Blacksmith

Luca was back in his dorm room, where he sat down on the sofa with a claw in his hand. He hoped that the skill shard would teach him something useful. He reached out and pulled out the skill shard that was in the claw. He cleaned it and was able to see that it was light gray in color. He put the skill shard on his forehead and poured primordial energy into it. This was his first time using a real skill shard and the experience was out of this world.

He felt like he was watching someone else's dreams. He was in a dirt training field, well it was more like a shooting range and on that range was a man. There were five training dummies made of wood that looked like humans. The man on the field had long black hair and pale skin. His face was covered with a black full face mask with a silver star on the forehead of the mask. Luca was like an observer, and he could move around in the sky. Choosing whatever angle he wanted to see, he decided to be right next to the man.

On this man's legs, there were five silver daggers in their sheaths on each leg. His hands blurred as he grabbed the daggers, putting the handles in between his fingers. It looked like he had two fans in his hands. He pulled his upper body back and threw the daggers.

There were ten daggers in the air, each one was flying at different speeds. But the strange thing was that he threw 4 daggers high into the air. They flew behind each other in a line, looking like a pole in the air. Then the dagger in the back hit the dagger in front of it and the process continued until it came to the dagger in the lead. The dagger in the utmost front of the line was hit at an angle by the dagger behind it which had the combined power of three daggers, with the back three daggers falling to the ground, the front dagger dived down towards one of the dummy targets. The dagger was now faster in speed, allowing it to go through the training dummy like butter and continuing into the ground.

The name of the technique appeared in Lucas's mind, "flying sparrow", with a description,

"Use the combined power of multiple daggers into one dagger to increase its penetration power, hard to dodge with its unpredictability."

Luca was distracted by the daggers that were thrown into the air and missed out on what happened to the other six daggers! But then he remembered something that he read back in Greenwood. In a skill shard, you could playback a scene and rewatch it. You could even slow it down or speed up the memory of the skill shard. He tried doing that, and with a simple thought, he was able to rewind the scene back to when the daggers were first thrown.

Luca than saw what happened to the other six daggers. Three of the daggers curved in the air and hit the training dummy on its neck and the temples on the side of the head. This was a simple technique with the name "sparrow". The other three did the same thing that the one in the air did, making the daggers fly behind each other in a straight line and hit each other to increase the daggers speed and to change its direction when least expected. The dagger hit the target right in the throat, making a big hole and going on until it hit the ground a few meters away. This was just a variation of the "flying sparrow technique."

This skill shard only had this short scene but what made it amazing was that Luca watched it till the end of the memory. When the guy who threw the daggers went to pick up the daggers, he said, this was only the first level of the sparrow dagger art. Which means that these skills are only the basic ones. This must be a high-level dagger art, with his cultivation level not being high enough the skill shard stopped the memory. He could only see the rest when he reached a higher level. Meaning that these techniques are worth learning.

Lucia wanted to learn these techniques, and luckily, he knew that the academy had a huge practice range. So, with his remaining time, he wanted to practice so he went to find a weapons shop to buy some daggers. But Luca was confused about weapons tiers and he asked Damien about it.

"I was wondering when you would ask me that question. There are 7 weapon tiers, and each weapon tier has three ranks with rank 3 being the weakest and rank 1 being the strongest. From the weakest weapons tier to the strongest we have, bronze, iron, silver, gold, platinum, diamond and legendary. An example is that a rank 3 bronze weapon is weaker than a rank 1 bronze weapon. Weapons that are gold tier and above will have runes on them and the higher the tier the more complex the ruins get. I don't want to confuse you so well stop here. Now don't buy anything lower than a gold-tier weapon. You'll know if the weapons are the gold tier because only gold-tier weapons have visible runes, the higher-ranked weapons hide their runes." said Damien

Luca went to find a weapons shop and looked around for daggers. The more he looked, the more he understood how hard it was to find a gold tier weapon. He could only find silver-ranked weapons. It was until he asked around that he found out that he was currently in the commoners shopping district. If he wanted to find better goods, he had to go to the noble shopping district but to be able to go there you had to be a Cypress noble.

Luca didn't know what he was going to do now. He was about to give up, but Damien told him that they probably didn't sell weapons in the commoner shopping district because of how expensive they were. So it was pointless to sell them to customers who couldn't buy them. Which means instead of looking for a shop he should go to a blacksmith. Where he could try his luck and see if the local smiths in the commoner's area had the skill to make him some gold-tier daggers.

Luca spent most of the day going from blacksmith to blacksmith. He heard from a few blacksmiths that recently a young blacksmith from the noble district was kicked out for pissing of a noble, almost losing his head. That young blacksmith had just opened a smithy. But he was having trouble selling his weapons to weapons shops because of his new reputation. He was forced to sell them in front of his smithy, but that just made him look even more desperate. Luca asked for the young blacksmiths' address.

In front of Luca was a smithy, the sound of metal hitting metal could be heard. Smoke and fire visible through the cracks in the wooden door. The building was in a poor district. The smithy was small and was almost as big as Lucas dorm. Compared to other smithies he went to, where they were four to five times the size of his room. It was obvious how much he was struggling, there was a small table in front of the smithy, where a bunch of weapons were lying around. There was a teenager sitting next to the small table, with black burn marks on his leather clothes.

When he saw Luca coming, he looked happy. Let's not forget that Luca had his bodyguards and it made him look like a rich kid even if his clothes were simple. Luca wanted to see the craftsmanship of the weapons and went up. He was dumbfounded the moment he laid eyes on them. Simple, the weapons all looked so simple and with no decorations. If he hadn't seen the ruins on the weapon, he would have turned the other way and never looked back. Luca looked at the teenager and asked him if he was the blacksmith who made these weapons.

"No no I'm just an apprentice, but someday I'll become the greatest blacksmith! These weapons were made by my master he's inside." said the teenager with pride, puffy up his chest and pointing towards the smithy.

"Tell your master if he can make me five gold-tier daggers, rank 1 if possible." said Luca

The young teenager nodded his head and went inside the smithy. He came back a minute later with a tall man following behind him. He was 6 feet tall and lean but muscular. His forearm muscles bulging from his long-sleeved shirt. His piercing blue eyes were looking at Luca.

This man walked up to Luca and approached in a friendly manner.

"I hear you want five daggers made, it'll cost you 150 gold coins for all five, I can get it done by tomorrow evening. This also includes the sheathes for the daggers. I also need to look at your hand's to have the daggers fit you and I need to know about the kind of rune you want on the daggers." said the blacksmith, who looked calm on the surface, but Luca could smell the man's excitement and anxiety.

When Luca paid the man, the blacksmith looked at his hands with concertation, and he also felt Luca's hands, which made Luca a bit uncomfortable. Since Damien was linked to Luca, he could see what Luca saw in the skill shard. Damien said that the dagger technique put a lot of stress on the daggers. Durability runes were needed to keep the daggers from breaking too soon. So Luca asked the blacksmith for a durability rune on all the daggers.

"If you ever need maintenance on the daggers or need some other weapons, you can always come to my smithy. You can call me Ferron." said Ferron, the young blacksmith.

"Oh, my names Viktor !" said the young apprentice with a foolish smile.

"I'm Luca, I'll definitely be back if I need anything else. I'll see you tomorrow." Luca waved goodbye.

Since Luca couldn't train until tomorrow, he explored the city some more. He also checked out the local restaurants and was amazed by the amount of new food that he discovered. He went to dorms with a full stomach.

He picked up the daggers the next day and even though they looked very ordinary and plain. With a simple black straight handle and a short steel blade. They fit amazingly in his hand, the daggers are perfectly balanced. He played around with them and went to the academy's target range. He was surprised by how difficult it was to learn the sparrow techniques. It looked easy but when he practiced it, he had a hard time even trying to hit the target with just one dagger. Forget about trying the flying sparrow technique. He spent most of his remaining time just trying to improve his accuracy.

And like that after a few days the first day of the Academy came, the first class would be on the first floor of the main buildings at 8:00 am. Luca woke up early and was happy that he could now hit a target with his daggers. He put on his uniform and walked out of the dorm. The academy didn't allow you to bring weapons and bodyguards to class. But Luca brought a sheathed dagger just in case and hid it in his shoe.

He walked into the main building and was lost! It was too big, and if he had woken up any later, he would have missed the first day of class. He made it with five minutes to spare. The classroom was big enough to fit 30 desks lined up in three rows comfortably. A lot of the seats were already taken, but he saw the back seats were still available. He picked a seat in the far right back of the class.

He saw some familiar faces in the class, Reed, and Kamar, who were sitting in the middle on opposite sides. With Kamar giving Reed some dirty looks whenever Reed wasn't looking. Two minutes before class started the cute mid-blood girl that he saw back at that clothing store entered the classroom. She was out of breath and almost ran into the door of the classroom. This made some of the people in the classroom laugh. Lucia giggled a bit as well; the cute girl was looking for a seat and sat in a row in front of Luca. She noticed Luca and gave him an awkward expression.

The class started but to everyone's confusion, there was still someone missing. The teacher was nowhere to be seen!