Andrew poured the newly silvered mixture out into an ingot mold, filling almost the entire thing. There was definitely some material loss still, but the addition of two inches of stir stick seemed to even that right out. He moved the ingot into the running fire dispersal circle in the dirt and looked over his remaining ingots. One and a quarter silver-red with black streaks, one and a half black-red with silver streaks, two pure black with silver-red streaks. Each one could be reasonably converted into pure silver-red ingots.

Is there any benefit to keeping some of those black streaks in? They melt quicker, and are harder and more brittle. In theory that means they would make good edges on a blade, I think. I'm not sure if I have the skill to properly mix them like that though, maybe on a single edge blade? It's pretty easy to make more like that now that I know what I'm doing. I can experiment with that later. I need to focus, I'm working on a mass producible product here, with a very specific purpose. I don't have all day to mess around with new smithing techniques.

Andrew started all four of the forges back up and loaded four ingots worth of material into the respective crucibles. By the time he was finished the three knife molds were fairly solid, but still had decent streaks of red-pink running across their silver faces. He pulled them out of the circle and checked their mana composition, three to one metal to fire. More fire mana than the other bars, and they looked a little softer. He wanted to see if they would cool naturally into higher fire affinity metal if pulled a little early. He waited a few minutes more before pulling the silver-red ingot out of the dispersal circle and tapping it out of it's mold onto the anvil, it came out as the solid four to one metal to fire mix. Andrew grabbed the finished ingot with his tongs and promptly tossed it back into the forge before using Mana Welding to mend the break in the anvil's fire dispersion circle. He powered the circle, waited a minute, then pulled the ingot out and started hammering it out into the rough shape of a long dagger. It had a thin eight inch blade, with a relatively wide face and short tang. He set it aside and grabbed his chisel, using it to cut a slice off the log next to him and setting it on the back of the wagon next to the unfinished blade. He grabbed the cold box and filled it with river water, then activated the circle and left it to freeze.

He leaned back on the anvil and watched Tyler and Rowan at work, a healthy distance off this time. They had successfully fused some wood boards together into a couple different shield designs. One was an oversized round shield, and the other was a rectangular tower shield with three inch wooden spikes across the bottom. They had each one laid out flat now, and were carving the standard binding circle into the face of each one. It was a good design in Andrew's opinion, he wasn't sure what would happen if something moving really fast ran into the circle on the shield though. For the oversized round shield, it looked like it was designed to be tossed on the ground in front of you. It might end up just sliding across the ground as it absorbed the target's momentum. The other one looked designed to plant into the ground in front, which was all kinds of useful for people wielding the mana rifles regardless of the binding circle's effectiveness. It looked like he would have to figure out another task for them soon.

He returned his attention to the three silver knives streaked with red. They looked solid to him, so he tapped one out on the forge. It was warm to the touch, but not enough to burn. He held the tang between two hands and tried to bend it, using increasingly more and more force. He stopped as soon as he felt it give, it was definitely more elastic with the greater concentration of fire mana inside, but no so much to be a functional problem. Andrew cut a bit of the nearby log down into a pair of one handed hilts and pommels. He bored a hole into the hilts, infused them with a bit of water affinity from the ice box, and hammered them on to the end of the eight inch blade and one of the six inch knives. He attached the pommels as well, then poked around the two nearly finished daggers with siphon affinity. They each had a fairly high metal and fire affinity, even without bolstering it with affinity from other ingots. Each one had roughly five times as much metal affinity as a typical ingot, the eight inch blade had nearly double the fire affinity, and the six inch knife had about four times as much. He didn't really need to add any more to these. He leaned against the anvil, closed his eyes, and empowered each one.

You will conduct and expel mana. You will become a dagger. Your edge will harden and sharpen. You will conduct and expel mana. You will become a dagger.

The two blades shifted in predictable ways as more mana that typical surged into them. The wood of the hilts merged and melded into the exposed metal of the blades, and the edges sharpened out. Andrew pressed a palm to the face of the eight inch blade and begun inscribing runes into it. He carved a small metal accumulation circle in the center of the face, with one rune replaced with a battery bridge pair rune. This circle was connected to another circle layered around it by a trigger connector. The exterior circle was made up of eight bridge runes which each extended out into a single expulsion rune and expulsion 'barrel' connector. All in all, the interior circle would gather metal mana, and release it outward equally in eight different bolts from that face of the dagger after a brief delay. The runes spiderwebbed their way across the face of the long dagger, nearly filling it. He wouldn't be able to replicate this design on the shorter six inch blades. He did copy it onto the opposite face of the blade, replacing the metal accumulation circle with a fire one. It was very possible it would melt into the wound in addition to exploding outwards when the fire accumulation circle was charged. It was a nasty weapon and Andrew had a hard time imagining anything surviving something like that.

[Runic Artisan Level up]

He tinkered around with the design on the smaller blades, removing runes from the circles until he had a complete system that filled just about every inch of the smaller knife's faces. He was left with a three rune accumulation circle, and five expulsion runes surrounding it. It was just about as small as he could make the runes with his current Mana inscription skill. He used the same metal on one side, fire on the other design. The accumulation circles would be horrifically slow compared to the standard eight rune design, but as long as they built up a charge of mana before the battle that wouldn't be much of an issue. Andrew was pretty sure that Rowan and Tyler would have a hard time replicating the design with their tools, but that wasn't exactly a bad thing. If they managed to pull it off their rune modification skills would probably skyrocket.

Andrew looked up from his work to see the both of them peeking over his shoulder at his work, he jumped a little and they backed off. "Jeeze, you guys sure are quiet."

"We actually tried to call you over like, twice, but you were too focused on that knife. Those are the same runes the mana rifles have right? They're just connected in a different way?" Rowan said.

Andrew leaned back against the anvil again, "Yeah, same runes. I'm going to want the two of you to try making one of these next. How's your project going?"

"We're done! Watch!" Tyler said, pointing to the tower shield planted into the earth nearby, binding circle glowing merrily on it's front. Tyler ran at it from an angle and leapt in front of the circle. The shield shook a bit in place, but held firm as Tyler froze in place in front of it. Andrew couldn't see his expression, but could tell he was focusing hard on something. He slowly regained control of his movements and started backing out of the circle. It took a good amount of effort, but he had clearly practiced it a few times.

Rowan spoke up from beside him as they watched. "The other one works too, by the way. But if you run at it like he did, it can slide around a little bit sometimes. We got it to flip over once and it kinda rolled off and he got free as soon as he was out of it, so it's not like, perfect or anything. I bet a swarm of goblins would tip one pretty quick."

"Huh, have you tried holding it and pointing it directly at someone?"

'Yeah, it jerks like a mother-. There's a lot of recoil, but it's works. I have to use body enhancement in my arms to handle it, Tyler usually drops his."

"Cool. Wanna get a head start on Tyler while he drags himself out of that thing?"

"Fuck yeah!"

Andrew spent the entire rest of the day showing the two of them around his workstation, explaining how he made the two different kinds of daggers and the options they had for producing the necessary ingots. Then he carved a new hilt and pommel for one of the six inch blades, assembled it, and used his chisel to carve the runes into it's face. It was significantly harder to do without his typical skill, and he had to use Mana Welding to fix mistakes more than once. When he was finished he left all three sitting around as examples for them to practice on and sat back to observe. He would have to transfer the water affinity into the weapon hilts and empower them, but they were theoretically capable of doing every other part of the construction process. He fixed minor rune inscription mistakes for them using mana welding, but each of them was forced to melt down a failure and restart several times over, mostly because they created the runes too large in general.