The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) Jonathan Brooks (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

away a bit of the soot and sweat that his whole body felt covered with.  He grabbed a relatively clean rag from nearby and dried his face off, before looking in the small polished sheet of steel he had nearby.

It’s no wonder the Orcs look down on me, he thought, as he looked at his reflection in his highly prized possession.  While most of the Orcish race had a slightly snubbed noses, bald heads, rough greenish-colored skin, beady black eyes, and short mouth tusks, Kelerim took after his other parentage more.  The face that stared back at him had a full head of brown hair – a bit dirty and stringy at the moment – dark russet-colored skin, trimmed beard, and very small nubs where some mouth tusks would be if they ever grew out.  In fact, some of the elder Orcs he had met in his short 11 years living in Orcrim – the land of the Orcs – said that he looked more like a “Human” than either one of the races he was spawned from.  He wouldn’t know, though, as there hadn’t been any Humans nearby for decades, apparently.

Kelerim took the small Dwarven steel sheet off the wall and put it in his burnt and holey leather apron’s pocket, as he left the smithy and headed off to get a brief bite to eat.  The steel mirror was the only thing he had from his mother, who had apparently died not long after he was born.  He didn’t know the complete details of how his mother came to be impregnated by an Orc, but he figured it was probably best that he didn’t know.  As it was, he didn’t know who his father was, and he doubted his father even knew about him anyway.

He was raised by his mother’s family in relative secrecy until he was about 8 years old, when he was revealed to be obviously not fully Dwarven because he had already shot up in height so that he was taller than anyone else under the mountain.  When his ancestry was made public, he was forced out by the community and eventually made his way to Orcrim, where he was eventually taken in and made to work menial tasks even as a child.  There was no actual slavery in the Orcish lands, but to Kelerim his situation was close enough that he could barely tell a difference.

Regardless of the rough life he had led, the half-blood Orc/Dwarf had survived.  Shunned by his mother’s family and held in high disregard from his father’s people, he nevertheless showed them that he was able to work hard, even if they didn’t consider him to be fully one of them.  Which, unfortunately, was how he got the Blacksmithing position he now held.

Kelerim went to the communal fire in the middle of the village of Grongbak, where the Orcish cooks kept what little food there was available.  At first, his arrival a year ago had led to a few hungry days when they refused to serve “Hafanorc”; the word was a derogatory term for a half-blood that had stuck with him over the years – but now he embraced it so that it wasn’t as hurtful as it used to be. Despite their blatant disgust for him, though, they soon learned that, as the only Blacksmith within 50 miles, he was too valuable to let starve to death.  Now, they barely blinked an eye at his presence, as they were accustomed to seeing him around.

“Food” was a bit of an over-exaggeration for the meal he received.  Meat would probably be more accurate, as normal Orcish cuisine consisted primarily of whatever the hunters could locate nearby, and any vegetables other than natural root-based selections like potatoes were hard to come by.  Mainly because there were very few Orcs that degraded themselves enough to become farmers.

Stringy as the meat was, the small meal easily filled Kelerim up as he sat on one of the nearby logs, and when he was finished, he headed back to his forge to continue his work.  When he got there, however, he could see that he had a visitor – and an unpleasant one at that.

“There’s the lazy half-blood now!  What are you doing, Hafanorc?  Why aren’t our weapons done yet?” the tallest of the three Orcs inside his smithy unnecessarily shouted at Kelerim when he was within eyesight.  The gruff, scratchy voice of the local warband’s leader always grated on his nerves when he heard it, and this time was no exception.

“Your order isn’t due until tomorrow, Razochek.  Come back then and I’ll have them ready,” Kelerim responded with a little more heat in his voice than he should’ve had.  He was annoyed that the warband leader was bothering him today, when it was common knowledge that the shipments always went out at the end of the week.

The little village of Grongbak was one of the few places in Orcrim where iron was plentiful; it was near the edge of a relatively easy dungeon – or so he was told – that supplied them with loads of the precious ore.  While more than half of what was collected was sent back to the major towns and cities in the interior of their land, Kelerim turned quite a few the small dungeon loot orbs into weapons.  Some of the swords stayed in town to help arm the local warbands, while most went back with the shipments of the raw ore.

“Well, we need them today, you worthless weakling!  We have more reinforcements coming in later this evening, and they need swords to kill things – not that you would know anything about that,” Razochek sneered at him, the derision that he – and almost every other member of the Orcish race – showed toward those they thought weaker than them obvious on his face.  Though, for some reason he didn’t fully understand, the warband leader seemed