Chapter 107: Sil-Graves Silver Alloy [Bonus - ]
Chapter 107: Sil-Graves Silver Alloy [Bonus Chapter]
Thora looked around at the blushing emotional faces of the girls as her warm smile slowly twisted into a massive unapologetic smirk.
"Besides," Thora added, her voice dripping with degeneracy. "If I died down here, who would finish forging all those custom deep-earth vibrating attachments I promised you girls for your private quarters? I couldn’t let my loyal customers suffer like that!"
The heartwarming atmosphere shattered like cheap glass.
The blush on Eluned’s face turned from affectionate pink to murderous crimson.
Morwenna’s hand snapped straight back to the hilt of her cutlass. Tasmin’s chained daggers ignited with a violent whoosh of dark fire.
"I’m going to kill her..." Morwenna snarled, drawing her blade an inch from its scabbard.
"I should have let the smog eat her..." Eluned hissed, raising her hands to summon a barrage of wood-spikes.
"You ruined a perfect moment, dwarf!" Brida yelled, stepping forward.
Thora laughed, a booming obnoxious sound, quickly ducking behind Silas to use his broad back as a shield. "Truth hurts, ladies! Don’t act like you didn’t place the pre-orders!"
Silas pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling a familiar migraine blooming right behind his eyes.
’What are these pre-orders they’re talking about?’ Silas thought.
"Enough," Silas ordered, throwing his arm out to stop the incoming assault. "Put the weapons away. We are not murdering the territory’s only blacksmith because she lacks a social filter."
He turned around, glaring down at Thora.
"Mine the silver," Silas commanded. "Quickly... We are leaving."
Thora gave him a sloppy salute and grabbed her pickaxe.
They didn’t swing wildly at the pale stone.
Following Thora’s instructions, Silas and the girls used the flat edges of their tools to carefully chisel around the base of the massive silver formations.
The rock here was softer than obsidian making the extraction surprisingly fast.
Within twenty minutes, they had chipped out a dozen massive flawless chunks of the glowing white metal.
Silas loaded the heavy crystals into his Lord Inventory, not wanting to risk putting unknown magical ores in the same wooden carts as the volatile star-iron.
"That’s all we can carry..." Silas said, wiping the chalky dust off his gloves. "Let’s roll out."
They marched back up the long, dark tunnel, leaving the pale chamber and the pile of spirit ash behind.
When they reached the main cavern, the five overflowing ironwood carts were waiting right where they left them.
"Grab a wheel," Brida barked, sliding her shoulders into the back of the heaviest cart. "Time for the leg workout."
Pushing thousands of pounds of raw ore up a sloped, uneven dirt tunnel was a brutal test of endurance.
Silas took the rear cart by himself with his boots digging deep into the stone floor as he shoved the heavy ironwood frame forward.
His muscles burned, sweat pouring down his face and soaking his dark canvas undershirt.
The girls grunted and strained, the wheels groaning in protest as they hauled their fortune toward the surface.
It took them over an hour just to push the carts out of the cavern and back into the gray daylight of the Umbral Basin.
The freezing rain was still coming down, turning the ground outside the wooden dome into a slick treacherous paste.
"Oh fuck..."
Eluned floated out last.
She turned around, raising her hands toward the massive ironwood barrier she had built.
The green runes flared, and the thick wooden trunks shifted, sliding seamlessly back together and sealing the tunnel entrance shut behind them.
"It’s locked," Eluned reported, wiping rain from her eyes. "Nothing gets in or out without me knowing."
"Good work," Silas said, grabbing the handles of his cart again. "Next stop, Blessed Land. Keep your heads on a swivel."
The trek back to the territory was a miserable muddy slog. The rain made the ground soft, causing the heavy wooden wheels of the carts to sink deep into the muck.
Silas and the girls had to stop twice just to physically lift the axles out of deep ruts.
By the time the towering, black steel-weave walls of their home base finally came into view, everyone was exhausted, soaked to the bone, and covered in a thick layer of mud and rock dust.
"Open the gates!" Brida roared over the sound of the rain.
The heavy iron doors of the Blessed Land slowly ground open.
Aeliana was standing just inside the threshold, holding a large enchanted umbrella over her pristine hair.
She looked at the filthy sweating squad, then down at the five overflowing carts of glowing treasure.
Her eyes widened in awe. "Lord Sy... you cleared the entire vein?"
"We left plenty behind for next time," Silas grunted, pushing his cart past her and onto the dry cobblestones of the courtyard. "Perimeter secure?"
"Flawless, my Lord," Aeliana beamed, her chest puffing out with pride. "There were no monsters or anything."
"Perfect." Silas nodded to the girls. "Push these straight to the Foundry. We get the ore out of the rain, then everyone hits the showers."
They rolled the heavy carts across the courtyard, the wheels rattling loudly on the stone paths.
They reached the large reinforced iron building that housed Thora’s domain.
Thora hopped off the lead cart, jogging up to the heavy metal doors. She grabbed the large iron ring, pulled out a thick brass key from her belt, and unlocked the heavy deadbolts.
She threw the doors wide open.
A massive suffocating wall of blistering heat rolled out of the doorway, hitting Silas and the girls right in the face.
The Foundry was a massive industrial space.
Three huge smelting furnaces dominated the back wall, their fires banked but still roaring with intense heat.
Massive mythril anvils, heavy quenching troughs, and racks of heavy iron tongs and hammers lined the workbenches.
The air inside smelled like roasted coal and sweat. Thora walked inside, turning around and opening her arms wide.
"Welcome to my domain, ladies!" Thora announced, a wicked enthusiastic grin on her face. "Leave the carts by the crushers. Today... I’ll teach all of you how to craft weapons."
The girls slowly pushed the carts into the sweltering room.
The heat was immediate and punishing.
After spending hours in the freezing rain of the Umbral Basin, walking into a room that was hovering around a hundred and ten degrees felt like stepping into an oven.
Silas wiped a fresh sheet of sweat from his forehead.
The tight, restrictive canvas mining clothes Thora had forced them all to wear were already clinging uncomfortably to their skin, trapping the body heat.
Fenna dropped the handles of her cart, waving a hand in front of her flushed face.
"By the stars, Thora..." the archer complained, tugging at the tight collar of her leather top. "Why don’t you open the windows? It’s boiling in here."
Brida nodded, rolling her shoulders as the sweat started pooling on her collarbones.
"Yeah, dwarf. Throw open a shutter before someone passes out from heatstroke."
Thora didn’t move toward the heavy iron shutters lining the walls.
She walked over to her main anvil, picking up a heavy forging hammer and resting it casually over her shoulder.
She looked at the squad of gorgeous dangerous women, all of them currently sweating profusely inside skin-tight, restrictive clothing.
Thora gave a cheeky perverted smile.
"That’s a secret~" Thora purred.
Silas stood by the door, staring at the dwarf. It didn’t take a genius to figure out her game plan.
She had engineered the restrictive outfits, forced them into hard labor, and now locked them inside a roasting forge.
She was shamelessly trying to make his entire Vanguard strip down to their base layers right in the middle of a weapon-crafting lesson.
He crossed his arms, leaning back against the heavy iron doorframe.
’You know what,’ Silas thought with a smirk touching his lips as he watched Morwenna angrily peel off her leather bracers to beat the heat. ’I’m not even going to stop her... Let the dwarf cook.’
"Alright, Professor," Silas called out, walking deeper into the sweltering room. "Where do we start?"
"We’ll get on that but first... my Lord, could you borrow me one of those alloys?"
The heat inside the Warlord Foundry was relentless, bouncing off the dark stone walls and shimmering in the heavy air above the three main smelting furnaces.
While the rest of the girls wiped the sweat from their foreheads and fanned their flushed faces, Thora was completely in her element.
The dwarven blacksmith didn’t even grab a rag to dry herself. Instead, she jogged over to her primary workbench and pulled out a massive, leather-bound chest of specialized equipment.
Silas reached into his Lord Inventory and pulled out one of the jagged, milky-white silver crystals they had chipped out of the hidden underground chamber.
He tossed the cold, heavy ore onto the iron table.
"Let’s see what we’re dealing with here," Thora muttered, leaning over the table.
She pulled down her welding goggles, snapping the tinted lenses over her eyes.
She grabbed a pair of fine, silver-tipped calipers from her chest and meticulously measured the dimensions of the crystalline structure.
She tapped the blunt end of a tiny jeweler’s hammer against the surface, listening closely to the crisp high-pitched vibration that echoed through the room.
SHIIIINNNGG!
Next, she grabbed a small glass dropper bottle filled with a bright green, acidic testing fluid.
Thora squeezed a single drop onto the center of the ore.
Normally, when acid hit standard scrap iron or low-grade copper, it would sizzle and hiss, leaving a dark pitted scar on the metal.
But when the green drop hit the pale silver crystal, the acid simply beaded up on the surface and evaporated into a harmless wisp of steam without leaving a single mark.
Thora pulled her goggles back up onto her forehead with her jaw hanging open for the second time that day.
"This is incredible," Thora breathed out, running her calloused thumb over the untouched stone. "The density is off the charts... It has the high-mana conductivity of deep-mountain star-iron but the natural corrosion resistance is higher than refined mythril."
She turned around, aggressively digging through a messy pile of tools under her workbench until she dragged out a massive tome bound in ironwood covers.
The pages were yellowed, stained with soot and grease, and covered in thousands of intricate dwarven runes and weapon blueprints.
’I remember, she was holding that when I summoned her..’
Thora slammed the heavy book open on the table, flipping through the thick parchment pages with speed.
Her eyes darted back and forth across the charts, tracing tables of melting points, grain patterns, and mineral hardness ratings.
She flipped all the way to the back cover, slammed her hand flat against the empty leather inside, and looked up at Silas.
"It’s not even here," Thora declared, her voice echoing over the crackle of the hearths. "This book holds the records of every single alloy my clan has ever discovered or traded for over the last three thousand years... We have entries for abyssal iron, star-steel, solar brass, and void-copper. But this? This white silver isn’t recorded anywhere in dwarven history."
Brida leaned her heavy battleaxe against a quenching trough and crossed her thick, muscular arms. "So what does that mean, dwarf? Is it useless?"
"Useless?" Thora scoffed, glaring at the brawler like she had just insulted her family. "Are you thick in the skull? This is a virgin alloy! A high-tier unmapped mineral formation that hasn’t been corrupted by the surface atmosphere! It’s priceless!"
She tapped her soot-stained chin with a massive proud grin stretching across her face. "Since I’m the Master Smith who’s going to figure out how to melt and forge this beauty, that means I officially have the right to name it."
Eluned floated a few inches off the floor, crossing her delicate legs in the air and fanning her sweaty neck.
"Name it something graceful. Like Moon-Weave Silver or Astral Pearl."
"Hell no," Thora rejected the suggestion instantly, waving a greasy hand. "Those sound like cheap perfumes you buy in an elf brothel... This metal is tough and cuts deep. It needs a proper name."
"Elves don’t have brothels!"
The dwarf ignored her and turned around with her eyes locking onto Silas. She looked him up and down, taking in his broad sweating chest, the heavy muscle of his shoulders, and the calm aura of his Gold Core.
"I’m naming it after the Boss," Thora announced proudly.
She slammed her palm onto the iron table next to the white crystal. "We’re going to combine both parts of your name, Captain. Silas Graves. From this day forward, in every forge and ledger across the Sovereign Realm, this white metal is officially known as Sil-Graves Silver alloy."