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

Chapter 215: Chapter 215: Groundbreaking (1)

Chapter 215: Groundbreaking (1)

The dead ground did not want to be built on.

THUNK.

It was seven in the morning. The pile driver came down and sank three feet into the ash.

Not soil. But Ash. It went three feet deep before it hit anything that even pretended to be a bedrock.

"Pull it," Halvers called.

"Pull it and move six meters east."

They pulled it. They moved it. It sank again.

Two hundred and six workers stood on a gray plain. They stood in a fog that came up to their waists. They moved when the wind did not. They began to understand the horrors of building outside the walls.

Nobody on the site was surprised to see Strike Team Zero.

Master Engineer Dorn Halvers had picked every single name on that convoy roster himself. He had picked each and every one of them who he knew personally at some level. He was quite the social guy!

He had brought along forty year old veterans, two of his own apprentices, and a rigging foreman whom, he had known since they were nineteen.

He had brought them into the workshop three days ago, closed the doors, and told them the truth.

"The children are not dead. They are going to be standing next to you outside the wall. You will not say a word about it, not to your wives, not to your priest, not to each other once you leave this room."

Nobody had argued.

So when Bram Stonehelm walked onto the site without a mask, the crew simply moved out of his way and let him do the heavy lifting.

"Left," the rigging foreman said.

"Left. Down. That is good, lad, that is good."

BOOM.

The slab seated. Dust rolled out across the ash.

"Next one," Bram said.

Over at the trench line, Reina walked with her axe over her shoulder. She froze the surrounding water with her presence alone.

CRACKLE.

Forty meters of standing water went solid in under a second. The masons behind her walked straight out onto it and started laying block on a dry surface.

Aegon sat on an upturned crate with a bucket of cold rivets, picking them up one at a time, holding each between two fingers until it glowed cherry red, and tossing them to a catcher who fielded them in a steel cone.

Lucien handled the seam welds with the tip of his index finger and a great deal of unnecessary elegance.

ZAP.

"Show off," Cole muttered, walking past with the cradle strapped across his back. He did not let anyone touch it.

"Come on! Don’t be so salty! I am providing morale," Lucien said.

Natalie Tokks sat on top of the tallest transport with her bow across her knees, watching the fog, and had not moved in three hours.

And in the narrow shade under the water tanker, Nyx Vespera lay on her back with her hood over her face, deeply and visibly bored.

"There is nothing to kill," she said, to nobody.

"Give it time," Natalie called down.

The workers were not calm.

They were working, which was not the same thing.

There was a young mason named, Petta. She kept looking up every time the fog shifted. She had been doing the same thing since the convoy came to a stop. By mid morning her hands had a tremor in them and this had nothing to do with the cold.

"You are going to wear yourself out," the rigging foreman told her.

"There is no sky," Petta said.

"There is sky."

"There is no sky, Odran." She pointed up with her trowel at the flat gray nothing above them.

"When you are in the city, you can always see the wall. Anywhere in the Bastion you stand, there is always a wall telling you your standing. Out here there is nothing to look at. It is just gray in every direction and you cannot tell how far away anything is."

Ordan kept quiet. He had no answer for that. Because she was right.

Sella was a cook, who had run the Vanguard Field Kitchen for twenty years. she said it more palinly at the noon meal.

"Everything out here eats," she said, ladling stew.

"That is what my father used to say. Everything past the wall eats, and the things that do not eat are already dead. Take two, love, you are too thin."

The line moved.

Nobody argued with her either.

The foundation failed twice more before noon.

"It is ash," Halvers said finally, on one knee, running the dead soil through his fingers for the fifth time. "It is ash the whole way down. There is nothing under this to hold."

He looked up at the half raised lattice spine and the three thousand tons it was going to become.

"Pre-Fall spec calls for bedrock at four meters. They wrote that in a world that still had bedrock at four meters."

"Then we will make bedrock," Cole said.

Halvers looked at him like he was looking at a madman. He had never thought of ’making a bedrock’ as it was not an engineers job.

What happened in the next six hours was not, by any standards, anyone would classify as Engineering.

Bram sank the anchor pylons by hand.

He did not need the driver to put a big hole in the ground. He put his shoulder against the head of each pylon, set his boots, and pushed.

His skin went gray and hard as the load came onto him, and the steel went down through eleven meters of ash until it found something that argued back.

Twelve of them. One after another. He did not stop between.

Then Reina walked the perimeter with both hands out.

She pushed the cold down, and the ash beneath the site froze into a single solid raft. The raft was forty meters wide and nine meters deep.

And Cole walked the frame with his palm flat against the steel.

He shut his eyes as he analyzed and called out the corrections in millimeters. He was so precise that no instrument on the site was capable of measuring.

"East pylon is proud. Two, maybe three."

"That is within tolerance," a surveyor said.

"It is within your tolerance by your standards," Cole said.

"The cradle has to sit true or the note wanders, and if the note wanders this entire thing is a very expensive lighthouse. Drop it three."

They dropped it three.

Halvers stood back and watched all of it with his arms folded and something complicated on his face.

"Thirty years," he said, to Draven, who had come up beside him without making any noise at all.

"Thirty years I have been told the pre-Fall builders were giants. That they knew things we lost. That we are children playing in their ruins."

He nodded at the site. At the boy freezing bedrock into existence. At the giant sinking eleven meter pylons with his shoulder.

"Turns out they just had better tools," Halvers said. "We have got better hands."

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