The journey to work on who she was and would be, other than just the person training guards or helping healers, was not exactly what Su expected to be.

She hadn't planned for real to be sitting here with the wandering blacksmith, sharing her mana and giving pointers on the next set he was redesigning for her.

She hadn't expected that he would have her holding small bits of metal and salts he was adding to the crucible as he smelted the connecting parts.

She didn't even expect to be the one allowing her mana to bleed in to the inks used to paint on the rune formations he would then carve over.

The entire process that she had been working with felt like she was something just there rather than actually helping. Especially when it came to the fact that she was not the front-running actor in the creation of her armor.

She was the support.

"Hand me the ball pin hammer." This was another ask from the wandering blacksmith that Su was about to follow through with. But with her hand grazing the handle of the hammer, she stopped.

"You normally work alone on things like this. Why do you need me?" She was hesitant, but it had been two days of this now. There would be weeks left working like this.

How was this helping her other than making armor slower compared to how the wandering blacksmith worked?

"Your armor. Your time." He'd never said something this blunt before. It was.. Rude.

There was the sudden stirring of frustration. Progress hadn't come from this. There wasn't growth for her to look forward to. "The damn armor isn't any closer to being done!" she suddenly shouted out and the wandering blacksmith full set the tools down and looked at her.

"So what?" He looked at her and saw her face shifting through more and more emotions.

"So what? I need this. I have to take armor and shields with me to go out and find what I should do now! I have spent so much time in positions where I need to." She halted her own thoughts. Su was just sitting there, not moving in the middle of the room at this point.

"Seems like you caught on. It happened to me when I was younger too." Su hadn't taken the time to delve in to the wandering blacksmith's past.

No one really had.

Even Walker who had spent a lot more time working on things with the wandering blacksmith, hadn't taken the time to ask what his childhood was like. So, a comment like this was off and hearing as the wandering blacksmith started to explain things made Su understand the lesson here for her. Something that she found she shared with him.

"When I first started crafting things, I was an apprentice too. I wanted to do more. Do everything. But I kept waiting for the situation to be perfect. No orders. No commissions. No shortage of materials. I waited for another apprentice to join the master I trained under at the time."

Su understood even more now. Most apprentices were taught singularly years ago. They weren't the dwarven race so it was rarer for a master blacksmith to have several apprentices in the start of their education.

"I kept telling my master that I would travel and find materials or new crafting methods, but I didn't do it. So I was stuck. No one stopped me. I stopped me." he was speaking a lot, showing off a lesson he felt was part of who he was and what had made him who he was now.

"So, I started my journey after realizing that I was trapped by myself. Su, you became a hero because of your kind heart and determination. But you cut out a hole to fit yourself in and decided that was where you had to stay. A guardian, a teacher, a healer, a hero who would stay the same. What do you do now that you aren't the same?"

He stood up and grabbed the hammer while pointing it at the door. "Make a choice. Spend a few years stuck like I did when I was very little, or go on your journey and find whatever it is you feel you need. Armor and shields aren't what you need to do it anyways. I already heard you can use that tough body of yours to counter most attacks. Who needs shields and armors for that?"

All these words were beyond that norm for the wandering blacksmith. However, they were all true and heartfelt. They were a message from him to her because he had been taught a lesson in his youth before he properly began his own path.

While he had a very different life over the years and was much older than her, Su understood the core of what he learned through a harder trial of his own mind. He used that to help her, someone she believed was important to him because of his bond with their party. No, with their family.

He was always working but the wandering blacksmith had lived with them. He had spent time helping all of them. While he was rarely showing up and speaking monologues, he did his own best to help them. Right now, it was a life lesson that moved slower than his usual. He'd gone out of his way to make sure he passed this on to her.

Maybe not just because of his feelings shared by the situation. Maybe in his own way, he looked at them as the same kids who first found him. Whether that was true or not, Su was out the door without the usual armor adorning her. Instead, she used her skills and made the dragon scales more prominent on her body.

The wandering blacksmith was right about that, she was tough and no one or no thing could really push her to the point of needing her armor and shields. So she could take herself put in to the wilderness.

The wandering blacksmith stretched a little and began to work much faster than before. He already had a vision for the armor sets he would make and the shields he would forge. He knew how to improve them and what Su would need. He just needed to help her first.

With how rare it was for Su to venture around Genesis without armor or shields in her hand, the guards at the gates didn't notice her. Nor did the average population. Only a few of the guards who knew her better or had been directly trained by her made nods of greeting for her. But when they saw her moving faster toward a group of adventurers leaving through a teleportation formation, they could only wonder what was happening.

The sudden joining of Su on the formation was a surprise but the group of adventurers just assumed someone was rushing to get to a quest location like they were.

As Su dashed forward after the teleportation, the adventurers understood that they were small fish in a larger pond by comparison.

All the while, Su was letting loose more and more. Nothing like she was going to fight but more that she was consciously shaking herself out of the niche she had dug herself in to.

Yes, she loved training the guards. She knew that they would protect the next generation. That made her heart rest comfortably.

She enjoyed assisting Alice and the cathedral in healing people. She felt truly at peace knowing she had made a difference for those suffering.

There was a blooming love for those that she assisted as a hero. As the example for Genesis. She knew it was a duty that resonated with her soul.

But had she let herself feel the freedom of the wind blowing around her hair? What about the peace of the wilderness where she and she by herself could enjoy the flow of nature around her? What about a moment without responsibility of any kind to allow herself to bask in the sun?

Had she forgotten that she had become part of the dragons in a way? Did that mean she was any less human and any more dragon? Had she not realized that living her life in a perfectly protected niche like that was limiting her perspective. Isolating her ability to grow?

She had been pushed to grow and needed to let herself do so in her way, not the clean and cut ways she was doing. Because those ways were limits she had given herself. That's why she had so many emotions built up when Midnight grew and the mana and aspects flowed through her bond.

She had forgotten to just be her.

To just be free.

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