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  Chapter 23: The Worst Material

  Craft raked the ground with his hands, looking for branches which had been covered up by leaves. He hadn’t gone stave-hunting in a long time; the last time had been the day before he and Rafflesia had killed each other.

  His hands stopped. Though he smiled with drooping, tired eyes, he would never allow the knowledge she had passed onto him to fade away. Rather, it was knowledge that his body was not physically allowed to forget — because crafting was pain.

  He got back to Lei-rei with two branches, neither one long enough to make a bow. One was practically just a handle. He sat down beside Lei-rei and dropped them on the floor.

  Lei-rei stared at them for a moment. “I don’t see it,” she said.

  Craft looked down at his materials and sighed. “I’ll be honest with you. All the materials in this forest are so, so bad, I’d be a masochist if I enjoyed working with this crap.”

  Lei-rei shifted uncomfortably. “I — er” —

  Oh no. “S-sorry, that just came out. I mean, it’s bad, but I can do it. Not that I expect it to work, but you’re just curious about it, right?”

  She slowly nodded, but Craft was still bothered. Did I push a bad button here? he thought — and “Please don’t feel bad,” he said.

  She hurriedly shook her head. “I don’t, I don’t. I just don’t know what to say to someone’s complaints.”

  “Oh.” It wasn’t serious. He chuckled. He sat down and flipped out a pocket knife. “Well, you don’t have to say anything. I’m just complaining to myself anyway.”

  He picked up one of the branches and touched the blade against the bark. Already, he could feel that this would never have become any sane man’s workpiece, but he wasn’t too intimidated; once upon a time, Rafflesia had forced him to make do with a washed-up pallet and a jagged rock.

  That might have actually been better than his current situation, but… Oh well.

  His knife started moving to remove the bark. There was a grocery list of things to consider when crafting a bow, but they generally fell under ‘materials,’ ‘tools,’ and ‘skills.’ Right now, he only had skills; his tools from Enthusia’s domain had mysteriously vanished after he’d been dropped into Amatoria, and his materials were screaming to be put out of their misery.

  Some people might think most types of wood would work. Such people shouldn’t be considered sane. Ignoring the species-specific peculiarities of compressive and tensional strength, it was also the direction of the wood fibers — the grain — that decided how much pain one would have to suffer.

  Ah, it would be such a wonderful world if wood grains only ran in one direction, but noOoo, they just went whichever way they wanted and ran in circles sometimes — as with ‘nodes’ from which future branches would have sprung.

  No one could blame nature for that. Branches had to fork, or else the tree wouldn’t be able to put out enough leafy real estate to live. Forks also made for good slingshot material, so it wasn’t a net negative for craftsmanship as a whole.

  But Craft wasn’t into slingshots. He was a self-deprecating creature willing to withstand the pain of the craft — a bowyer.

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  Where nodes occurred, the material’s integrity nosedived, and Craft would have to avoid them and leave the bow thicker in those areas. (By how much, exactly, he would have to “feel in his heart.”) For the branch in his godforsaken hands, there were three of them — three points of potential failure and woe.

  If it was just that, it would have been fine, but the branch wasn’t even long enough in the first place, measuring under a meter in length. He didn’t have a choice, though. It was the longest he could find.

  He had thought to double the effective length by splitting the branch lengthwise and adjoining the halves end-to-end, lashing them to another, thicker branch, hence the handle-like branch.

  It was fundamentally a dumb and unrealistic idea — the grains would never allow him to make a perfect split — but he had no choice. He would just have to be patient and shave down the thicker half to match the thinner half — very, very carefully.

  He wasn’t even done removing the bark, and yet he had already predicted the future. He groaned.

  Lei-rei furrowed her brows. “Are you okay?”

  He looked at her and quickly looked away. “Oh, yeah, I was just annoyed. It’s just” — he raised the two branches — “it feels like I’d been given a pile of sand and told to make a calculator with it.”

  “I’m not sure what that means, but I’ll see this through with you until the end.”

  He chuckled. “Gee, thanks.”

  The moment he turned his attention back to the branches, he groaned again. No matter how much he complained, however, nothing would happen, and he consigned himself to the fact that his centuries of experience were being brought together to make rubbish.

  …Wasn’t that always the case, though?…

  Turning his attention to the branch — for real this time — he noticed the knife’s interaction with the bark felt weird under his fingers. It was…crumbly.

  Well, whatever. It didn’t take long for him to finish up, and it was time to split it in half.

  As he stood the branch on its end, he still couldn’t get the weird sensation from a while ago out of his head. Did bark do that? Maybe it was just extra dry?

  All those thoughts were just extras in front of his next task. With much paranoia, he stood up and centered the knife across the diameter of the branch as best he could. Even a fractional millimeter’s shift would decide the bow’s maximum strength.

  Lacking a mallet, he found a nice rock — and tapped the back of the blade with the rock, driving the blade edge into the wood. To his surprise, there was a pop, and the branch was split perfectly in half, tipping away from each other and hitting the ground.

  “Oh, how skilled” —

  Craft looked down at the two halves with an even worse look than before. “Damn it,” he muttered.

  “Wait, wasn’t that good?”

  “The fact that a meter of wood popped open in one hit like that? No. Not all.” He bent down to pick them up, looking at them with disappointed eyes. “It’s abnormally brittle.”

  “I” — Lei-rei covered her mouth. Craft looked at her.

  “What?”

  “No, I — I just remembered something.” She pointed at the trees all around them. “These are glasswood trees.”

  “Am I allowed to cry?”

  “Come winter, they turn so fragile that they shatter like glass.”

  Craft sighed. It was going to be like making a bow with dinner plates.

  Lei-rei covered her mouth, alternating looking between him and the branches in his hands. Even she knew that you couldn’t make a bow with dinner plates. “If it’s this bad, then” —

  “No, no, I can do this.” Man, this is gonna be so bad, he thought, but even without unassailable confidence, he couldn’t dismiss the blueprint forming in his mind. It might just work.

  “You really don’t have to” —

  He got the closest straight-ish branch in arm’s reach. It was a little shorter than the first branch, but that was his intention. He stood one end on the ground and mercilessly split it down the middle.

  “Another one?” Lei-rei looked on with eyes of pity. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but I can’t see how that could make a bow” —

  Craft chuckled…deeply.

  “C-craft?” She was actually kinda scared.

  “No, no, it’s expected that you can’t see it.” He gathered the split branches, and now he had four potential bow limbs, albeit thin. “I’ve never done this before.”

  Lei-rei excitedly clapped her hands. “Oh, is that an X-bow?”

  Craft stopped and squinted at her. They stared at each other. Lei-rei was losing.

  Her clapping slowed to an uncertain stop. “W-what?”

  “ ‘X-bow’ ?” He shook his head. “I don’t disrespect my materials. Ohoho-hell no, I only do designs that work.” He stared at the sticks on the ground. “Probably. We’ll see.” He wiped his brow. “I haven’t felt this stressed in a while.”

  Stumped, Lei-rei blinked her eyes as she realized she might have kicked the pebble that unleashed an avalanche — and just as she would an avalanche, she couldn’t stop watching him. His eyes were making all sorts of shapes as he sat and continued to work.

  “Why do I do this to myself,” he said, showing such a satisfied smile.