Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - The First Commission
Raindrops tapped softly against the35 The
Raindrops tapped softly against the high double-paned glass of
Unit 303’s work alcove, blurring the distant, amber lights of the upper quad into smudged yellow rings.It was eight o’clock in the evening.
Kae sat in her swivel chair with her knees tucked up into her fleece sweater, a lukewarm mug of roasted chicory tea resting on the edge of her desk.
For twelve solid hours, the dark matte-black interface of
Forge had sat completely silent on her desktop monitor, showing zero order submissions and zero message pings.Part of her felt a quiet, comfortable wave of relief.
If nobody used the encrypted portal, she wouldn’t have to forge anything.
She could spend the evening reading old
Commonwealth technical journals or organizing her spice jars of refined ore dust in total, unbothered peace.Another part of her—the part looking at her five-hundred-merit registration fee deduction—felt mildly annoyed.Five hundred merits for a blank screen,
Kae thought, blowing a small bubble in her chicory tea.
I could have bought two sets of high-temp ceramic tongs for that.PING.A sharp, amber alert box flared in the center of the terminal interface, accompanied by a low, mechanical chime.Kae nearly dropped her mug.
She set the tea down, wiped her glasses on her hoodie sleeve, and leaned closer to the blue holoscreen.— THE INFINITE FORGE :
INCOMING COMMISSION —CLIENT: [ENCRYPTED – CADET 312-709]ROLE: 3RD-YEAR VANGUARD (HEAVY AGILITY TRACK)DEPOSIT STATUS: 1,200 MERITS / 2,000 CREDITS (ESCROW LOCKED) MATERIALS SUBMITTED:
AUTOMATED VAULT LOCKER 41-BKae clicked the order header, pulling up the client’s attached specification sheet.The cadet—a third-year
Vanguard named
Valen, according to the encrypted secondary tag—had filled out the form with a chaotic mix of frantic notes, bullet points, and messy digital sketches.’Need a secondary sidearm,’ the text read, the font jagged where the buyer had typed it out in a hurry. ‘Standard issue trench knives are too heavy in the spine.
I keep failing my 3-v-3 agility benchmarks in
The sparring bots catch my wrist recovery every single time.
Need a shortblade that cuts wind resistance without snapping when
I block a heavy
Vanguard broadsword.
I’m dropping two blocks of
Cobalt-6 and a vial of kinetic-friction plant extract into
Please tell me you can do something with this.’Kae scrolled past his emotional ranting about failing his mid-term combat assessments and went straight to the raw numbers: wrist torque, reach radius, and desired weight-to-length ratio.”He thinks speed comes from a lighter pommel,” Kae mumbled to the empty room, her eyes scanning his weapon metrics. “It doesn’t.
If you shave the pommel on a trench knife, you throw off the center of balance and force the wrist tendons to work twice as hard on the recovery arc.”She clicked the secondary diagnostic tab to inspect the raw materials
Valen had deposited into
Locker 41-B.The vault scanner displayed two dense, unrefined blocks of
Cobalt-6 and a glass vial filled with a thick, pale-gold liquid—refined
Wind-Runner root pulp, a high-friction bio-fluid harvested from the mountain cliffs of
Sector 2.The
Cobalt was good stock.
High density, clean crystalline structure, minimal iron-slag contamination.
Wind-Runner pulp was tricky.
If you heated the organic extract past eight hundred degrees
Celsius during the smelting phase, the bio-alkaloids broke down into useless ash, ruining the dynamic friction loop entirely.Most third-year academy engineers refused to work with
Wind-Runner fluid because of the strict thermal tolerance required.
They preferred standard geometric speed runes etched onto the surface, which wore down after twenty hours of combat use.Kae stared at the material specs for thirty seconds, her fingers hovering over the desktop trackpad.She could reject the order with a single click and keep her evening free.
Or she could take his two thousand credits, refine his cobalt, and prove that his third-year
Vanguard instructors didn’t know the first thing about kinetic drag.She tapped the green
Commission tab.— COMMISSION ACCEPTED —FUNDS LOCKED IN ESCROW.PROCESSING TIME: 24 HOURS.DISPATCHING MATERIALS FROM VAULT LOCKER 41-B…A heavy pneumatic
THUNK echoed behind the wall as the internal dorm drop-chute cycled, dropping a sealed, stainless-steel cargo container straight into
Kae’s lower receiving bay.Kae slid off her chair, unlatched the container’s brass safety locks, and pulled out the cold blocks of cobalt along with the vial of gold fluid.She set the raw materials on her workbench, pulled her oversized fleece sweater sleeves up to her elbows, and tied her dark bangs back with a plain rubber band.
Across the room, the heavy black cylinder of her portable alchemy furnace sat resting on its tungsten vibration pads, its cooling pipes cold and dark.”Three-point-two inches on the fuller,” Kae whispered, her fingers tracing the cold metal of the cobalt blocks as her mind built the three-dimensional blueprint in mid-air. “Hollow core, aether-infused spine, and a five-degree reverse bevel.” She pressed her thumb against the furnace’s master ignition switch.The ignition coils hummed to life, a deep, cherry-red glow bleeding out through the lower manifold vents as the workshop temperature began to rise.