The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Hangar Two, Central Supply Depot

"It vibrated because you forged the main rotor shaft like a bent turnip!" Brakka yelled, his voice echoing off the high steel rafters. He threw a grease-stained wrench onto the concrete, where it bounced with a sharp metallic clatter.

"I forged that shaft to exact two-millimeter tolerance, you bearded mole!" Ironbreaker roared back, crossing his massive, leather-aproned arms. He gestured angrily at the corner of the hangar, where the charred, twisted wreckage of their latest experimental flying machine lay slumped like a dead mechanical spider. "The shaft didn’t fail. Your stupid mana-circuit surged and tried to spin the tail fan faster than the main blades!"

"It was a harmonics issue!"

"It was a fireball!"

"Gentlemen, please," Maerath said smoothly, stepping between the two dwarf engineers before fists started flying. The mage adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and tucked his robes closer against the hangar’s freezing chill. "Lord Lucien assured us that today’s delivery would resolve our little... structural misunderstandings."

"Our jet engines work fine," Ironbreaker grumbled, muttering into his beard. "We built piston fighters. We built the Me 262 jet frame. Planes make sense! Wings go fast, air stays underneath, everyone goes home for dinner. But tying a giant metal propeller to the roof of a box and expecting it not to shake itself into scrap metal is unnatural wizardry."

"Speaking of wizardry," Gandalf murmured, pointing his oak staff toward the main depot doors. "They’re here."

The heavy steel doors groaned on their tracks, sliding open with a pneumatic hiss.

Seven commandos marched into the bay in a tight formation. Encased in matte-black mana-plate armor with short carbines held low, their boots struck the concrete in absolute unison. The sergeant leading them stopped three paces from the group, his cold eyes sweeping over the dwarf smiths and human mages.

"Which one of you is Brakka?" the sergeant barked.

"That’s me," Brakka grunted, wiping a streak of black grease across his forehead. "What did Lord Lucien send us?"

"Sir. You have a delivery."

The sergeant pulled a heavy, runic brass ring off his finger, flicked his wrist, and held his palm over the bare floor. A pulse of azure mana flared from the band. The air tore open six inches above the floor with a sharp CRACK of ozone, and two heavy objects dropped out of thin air.

First came a massive wooden crate, slamming onto the concrete with a hollow thud. Sitting right on top of it was a book thick enough to kill an ox.

Directly beside the crate, a full-sized, grey-green flying machine dropped onto the floor with a teeth-jarring metallic clack. It rocked once on a pair of tubular steel legs, settled, and stood still.

"Signed and delivered,good luck with it sir" the sergeant said crisply. "We’re holding the outer perimeter. Nobody comes through these doors until you’re finished."

The seven commandos turned around in unison and marched back into the corridor, sealing the heavy doors shut behind them.

The hangar fell dead silent.

"By the Ancestors," Ironbreaker whispered as he stepped over to the crate first, his hands hovering reverently over the massive book. He read the embossed gold title on the spine: Precision Machine Tools and Tolerance Practices.

He flipped the cover open. His eyes widened behind his spectacles as he took in dense, immaculate pages of metallurgical formulas, gear-grinding ratios, micro-tolerance charts, and alloy heat-treatment specs.

"Brakka, look at this," Ironbreaker breathed. "This isn’t just a manual. It’s an entire manufacturing revolution. Micro-millimeter tolerances, standardized screw threads, self-hardening alloys... this contains everything we need to upgrade every foundry and machine shop in Elarion."

Brakka walked over, took one look at a diagram of a precision gear lathe, and let out a low whistle. "Gandalf. Take this book right now. Lock it in the heavy iron vault in the back room. Throw both deadbolts. If a single drop of grease gets on these pages, I’ll shave your beard down to your chin,while you sleep"

Gandalf instantly gasped, gasping in utter horror as he wrapped both hands around his treasured beard, cradling it defensively against his chest. "You lay a single callous dwarven hand on this divine masterpiece, Brakka, and I will personally transmute every ale barrel in your quarter into vinegar!"

"Just move the damn book before I spill oil on it, ou damn old fogey!" Brakka barked.

Gandalf carefully cradled the massive volume in his arms and hustled toward the rear storage room, leaving the rest of the team to gather around the strange new flying machine.

It was a UH-1 utility helicopter—a vehicle entirely foreign to everyone in the room. They were used to sleek, fixed-wing aircraft with massive propellors on the nose or roaring jet tubes tucked under swept wings. This thing looked like a giant dragonfly built out of flat metal plates and curved glass windows, with a long, thin tail ending in a tiny vertical fan.

Though manufactured in another world, the System had seamlessly adapted its internals to the laws of Elarion. Its original engine had been modified to feed on raw mana rather than liquid fuel, though its mechanical skeleton remained purely physical.

Ironbreaker walked up to the fuselage, raised a heavy fist, and smacked the side panel.

THUMP-THUMP.

"Thin!" Ironbreaker scoffed immediately. "Stupidly thin! A drunk man with a heavy crossbow could punch a hole right through this!"

"It’s an aircraft, not a siege tower," Tomas said, walking around the rounded glass nose. He was their chief test pilot, and his eyes were practically sparkling. "Look at how light it is."

"Light is one thing, paper-thin is another!" Ironbreaker argued, dragging his palm along the side panel. But as his fingers felt the metal, his scoffing slowly faded into confusion. "Wait... the rivets are spaced eighteen inches apart. Every single panel is curved to lock into internal ribbing. The skin isn’t just hanging on a heavy frame like our jet fuselages... the skin is the frame!"

Meanwhile, Brakka was already flat on his back beneath the helicopter’s belly, squinting up at the underside.

"Where are the wheels?!" Brakka yelled from under the airframe.

"There aren’t any," Tomas said, crouching down. "How does it taxi?"

"Maybe this one doesn’t!" Brakka slid out from under the belly, pointing an oil-stained finger at the skids. "Look at these legs! No hydraulic struts. No oleo shock-absorbers. No folding gear like our fighter planes. It’s literally two bent steel pipes bolted to long running skids! When it lands hard, the steel just flexes outward, absorbs the smack, and snaps back!"

"Nothing to jam in the mud," Ironbreaker admitted reluctantly, leaning down to kick the skid. "Nothing to blow out under pressure,annoyingly practical."

Brakka grabbed a wooden ladder, leaned it against the side of the fuselage, and scrambled up to inspect the main rotor assembly on the roof. He stared into the open mechanical housing, his jaw slowly dropping.

"Two blades..." Brakka whispered. "There are only two blades."

"Only two?" Ironbreaker climbed up the opposite side of the ladder. "Our failed prototype had four blades stacked in a counter-rotating cage!"

"And our four-blade stack had forty-one moving parts, three hydraulic dampeners, and a spell-circuit that caught fire!" Brakka yelled back. He reached into the rotor hub, grabbing the root of one blade, and yanked it down with all his weight.

With a smooth, silent pivot, the opposite blade tilted up into the air.

Ironbreaker stared at it. "It see-saws."

"It see-saws!" Brakka repeated, amazed. "The whole two-blade assembly sits on a single steel pin!"

Maerath opened the second manual left on the crate—the UH-1 Flight and Operator’s Manual—and flipped through the cutaway diagrams. "The manual calls it a ’teetering rotor hinge,’" Maerath read aloud. "When the machine moves forward, the blade biting into the wind generates more lift than the blade retreating. On a rigid mount, that uneven lift flips the whole craft sideways. On this hinge, the blades just rock back and forth automatically, dumping the excess lift and balancing the forces."

Brakka stared at the central pin, feeling equal parts inspired and insulted. "It doesn’t fight the air with heavy titanium brackets... it just steps out of the way! How many moving parts in this hub, Maerath?"

"Nine," Maerath replied.

Brakka groaned, slapping his forehead. "Nine! Ancestors take me, we built forty-one!"

He scrambled down the ladder, unlatched the top engine cover behind the rotor mast, and peered inside. Nestled inside the housing sat a single, beautifully machined turbine unit connected to a crystal-lined mana-core chamber.

Brakka then walked down to the long tail, popping open a thin access hatch running along its top spine. Inside lay a solid steel drive shaft, three inches thick, floating in brass bearings every four feet. It ran directly from the main transmission straight back to the small tail fan.

Brakka grabbed the shaft and shook it. It gave half a millimeter within its brass bracket.

He froze. He stared into the dark metal channel for five solid seconds without breathing.

"One engine," Brakka whispered, his voice dangerously low.

"What was that?" Ironbreaker asked.

Brakka turned around, his face a mixture of awe and absolute rage at his own past stupidity. "One engine! The tail fan is geared directly off the main gearbox! It turns because the top blades turn! There is no secondary mana-core!"

"Wait," Ironbreaker frowned. "On our prototype, we installed two independent mana-cores. One for the main head, one for the tail."

"BECAUSE WE ARE IDIOTS!" Brakka roared, throwing his hands in the air. "We thought we were being brilliant! ’Oh, what if the main engine fails? We need an independent core for the tail!’ But two independent mana cores never pull the exact same amount of energy! A half-percent power variance was twisting our airframe in half! We spent eleven weeks rebuilding titanium engine mounts, thinking our welds were cracking! The welds were fine! Our two engines were literally wringing the aircraft’s neck like a chicken!"

Silence fell over the hangar, save for Maerath quietly turning a page in the manual.

"Right," Ironbreaker cleared his throat, thoroughly embarrassed. "Well. At least now we know."

"I am going to dream about this drive shaft tonight," Brakka muttered, rubbing his temples. "It’s so simple it makes me want to cry."

"Hey!" Tomas called out from the side door. He had climbed into the cockpit and settled into the worn canvas pilot’s seat. "If you two are done having an existential crisis over steel tubes, can we test this thing? I want to see how she flies!"

Tomas grabbed the controls, placed his boots on the floor, and grinned like a kid on harvest festival day.

Then, his grin slowly withered.

He looked down between his knees. He looked to his left hip. He looked at his feet then looked at the dashboard.

"Uh..." Tomas blinked. "Where are the flight controls?"

"You’re holding them, aren’t you?" Ironbreaker asked, walking over to the cockpit door.

"No, I mean... where are the rest of them?!" Tomas yelled, starting to sweat. "I’ve flown piston scouts! I’ve flown jet prototypes! Jets have eighty switches, a flight yoke, trim wheels, flap levers, and a throttle quadrant! This cockpit has a stick between my knees, a stick by my hip, two pedals, and six basic gauges! How do I steer?! Where is the button that keeps us from dying?!"

Maerath stepped up to the cockpit window, holding the operator’s manual open. "Calm down, Tomas. It’s actually much simpler than a jet. Read the layout with me."

"I’m listening!" Tomas squeaked.

"The stick between your knees is the Cyclic" Maerath explained, pointing to the diagram. "It tilts the main rotor disc. You push it forward, the rotor tilts forward, and the helicopter moves forward. Lean it left, you go left."

"Okay... okay, simple enough," Tomas breathed, loosening his white-knuckle grip on the stick. "What about the lever at my hip?"

"That’s the Collective" Maerath continued. "Pulling up on that lever changes the angle of both main rotor blades at once, making them grab more air to lift you straight up. And see that twist-grip on the handle? That’s your engine throttle."

"The throttle is on the lift lever?!"

"There’s a mechanical cam inside," Maerath read. "When you pull up on the lever for more lift, the cam automatically feeds more mana to the engine. The twist-grip is just for fine-tuning."

Tomas tested the motion, pulling up gently. A crisp, mechanical click-clack echoed behind his head. "Smart. So what do the floor pedals do?"

"They change the pitch of the small tail rotor," Maerath said. "They point the nose left or right. That’s it. Four controls, connected directly to the rotor head by mechanical rods. No complex spell-magnifiers."

Tomas stared at the simple setup, a slow, nervous smile creeping back onto his face. "Four controls... directly connected to the blades. I can actually do this."

"Not without safety nets, you won’t," Brakka interjected sternly. "If you slip up on that hip lever, you’ll rocket thirty tons of foreign engineering straight into the hangar ceiling."

Brakka turned to the two human mages. "Maerath, Gandalf—you’re on crash duty. Stand ten paces back on either side. Channel your containment wards and keep heavy kinetic levitation fields ready on your fingertips. If this thing starts to torque-roll or leap out of control, catch it in mid-air with magic before it hits the walls."

Gandalf raised his oak staff, its tip glowing with a bright, amber light as he began weaving a kinetic safety net around the bay. Maerath stepped to the opposite side, blue mana ribbons swirling around his hands, framing the helicopter in a defensive ward.

"Ironbreaker, get the heavy mooring chains!" Brakka ordered. "Anchor the skids directly to the steel floor rings in the concrete pad. Give him two feet of slack—not an inch more!"

Ironbreaker dragged heavy forged iron chains across the floor, wrapping them tightly around the UH-1’s steel skids and locking them to the floor anchors with massive brass padlocks.

"Chains are locked!" Ironbreaker shouted, stepping back to a safe distance. "Mages are ready!"

"Now listen ya kid if something goes wrong immediately land or i will slap your soul out of you"

Tomas took a deep, steadying breath in the cockpit. He flipped the main mana-feed switch on the overhead panel, gripped the cyclic with his right hand, and twisted the throttle on the collective with his left.

Deep within the fuselage, the Tier mana-core hummed to life. The main rotor blades above began to turn, picking up speed until they dissolved into a sweeping, thundering blur of motion. Cold air whipped through Hangar Two, scattering loose schematics across the concrete as the UH-1 strained lightly against its heavy iron chains, ready to lift off.

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