It was just after breakfast when this all happened, so after the tools were handed out James and the rest of the slaves entered the mines for a full day of work. James was pacing himself, as normal, so as not to outpace everyone else, when he looked over and noticed the new boy was swinging the pick-axe, poorly, at a vein of red iron ore. He quickly walked over.

  “Hey.”

  The new boy jumped, nearly dropping the pick-axe. “What?” he asked, sounding annoyed and looking embarrassed.

  “You shouldn’t mine that, that’s red iron ore. We’re just supposed to get regular iron ore. Look, see how it looks different? This over here is regular iron ore, just try to get this stuff.” James pointed out a vein of regular iron ore.

  “Oh. Oh!” The boy twitched a little. “I just got a skill. [Ore Identification].”

  “Oh, you got that too?” James asked, a little surprised. As far as he could tell, everyone else was just going off what they’d been told to tell regular iron ore apart from the small amounts of special iron ore in the mine. This was the first person he had met who also had the skill, save Jared.

  James throat tightened and his eyes moistened at the thought of Jared, but he pushed the emotions down and focused back on the present.

  “Oh, so you have it too, huh. Are you also an Earth Mage?” the new boy asked.

  “Er, no, I’m a Smith actually.” James replied.

  “Oh…” the new boy looked down sadly.

  James spent a few more minutes showing the new boy how to use a pick-axe, then returned to his own mining.

  Later that day, during lunch, the new boy asked the slaver keeping an eye on them for seconds and got a backhand to the face for his trouble. He was sent sprawling to the dirt. James thought he was lucky that it had been one of the more disinterested slavers, and not the one with the whip.

  Back in the mine, at the end of the day the grey-eyed boy pulled the new boy aside and talked to him while everyone else was clearing rubble away. James saw the grey-eyed boy pointing at the pile of ore the new boy had produced, but did not hear what exactly they were talking about.

  The next morning once they all started mining again, the new boy was swinging hard with the pick-axe, at least, as hard as a fifteen year old mage could. He worked hard until lunch, producing almost as much ore as the more experienced boys. At lunch he ate quietly, idly touching the bruise on the side of his face. Then, back in the dim light of the mine, it happened. His foot slipped on a loose rock he had dug out of the tunnel in the morning and his ankle twisted with a sickening crack and a scream. James and the grey-eyed boy both moved to the new boy immediately, while everyone else stopped working to watch. That didn’t last long, as a look from the grey-eyed boy had them all turn back to mining again.

  James propped the hyperventilating new boy up while the grey-eyed boy inspected his foot and ankle.

  “Might be a sprain, might be broken.” the grey-eyed boy diagnosed.

  “I heard a crack, do sprains make a crack?” James asked.

  “No, no they don’t. Probably broken then. Shit.” the grey-eyed boy swore. He turned away from the boy’s foot and looked James in the eye. “Are you still good with Coin?”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Er, yeah, I think so. Why?”

  “We need to stabilize his foot if he wants any chance of it healing at all. He sure as shit can’t move or work with it broken and untreated. I can go get some sticks for a splint, and a walking stick, but I don’t have any cloth.”

  The boy continued breathing heavily through gritted teeth, with tears carving muddy tracks down his dusty face.

  The grey-eyed boy continued. “If we tear up your shirt we can do the splint, and Coin knows you’re more valuable than the rest of us. He’ll probably give you another shirt. He won’t want you getting sick as winter sets in. The alternative is we use this guy’s shirt, but there’s no way Coin will give him a new shirt, and he probably won’t make it through the winter if he can’t keep warm.”

  The grey-eyed boy didn’t offer his own shirt, and James didn’t ask. That’s not the kind of guy he was. Even this medical treatment was more about minimizing the consequences of the injury for the group than anything else.

  James paused for barely a moment before nodding. “Okay, use my shirt.”

  With deft hands, the grey-eyed boy tore into James shirt while he was still wearing it. Now it was more tatters hanging on his body than proper clothes. “The story is your shirt caught on some rock, then a scrap caught on your pick-axe.”

  James nodded.

  With that, the grey-eyed boy casually walked out of the mine, as if he was headed towards the latrine. When he returned, he was carrying a long branch with several smaller branches on it. He tore the smaller ones off. He looked to James.

  “Coin’s hanging out around his usual place. Go ask him for a new shirt now. I want to get this wrapped up quickly.”

  James laid the new boy down and left the mine. He quickly spotted Coin seated next to his magic bag, doing some kind of calculation on his fingers as he sometimes did, and approached him.

  “What is i-” Coin started before he looked up and saw James with his shredded shirt. “Oy, what the hell happened to your shirt, smith?”

  “It, uh, tore on a rock, and then I caught it on my pickaxe, and, uh…” James replied. “Uh, I was hoping I could get another…?”

  Coin rolled his eyes. “Seriously? Right as winter’s setting in you start tearing up your clothes? You think that shit grows on trees?”

  James gulped. Coin glared at him for a second before sighing. “Fine.” He reached his hand into the satchel and pulled out another shirt, which he tossed at James. “That’s it though, you’re not getting another one if you screw up that one.”

  “Th-thank you, sir.” James said.

  “You owe me a favor, though.” Coin reached his hand into the magic bag again and pulled out a broken spearhead in two pieces. The tip had cleanly broken off. “I want you to make a replacement for this tomorrow morning.” He passed the pieces to James. As James took the pieces, then tried piecing them back together-

  [Template Memorization]: Spearhead memorized

  [Smith] Class Skill [Template Memorization] has reached level 2.

  James held up the pieces again. “Do you want these back?”

  “Nah, you keep ‘em as an example. You’re not the kinda dumbass that’ll do something dangerous with ‘em, are you?”

  “N-no, I’m not.”

  “Good then. Go on, back to work. Time is money after all.” Coin chuckled and made a shooing motion with his hand.

  James returned to the mine. When he got back to the grey-eyed boy and the new boy, he stripped off the shredded shirt and put on the new (ish) one. The grey-eyed boy had already arranged his sticks for the splint, leaving the larger branch stripped down and ready to act as a makeshift crutch. Taking the shredded shirt from James, the grey-eyed boy finished tearing it into strips, and quickly fashioned a splint around the new boy’s broken ankle.

  “Keep your weight off your broken foot. The more you put your weight on it, the slower it’ll heal. Just sit down and use the pick-axe from there.”

  “If I didn’t have these damn magic-blocking bracers, I wouldn’t even need the bloody pick-axe.” the new boy hissed between gritted teeth. “I’d just [Manipulate] the ore right out.”

  “If you didn’t have those bracers, you wouldn’t be here anyway.” the grey-eyed boy said coldly.

  With the new boy’s issue dealt with, at least from his perspective, the grey-eyed boy got up and returned to mining without a second look back.