Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 210: Chapter 210: The Forge Reopens

Chapter 210: The Forge Reopens

The engineering district of Bastion Seven smelled like it always had.

Hot iron. Quenching oil. Coal smoke that never fully cleared out of the rafters no matter how many exhaust runes they carved into the ceiling.

Draven walked in through the eastern service door with his hood up.

Nothing had moved in a month.

Long benches sat exactly where they had been, laid out with tools nobody had picked up. A half-shaped ingot rested on an anvil, cold and gray, abandoned mid-strike.

At the far end of the hall, under a heavy canvas tarp, sat the thing they had all built together.

The glass test chamber from the prototype run still stood beside it. The interior was clean. Perfectly, uselessly clean. The last thing it had ever held was air.

Men moved through the hall in slow, purposeless circles. Sweeping floors that were already swept. Sorting bolts into trays that had been sorted twice.

One of them stood in front of the tarp with his back to the door.

He was broad and bald and gray in the beard, and he had a datapad in his hands that he was not reading. He had been standing there long enough that the coal dust had settled on his shoulders.

Master Engineer Dorn Halvers had knelt on this floor a month ago and begged a seventeen year old boy to take him as a disciple.

Then he had gone to a funeral and looked at ten folded jackets on ten marble pedestals.

’They never even found the bodies,’ Dorn thought. ’They ran the ceremony over empty stone.’

Behind him, the eastern door swung open again.

Boots on concrete.

"You people let the fires go out," a voice said. "Do you have any idea how long it takes to bring a bank of forges back up from cold?"

Dorn Halvers did not turn around.

He stood very still, the way a man does when he thinks his own mind has finally slipped its housing.

"Halvers. I am talking to you."

He turned around.

Cole Rust stood in the middle of the workshop floor with his sleeves rolled up and soot already on his forearms, looking deeply irritated about the state of the furnaces.

The datapad hit the concrete and shattered.

"BOY!"

CRASH!

Dorn Halvers crossed twenty feet of workshop, took the God-Forge Artisan by the shoulders, and shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth.

"You are dead! We buried you! I stood in that plaza in a black coat, you inconsiderate little slag-brained apprentice, I stood there and I wept into my own beard in front of four hundred people!"

"Halvers."

"Do you know what a fool I looked?"

"Halvers, you are lifting me off the floor."

Every man in the hall had stopped moving.

Then the noise started.

Someone shouted. Someone else dropped a tray of couplings and did not bend to pick them up.

Two junior smiths came sprinting in from the annealing room and skidded to a halt on the oily concrete, staring.

An old bellows operator sat down heavily on a crate, put his face in both hands, and said nothing at all.

They crowded him. Grabbed his arms. Thumped his back hard enough to bruise. Grown men with forty years in the trade, making an absolute fool of themselves in front of the apprentices.

Cole endured roughly ninety seconds of it before he’d had enough.

"Right," he said. "Enough. Everyone off me."

"Where have you been?"

"Working," Cole said. "Now shut up and come here, all of you. I want to show you something."

He walked to the tarp and pulled it off in one motion.

The prototype sat there. Their prototype. Star-Iron casing, runic core, the thing that had cleared a sealed chamber of Miasma in ten seconds flat and made a room full of veteran engineers fall silent.

Cole put one bare hand flat against the casing.

He closed his eyes.

The [Forge-Soul] stirred in his chest, and the metal stopped being metal.

He could feel the grain of it. The direction the ore had cooled in when it first came out of the pour.

The microscopic tension where the plate had been bent and never fully relaxed. The place where two seams met and one of them was carrying more of the load than it should.

He could hear it, the way you hear a struck bell keep ringing after the sound is gone.

"Halvers," Cole said, eyes still shut. "Who ran the final seam on the northwest quadrant?"

Dorn frowned. "I did. Myself. Three passes, tested to spec."

"It is out of true."

"It is not. I ran the resonance scan four times."

"Your scanner reads density." Cole opened his eyes and slapped the plate lightly, twice.

"It does not read grain. You welded a cold-poured plate to a hot-poured one and forced them to agree with each other. They are agreeing. They are not happy about it."

He looked around at the ring of faces.

"It would have held for the test chamber. Ten seconds, sealed room, no load. At full output on an open field, running eighteen hours a day for fifty miles of atmosphere, that seam sings itself apart in about nine weeks."

Nobody spoke.

Dorn Halvers walked slowly to the northwest quadrant of the housing and laid his own thick palm against it, as if he might feel it too if he pressed hard enough.

He could not, of course. He had spent his whole life learning to read metal through instruments.

The boy just knew.

"...Get me a stripping torch," Dorn said hoarsely. "And a grain-etch kit. And somebody wake the second shift, we are re-running the entire northwest housing."

He turned back to Cole. His eyes were wet again, and this time he did not bother hiding it.

"You could have told me that a month ago."

"I could not have," Cole said. "A month ago I could not hear it."

They lit the forges.

By the time the first bank came up to working heat the hall had thirty people in it, and someone had produced a chalkboard, and the noise had changed from grief to argument, which in that district amounted to the same thing as joy.

Draven let it run for an hour before he stepped out of the shadow of the doorway.

"Halvers."

The room quieted.

"How many towers can you build?"

Dorn wiped his hands on his apron and gave the honest answer, which was the one Draven wanted.

"One."

"Explain."

"It is not the steel." Dorn gestured at the housing behind him.

"Steel we can pour. It is not the runes, Voltaire’s lattice work is written down and any competent scribe can copy it. It is the heart."

He tapped the sealed chamber at the base of the prototype.

"The pre-Fall design calls for a Level 200 monster core. Not a rare one. Not a strong one. A King’s. That is what killed the original project. Their notes are quite clear about it, they had the whole thing drafted and they sat there for two years unable to build it because nobody could go out and kill a King."

Nobody in the workshop said anything.

They all knew what a fifty mile radius of clean air was worth.

They also knew there were perhaps three men alive on the continent who could reliably kill a King-Level Beast, and every one of them was tied to a wall he could not leave.

Draven reached into his coat.

He set a heavy black stone on the workbench.

The temperature in the workshop did not change, but something about the light did. The core was faintly translucent, and deep inside it something turned over slowly, like an eye behind a lid.

Dorn Halvers stopped breathing.

"That is an Abyssal Core," he whispered.

"It is."

"Those come out of Elders. High ones. That is a Level 200 signature, boy, where in the seven hells did you..."

"It came out of the Fifth Elder of the Church of the Eternal Eclipse," Draven said. "He is not using it."

A very long silence.

"One core," Dorn said at last. "One tower. Fifty miles."

"Yes."

"And then?"

"And then nothing," Draven said. "Unless somebody finds another way to build a heart."

"They were wrong."

The voice came from the back of the workshop.

Every head turned.

Lyra Voltaire was sitting cross-legged on a bench beneath the high windows with a book open across her knees and four more stacked beside her.

She had been there since before dawn. Nobody had noticed her come in, and nobody had noticed her stay.

The book was not a Vanguard manual. The pages were thin and pale and the script running down them was not human.

"Who was wrong?" Dorn asked.

"The pre-Fall team." Lyra did not look up. "They spent two years trying to source a King’s core because they thought the core was the fuel."

She turned a page.

"It is not. It is the tuning fork."

Dorn Halvers opened his mouth to argue and then closed it.

"A Miasma Clearing Tower does not burn a core to make clean air," Lyra said. "That is not how any of this works, the energy does not remotely add up, and if you actually run their numbers the whole thing should fail in eleven days. The core is not powering the purification. The core is setting the frequency. It tells the lattice what clean is supposed to sound like, and then the lattice does the rest."

She finally looked up.

Her eyes had the specific manic brightness that everyone who had ever worked with her had learned to be frightened of.

"They needed a King’s core because a King is the loudest source of Miasma on the continent, so its inverse is the cleanest note they knew how to strike. That was the only reason. They were not wrong about the physics. They were wrong about the shopping list."

"Voltaire," Cole said slowly. "Are you saying you can build a heart without a core?"

"I am saying I can build a heart without a monster," Lyra said. "There is another source on this continent that produces a purification frequency, and it produces one considerably purer than any King-Level corpse ever will."

She closed the book.

"It is growing in our front garden."

The workshop erupted.

Draven walked out into the yard while they were still shouting at each other, Dorn Halvers halfway up on a bench with a piece of chalk, Lyra already sketching a lattice diagram directly onto the concrete floor with the side of her hand.

Cole followed him out.

"She is right," Cole said. "I do not know how she is right, but she is right, I could feel it when she said it. The core is not fuel." He shook his head. "How does anybody just know that?"

"She read it in a language nobody has spoken for four hundred years," Draven said. "Do not ask her to explain it. She will."

They stood in the cold air by the loading dock.

"Money," Cole said.

"Yes."

"Real money, Captain. This is not a weapon commission. A tower is two hundred workers, forty tons of Star-Iron, transport contracts, scaffolding, a permanent site garrison and wages for all of it. And that is the first one."

Draven took out a plain black metal card and handed it over.

Cole looked at it.

"...This is not an Academy card."

"No."

"There is no bank crest on it."

"No."

Cole turned it over twice. "How much?"

"Ten million."

Cole nearly dropped it.

"Credits?"

"Yes."

"Whose?"

"Yours, as of this morning," Draven said. "Spend it on steel and wages. Do not ask me where it routes."

Cole stared at the card, then at him.

"You know that Halvers is going to file requisitions," Cole said carefully. "Site permits. Land grants outside the wall. Two hundred workers is a payroll, Captain, payrolls go through the Vanguard registry. That paperwork lands on a desk."

"I know."

"Does the Lord Commander know we are doing this?"

Draven did not answer immediately.

The wind came across the yard and pulled at his coat.

"He will," Draven said. "When there is a tower standing, and not a plan."

Cole watched him for a moment longer.

’That is the second time this week,’ Cole thought. ’Lucien asked him the same thing in the cell.’

He put the card in his pocket and let it go.

CHIRP.

Something moved inside Draven’s coat.

A sleek black head with neon purple eyes pushed out through the collar, sniffed the coal smoke on the air, and made a small delighted sound.

"No," Draven said.

Astraxion launched off his shoulder, sailed through the open loading door into the workshop, and landed directly on the anvil beside Master Engineer Dorn Halvers.

The chalk stopped.

Thirty engineers stared at a Void Dragon the size of a large cat sitting on their primary anvil, tail curled around its feet, wings folded, looking around the hall with obvious approval.

Dorn Halvers, fifty-one years old, four decades in the trade, veteran of two Beast Waves, made a noise that no adult male should make.

Astraxion leaned down and bit a corner off a Star-Iron offcut.

CRUNCH.

He chewed it. He swallowed. He looked directly at Dorn and chirped.

"It ate my sample," Dorn whispered.

"He does that," Cole said from the doorway.

"That was six hundred credits of refined Star-Iron."

"Then do not leave it lying about."

Astraxion, deeply satisfied, curled up on the warm anvil and went to sleep in front of the entire senior engineering staff of Bastion Seven.

Draven stood alone at the edge of the yard and opened the map.

[The Omniscient Cartographer’s World Map]

The world unfolded in his mind in fine blue geometry. He pushed the frame out past the Great Wall and let the Miasma density render itself in layers of shifting gray.

He was not looking for the thickest fog. That was the obvious choice and it was wrong.

He needed three things.

Miasma dense enough that clearing it meant something. Terrain a garrison could hold. And distance.

His finger traced a line along the northern approach and stopped eleven kilometers out from the wall.

Close. Very close. Close enough that the guns on the northern parapet could range it. Close enough that a Vanguard relief column could be standing on the site inside forty minutes.

Close enough that nobody could put a hand on that tower without openly, visibly, and undeniably attacking Bastion Seven in front of every neutral Bastion on the continent.

’Build it where they can see it,’ Draven thought.

’And where they cannot touch it without confessing.’

He dismissed the map and checked the Nexus-Band on his wrist.

Isolde Renwick had bought him three days of fuel audits and requisition forms. One of them was already burning.

Behind him the workshop was roaring. Somebody was arguing about lattice geometry at the top of his lungs. Somebody else was calling for the second shift. A dragon was asleep on the anvil.

"Halvers," Draven called back through the door.

The shouting stopped.

"Ground breaks tomorrow."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!