Chapter 781: Fruits Of Labor [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 781: Fruits Of Labor [II / Bonus Chapter]

The room inside was big and high-ceilinged, and it was neatly organized despite the clutter of blueprints, mana crystals and testing rigs along the walls.

The air was much cooler here.

Standing in the middle of the room, completely still, was Titan-01.

The twelve-foot four-armed golem stood like an ancient guardian, its dark polished armor plating gleaming under the hanging lanterns. Its heavy limbs rested at its sides, and the slits of its eyes pulsed with a low dormant golden light.

A few feet from the golem’s iron feet, a brisk rolling sound echoed through the room.

WHIRRRR!

Gliding across the stone floor on its single wheel was Cogsworth.

The artificer’s small round trash-can golem balanced perfectly upright as it rolled, its crimson eye glowing cheerfully.

On its flat lid sat a wide copper tray holding a steaming teapot and six clay cups of hot roasted barley tea.

The little golem rolled right up to Silas’s boots and came to a smooth stop without spilling a single drop.

"Good afternoon, Lord Silas," Cogsworth said politely, its crimson eye brightening. "Welcome to the workshop. Please, have some tea... It’s quite cold outside today."

"Thanks, Cogsworth," Silas smiled, plucking a cup off the tray.

Aurelia, Rowenna, Lupina and Morrighan stepped forward, and each of them took a steaming cup from the eager little machine.

Lupina sniffed hers with a curious twitch of her nose before she took a careful sip, while Rowenna gave the golem a soft polite bow of thanks that made its crimson eye flicker happily.

From the far corner of the workshop, Solenne came out from behind a big workbench cluttered with lenses and calipers.

The nine-tailed artificer had wiped the forge grease from her hands, and her robes rustled as she walked.

Her fox ears twitched with bright satisfaction, and all nine of her thick silver tails swished behind her in broad lazy arcs that nearly brushed the worktables.

"You took your time getting him down here, Thora," Solenne said softly, a light musical laugh slipping out as her golden eyes met Silas’s. "I was starting to think he’d wandered off into the snow again..."

"Had to pry him away from his flock," Thora grumbled, walking over to the middle of the workshop where a big raised wooden platform had been built.

Sitting on top of it, completely hidden from view, was a large shape under a heavy tarp of waxed canvas.

The canvas was tied down with thick ropes, but the sheer bulk of it took over the whole room.

Thora walked up to the left side of the platform and grabbed a thick corner of the tarp with both hands, while Solenne stepped up to the right side and caught the other edge.

The dwarf looked back over her shoulder at Silas with a fierce triumphant grin splitting her soot-streaked face.

"You wanted real firepower to protect this valley, my Lord?" Thora declared, her voice booming up to the rafters. "...Well, feast your eyes on the best damn work ever to come out of the Titan’s Anvil!"

Together, Thora and Solenne hauled back with all their strength and ripped the heavy canvas off the platform in one sweeping pull.

WHUMP!

The heavy canvas fell away and landed on the platform in a heap of dusty gray folds.

Resting on heavy ironwood skids under the hanging lanterns were four big cannons, their long midnight-tinted barrels drinking in the warm orange light of the lanterns.

They sat low and mean on reinforced carriages braced with dark iron bands and bronze adjustment gears.

The surface of the barrels had an oily shimmering sheen that shifted between deep plum and midnight indigo whenever the lantern flames flickered, and dense runes were cut cleanly into the metal, winding from the heavy breechblocks all the way down to the thick flared muzzles in long unbroken spirals.

Silas walked forward and ran his bare palm along the cold glassy curve of the nearest barrel.

A steady vibration hummed through the metal against his skin, as dense and quiet as solid bedrock... For a moment, he just stood there with his hand on it, and behind him, Lupina let out a low impressed whistle.

Thora puffed out her broad chest, planted her fists on her hips and let out a snort that blew soot off her upper lip.

"Look at that finish, heh!" Thora bellowed, her rough voice bouncing off the stone arches of the workshop. "You’re looking at the finest cannons this forge has ever put out... Every barrel’s got a core of pure star iron, folded sixteen times under the heavy hammers until the grain’s tighter than a bank vault!"

She reached down to her belt, unhooked a solid steel hammer and brought it down against the side of the barrel with a full swing.

CLANG!

The hammer bounced back so hard it nearly tore itself out of her grip and rattled her thick forearm all the way to the shoulder.

On the barrel, there wasn’t even a smudge.

"Not a scratch," Thora barked proudly, tucking the hammer back into its loop. "We blended that star iron with a few other alloys, and the Sil-Graves alloy too. That mix makes the barrels practically indestructible... A normal barrel starts warping after thirty rounds in a row, because the heat cooks the metal until it stretches like warm taffy. With these babies, you could pack the chamber with three times the powder, and the barrel wouldn’t even sweat."

’Let anything come knocking on our gates now,’ Thora thought, a broad feral smirk splitting her soot-streaked face. ’Let it walk within range of these four barrels and see how fast my iron turns it into a smear...’

Silas whistled low under his breath and traced the clean sharp seam where the breechblock swung shut on its bronze hinges.

"So if they’re practically indestructible, the crews can keep firing without stopping to cool the barrels down."

"Aye, exactly!" Thora grinned, slapping the carriage wheel with a loud thud. "You load, you latch and you fire until the loader runs out of breath or the targets run out of blood!"

"A sturdy carriage and a tough barrel are only half of it, Lord Silas," Solenne said smoothly, gliding forward with an elegant swish of her robes.

"Thora handled the casting with her usual brute enthusiasm," Solenne said, a teasing smile playing on her lips as she glanced at the dwarf, "but a weapon like this deserves ammunition to match... Feeding plain lead balls into these barrels would be like serving muddy pond water in a crystal goblet."

She turned toward a row of reinforced wooden crates against the far wall. Instead of walking over and lifting the heavy lids with her hands, she let her tails do the work.

SWISH!

Four of her silver tails stretched forward like thick fluffy serpents, their soft silky fur hiding the frightening strength coiled underneath.

The fluffy tips hooked under the edge of the nearest crate and popped the heavy lid off with a single flick that sent the planks clattering onto the floor.

CLATTER!

Two more tails slid deep into the straw packing inside.

With absurd comical ease, the fluffy silver tails coiled around the middle of two huge shells, hoisted them out of the crate and lifted them high into the air.

Each shell was nearly four feet long, tipped with a cone of gleaming star iron and banded around its base with three raised copper rings.

...They had to weigh at least two hundred pounds each, yet Solenne’s tails bobbed them up and down in the air like they were stuffed silk pillows.

Solenne tilted her head, her golden eyes sparkling with wicked amusement as she caught Silas staring at the slow hypnotic sway of her tails.

"Watch, my Lord," Solenne said, her voice dropping soft and velvety.

One tail held a heavy shell up high, while another tail playfully reached out and tapped the glowing blue rune at the base of it with its fluffy tip.

TAP!

"We made new ammo for all of the cannons, the old ones too," Solenne explained, her tails bouncing the shells with light playful bobs. "The nose is hardened star iron, so it punches through hide and armor... When it stops, the rune inside triggers and pulls everything near it inward, and a heartbeat later, it blows outward in a storm of Sil-Graves fragments."

Beside the workbench, Lupina’s ears snapped forward.

Her tail wagged so fast it turned into a gray blur as she scampered over to the floating shell and pressed her nose right against the polished steel, sniffing the seam with quick snorting breaths.

SNIFF! SNIFF!

"Whoa! It smells like lightning hitting a wet pine tree!" Lupina barked with a wide fanged grin, reaching up to scratch at the blue ring with a fingernail. "Can I chew on the back part? Just a little bite?"

"If you want to keep your teeth and your tongue, little wolf, you’ll keep your mouth away from that," Solenne said mildly.

Before Lupina could argue, a third fluffy silver tail whipped through the air and landed a light stinging slap right across the wolf-girl’s behind.

THWACK!

"Yip!" Lupina squeaked, jumping two feet straight up with her ears pinned flat and rubbing her backside with both hands as she glared at the fox. "Hey! What was that for?!"

"For trying to gnaw on live ammunition in a closed workshop," Solenne replied with a calm unbothered smile, though her golden eyes flicked back to Silas, and her nine tails fanned out even wider, practically begging to be touched.

’Look at my Lord,’ Solenne thought, a warm quiet thrill rising in her chest as she watched the hunger in Silas’s dark blue eyes. ’He’s pretending to look at the barrels, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off my tails for three whole minutes... If he keeps looking at my fur like that, I might just wrap all nine of them around him and pull him behind the testing rigs.’

He turned to look at the rest of his companions.

Morrighan was leaning against the corner of a heavy tool chest, her molten gold eyes calmly studying the breeches of the four cannons.

Her face was as smooth and unreadable as dark stone, but behind the hem of her leather skirt, her spade-shaped tail was swaying back and forth in slow contented arcs, the tip occasionally tapping the floor with a quiet click.

Rowenna stood a little behind her, hugging her notebook to her chest with both arms.

Her shy blue eyes were wide and focused as she studied the runes on the barrels, her lips moving silently as she nodded them and a soft blush dusted her cheeks whenever Silas glanced her way.

Even Aurelia had stepped closer, her hands folded over her silver medallion.

The Saintess leaned forward and peered down the dark barrel of the second cannon with gentle curiosity, her golden-amber eyes blinking as she whispered a quiet prayer for whatever beasts would end up on the wrong end of it.

The only thing left was getting these four iron monsters up where they could actually do some good.

Thora stepped over to a big wooden drafting table, grabbed a heavy sheet of ink-stained paper and unrolled it flat, pinning the corners down with a pair of iron pliers and an empty ale tankard.

"Here are the schematics, my Lord," Thora said, jabbing a thick thumb at the drawings.

THUMP!

"The molds downstairs are ready. Once we see how these four hold up firing in the real world, we can turn the whole south wing of the shop over to making more... We’ve got the star iron ingots stacked in storage, and the girls have the routine down. We can turn out four more every two weeks without slowing down the tools for the mines."

She leaned her forearms on the edge of the table and looked up at him with a serious practical glint in her eyes.

"Just remember," Thora added firmly. "These aren’t traps that fire themselves... These cannons are manned. Every one of them needs a crew, a gunner to aim and fire and a loader to load the shells. With a real person on the gun, they can adjust on the fly and drop a shell right on the skull of whatever’s coming."

Silas nodded, completely in agreement.

When the Umbral Basin decided to throw something unexpected at the walls, nothing beat the quick thinking of a trained gunner with her hands on the iron.

"Sounds good to me," Silas said, stepping back from the table and looking over the four finished cannons. "And since we’ve got a raid to run in Aki’s territory later, there’s no reason to leave them sitting here collecting dust. Why don’t we put them up on the walls right now?"

Thora blinked, her bushy eyebrows shooting up her soot-streaked forehead.

"Right now? Are you out of your mind, my Lord? Each one of those weighs two tons! It’d take six oxen and half a day’s work just to drag one of them up to the wall!"

Silas only grinned, a faint golden gleam flickering in his dark blue eyes.

"Oxen are way too slow, Thora... Did you forget I had my Inventory?"