The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Chapter 258: Chapter251:The sky is a way

Ironbreaker declared himself satisfied on a Tuesday. The announcement surprised everyone at Skyforge, largely because at the grand council he had promised to be the last man in the territory to say the word, and he had spent every week since proving it.

"That’s it?" Lucien asked, looking up from the maps. "You’re actually content?"

"I’m not content," Ironbreaker grunted, dropping a heavy stack of inspection sheets onto the desk with a resonant slap. "I’m out of objections, which is a different animal entirely, and considerably rarer. Three hundred gear cycles. Four full-power ground runs at combat throttle. Those guns have put more rounds into that berm than the Vulcans fired all year. I’ve run out of ways to be suspicious of it, my lord, and a man who keeps testing past that point isn’t being careful. He’s being frightened."

Lucien picked up the top sheet, his eyes tracking the dense columns of dwarven script. "At the council, you swore you’d be the last one satisfied."

"I was. Look at the date on that stamp, then look at when the mages signed off on theirs." Ironbreaker crossed his thick arms. "I made them wait four days just to prove a point."

"Then Tomas flies her," Lucien said softly.

"Then Tomas flies her," Ironbreaker agreed, his voice dropping into a rare, quiet gravity. "And I go stand somewhere I can’t be useful—which is the one part of this trade nobody ever warns you about."

They closed Skyforge for the run.

The security measure had been Cedric’s idea, raised during the same council in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation about supply lines. By dawn, the airfield was a ghost town. No foreign envoys, no wealthy buyers, no allied liaison officers scribbling in their ubiquitous notebooks. The perimeter belonged entirely to Cedric for the day, ensuring that nobody came within two miles of the apron without a slot on a list he had written by his own hand.

"Everyone already knows we build aircraft," Lucas observed, watching the distant silhouette of guards moving out toward the tree line. "We flew the scout prototype right in front of nine separate delegations."

"We flew a scout," Cedric replied, his gaze never wavering from the forest edge. "The scout tells the world we have eyes. It tells them we can look at things. This one tells them we can reach up and rip something right out of the sky. They’ll learn that when I decide they should—not on a Tuesday morning just because some farmer two miles off happens to own a good spyglass."

"And if she doesn’t fly?" Lucas asked.

Cedric finally turned, a hard, flat smile touching his face. "Then nobody outside this field ever knew we tried."

When Lucien arrived at the apron, he found twenty-five knights standing in a rigid, silent block. They were clad in full armor, a sight that felt strikingly out of place against the grease-stained gravel. The first complete suits had come off the forge benches just eleven days after the council, and the Commandos had practically lived in them since—a strict order from Malen, maintained until the men stopped noticing the sheer weight of the steel.

"You brought them all out," Lucien noted, stepping up beside him.

"I did."

"They’re not here to be impressed, I take it."

"They’re here to be asked," Malen said, his eyes fixed on the gleaming, predatory shape of the aircraft. "Whatever we build after today, these are the men who will have to fight in it. If they’ve never seen what an aircraft can actually do, they’ll ask us for the wrong things, or worse, they’ll ask for nothing at all. Then we’ll hand them something clever, only to find out in the middle of a war that it’s completely useless to them." He shrugged slightly, the plates of his gorget rasping. "Let them watch it fly. Let them tell us what they need. They know their work, Lucien. We don’t."

Lucien looked from the silent block of ironclad men to the lethal lines of the Stormwing. "Then they talk afterward. All of them, however badly the words come out. I’d rather hear a bad idea today than a good one two years too late."

Out on the tarmac, Ironbreaker was conducting his final walk-around of the airframe. He had been at it for forty minutes, a full half-hour longer than the protocol actually required.

"That’s the fourth time you’ve checked the port mount," Gandalf muttered, trailing a few paces behind.

"It’s the fifth. You weren’t watching properly," the dwarf snapped. He crouched down anyway, running a calloused thumb along the reinforced plate—the heavy, double-thick piece fitted after the second engine had nearly twisted the airframe off its own wing during a ground test. "This is the last hour in which anything is my fault. After this, it’s the sky’s fault, and the sky has never once accepted a memorandum."

Gandalf let out a dry chuckle. "You’ve been saving that line, haven’t you?"

"For days. But yes."

In the cockpit, Tomas Renner had been strapped in for half an hour already. He was moving through his pre-flight checks with a slow, methodical hand, a calm precision that Ironbreaker watched from the ground with open approval.

"He doesn’t look nervous," Maerath remarked, leaning against a tool cart.

"He’s terrified," Ironbreaker corrected him. "He’s simply decided to be terrified in an orderly fashion. It’s the only kind of pilot worth the price of the fuel."

Lucien approached the cockpit last. Seeing him, Tomas began to unbuckle his harness, but Lucien reached up and waved him down.

"Stay put. I’m not about to make a speech at a man strapped into a machine."

"I wouldn’t mind one, my lord," Tomas said, offering a tight, strained grin. "Might settle the stomach a bit."

"Then here it is: if anything—absolutely anything—feels wrong up there, you come back down. Not after you’ve tested it, not after you’ve tried to be clever about it. Immediately." Lucien placed a heavy hand on the metal fuselage. "We can build another one of these machines in three months. We can’t build another you at all."

Tomas swallowed hard, his hands tightening on the controls. "Better speech than I expected."

"It’s the only one I have. Fly it."

The engine caught at a quarter past nine, and the sheer force of it vibrated through the boots of every man on the field.

There was no ceremony to the takeoff, no grand signal. Tomas brought the throttle up exactly —like easing a nervous horse into a steady canter, rather than murdering a door. The massive propeller bit into the air, pulling the Stormwing forward. She rolled, gathered momentum, and the tail lifted clear of the gravel. A moment later, the wheels stopped touching the earth entirely, and the gathered crowd let out a collective sound that was less of a cheer and more of a synchronized intake of breath.

She climbed. That was the first thing that tore at everyone’s senses. Nobody who had spent months watching the lumbering blimps or the fragile scout gliders was prepared for the sheer violence of how she took to the air. The scout went up like a man walking a steep hill; this thing went up like it had been thrown by a giant.

"Gear," Ironbreaker muttered to the open air, his fists clenched.

"Coming up," Maerath reported, his eyes glued to the glowing crystal repeater in his hands. "Both legs folding into the wings... airframe is going smooth. Green. Locked. Both."

"Say it again."

"Both legs locked up, my lord dwarf."

Ironbreaker let out a massive breath he felt he’d been holding since a tie-down stake had ripped out of the tarmac five weeks ago. "Nineteen days of misery for that noise," he muttered. "Nineteen days, a cold-box the size of a supply cart, and a strut that seized at two-thirds right in front of every man here."

"It fell, though," Gandalf noted quietly. "When it seized during the test. It fell back down."

"It fell back down," Ironbreaker agreed, a fierce pride breaking through his gruff exterior. "Which is exactly why there’s a living man in that aircraft this morning instead of a condolence letter on my desk."

She flew for forty minutes.

Tomas took her up into a long, sweeping climb, leveling off until the thunderous roar of the engine settled into a hard, steady snarl high overhead. On the ground, the onlookers simply stared, trying to mentally process the physics of what they were witnessing.

It was the turns that truly stunned them. Tomas rolled the Stormwing hard onto her wingtip, pulling her around in a fraction of the airspace the scout ever needed. The arc was so impossibly tight that Varro uttered a sharp, involuntary "no" under his breath, sounding exactly like a man who had just watched a magician perform an impossible card trick.

"That’s the wing," Gandalf breathed. There was a raw, undignified tremble in the engineer’s voice, and he didn’t care who heard it. "That’s the wing right there. months on paper. I’ve argued about that exact curvature with every single one of you, and there it is, doing it."

"There it is doing it," Ironbreaker echoed. "Now watch him level out. Because a wing that turns like that will also kill a man the second he gets bored."

But Tomas didn’t get bored. He flew like a man checking off a rigid, written list—climbs, turns, high-speed runs, each iteration a fraction harder than the last, each one repeated flawlessly before he moved on to the next parameter. It wasn’t spectacular or flashy; it was disciplined. Twice, he flew a slow, wide circuit for no reason anyone on the ground could discern.

"He’s listening to it," Ironbreaker said before anyone could ask. "Good lad. That’s what those extra loops are for."

At the thirty-one-minute mark, Tomas brought the Stormwing down the length of the field, low and screaming fast. The tearing roar of the airframe arrived a full second behind the shadow of the plane itself, and several hundred engineers, fitters, knights, and dwarves discovered simultaneously that they were screaming at the top of their lungs.

Ironbreaker turned his back to the field, looking up toward the high, tiled roof of the main hangar without checking to see if he was being watched. "You told the council it was finished in every respect except the one that mattered."

Above him, resting on the reinforced joists, the great dragon Aurethar shifted. There was a long, heavy pause—longer than was strictly comfortable for a creature of that scale.

"Consider the remark withdrawn," the dragon said.

"Louder, lizard!" Ironbreaker bellowed back. "The engine’s noisy!"

"Consider it withdrawn," Aurethar repeated, a massive tail flicking once against the tiles with the force of a falling log. "It is also significantly faster than I expected. You may have that in writing, since ink appears to be the only currency you people truly value."

The gear came down at thirty-eight minutes. Two solid green lights flashed on the ground repeater. Tomas brought the heavy machine down so gently, kissing the gravel with such perfect precision, that the entire airfield groaned in mock disappointment; everyone had been hoping for at least one good bounce to shout about, and the pilot had flatly declined to give it to them.

The massive propeller spun to a halt. The canopy slid back with a metallic hiss. Tomas sat motionless in the cockpit for a long moment, his hands remaining steady on the controls, before he finally unbuckled, climbed out onto the wing root, and looked down at the sea of people surging toward him.

"Well?" Ironbreaker bellowed, outrunning men half his age to arrive first at the wing.

"She wants to fly," Tomas said. He spoke with the quiet gravity of a man reporting a physical fact rather than an emotional feeling. "That’s the whole of it. She isn’t being dragged up into the air. You’ve built something that would genuinely rather be up there than on the ground. It doesn’t fight you. When I asked her to turn, it felt like she’d already started moving." He shook his head, a breathless laugh escaping him. "And the gear. That double thunk when it locks home... I have never in my life been so pleased to hear a noise."

"Nineteen days for that noise," Ironbreaker barked, slapping the metal hull.

"Worth every second."

"Of course it was worth it. I built the damn thing."

Lucien stood back, letting them have the moment—the shouting, the crowding around the wings, the sight of Gandalf fiercely embracing a master fitter he had been furious with since Monday. The solid days of grueling, impossible work had left the earth and come back down intact. There would be time enough tomorrow to calculate what it had cost, and what had to happen next.

Then he caught Malen’s eye.

Past the commander, the twenty-five armored knights still stood in their neat, unbroken block at the edge of the apron. They hadn’t shifted an inch. They hadn’t joined the cheering, and they hadn’t once taken their eyes off the sky where the machine had just been.

"Right," Lucien said, adjusting his cloak as he walked toward them. "Let’s go hear what they want."