: the banner of the Fianna knights.
Isagi had never worked out what the thing was good for. He could feel some sort of power lingering inside it, something resembling Divine Power, but once he'd brought it back to the present day and the goddess Astrea and the others had taken a look, they'd said it wasn't Divine Power at all.
It was closer to a kind of "power of wishes" — or a "strength of hope."
The goddesses couldn't explain it any better than that.
So Isagi had stopped worrying about it and simply handed the banner off to Cecil — and Cecil hadn't been able to make heads or tails of it either, which was why it had never been forged into anything at all.
Until today.
"Mm."
The god Goibniu identified the ancient banner of the Fianna knights almost the instant his eyes landed on it.
"Now this is an interesting thing."
The god of the forge turned the banner over in his hands, thoroughly intrigued.
"We'll use this. It ought to make a fine sword — and by the look of it, a sword that will never break."
"?"
Why would he say that?
"Because faith and hope don't vanish."
As though the matter were already settled in his mind, Goibniu didn't so much as reach for any of the other materials. He waved a hand, motioning for Isagi and Ais to pack the rest of it away.
And then—
with great care, he folded the banner up and put it aside.
He had the look of a god about to undertake something momentous, which was tremendously reassuring, Isagi thought. He only wished he knew what the forge god's finished work would turn out to look like.
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