Chapter 109: The Art Of Forging [II]
Chapter 109: The Art Of Forging [II]
The girls nodded intently, absorbing the blacksmith’s lesson.
This wasn’t just mindless hammering like they expected... it was alchemy and combat engineering all blended together.
"Let’s get to work!" Thora ordered, slamming her hammer onto the anvil. "Everyone grab your core ingots and get them into the hearths! We need to bring the metal up to welding heat before we start shaping the billets!"
The Warlord Foundry instantly erupted into chaos.
The girls swarmed the material carts, carefully selecting their ingots based on Thora’s recommendations.
Brida grabbed two massive blocks of deep-earth alloy for her shield core, while Tasmin carefully weighed out smaller equal-sized bars of star-iron for her matched shortswords.
Silas walked over to the primary hearth, grabbing a heavy iron shovel and tossing a fresh load of refined coal directly into the roaring belly of the furnace.
’I know a bit about this from gaming...’ Silas thought.
He reached up and pulled the heavy leather chain of the main bellows.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
The massive leather bellows compressed, driving a powerful blast of oxygen straight into the coals.
The orange flames violently roared to life, shifting from a dull red to a blinding incandescent white heat that pushed the ambient temperature of the room even higher.
The heat was murder.
Within fifteen minutes of managing the hearths and prepping their metal billets, everyone was dripping in sweat.
The skin-tight restrictive canvas mining clothes Thora had dressed them in were completely saturated, clinging to their bodies and making every movement a heavy sweltering workout.
Morwenna stood by her furnace, cursing under her breath as she used long tongs to arrange her steel bars inside the white-hot coals.
The pirate queen’s face was smeared with dark soot, her hair plastered to her neck and the cropped leather halter top she wore was struggling to contain her heavy breathing as the heat radiated off the fire.
Right next to her, Eluned wasn’t faring any better.
The Goddess had completely abandoned her dignified posture, leaning her elbows against her workbench and panting softly.
She had rolled the sleeves of her tight canvas shirt all the way up to her shoulders as her pale skin glistened with sweat in the firelight.
Despite the exhaustion, she kept glaring over at Morwenna’s furnace, silently refusing to let her steel heat up a second slower than the pirate’s.
Silas stood at his own anvil with his heavy tongs gripping a glowing red-hot billet of deep-earth alloy and star-iron that he had just pulled from the fire.
He set the glowing metal block onto the cold steel face of the anvil.
He raised his heavy forging hammer, setting his boots shoulder-width apart on the stone floor.
’Fuck...’
He took a slow breath of the hot dry air, focusing on the alignment of his wrists and shoulders.
CLANG!
The heavy hammer struck the glowing billet.
A massive shower of bright yellow sparks violently erupted across the room, bouncing off his leather apron and illuminating his sweating face.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Silas fell into a groove.
With every strike, he rotated the glowing metal bar slightly with his tongs, forcefully welding the outer layers of star-iron directly into the dense alloy core.
His back muscles flexed under his soaked canvas shirt with his Gold Core naturally regulating his stamina as he shaped the raw steel into a unified solid bar like Thora had told them.
It was grueling physical labor, but it felt amazing.
There were no shortcuts here. If you didn’t hit the metal with the exact right force and angle, the weld would fail and the steel would split apart.
"Keep your elbow tucked, Captain!" Morwenna called out over the ringing of her own hammer with her stormy gray eyes watching his form. "You’re letting your shoulder drift on the rebound! Strike from the center of your chest!"
"Ignore the pirate, My Lord!" Eluned chimed in, hammering her own glowing billet with surprisingly fierce determination. "Let your breath guide the swing! Don’t force the metal to move, invite it!"
"Both of you shut up and focus on your own steel!" Thora yelled from the crushing station, where she was helping Brida flatten a massive plate of alloy for her shield. "If I see a single cold weld or a crack in those billets, I’m throwing them back in the scrap bin and making you start over!"
Silas chuckled, wiping a stream of sweat out of his eyes with his forearm as he returned his ingot to the fire to reheat.
While he waited for the steel to get back up to glowing white heat, heavy footsteps approached his station from the side.
Silas turned his head.
Thora walked over from the crushing station, her heavy hammer resting lazily over her shoulder.
The dwarven blacksmith looked like she had just stepped out of a sauna. Her bare muscled arms were covered in soot and grease, her welding goggles hung around her neck and her canvas mining trousers were plastered tight against her thighs.
She didn’t stand at a polite distance.
Thora stepped completely into his personal space, aggressively invading his bubble until her chest was practically pressing against his arm.
She leaned her hip against his anvil, looking up at him with a cocky incredibly degenerate grin that made her eyes sparkle in the furnace light.
"You’re making good progress on that billet, Boss..." Thora purred with her voice dropping into a husky sound that was meant just for him.
It was one of her many tries at seducing her Lord.
"Your alignment is getting cleaner by the minute. You’ve definitely got the stamina for heavy forge work."
Silas looked down at the half-naked dwarf leaning against his workbench, crossing his arms over his wet shirt.
"I’m just trying not to ruin good steel, Thora. Don’t jinx me."
Thora chuckled, reaching out a soot-stained finger and shamelessly poking him right in the center of his sweating pectoral muscle.
"I’m serious, Boss," Thora teased with her grin widening as she looked around the sweltering room at the five gorgeous breathing girls working the anvils. "Just look at this place... We’re pulling rare ore out of the deep earth, melting down custom alloys, and hammering out weapons that will put this territory on the map. We’ve got a good setup here."
She leaned in closer, rising up on her tiptoes until her lips were right next to his ear.
"But you know what would make this forge even significantly better?" Thora whispered with her degenerate imagination running completely wild without a shred of shame. "More hands on the hammers."
Silas raised an eyebrow, looking down at her. "I already told you, I can’t summon more Troops until I get my hands on some cards..."
"I’m not talking about summons, Captain," Thora purred, giving him a wicked suggestive wink that made his brain stall for a second. "I’m talking about local home-grown talent. If you took me back to your quarters, bred me proper, and made a dozen little dwarf kids run around this base, I’d have a whole crew of natural-born blacksmiths to run these bellows for you in a few years~ Just think about the long-term economic efficiency, Boss~"
Silas stared at the dwarf.
She wasn’t just flirting; she was actively trying to pitch him on starting a generational blacksmithing dynasty to optimize base productivity but then again, he wasn’t surprised.
This wouldn’t be the first time
Before Silas could formulate a proper response to being propositioned by his own Master Smith, his iron billet in the hearth began to emit a bright, blinding white glow, throwing off tiny shooting stars of pure heat.
"Your steel is at welding temp, Boss!" Thora barked instantly with her perverted teasing vanishing in a microsecond as her professional blacksmith instincts took completely over.
She stepped back from his anvil, pointing her hammer at the hearth. "Pull it out right now before you burn the carbon out of the alloy! Strike while it’s hot!"
Silas didn’t waste a millisecond.
He grabbed his heavy tongs, pulled the glowing white-hot billet from the roaring fire, and slammed it back onto the anvil.
He raised his hammer high with his muscles bunching as he prepared to shape the first half of his custom blade.
The heat inside the Warlord Foundry had officially crossed the line from uncomfortable to straight-up brutal.
The three brick hearths lining the back wall had been roaring at maximum blast for nearly two hours.
Every time someone pulled the heavy leather chains of the overhead bellows, a fresh surge of oxygen slammed into the crushed coal, shooting pillars of white-hot fire upward and pushing the ambient room temperature well past one hundred and fifteen degrees.
The air was thick with the sharp smell of burning coal and melted iron. It felt like breathing inside an active volcano.
Nobody was having an easy time with it.
The skin-tight restrictive canvas mining clothes Thora had ordered from Clara the tailor were now a complete curse.
The thick fabric was completely saturated with sweat, clinging desperately to everyone’s skin and trapping their body heat.
Silas wiped his forehead with the back of his leather smithing glove, flinching as a drop of salty sweat ran straight into his eye and stung like mad.
His dark canvas undershirt was glued to his chest and back, outlining every muscle as he leaned over his workbench.
His lower back felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his spine, and his forearms were burning from the sheer, repetitive shock of hitting metal against metal.
"Alright! Listen up, apprentices!" Thora’s abrasive voice rang out over the crackle of the hearths.
The dwarven blacksmith walked down the center aisle of the workshop with her heavy forging hammer resting over her shoulder.
Unlike the rest of the girls, who looked like they were ready to pass out from heatstroke, Thora was thriving.
Her bare, muscular shoulders were covered in a dark sheen of oil and soot, her welding goggles were pushed up onto her forehead, and her canvas trousers were plastered even tighter against her thighs.
She stopped at the end of the line, tapping her hammer against an empty anvil to get everyone’s attention.
"You’ve all shaped your core billets!" Thora barked, pointing toward the dull, dark gray bars of metal cooling on their workbenches. "You took that deep-earth alloy, heated it up, and pounded it into the rough spine of your weapons. That gives you elasticity. That gives you shock absorption so your gear doesn’t snap in half when a boss monster hits you."
She walked over to a nearby crate and pulled out a glowing blue cluster of star-iron, holding it up in the orange furnace light.
"But you can’t fight with just a spine!" Thora educated them with her eyes turning sharp. "Deep-earth alloy is too soft to hold a razor edge. If you try to slash a Corrupted Orc with an alloy blade, the edge will roll over like tin foil after three hits... Step two is forge-welding your outer jackets!"
She pointed her hammer down the line of sweating girls.
"We are taking this bright blue star-iron, heating it until it’s sweating liquid glass, and hammering it directly around your alloy cores!" Thora explained. "That wraps your flexible spine in a hard indestructible cutting shell that holds magical charge and stays sharp enough to shave a dragon’s beard!"
Brida groaned from the crushing station, wiping her dripping face with a dirty rag.
The commander had tied her sleeveless canvas top into a high knot just to get some air to her midriff with her biceps glistening in the firelight.
"So we just wrap the blue rock around the gray rock and smash it?" Brida asked, her voice raspy from the dry heat.
"It isn’t that simple, big boobs!" Thora laughed, walking over and poking Brida right in her sweating ribs. "You have to get both metals up to the exact same welding temperature! If the star-iron is too cold, it won’t bond to the alloy and your outer jacket will peel off in the middle of a fight! If it’s too hot, you’ll burn the carbon right out of the iron and turn it into useless slag! You have to watch the color of the metal!"
"Smithing is complicated..."
Thora spun around, pointing toward the two scouts standing at the side anvils: Elara and Fenna.
Originally, only Elara had asked for a compact recurve bow for close-quarters emergencies.
But halfway through the morning session, Fenna had taken one look at her junior scout’s blueprint and realized her own five-foot bow was going to be a total liability the next time they got cramped inside a narrow dungeon tunnel and she needed a small one.
"I’m not getting stuck in a cave with a bow I can’t even draw..." Fenna had announced, grabbing a second block of alloy. "I’m building a short bow too."