Chapter 2


    Ever since I had my abilities I wanted to experiment and see what I could do with them. Of course, by the time I realized what I could do I had a sense of how bad it could turn out for someone to advertise having powers I have. I read enough comics and watched enough shows to know what could happen to me and my family. So I kept it a secret from everyone and I would always go deep into the woods whenever I decided I wanted to try out some things. Over the years I learned a few things about my powers, both good and bad. First of all I was immune to getting hurt by fire, but that wasn’t all, I couldn’t get hurt from holding anything that was on fire or was extremely hot.


    I tried to hold a kettle of water and used fire to bring it to a boil. The kettle felt a little warm in my hands but nothing else, the real test was to pour the water over my hands. My hand was shaking as I was about to pour out the kettle. I was afraid of what could happen, could I get burned? I was so afraid of what could happen that as I was going over it in my head I never realized that I had already poured it over my hand. When I saw the water flowing over my hand I was overcome with a sense of relief. Being able to not get burned by anything helped me feel safe, that nothing I did would get me hurt.


    With this I knew that I could never be burned or hurt by anything hot as far as I knew. I had not experienced anything over 500° F so I was very tentative on how far my heat tolerance went. Although my heat tolerance was good I also was learning to manipulate fire on a base level. The biggest thing was that the fire was a little hard to manipulate and have certain things happen as I wanted. It was hard to control in of itself but the biggest problem wasn’t the manipulation of fire, but the side effects.


    I could hear this voice in the back of my head whenever I tried to manipulate fire. I heard it only slightly at first, but as I used my powers over the years I began to hear it more and more. It was this voice that kept telling me to burn everything, that everything was only fuel for it to live and spread. This only continued over the years as I trained, and now I could feel this constant tug at the back of my mind. It hasn’t driven me crazy or anything, but it has made me wonder what will happen to me as I use my powers more. Of course I want to figure out how to stop myself from possibly going crazy, but nothing I have tried has worked very much. The only things that have helped me is listening to music and meditating for an hour a day.


    Getting back to forging, I have always wanted for forge an item with my bare hands and little to no tools. Now that I was free I started with some 304 stainless steel which I heated up until I could mold it like clay. I was tentatively poking at the metal bar for a few seconds before realizing that even at roughly 2200° F I am not getting burnt. Now that I have the metal to the desired temperature I began trying to mold it with my hands, slowly but surely drawing out the blade and making a back edge. Halfway through the process I decided that a bowie knife would be a pretty good idea for what I wanted to make. Going into the process of making the blade I had no idea what type of design I wanted to make. In the end I chose the bowie knife for its relative simplicity, but also its large flat sides and smaller edge, along with small flourishes along the blade.


    The finished result allowed me to try to straighten the material by hand and get a feel for assorted styles of curving the blade with my hands. What ended up happening was that the blade was relatively straight, but there were small inconsistencies such as how it has slightly narrower along certain parts of the blade. Otherwise the blade turned out pretty good, especially with me making the handle entirely out of metal being my biggest accomplishment. The entire blade and handle was one solid piece of consistent metal. This made the blade a little unbalanced, but I would be able to fix it in the future relatively easy. In the end I decided to use my tools such as my hammer press and such to straighten out the blade and make it consistent. I wasn’t nearly ready enough to not use these tools, and I wasn’t above using my tools.


    With the blade successfully fixed of its flaws I heat treated the blade in oil and let it sit down to cool. Being done with forging I went to my living room to relax and watch some tv. It seemed that there were some documentaries on emperor penguins running on national geographic, so I turned up the volume and headed over to the kitchen to make myself a quick burger while watching from the stove. Although I am good with fire and forging stuff, cooking is not my forte per say. I usually have trouble heating stuff to the right temperature and leaving food on too long so my food is usually a small bit burnt or overcooked. I think it may be a passive effect I have on the temperature of things around me but I have no proof as of yet.This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    It’s because of this that I am usually reliant on take out or delivery for most of my food. In fact, I am on a first name basis with a certain pizza guy who is the only person willing to drive all the way out to my place. I like to think it’s my personality that makes him want to come all the way out here, but it’s probably just the huge tip I give him every time because I feel guilty making anyone come all the way out here. My fridge itself is a testament to how much I eat out, being almost entirely filled with almost only pizza and Chinese food. I honestly waste too much money on food each month because of this, but luckily my knife requisitions and such give me quite a wide berth of expenses and income each month.


    After I finished cooking I ate my food and watched the documentary before heading outside to get some air. Going over to my open area near the back of my house I began doing some light yoga before setting up to meditate for an hour. Working with the materials and using my powers today took a lot out of me and I feel like I need to try and relax for a while. Before I know it its already 2 hours later and I have seemingly meditated for an extra hour today. Getting up from my sitting position I headed back to my work station and got back to working on my actual orders for the day instead of experimenting. After finishing 3 knives, a sword, and 2 necklaces, I decided to call it a day. I went back inside my house and watched a few YouTube gaming videos before heading to bed excited for seeing the final finished product of today’s work.


    Waking up I made some quick scrambled eggs and ate before heading to my work station to see my finished knives from yesterday. Everything looks good so I am going to spend today putting the finished details on them. After I heat treated the knives and sword yesterday I made sure they were perfectly straight and left them to cool. So now they are going to need to be sanded down and brought to shape as I take off any excess material and start to really give them all an edge. After that I will put together the handles and inlay any engravings or other such detailed pieces. This is more precise work that I have to do now, whereas yesterday was most of the rough work.


    Now that everything that was commissioned is done, I can finally move onto my pet project. With some excess metal I had I made metal plates to finish the handle on the bowie knife, as I cut the plates to shape and riveted them together I had a solid piece of metal as the handle. I then did a little bit of sanding to the handle to shape it more to better fit my hand, and added a cross pattern texture to the handle to give it a better grip. When all was said and done I had a large bowie knife entirely made of metal which looked something like this, but with a metal handle.


    Now that everything was complete I could finally do my experiments with the knife. Now there was a reason I wanted a hard metal that could hold heat well, and to put it simply, I wanted to cut things with a heated edge. Mind you many people don’t do this as the blade will usually transfer its heat to whatever its cutting until it reaches equilibrium, and the blade also loses its strength as it gets hotter. What I am planning to do though is heat the blade up to 500° F so it will not lose much strength at all, while trying to manipulate fire to keep the blades temperature constant.


    The blade seemed to heat up easily enough as I got a temperature reader gun which kept track of the blades temperature as I heated it. I then got a small log out as I wanted to test the ability of the blade against wood. It cut in easily enough as I slashed into the side and through the bark, but it seemed to just stop an inch into to log as it seemed to be losing its heat. I began making the fire hotter and more compact near the back spine of the blade as it began to regain its higher temperature. I could feel the blade bend the tiniest amount as I put more force into it. As I was doing this I felt as though my blade kept losing its heat near the cutting edge of the knife no matter what I did. I saw that the spine seemed to glow a dull red color while fading into black as it neared the cutting edge. I didn’t want to directly burn the wood, but have the blade do the cutting and burning for this test.


    As I struggled to try and find a way to keep the blade hotter near the edge, I had a strange epiphany as I felt the flames grow hotter near the edge. I felt as though I should be able to move the heat into the blade, and not just the fire I was creating. Thinking this I tried to focus on the heat and not the fire itself. As I focused on the feeling of heat I began to feel a phantom sensation within the flames. Something more primal than even flames, and life itself within it. As I pulled on this sensation within my mind and tried to move it, the flames suddenly disappeared.