Chapter 741: Visiting The Warlord Foundry [Bonus - ]

Chapter 741: Visiting The Warlord Foundry [Bonus Chapter]

The heavy oak door of the Keep closed behind them with a solid echoing thud.

Stepping out into the late afternoon air of Blessed Land, Silas took a deep breath and let the clean air fill his lungs.

The fog that had choked the ridges was beginning to roll down into the valley in soft milky tendrils, but down here the streets were wide and well swept and lit by the warm orange glow of hanging oil lanterns.

Solenne took two quick steps to match his long stride, her soft leather boots tapping lightly on the smooth river-stone pavers.

Her nine silver tails fanned out behind her hips and twirled in slow looping arcs, and every few seconds her long fox ears flicked toward the voices, the rattling carts and the distant clang of iron from the lower terraces.

’I’m really walking through his home,’ Solenne thought, her heart doing a nervous little somersault as she clutched the straps of her satchel. ’It isn’t like the crowded flues of Central City, where everyone stares at your tool belt to see if you stole a wrench. It feels... safe here and a foundry master is waiting for me! Oh, what if she thinks my dampening ratios are too conservative?! What if she likes pneumatic actuators more than runic pressure seals?!’

As they passed the first row of timber-and-stone cottages, three women carrying wicker baskets of mountain root vegetables paused by a stone well.

When they saw Silas their faces lit up at once.

"Good evening, Lord Silas!" the eldest called out with a deep bow that made her linen apron flutter.

"Welcome back, my Lord!" the younger two chorused.

"Evening, girls," Silas answered with an easy wave. "Good harvest?"

Well Eluned was also growing things around the territory, not only in the Verdant Observatory so the girls even though they were soldiers helped pick them up.

"The best this week, my Lord!"

Silas stepped over, laughing softly, and patted the youngest girl on top of her soft rabbit ears.

"Good work... Make sure the kitchen gets the best picks for tonight’s stew, alright?"

The rabbit-girl flushed bright pink with bashful delight and nodded frantically. "Y-Yes, my Lord!"

The women turned to Solenne, and their eyes widened at the nine silver tails flowing behind her.

There wasn’t a trace of suspicion in their faces, only open welcoming curiosity.

"Welcome to Blessed Land, sister!" one of them said with a bright smile.

Solenne jumped.

Her ears pinned back for a heartbeat and then shot straight up, a flustered pink dusted her cheeks, and she bowed so quickly and so low that two of her tails brushed the ground.

"H-Hello! Good evening! I-I’m Solenne! It’s a pleasure to meet you!"

Her tails twirled so fast with excitement that they whistled against Silas’s trousers. She looked up at him with her golden eyes shining in pure relief.

’Everyone here is so kind,’ she thought, her chest swelling warm. ’They don’t look at my ears like I’m strange, and they greet Lord Silas like he’s family.’

They passed a few more women along the way, a pair of Shieldmaidens coming off patrol and a girl hanging laundry between two posts, and every one of them stopped to greet the Lord.

Silas greeted every one of them back, ruffling a head here and squeezing a shoulder there, while Solenne’s tails spun faster with every step.

They turned the corner onto the broad industrial avenue.

Here the quiet sounds of the homes gave way to a deep bass thrum that came straight up through the soles of their boots.

The ground shook with the steady THUD-THUD-THUD! of heavy trip-hammers, and the air grew thick and hot and dry with the bite of burning coal, flux paste and molten iron.

At the end of the stone lane stood the Warlord Foundry.

It was a sprawling three-story fortress of dark heat-treated basalt, braced at every corner with heavy iron tie-plates and thick brass rivets.

It was squat and brutal and built to take the backfire of volatile magical metalwork.

High above the slate roof a towering iron chimney thrust into the gray sky and poured out thick billowing plumes of ash-streaked smoke and bright orange cinders.

PFFFF-HUUUUUUM!

A heavy blast of vented steam hissed from a low brass grate near the foundation and rolled a wave of superheated air across the street.

Solenne stopped dead and tipped her head all the way back until her bangs fell away from her forehead.

Her golden eyes followed the chimney, the soot around the vents and the heavy iron cranes on the upper loading docks as her ears stood straight up, catching the bright chime of high-grade anvils ringing in rhythm.

’This isn’t just a repair shop,’ she thought, awe washing over her face.

Her fingers twitched against her satchel as she measured the sounds without meaning to. ’Listen to that hammer stroke! That’s an eighty-pound drop-forge! And the heat coming off those walls... they must have three or four hearths running full blast! This is a place where real work gets done!’

Silas stopped beside her with his hands on his hips and squinted up at the blackened stone face of the building.

"Man..." he muttered under his breath, watching the exterior bays where crates of raw ore were stacked three high under canvas tarps. "I really have to increase the tier of this place for more space..."

His thoughts turned inward as he looked over the crowded facility.

’I’ve been keeping the buildings at Tier 3 on purpose,’ he reflected, his brow furrowing slightly. ’Back then I didn’t have a clue how much Tier 4 items or buildings were actually going to cost, and I didn’t have a lot of UP to throw around... I was hoarding points like a miser counting coppers, scared of blowing the whole pool on one upgrade and getting caught short when something went wrong.’

He shifted his weight and looked at the heavy basalt foundation stones.

’But things are different now. I’m free and ready to go there.’

A faint cautious sigh slipped out of him as a burst of sparks showered from the chimney.

’I just hope these Tier 4 buildings don’t have some kind of downside,’ he thought. ’You know how it goes. The stronger something gets, the more likely it is to come with limits... The last thing I need is to upgrade this place and find out it needs a virgin dragon’s liver just to keep the hearths lit, I really don’t want that.’

He shook off the thought and gave Solenne an encouraging nod.

"Stay close. It gets loud and hot in there, and the foundry master doesn’t believe in inside voices."

"I’m an artificer, my Lord!" Solenne said proudly, puffing out her chest, though her ears gave a tiny nervous twitch. "I grew up next to the machine flues! A little heat can’t scare me!"

Silas walked up the broad stone steps to the heavy iron-banded doors.

He grabbed the thick bronze ring-handle and cleared his throat so his voice would carry over the roar inside.

"I’m coming in!"

He hauled the door open.

FWOOOOOOSH!

The moment the seal broke, a huge deafening blast of superheated steam and dry furnace air exploded out over the threshold like a physical wave...

It carried the scorching heat of an open blast furnace and the stink of sulfur, melted flux and burnt machine grease.

"Eeeek!"

Solenne let out a terrified high-pitched squeak and forgot her brave declaration completely.

In a fraction of a second she scrambled behind Silas and buried herself against his broad back...

She grabbed his jacket with both hands and pressed her face against his shoulder blade, while all nine of her fluffy silver tails shot forward and wrapped around his legs and waist like a thick wall of fur, using him as a human shield against the gust!

Silas didn’t even flinch.

He just squinted into the dry rush of air and waited for the pressure to even out and the thick white cloud of vapor to drift away into the cool evening.

When the steam finally cleared, the cavernous soot-stained workshop came into view.

Silas braced one hand on the doorframe and yelled into the echoing hall.

"Thora! What did I tell you about the windows?! Keep them open when you’re blowing down the steam lines!"

He stepped over the threshold onto the dark oil-blackened flagstones with Solenne peeking out timidly from behind his hip.

Her nine tails slowly unwound from around his thighs as she looked around with wide blinking eyes.

The main hall of the Warlord Foundry was a sprawling arena of brute-force craftsmanship.

Massive iron pillars held up a vaulted ceiling three stories overhead, strung with thick chains, pulley blocks and brass air lines that hissed in steady pulses.

In the middle of the hall three huge brick hearths roared with blinding orange-and-white flame, fed by heavy hand-cranked bellows worked by dwarven apprentices in soot-stained leather smocks.

Anvils of solid skysteel rang with sharp CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! strokes as dwarven smiths hammered glowing bars into broadswords, spearheads and interlocking armor plates.

...Yet with all that furious sweating industry roaring across the workshop, the master of the place was nowhere near a hammer.

On the left side of the hall, up on a clean wooden platform tucked safely away from the sparks, sat Thora.

The head of the Warlord Foundry was reclining in a plush high-backed armchair of polished cherry wood that looked like it had been stolen straight out of a noble’s drawing room.

A pair of thin wire-rimmed glasses with perfectly round lenses sat on the bridge of her small nose.

Her usually wild braided hair was gathered neatly behind her head with a ribbon, and she had one leg crossed daintily over the other.

In her callused muscular hands she held a thick leather-bound book titled A Treatise on Advanced Runic Harmonics and Thermodynamic Transmutation, and she turned its pages with an unhurried scholarly flick of her thumb.

Silas blinked as his jaw slackened slightly.

’I’m looking at Thora,’ he thought, watching the dwarf turn another page with a thoughtful little hum. ’Thora... The woman who usually talks in bellows, drinks ale straight from the tap and tackles my waist like a berserk badger the second I walk into a room. She’s sitting in an armchair wearing reading glasses... What alternate reality did I just walk into?’

He shook his head and made himself look at the bigger picture.

’Whatever weird phase she’s going through, this place needs an overhaul,’ he thought, his eyes sweeping over the rows of weapon racks the hammers were filling. ’I’m planning to move Blessed Land into a whole new industry... Weapons... The territory can’t live on loot and farming forever. We need our own income.’

His dark blue eyes sharpened with calculation.

’And thankfully, the Brassbound Guild is the perfect place to make that happen. Well... thank the gods for that stupid guy.’

A cold smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth as he remembered the disgraced guild master who had stolen Solenne’s golem design.

’If that idiot hadn’t done that to Solenne, none of this would’ve happened... Now eighty-five percent of the gross on every Blessed Titan Golem comes straight to us... The Blessed Golems are going to sell a ton once Blessed Land puts its name behind them but golems are big expensive orders that take time to build. We need to sell other things too, swords, shields, armor plates. A full catalog.’

As Silas walked deeper into the workshop with his boots clicking on the flagstones, the dwarven smiths paused their hammering.

"Hail, Lord Silas!" a broad-shouldered smith called out, wiping sweat from her brow and raising her glowing tongs in salute.

"Welcome back to the forge, my Lord!" another shouted over the roar of the furnace.

"Hail, girls!" Silas called back warmly, nodding to each of them as he passed. "Keep the rhythm steady!"

He walked over to the edge of Thora’s platform.

"Thora," he called, half amused and half genuinely curious. "How are the new girls settling in?"

Thora didn’t leap out of her chair, instead the dwarf slowly lowered the book into her lap, reached up with a remarkably refined gesture and pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up her nose with the tip of one finger.

Her amber eyes blinked at him with calm serene sobriety.

She lifted a small hand and pointed with aristocratic elegance toward a newly partitioned side gallery, set off from the main floor by a row of stone arches.

"I have put them to work in the annex, Lord Silas," Thora said, like a dowager duchess presiding over a garden party. "They are checking the compositions of the alloys."

Silas raised an eyebrow and looked toward the gallery, where several dwarven women were bent over testing tables tapping metal ingots with small chisels.

"Thora," he said, frowning a little as he looked back at her. "Those aren’t just iron-stokers... They’re master smiths and precision engravers, and they each have different uses. Don’t waste them on intake checks... Put them to proper work where their skills matter."