Chapter 104: Degenerate Dwarf
"Good... Move the iron!" Thora ordered, jumping down from the cart.
Brida, Tasmin, and the other girls leaned their shoulders into the carts, pushing the heavy ironwood wheels over the stone threshold and into the pitch-black mining tunnel.
Silas walked at the front, tapping the glowing brass anti-grav lantern floating above his head.
The cold white light flared to life, pushing the darkness away and illuminating the damp obsidian walls of the cavern.
As they marched deeper into the mountain, leaving the rain and the gray daylight behind, the entire atmosphere of the group changed.
Thora walked at the absolute front of the pack with her boots clicking rhythmically on the stone floor.
She wasn’t making lewd jokes anymore.
Her posture was straight, her eyes were sharp behind her welding goggles, and as she looked at the raw veins of ore embedded in the cave walls with her expression softened into one of pure genuine joy.
This was her home... This was her heritage...!
She held up a hand, signaling the carts to stop in a wide high-ceilinged tunnel about two hundred yards from the entrance.
"Alright, ladies. Set the wheel-chocks here..." Thora instructed with her voice echoing warmly in the cool dry air of the cavern.
She walked over to the right wall, where the black obsidian rock was marbled with glowing blue streaks of star-iron.
She turned around to face Silas and the girls, leaning on the long handle of her custom pickaxe.
Thora looked completely dedicated with her face lit up by the white light of the lantern.
"Listen up," Thora said, her voice sounding like a master craftsman addressing her apprentices. "A lot of surface-dwellers think mining is just grabbing the heaviest piece of iron you can find and smashing it against the dirt until something shiny falls out... That is a great way to break your tools, exhaust your muscles in thirty minutes, and trigger a stress-fracture that brings the ceiling down on your head."
She walked right up to the obsidian wall, pressing her bare calloused palm flat against the cold black stone.
She closed her eyes for a second, feeling the deep vibrations of the mountain.
"Rock isn’t just dead dirt," Thora explained softly as her voice filled up with respect. "It has grain, just like ironwood... It has stress lines, faults, and veins. When you’re extracting high-tier materials like star-iron or deep-earth alloy, you don’t fight the mountain. You simply read it."
She opened her eyes and pointed a soot-stained finger at a faint, slightly discolored gray line running diagonally down the obsidian wall, right beside a massive cluster of glowing blue crystals.
"See this mark right here?" Thora asked, looking back at the group. "That is called a bleed-line... When high-density mana crystals form over hundreds of years, they generate intense internal heat. That heat cooks the surrounding bedrock, pushing the impurities outward and leaving these thin gray tracks in the stone."
Brida raised her hand, resting her massive battleaxe against her cart.
"So if we spot one of those gray lines, we just swing our pickaxes directly into the track to break the rock?"
"No! Exactly the opposite!" Thora laughed, a bright happy sound that bounced off the cavern walls.
She beamed at Brida. "If you smash directly into the bleed-line, the shockwave travels straight into the crystal matrix sitting behind it. You’ll shatter the ore into worthless dust before you even see it... What you do is hit beside the track."
She stepped back from the wall, giving herself three feet of clearance.
Thora gripped the leather-wrapped handle of her pickaxe with both hands, setting her boots shoulder-width apart on the stone floor.
"You look for the solid rock roughly six inches outside the bleed-line..." Thora instructed with her muscles tightening as she adjusted her grip.
She wasn’t using any glowing skills.
She wasn’t channeling mana or elemental magic either.
This was pure physical technique refined by generations of dwarven miners.
"You don’t swing with your back... You let the weight of the alloy tool do the work, and you snap your wrists right as the point connects to send a clean vibration through the fault!"
Thora swung the pickaxe.
Tink!
The sound wasn’t a heavy deafening crash like one would expect.
It was a crisp high-pitched ring that sounded like a clear bell echoing through the shaft.
The blunt alloy point of the pickaxe struck the black obsidian rock exactly six inches to the right of the gray bleed-line.
For one second, nothing happened then, a tiny, hairline fracture appeared at the point of impact.
The crack spread with blinding speed, spider-webbing across the black rock face in a perfect circle roughly ten feet wide.
With a low satisfying rumble, the entire ten-foot section of solid obsidian bedrock simply slid forward and crumbled away, collapsing into a heap of loose gravel at Thora’s boots.
The dust cleared in the white light of the lantern.
A collective gasp echoed from the girls even Morwenna and Eluned stepped forward with their eyes wide.
Resting cleanly inside the exposed wall, completely untouched by the impact and entirely free of surrounding rock, was a massive breathtaking formation of deep-blue star-iron.
The crystal cluster was over six feet tall, branching out like a frozen azure tree embedded in the heart of the mountain.
It glowed with a rich and pure intoxicating mana that bathed everyone’s faces in a soft blue glow.
It looked like a piece of the night sky carved out of the earth.
Thora smoothly pulled her pickaxe back, resting the heavy handle over her shoulder. She placed her free hand on her hip, tilting her welding goggles up onto her forehead.
She looked back at Silas and the mesmerized girls of his army with her soot-stained face stretched into a wide and truly happy smile.
"Well?" Thora asked cheerfully, gesturing to the glowing fortune she had just uncovered with a single swing. "Are you all interested now?"
The girls just stared for a second.
The massive branching cluster of deep-blue star-iron pulsed with a soft, rich light, casting long shadows across the damp cavern walls.
Silas could guess that this was easily worth a million or more of spirit credits on the Valoria City market and Thora had popped it out of the rock like a loose tooth.
Brida was the first one to snap out of the daze.
The commander grinned, stepping forward and grabbing a custom deep-earth alloy pickaxe off the nearest cart.
"Show me how to hold it, dwarf..." Brida demanded, rolling her broad shoulders. "I want to break something."
Thora’s grin widened into a highly satisfied smirk.
"Right this way, big girl. Line your boots up with your shoulders. Keep your back straight, and let the tool do the heavy lifting."
Within ten minutes, the quiet atmosphere of the cavern transformed into a booming industrial work zone.
The sharp tink, tink, tink of metal striking obsidian echoed off the high ceiling, layering into a chaotic but deeply satisfying sound of hard labor.
Silas grabbed his own pickaxe and found a solid bleed-line near the back wall.
He adjusted his grip, taking a slow breath and snapping his wrists exactly like Thora showed them.
Crack!
A three-foot slab of black rock gave way, revealing a thick vein of crimson blood-crystal.
Silas wiped a stray bead of sweat from his forehead with the back of his canvas glove.
He had to admit, there was something genuinely rewarding about the work.
No monsters trying to bite his head off, no monsters wanting to burn his base to the ground.
It was just raw labor and the immediate dopamine hit of pulling treasure straight out of the dirt.
’I think I can understand why dwarves are so obsessed with mining...’
He swung again, watching a cluster of fiery orange Sun-Forge Topaz tumble into the dust.
He scooped it up, tossing it into his designated cart.
Silas glanced over his shoulder to check on the squad.
They were going to work, and the scandalous, skin-tight outfits Thora had commissioned from Clara the tailor were doing exactly what the dwarf intended.
The cavern was naturally warm thanks to the deep geothermal vents running under the mountain, and the physical exertion cranked the heat up fast.
Every single person in the room was covered in a thin sheen of sweat and dark rock dust.
"Haah! Haah! Haah!"
Brida was an unstoppable machine.
She stood in front of a massive wall of ore, her thick biceps and broad back muscles flexing with every single swing.
The tight dark canvas trousers clung to her thighs, and her cropped leather top was soaked through, but she looked like she was having the time of her life.
She laughed out loud every time a huge chunk of star-iron crashed to the floor, tossing fifty-pound boulders into her cart like they were crumpled pieces of paper.
Tasmin took a completely different approach.
The Huntress treated the rock face like a high-value target.
She didn’t use wide sweeping swings. Instead she darted around the bleed-lines, using short taps of her pickaxe to pop the crystals loose without shattering them.
Her skin glistened with sweat as her lean acrobatic frame twisted and pivoted with a dancer’s grace.
A few yards away, Morwenna and Eluned were somehow turning manual labor into a bitter spite-fueled competition.
"My pile is bigger, trench-rat..." Eluned boasted, hovering a few inches off the cavern floor.
The Goddess of Nature wasn’t even swinging a pickaxe at first.
She was floating cross-legged in the air, humming softly as she manipulated tiny, incredibly dense ironwood roots to snake into the microscopic cracks of the stone and pry the crystals out flawlessly.
"You aren’t even lifting a tool, you lazy weed!" Morwenna shot back, wiping soot from her forehead.
The pirate queen was swinging her pickaxe like it was a boarding axe during a naval raid.
The restrictive leather halter top she wore barely contained her as she worked, and every time she bent over to scoop up a loose crystal, the tight canvas pants fought for their life against her thick thighs.
Thora, who was sitting on top of the lead ironwood cart to supervise, immediately intervened.
"Hey! Goddess!" Thora barked, pointing a greasy finger at Eluned. "Drop the magic! The ambient mana in those roots is contaminating the purity of the void-amethysts! You grab a pickaxe and dig like the rest of us, or you don’t get a share of the profits!"
Eluned gasped, offended by the reprimand. "I am a divine being! I do not sweat in the dirt!"
"You do today!" Thora yelled back. "Grab a handle!"
Grumbling curses under her breath, Eluned finally dropped to the muddy floor.
She grabbed a pickaxe, her delicate hands gripping the rough leather handle, and awkwardly swung it at the wall.
The metal clanged against the rock, jarring her shoulders, but a small blue crystal popped loose.
Eluned blinked, looking at the shiny gem, and a tiny, proud smile touched her lips.
Within minutes, even the Goddess was covered in dust, swinging away and trying to outpace the pirate.
Sitting atop her perch on the cart, Thora watched the entire scene play out like a degenerate queen surveying her kingdom.
The dwarven blacksmith leaned back against a pile of raw ore, resting her heavy boots on the edge of the wood.
She pushed her welding goggles up onto her forehead, took a swig from her water canteen, and just shamelessly drank in the view.
’Damn, I am a genius...’ Thora thought, her perverted mind running a mile a minute as she watched the squad work.
She looked at Brida first.
The back muscles of the woman rippled as she hoisted a massive boulder of star-iron.
’Look at the sheer power...’ Thora mused, biting her lip. ’I want her to put me in a headlock. Just crush my skull like a sparrow’s egg.’
She shifted her gaze to Tasmin.
The woman was bent over, tapping a low bleed-line with the tight canvas highlighting the flawless curve of her hips.
’The flexibility on that one,’ Thora thought, fanning herself with a dirty rag. ’She could probably bend in half... I need to test Lord Silas to bend those joints.’
