With three distinct pops, three bright orange bags materialized out of the rain, hovering for a split second before falling into my hands. Helga let out a choked sob of wonder, and Rufus's jaw dropped so low it might have hit his boots.
"Sell these," I said, shoving the bags into Helga's trembling arms. "But listen to me: Business 101. Low supply, high demand. The Palace is looking for these now, so the price just went up. Ten gold per piece. Not per bag. Per piece."
Helga nodded frantically, clutching the bags like they were her own children.
"If I need help, I'll use the scrolls," I said, stepping up into the carriage. "Take care of the 'Vessels,' Rufus. And Helga? Don't let the Queen catch you with orange fingers."
"We swear it, Master Arthur!" Rufus roared over the sound of the rain, bowing so low his beard dragged in a puddle.
"Move out!" I barked to the front.
Barnaby snapped the reins. The carriage lurched forward, the iron-rimmed wheels grinding against the wet stone. As we rolled out of the alley and into the dark, rain-slicked streets of the capital, I leaned back against the plush velvet seat.
I had a pouch containing nearly 300 gold coins, a "God-Skin" jacket, and a team of misfits. I was a fugitive, a merchant, and a legend in the making.
"So, Elsa," I said, looking at the elf sitting across from me in the dim lantern light. "Hope you like camping. Because we're about to make the Southern Territories very, very interesting."
****
The rain hammered down on the cobblestones of the capital, a relentless rhythmic drumming that matched the frantic beating of Rufus's heart. He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Helga in the mouth of the darkened alley, the shadow of the departing carriage finally swallowed by the mist and the midnight gloom.
In his thick, calloused hands, Rufus clutched two bags of the Divine Orange Relic as if they were the beating hearts of gods. Helga held the third, her knuckles white, her breath hitching in her throat.
Rufus was not a man prone to flighty fancies. He was a Dwarf of one hundred and fifty years. He had seen kings crawl on their bellies before the Solar Throne Of The Queen; he had watched legendary knights shatter their souls against the scales of elder dragons. He had spent a century and a half studying the flow of mana, the tempering of steel, and the intricate weave of enchantments. He knew what "greatness" looked like.
But Arthur? Arthur was an impossibility walking in the skin of a sickly boy.
"No mana," Rufus whispered into the rain, his voice thick with a reverence that bordered on terror. "No circle. No chant to the spirits of the hearth or the sky. Just… the tapping ritual."
He closed his eyes, replaying the "Ritual of the Air" Arthur had performed moments ago. To a common observer, the boy had been poking at the empty night, his fingers dancing against a void. But Rufus, with his soul-deep connection to the forge, had felt the very fabric of reality ripple. Arthur didn't just craft; he materialized. He spoke to the "Oxygen"—that ancient, primordial word Rufus still struggled to wrap his thick tongue around—and the world simply obeyed.
Rufus had been thorough. Before committing his forge and his reputation to this boy, he had sent his own shadow-seekers into the dregs of the slums. He had heard the tales of the starving orphan, the sisters who perished in the famine, and the boy who should have died ten times over. The reports were clear: Arthur was a nothing. A flicker of a life about to be extinguished.
And yet, that "nothing" had stood in his smithy and produced a multi-tool so perfect, so mathematically divine, that Rufus felt his eighty years of apprenticeship had been a lie.
"He calls it a Viper-X," Rufus murmured, his mind flashing back to the small black serpent-relic Arthur had shown him. A weapon that spat the wrath of the heavens without a single drop of mana. And then, the jacket. The God-Skin Mantle. Rufus had touched it; he had felt that smooth, alien hide that laughed at the most corrosive acids of the Royal Alchemists. It wasn't just High Grade. It was beyond the scale. It was an artifact from a realm where the laws of magic were replaced by something far more terrifying: absolute logic.
Behind him, Helga let out a shaky breath. Her shop had been a middling affair, a place for the lower nobles to haggle over silk. Now, because of the boy, she was the most powerful merchant in the district, holding the only supply of a substance that could double a mage's capacity in a single bite.
"The Royal Order," Helga whispered, her voice trembling but determined. "They will come for us, Rufus. They will demand we surrender his gifts. They will call it Heresy."
Rufus turned to her, his brown eyes glowing with a fierce, unshakable light. He thought of the way Arthur had looked in the rain—clumsy, sallow-faced, yet radiating a confidence that made the High Inquisitors look like bumbling children.
"Let them come," Rufus growled, his voice like grinding stone. "I have spent my life serving a Queen who measures worth in blood and taxes. But I will not defy the boy. I have seen the face of a New Era, Helga. Arthur is not a beggar, and he is not a scholar. He is the Architect of a world we are not yet worthy to inhabit."
He looked down at the orange bag, the "Chester" deity grinning back at him in the dim lantern light. Rufus made a silent, iron-clad promise to the stones beneath his feet. He would lie. He would sabotage his own forge. He would lead the Royal Spies on a chase through every mountain pass in the kingdom. He would protect the secret of the "Internal Logic" until his last breath.
Because Arthur had given him more than just a divine pouch or a mana-boost. He had given a tired old smith the chance to witness a miracle that didn't require a prayer.
"Go to your shop, Helga," Rufus commanded, his loyalty sealing like a cooled weld. "Sell the shards. Raise the price. Fund his journey. If the Palace wants a war, we will give them a war fought with the gold of a Genius."
As the rain washed the glitter from the alley floor, Rufus stayed in the dark long after the carriage was gone, guarding the spot where a boy from another world had turned the air into divinity.