Chapter 111: The Art Of Forging [IV]
She turned around and strolled right over to Silas’s station just as he pulled his reheated bar out of the hearth to begin his own first fold.
Thora didn’t stay back.
She stepped completely into Silas’s personal space, aggressively pressing her bare sweaty shoulder against his arm as he set the glowing metal on the block.
Thora reached up with a clean corner of her leather apron and gently, deliberately wiped a heavy stream of sweat right off his forehead and out of his eyes.
"You’re working significantly hard, Boss," Thora purred right into his ear. "Your shoulder definition is really popping under that wet shirt. There is nothing significantly more attractive than a Lord who knows how to handle a heavy tool and work up a real sweat."
Silas didn’t stop hammering. He brought his tool down, flattening the fold of his steel with a solid clang.
"If you don’t give me some elbow room, Thora," Silas grunted, his breath ragged as he rotated the bar, "I’m going to accidentally weld your goggles to this anvil."
Thora chuckled with a low perverted sound that vibrated against his shoulder.
"You promise, Captain? Because getting pinned to an anvil by you sounds like a great way to spend the afternoon~"
Before Silas could respond to the dwarf’s degeneracy, a loud celebratory shout echoed from the far side of the room.
"I got it!" Brida boomed.
Silas looked over.
The tall woman was standing in front of her anvil, holding a massive, heavy piece of metal with two pairs of oversized tongs.
Brida had successfully forge-welded a solid, half-inch-thick plate of glowing blue star-iron directly onto the curved front face of her deep-earth alloy buckler base. The weld was clean and seamless, wrapping the flexible gray core in an indestructible magical shield face designed to smash enemy weapons to pieces.
"The face is locked!" Brida yelled proudly, wiping sweat from her chin with her bare shoulder. "It didn’t delaminate... or whatever you called it."
"Flawless work, Brida!" Thora called out, abandoning Silas to run over and inspect the shield.
She tapped the glowing blue edge with her small hammer, listening to the crisp ring. "That weld is tight! Put it back in the hearth and let the heat equalize before we prep the quenching trough!"
At the side workbench, Tasmin was also hitting her stride.
The Huntress had successfully welded the blue star-iron cutting edges onto both of her matched shortswords.
Now, she was using the horn of her anvil to meticulously hammer out the steel loops at the base of the pommels.. the reinforced rings where she would eventually secure her high-tensile retrieval chains.
"The balance is heavy toward the hilt," Tasmin reported calmly, flipping one of the hot unfinished shortswords in her tongs to test the weight. "Once I grind the bevels down, the center of gravity will sit exactly where I need it for mid-range throwing."
"Keep the heat low on those pommel loops!" Thora instructed her from across the room. "If you overheat the rings, the metal will stretch and snap the first time you try to yank a heavy monster back toward you with the chains!"
For the next two hours, the Foundry turned into a grueling test of human and divine endurance.
The folding process was brutal repetitive labor that stripped away any remaining energy they had.
Silas worked his steel through the folds... Five layers became ten... Ten became twenty... Twenty became forty... Forty became sixty...
By the time he reached sixty-four folds, the glowing red bar of steel on his anvil had transformed.
It wasn’t just gray iron anymore.
Running across the entire surface of the metal was a breathtaking, intricate pattern of swirling white lines... the Sil-Graves Silver alloy completely woven through the steel matrix like freezing lightning bolts trapped inside a dark cloud.
"I’m calling it here." Silas grunted, dropping his heavy hammer onto the table and leaning over his anvil, gasping for air.
His forearms were shaking uncontrollably, his hands cramped from gripping the tongs for hours. "Sixty-four layers. If I fold it again, I’m going to over-work the steel and delaminate the core."
Next to him, Morwenna and Eluned had pushed themselves to the brink of sanity just to spite each other.
Both of them had successfully reached one hundred and twenty-eight folds.
Morwenna’s cutlass was a long slightly curved bar of glowing steel.
The Damascus pattern running down the blade was aggressive and jagged, looking like sharp ocean reefs and crashing waves carved into dark iron.
The pirate queen was resting her forehead directly against the cool brick of her hearth chimney with her entire body trembling with exhaustion as her skin was covered in sweat and coal dust.
"One hundred and twenty-eight," Morwenna wheezed out, her raspy voice barely audible.
She turned her head, glaring weakly at the Goddess. "Beat that... you houseplant."
Eluned was in significantly worse shape.
Her control over nature magic had went down an hour ago and Morwenna teased her, forcing her to rely on her muscles to finish the last three folds.
The Goddess of Nature was slumped against her workbench, her silver hair tangled and matted with sweat as her tight canvas shirt was completely stained with soot.
Her own double-edged elven longsword was a masterpiece of geometry.
The sixty-four and one hundred and twenty-eight fold lines had merged into a flawless symmetrical weave of white silver that looked like flowing river water running down the length of the blade.
"We tied... you pirate trash," Eluned panted out, sliding down the side of her workbench until she was sitting heavily on the stone floor. "I would rather... get eaten by a shadow spirit... than swing that hammer... one more time."
"Nobody is sitting down yet!" Thora barked, walking to the center of the Foundry and slamming her hammer down with a ringing crash that made everyone wince.
The dwarf looked around the room.
All six weapons were shaped.
Brida’s heavy assault buckler face was welded and curved.
Tasmin’s matched chained shortswords were drawn out and looped.
Elara and Fenna’s tactical short bow risers were bent and reinforced.
Silas’s hand-and-a-half blade, Morwenna’s naval cutlass, and Eluned’s elven longsword were forged, layered, and covered in shimmering silver Damascus patterns.
The light inside the workshop had naturally shifted.
As the hearth fires burned down from blinding white oxygen-blasts to a deep, intense angry cherry-red, the atmosphere in the room grew suffocating.
Thora didn’t smile. She didn’t make a single perverted comment about their sweat-soaked clothes or their exhausted groans.
Her face hardened into the dead-serious expression of a Master Blacksmith approaching the most critical, dangerous second of her entire craft.
"You’ve all done the heavy lifting," Thora said with her voice dropping into a low one that carried cleanly across the quiet room. "You shaped the metal. You welded the jackets... You folded the silver but right now... every single piece of steel sitting on those anvils is just soft, hot iron. If you hit a goblin with those blades right now, they would bend in half like lead."
She turned around and pointed toward the far wall of the workshop.
Lined up against the brickwork were three massive waist-deep stone troughs.
Two of the troughs were filled to the brim with a dark, thick, highly viscous liquid that smelled strongly of whale fat, sulfur, and crushed mineral oil.
The third trough was filled with ice-cold mountain spring water, salted and swirling with green nature mana.
"This is step three," Thora announced. "Quenching and tempering which is the make-or-break moment of blacksmithing."
She walked over to the oil troughs, resting her hand on the cold stone edge.
"Right now, your weapons are sitting at roughly fifteen hundred degrees," Thora lectured them, her eyes scanning their tired faces. "The crystalline structure inside the steel is open, expanded, and soft. When we plunge these hot blades directly into these cold troughs, the massive thermal shock forces those molecules to instantly contract and lock into a rigid crystalline lattice. That is what hardens the steel. That is what gives your weapons the strength to punch through mythril armor!"
She leaned forward, her voice turning grim and strict.
"But this is the most dangerous ten seconds of the entire process," Thora warned them. "When you drop hot steel into cold fluid, you are trapping the metal in a state of massive internal stress. If there is a single microscopic air bubble trapped inside your welds... if you left a cold spot in your core... or if your hand shakes and you plunge your blade into the oil at a crooked angle..."
She snapped her fingers with a sharp crack.
"The internal stress will tear the metal apart from the inside out," Thora said bluntly. "Your weapons will warp like boomerangs, crack down the spine, or straight-up explode in your tongs like a shrapnel grenade. Hours of sweat, rare silver, and hard labor turned into useless scrap metal in the blink of an eye."
Silas swallowed hard, looking down at his glowing red hand-and-a-half blade resting on his hearth.
In a video game, crafting success was just a random percentage roll generated by the server.
Here, success was entirely dependent on his own physical steadiness, his angle of entry, and whether or not his exhausted forearms could hold the metal dead straight while it violently reacted to the oil.
"Who goes first?" Brida asked, stepping up to her anvil and gripping her heavy shield plate with her oversized tongs.
"You do, big boobs!" Thora ordered, stepping back from the oil trough to give the woman clear footing. "Bring the buckler face over! Watch your heat! It needs to be a dull cherry red, shifting toward straw yellow on the thin edges! Don’t hesitate when you hit the oil! Submerge it deep and keep it moving so the vapor bubbles don’t insulate the steel!"
Brida took a deep breath, flexing her broad shoulders.
She hoisted the heavy glowing red plate of deep-earth alloy and star-iron out of her hearth.
The radiant heat cooking off the metal was intense, illuminating her sweating face in a crimson glow.
She marched over to the primary oil trough. She didn’t flinch or second-guess her alignment.
Brida thrust the glowing shield face straight down into the dark oil.
WOOSH-BANG!
The reaction was instantaneous and violent.
The exact second the fifteen-hundred-degree star-iron touched the surface of the oil, a massive roaring fireball erupted three feet into the air as the chemical vapor ignited.
Thick, black, sulfurous smoke billowed out of the trough, rolling across the ceiling of the Foundry.
Under the burning surface of the oil, the metal screamed.
It sounded like a high-pitched metallic shriek echoing through the stone fluid as the crystalline lattice forcibly slammed shut.
Brida grunted, her thick forearms trembling as she aggressively held the vibrating thirty-pound plate submerged deep in the oil, refusing to let the chemical explosions shake her grip.
After thirty agonizing seconds, the bubbling subsided. The fireball on the surface flickered and died out.
"Pull it up!" Thora commanded.
Brida hoisted her tongs out of the trough.
The shield plate emerged from the oil dripping with dark fluid. The glowing red heat was completely gone, replaced by a sleek black finish that mixed with small blue starlight across the star-iron face.
Thora didn’t wait.
She grabbed a small metal scraper, walked right up to the smoking plate, and scraped away the burnt oil residue along the center spine and edges.
She inspected the grain intently.
"No cracks!" Thora cheered, slamming her hand onto Brida’s shoulder. "No warping! The buckler face is hardened and locked! Flawless quench!"
Brida let out a massive booming laugh of pure triumph, holding the smoking, hardened plate high in the air before setting it down into a bed of warm sand to let the internal temper equalize slowly.
"My turn," Tasmin said calmly.
The Huntress walked over with her two matched shortswords clamped in separate tongs.
She didn’t use the oil; following Thora’s gesture, she moved to the second trough filled with salted mineral water.
Tasmin was a fighter so she needed her blades hard and brittle enough to take an attack even if it meant sacrificing a tiny bit of flexibility.
Tasmin stepped up to the water. She held the two glowing red shortswords perfectly parallel in front of her chest.
With precision, she plunged both blades straight down into the cold saltwater at the exact same fraction of a second.
HISSSSSSSSSS!
A blinding violent plume of white steam violently erupted from the water trough, shooting straight toward the ceiling and splashing boiling salted droplets across the floor bricks.
The two shortswords vibrated fiercely in Tasmin’s grip, making the steel chains dangling from her belt clatter loudly against her hips.
Tasmin didn’t blink. She held her arms locked, staring straight into the rising steam until the water stopped boiling.
She pulled them out.
