Morning in Dornheim began with the familiar, comforting routine of construction. The incident from the night before seemed to have given the people a second wind.
Marek was barking orders at the top of his lungs over at the sawmill. Saws shrieked, the crisp thud of axes echoed across the clearing, and thick, slate-gray smoke was already billowing from Darwin's smithies.
I woke up early. Shaking off the last remnants of sleep, the first thing I did was lock myself inside my workshop. The threat from Edriac had passed, but it had clearly demonstrated one thing: without a reliable, powerful ranged weapon, we remained vulnerable. My new ballistic prototype, resting on the workbench, needed teeth.
I had assembled the gun itself in just six hours, but we weren't going anywhere without ammunition. Fortunately, manufacturing cartridges was a streamlined, straightforward, and much faster process.
I dove headfirst into the work, laying out the blanks before me. Guided by mental commands and Lumon's flawless precision, my fingers moved at a rapid pace:
Casing stamping: Under the pressure of a small hand press, thin sheets of brass-plated alloy transformed into perfect cylinders.
Stabilizing core: At the base of each bullet, I placed microscopic grains of Chaos to grant the shot its kinetic force.
Energy primer: The caps were packed with ultra-fine Omega dust, capable of detonating from the slightest directed impact of the firing pin.
The work hummed along beautifully. Every few minutes, another heavy, purple-gray cartridge rolled to the edge of the table with a soft chime. I calibrated the balance down to a hundredth of a millimeter. By lunchtime, an impressive, formidable pyramid of several dozen completed rounds stood before me.
I loaded the first magazine, snapped it into the prototype's magwell, and ran a secondary systems diagnostic. A neon-blue hologram instantly unfurled before my eyes.
[LUMON SYSTEM ANALYSIS]
Weapon: Ballistic Prototype "Type-1" — Status: Optimal.
Ammunition: Energy-Kinetic Cartridges (Omega/Chaos) — Status: Stable.
Misfire/Overheat Probability: 0.01%.
Combat Readiness: 100%.
I let out a satisfied breath, leaning back against my chair.
My small triumph was cut short by a sharp gust of wind bursting through the open window. Along with it, Elyria flew into the workshop.
I frowned in irritation, about to scold her. "Where on earth have you been? I explicitly asked—"
But the words caught in my throat the moment I got a proper look at her. Her usually glowing, translucent wings were coated in a thick layer of gray dust, dirty smudges streaked across her tiny face, and a sizeable clump of cobwebs was tangled in her messy hair.
"Iron! Hurry!" she cried excitedly, practically squeaking as she waved her dirty little hands around. "Drop whatever you're doing! We need to go to the mine right now! I... I found a hidden opening!"
I narrowed my eyes skeptically, wiping my hands with a rag.
"Calm down, Elyria," I shut her down flatly. "You probably mixed something up again, didn't you? We have a mountain of work. I need to calibrate the smelter, and the miners are busy with their scheduled shifts. We don't have ti—"
"No! I didn't mix it up!" she stomped her little foot right in mid-air, looking deeply offended. "I flew deep into the back, where your bearded men with pickaxes haven't even reached yet! There's a real hole in the wall, and behind it—emptiness! A massive one! Come on, let's go, you'll see it for yourself!"
I sighed, stowing the ammunition into a pouch, and locked the ballistic gun into the mounts on my wheelchair. "Fine," I muttered briefly.
Getting ready didn't take long. Noah, whom I caught near the edge of the camp, merely arched an eyebrow at the frantic, dust-covered Elyria, but he didn't argue.
Marek assigned us three burly miners armed with heavy pickaxes and oil torches. Soon, our small group was descending deep into the Dornheim shafts.
As we pushed deeper, the damp, earthy air grew increasingly cold. The torch flames danced unevenly against the crudely hewn log supports. Elyria flew ahead, glowing faintly in the dark and confidently pointing the way with her dirty little finger.
"Just a bit further, almost there!" she urged us on, circling beneath the low stone ceiling. "There's an old cave-in coming up, and right behind it..."
She didn't get to finish.
We stepped into a dead-end corridor that began to widen. A strange, crumbling shale crunched beneath the wheels of my chair. Lumon suddenly flashed an alarming red warning in the corner of my vision.
CRACK!
The ground beneath us violently dropped. A massive sheet of stone and dirt collapsed with a roar, opening up a pitch-black abyss right beneath our feet. In the next split second, we were all plummeting straight down into the giant hole.
Absolute chaos erupted in the pitch darkness, punctuated only by the torches plunging below us. The miners shrieked at the top of their lungs in pure panic, tumbling haphazardly through the air alongside their pickaxes.
I clamped my hands onto the rims of my wheelchair, locking my body firmly in place. My gaze was fixed dead ahead into the rushing dark below. The main thing was to stay in the seat and not lose the weapon.
Meanwhile, Noah fell perfectly upright, his hands casually shoved deep into his pants pockets.
The darkness below rushed up at terrifying speed. Lumon frantically counted down the meters to the solid rock bottom: thirty... twenty... ten...
At that critical threshold, Elyria shot past us at immense speed.
"I've got you-u-u!" she squeaked.
She braked hard right at the very floor of the cavern and threw her tiny hands upward. A powerful wave of energy rippled through the chamber.
Our descent came to a sudden, smooth deceleration.
Once the miners finally stopped screaming and the dust from the cave-in settled slightly, we were able to look around. I raised my head, and my breath caught in my throat.
The entire space around us was flooded with a steady, azure-blue glow. The walls, the floor, and the massive stalactites were literally encrusted with enormous clusters of pure, shimmering Chaos and Omega crystals—of a size I had never seen before.
Beside me, Elyria panted heavily, proudly puffing out her chest despite her face still being smeared with soot and cobwebs.
I smiled softly and beckoned her over. As she hovered closer, I reached out and gently patted her head.
"Well, look at that... good job," I said genuinely, watching her eyes squeeze shut in sheer delight. "I guess I shouldn't have been angry with you. You've brought a miracle to Dornheim."
"I'll admit, squirt, you actually come in handy sometimes," Noah remarked, dusting himself off.
The miners, finally recovering from the shocking plunge, stared spellbound at the azure light. The realization of exactly what they had stumbled upon struck them, and without waiting for orders, they gripped their pickaxes and set straight to work harvesting the ore.
I activated the scanner to assess the scale of the deposit. Grid lines swept across the glowing walls, compiling data, when suddenly the system picked up an anomalous spike of energy deeper within the cavern. A strange amber radiance stood out from the surrounding azure mass.
I rolled closer to the ledge and froze. Embedded deep within the rock face was a large, flawlessly faceted yellow crystal, pulsing with an internal energy loop.
[UNIQUE OBJECT DETECTED]
Type: High-Temperature Crystalline Conductor (Class: Thermo-Magma).
Properties: Features extreme thermal conductivity and the capacity to stabilize critical temperatures.
Compatibility: Ideal catalyst for fusing Ocean and Prism structures.
Application: Facilitates completion of the smelter's thermodynamic circuit to construct Defense Tower components.
I let out a long breath of relief, feeling an immense weight lift from my shoulders. Now we had everything we needed to build the Tower.
"Noah," I turned to him. "Coordinate the guys. I need everything they can chip away down here transported immediately up to my workshop. Put a major emphasis on the azure ore, but most importantly..."
I didn't get to finish. Noah merely adjusted his grip on one of the pickaxes and had already thrown himself into the task.
I rolled further ahead, scouting the cavern. My gaze caught various other unfamiliar crystals shimmering down distant offshoots. My engineering hunger practically demanded that I stay, map out every single inch, and drown myself in analyses for hours or even days. But I checked myself just in time—the camp's infrastructure needed defenses right now, and there was no time to delay.
Securing the carefully extracted yellow crystal—which I mentally dubbed the "Sun"—on my lap, I gave Elyria the signal to haul me back up to the surface.
Back in the workshop, I immediately got straight to business. After polishing the facets of the "Sun," I prepared the foundation for a new, advanced smelting rig.
My hands worked with practiced confidence, linking copper busbars, mounting Omega stabilizers, and positioning the amber crystal directly into the center of the distribution hub. Bonding the final insulating components together, I secured the assembly in place.
Hummmmm...
The smelting apparatus reverberated with a low, heavy vibration, and the crystal inside it ignited with a radiant golden light.
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