When Andrew joined the inscription and smithing team they were just arriving at the table, shuffling chairs in an effort to fit everyone while the smithing group hovered around the three mana furnaces, awaiting direction. He made his greetings to Tyler and Carter and the other others at the table before setting down his chisel and dragging one of the blank stones over to himself.

"Okay! Smithing team, you're smelting team for today, those three furnaces are great for mana training, but let me know if they need charging. I made a few ingot molds yesterday but you'll probably want to get to work making more. Just crank out as many ingots as you can, and if you have free time do some weapons training or something. We're sending off some of our best fighters with the scouts after all. Inscription team, we're working on grenades today. And by we I mean you, I'm going to be working on some weapons for them, but I'll be around if you need help. For now come over here and pay attention, there's a couple new runes on these and they're stacked a lot closer, check this out." Andrew got to work with his personal chisel, carefully carving out the intricate runes that made up the grenades. These rune circles were far smaller, tightly packed and made up of fine lines. The inscription team would have their work cut out for them.

He explained his work as he went, and offered bits of advice based on his admittedly limited experience, and making quick work of the inscription process. He finished the grenade in forty minutes and left it behind as an example to work off, while setting up a smaller table nearby and laying out his creations from the previous day. Two barebones fire affinity blades and four metal affinity spearheads. Then he dug through a nearby box of scraps to pull out two thick branches and a handful of leather scraps which he also set out on the table, before grabbing his chisel and getting to work carving out a wooden handle, cross guard and pommel for each of the narrow, spike like daggers. When he was finished he crawled under the wagon and fished out the Ice box he stashed under there the day before. It was entirely frozen over. He used his chisel to break chunks out of it, then used Siphon Affinity to drain the water affinity out of the ice and into the wooden handle pieces until they were slightly cool to the touch at all times. He had to refill the Ice box twice and while he waited for it to freeze he wandered around the table, checking on the progress of the smelting and inscription teams.

Once the handles were fully infused Andrew sat down at the table and pulled out his chisel, getting to work carving water and earth gathering circles into each of the handles. They were connected by a battery rune in the middle, configured to slowly release accumulated mana into the two circles. Then he bored a hole down and through the center of the handle with his chisel for the blade's tang, and set them aside to work on the guards. He inscribed the same heat resistant set of circles into the small handguards, cutting a small notch just large enough for a thin piece of leather to squeeze through. Then he grabbed the thin leather cords he prepared earlier and quickly empowered each.

You will conduct mana. You will resist heat and fire damage. You will transfer mana of fire affinity easily. You will conduct mana.

When he was finished with his inscription and empowering Andrew assembled the blades, threading the small piece of leather cord through the hand guard, then fitting the hand guard and handle onto the tang of each blade with a few careful hammer strikes. The pommels were a little loose when he tried to fit them on, the tang of each blade was a little narrower at the end and they pulled off with relative ease when he tested them. Andrew hammered them down a little more securely, then let them be. He planned on empowering the entire blade once it was finished, and that usually melds all the individual parts together. He finished the blades up by wrapping the leather cord around the handle and the base of the blade, just above the handguard so that mana could be transferred directly from the handle to the blade. Then he sat down cross-legged with one of the blades across his lap and focused on pushing mana through it.

You will become a blade. Your edges will sharpen and never dull. You will be durable. Your handle and guard will be safe from harm. Your blade will conduct fire mana easily. You will become a blade.

He strained to maintain the empowerment for as long as he could, ignoring the steadily rising heat of the blade in his lap. When he was finished he had spend about four hundred mana on the empowerment, and he quickly grabbed the cool handle and slid the warm blade from his lap. It's shape didn't change much from the empowerment. There were no longer visible seams between the handle, guard and pommel. Instead it all flowed together in one smooth piece up to the thin, sharp, blade, gleaming with scarlet orange light at the edges.

Andrew pulled the next blade into his lap and repeated the process before picking up both blades and jogging over to where Kalan was sitting, taking a break from sparring and just observing the scout team practicing with Hobgoblin swords and bows. The four scouts practicing their archery were being directed by Shelby, and they were making steady progress. Shelby was by far the best shot but there was another scout who had clearly chosen an archery related class. He was a tall, lean man with close cropped hair, one of the kitchen staff who had obviously chosen an archery related class. He was firing twice as fast as the rest of the scouts and was almost as accurate as Shelby.

I think his name was Isaac. One of the two kitchen staff members working with the scouts, I heard he had a fire mana catalyst so I made a blade for him. It might've been more effective to make some fire affinity arrows instead, but those are liable to break along the way. If I have time before they leave maybe.

"Hey Kalan! Scouts look good, but we'll need your help around here too, no need to push yourself quite so much." Andrew said, dragging a stool closer and sitting down next to Kalan. He was still breathing heavy from his last sparring match and soaked through with sweat.

"Oh hey, I'm good, just taking a break. Those scouts are our best shot at finding other survivors and figuring out what's really going on. Maybe find some friendly natives or something I don’t know. I see you've been busy as well." Kalan said, gesturing to the blades. He looked tired, physically yes, but his face had also lost some of the passion it had when they were planning their raid on the mining camp. "Are we sure we shouldn't all just go along with the scouts? A week is a long time, especially if we want to try and find other survivors out there before some monster out there gets them."

Ah. Kalan has kids, he's got to be worried about them being somewhere out there in this world. I don't blame him. We don't know if the rest of the world is as dangerous as this forest has been, or even who all was sent here. That’s an issue for all of us though. No one here knew each other back home. No children either, youngest person here is nineteen, though that could be a consequence of the environment.

Andrew turned his attention to the daggers, trying to clear increasingly dreary thoughts from his mind. "I'm with you. I almost want to just pack everything up and run as quick as out legs can take us. Find my family, figure out what's going on out here. But we have to focus on the problems we can solve. Throw caution to the wind and we could end up with a lot of casualties. Though, uh, speaking of caution, could you test these out for me?" He put on a serviceable smile and handed one of the blades to Kalan, handle first. "We'll probably want to go shoot these into the river though." Andrew said standing up.

Kalan took the dagger and stood to follow him with a quiet assent and they headed their way out of the small palisade and over to the river. Kalan raised the blade and pointed it at the river, the blade briefly burst into flames, then a large bolt of fire burst from the tip and went flying into the river with a whoosh and a sizzle. Andrew handed him the other dagger and Kalan repeated the process, firing another bolt of flame into the river. "Yeah, it looks like your daggers came out alright, handles are still cool. It takes a little more mana for me to get a bolt of that size with this dagger though. Not a huge increase, but maybe the smaller size has something to do with it." Kalan said, before handing both blades back to Andrew. "I know you're right about the vote, and being cautious. I suppose I can take it a little easier, once the scouts are ready of course." The two of them headed back into the courtyard, Andrew passing the blades back to Kalan to give the kitchen staff scouts while he broke off to return to work on the spearheads.

"Of course, if you're heading back to train then take these with you. I need to get back to the inscription team and I want to try and get at least one of these spearheads done before lunch." Andrew said, breaking off to head back to his workstation, ignoring the somewhat skeptical "Good luck!" Kalan called out from behind him. The sun was high overhead and the skepticism was well warranted.

Andrew was only halfway done with one spearhead by the time everyone started breaking for lunch. He wanted to give the spearheads a little extra oomph, so he was working on applying his newly learned expulsion runes to the spearheads. His design was relatively simple, A metal mana accumulation circle on one side of the spearhead to convert pure mana into metal affinity mana. On the other side was a battery rune which would pull metal mana from the spearhead and transfer it rapidly through the trigger connector when it was activated. The trigger connector was configured to allow about a third of the spearhead's total mana flow into the expulsion base rune, which directs the mana to flow straight out in the direction of the spear tip, and from there out into the expulsion connector which actually releases the metal mana. Andrew set down the spearhead and joined the others for lunch once he finished up the trigger connector, and finished the spearhead entirely shortly afterwards.

Andrew took the finished spearhead outside, charging the metal accumulation circle with about fifty points of mana as he walked. He stopped when he was about five feet from the broken remains of the wooden bridge, and pointed the spearhead at one of the wooden support pillars. He pulsed a light wave of mana through the entire spearhead and heard a slight pop as the trigger connecting rune glowed brightly for a moment before all the runic circles went dark and a bolt of silver blurred across the space and collided with the wood with the crack of a falling axe. Andrew could see clear through the small triangular hole punched in the wood. He stepped five feet back and activated the spearhead again. This time it left a deep hole in the wood, but didn't manage to punch all the way through. Andrew stepped back five more feet and launched the final shot. He heard a thump as the mana made contact, but there were no new marks on the wooden support.

Looks pretty dangerous at five feet, but it loses a lot of power from there. Second shot only made it an inch and a half or so into the wood, the third did nothing at all. All in all, better than I expected. I've gotta get the rest of these finished up then.

Andrew headed back into camp and got to work on the rest of the spearheads. Along the way he stopped by the woodworking shop he set up in before and grabbed four long lengths of wood he remembered from the day before. They were long and thick enough that he could shave them down into workable short spear shafts, and that was exactly he planned for them. He made quick work of the carving job, shaving each shaft down to roughly the same length and width with his chisel. Each time he finished a spearhead he affixed it to one of the shafts and empowered the whole thing together before handing it over to one of the scouts to practice with. It took him until sunset to finish all four spears, and by that time the tailoring team was nearly finished with the leather armor so he sat down to empower each piece once he was done. He originally wanted to stitch an water or earth accumulation circle into each piece as well, for additional protection, but they simply didn't have the time if the scouts were going to be leaving tomorrow morning.

By the time Andrew took the last piece of finished armor from the last working tailor and empowered it the moon was well up in the sky and he was certain he would not be awake to see the scouts off in the morning, at least not for very long. He took a moment to look over the smelting and inscribing teams' work for the day. The smelters had accumulated a reasonable pile of ingots each, and the inscription team managed to create fifteen grenades, though Andrew found major errors with three of them bringing the total down to twelve. That means each of the scouts will have a full set of empowered leather armor, a bow and quiver, an inscribed spear or dagger, and two grenades. Hopefully it would be enough to get them through the next week and a half safely.