Chapter 743: Solenne Built This In A Cave... With A Bunch Of Scraps!

Chapter 743: Solenne Built This In A Cave... With A Bunch Of Scraps! [Bonus Chapter]

"E-Eeeeek!" Solenne let out a strangled peep. Her silver ears pinned flat and her whole body went stiff as an iron bar.

Silas looked down at the rippling silver fur floating right beside him... Seeing all nine tails up close in their full glory, the temptation was nearly impossible to resist.

He reached out and sank his fingers into the tail next to Thora’s, rubbing the silky strands between his thumb and fingers.

"Yeah, honestly," he murmured in quiet agreement, nodding. "They really are ridiculously soft."

Solenne stood paralyzed between them with her cheeks burning a crimson that put the foundry hearths to shame.

Her golden eyes darted from Silas, who was calmly stroking her tail with a thoughtful smile, to the dwarf who was nuzzling her face into the fur like a feral cat.

’I’m surrounded by perverts...’ Solenne’s mind wept. ’The Lord is stroking my tail! The dwarf is sniffing my fur! Why does everyone here have a fetish for my tails?!’

"Ahem!" Silas finally cleared his throat, reluctantly pulled his hand back and gave Thora’s shoulder a light swat to break her trance. "Alright, that’s enough petting... Let the girl breathe before she faints."

Thora pulled her face out of the fur with a heavy disappointed pout and wiped a stray silver hair off her lip.

She put her hands on her hips and looked between Silas and the flustered kitsune.

"Alright, Lord Silas," she said. "Why are you two really down here? You didn’t drag nine tails of prime fur all the way to the furnaces just to let me feel the upholstery."

Silas smiled and stepped back to let Solenne stand beside him, though she kept her tails tucked tightly against her shins.

"This is Kitsuna Solenne," he said, his tone turning proud. "She’s our new Chief Artificer... She designed her own golem chassis in Central City, and she knows golem engineering inside and out. She joined Blessed Land today, and she’s going to help our development go a lot more smoothly."

Thora’s eyebrows shot up.

"An artificer? A real golem builder?"

"I design full frames, Miss Thora!" Solenne spoke up as her professional pride briefly beat her shyness, and her ears twitched upright. "Limb joints, gear trains and dampening housings!"

"Hah! Then follow me," Thora said, jerking a thumb toward the reinforced iron doors at the back of the workshop. "If we’re talking golems, we need the testing room."

They walked down the wide central aisle between the roaring furnaces.

Thora waved a soot-stained hand at the crowded walls, where racks of unfinished swords and crates of raw ore were crammed into every corner and the apprentices had to squeeze past each other sideways.

"Look at this mess," she muttered with an annoyed grunt. "If you’re planning to make more golems,.. Lord Silas, we’re going to need to expand this building a lot more... Weapons too... We’re already tripping over each other’s anvils."

Silas nodded as he looked over the cramped space.

"I know."

They reached the heavy bulkhead at the back of the building, a door of four-inch rolled steel etched with glowing blue runes to hold in any blast.

Silas gripped the bronze lever with both hands and hauled it down with a heavy clank.

HSSSSS!

The seals broke with a hiss of pressurized air, and he shoved the door open and stepped inside.

The golem testing room was a cavernous high-ceilinged chamber of dark stone.

Its walls were lined with heavy shock-absorbing basalt tiles scored with black blast marks, and the floor was cracked from old experiments.

...High above the floor, reached by a flight of metal stairs, hung the observation platform.

Silas looked around the familiar room, and a faint nostalgic smile touched his lips.

This was the chamber where they had formed their very first Stone Golem... He, Thora and Rowenna had stood up on that platform holding their breath while the rocks pulled themselves together into a moving giant.

Thora walked out into the middle of the scarred floor with her knuckles on her hips and looked back at Solenne with a crooked challenging grin.

"This is where the magic happens, Fluffy-Buns," she said, her voice echoing off the high stone walls. "I just hope you can make a better golem than me."

’Because honestly...’ Thora thought, her cocky expression softening for a fraction of a second as she looked at the scorch marks on the basalt, ’I’m not much of a golem expert at all... I can hammer skysteel until it’s as hard as a dragon’s tooth, and I forged the bodies for the Stone Golem and the Titan haulers and the Phase 2 and Phase 3 units but they only ever moved because of Rowenna’s runes.’

Her jaw tightened slightly as she glanced at Silas’s tall relaxed figure.

’Rowenna ought to get a lot more attention from him. I get it, he’s been busy this whole period... But she works on a hundred things at once just to keep his eyes on her.’

Annoyance flared in her chest.

She took two brisk steps toward Silas and kicked him hard in the back of his heel with her iron-toed boot.

THUD!

"Ow!" Silas hopped forward half a step, rubbing his ankle with a bewildered scowl. "Why?!"

Thora turned her chin up with a smug defiant glare. "Nothing."

’This bastard,’ she grumbled inwardly, her amber eyes burning with fond irritation as she glared at his waist. ’He should at least dick her down too... Tch, why’s he keeping that big dick all to himself? At this rate I’m going to move into that Keep and get in on the action myself!’

Silas shook his head and walked out into the center of the chamber.

He stopped in the middle of the open floor and reached into his Inventory.

VUUUUUUUUUM!

A violent distortion of spatial mana detonated in the middle of the room... A wave of displaced air blasted outward, whipping Silas’s bangs across his forehead and snapping Thora’s vest against her ribs.

CRASH!

With an impact that shook the stone under their feet, an enormous machine slammed down onto the scarred flagstones!

Resting on a heavy iron cradle with locking clamps was Titan-01.

It stood at a towering twelve feet tall and threw a long dark shadow over Silas and Thora both.

Its broad-shouldered frame was built for brute siege work, and from its massive upper torso four arms reached outward, two heavy primary limbs ending in crushing fists and two smaller ones tipped with tool mounts.

In the middle of its broad chest sat an empty core cradle surrounded by cooling fins and bare mana lines, waiting for a heart.

Behind Silas, Solenne let out a soft breathless sigh.

Her tails fanned out wide and her golden eyes shone as she looked up at the machine she had spent fourteen months building by hand in a drafty shed, standing now in a real workshop for the first time.

’Titan-01...’ she thought, clasping her hands together against her chest. ’We made it.’

Thora stood completely frozen.

Her jaw dropped so far that her lower lip trembled.

Her amber eyes bulged as she stared up at the twelve-foot four-armed machine looming over her, and the arms she’d crossed so defiantly dropped limp to her sides.

She took one trembling step forward and lifted a single shaking finger at it.

"Tha—" Her voice cracked into a high disbelieving squeak that echoed weakly through the chamber. "Tha— that’s a golem?"

Thora took three slow heavy steps forward across the scarred basalt, her iron-shod boots clicking softly on the stone.

The shock that had frozen her jaw began to melt, and in its place came the sharp squint of a veteran smith looking at a strange piece of work.

She walked right up to the edge of the cradle and craned her neck back so far to look up at the twelve-foot frame that her braid brushed the collar of her vest.

Up close, the shape changed... It looked less like a golem than she had expected.

The golems Thora knew were massive blunt blocks of shaped rock or solid cast-iron shells roughly shaped like giant armored men, with broad chests built to hold a core stone and thick limbs driven by raw elemental pressure but this thing was completely different.

It was an intricate skeleton of exposed machinery... There were tiered gear trains tucked behind overlapping armor plates, coiled springs wound tight around the knee pins, and double-acting fluid lines snaking along the insides of all four arms like artificial veins.

It looked less like a stone idol and more like an enormous mechanical suit waiting for its engine.

Thora reached up with a callused soot-stained hand and rapped her knuckles against the casing of its lower thigh.

TINK!

The chime was dull and uneven... It didn’t have the pure ringing clarity of high-grade skysteel.

Thora frowned and leaned in closer.

She ran her thumb along a weld where two plates met over the knee, and her brow furrowed deeply when she noticed that the two sheets of metal weren’t even the same color.

"Hold on a minute," she muttered, turning her head toward Solenne, who was still hovering nervously beside Silas. "What in the molten deeps did you use to build this whole thing, Fluffy-Buns? The design’s insane, but the metal feels weird. It doesn’t ring like proper plate..."

Solenne jumped a little at the nickname, her long silver ears giving a frantic twitch.

She took two timid steps forward with her nine tails brushing nervously against each other. Her hands fidgeted with the buckle of her satchel, and a faint self-conscious pink crept into her cheeks.

"A-Ah..." she stammered, her golden eyes dropping to the cradle before rising to meet Thora’s. "T-The materials... well, they aren’t very good, Miss Thora... Almost the whole chassis is made of recycled brass pipe fittings, scrap gears I pulled out of old elevator shafts and low-grade scrap metal from the demolition yards."

Thora stared at her. "Recycled brass?! Scrap gears from elevator shafts?!"

"Y-Yes," Solenne murmured, tucking a strand of silver hair behind her ear as her voice went quiet and humble with old memories. "High-tier alloys cost far too much for me... I spent two years scraping by in the gutters of the lower terrace of Central City. My workshop was an old drafty brick shop I could barely pay the rent on, tucked under the steam lines where the sun never reached. I didn’t have a blast furnace or a crucible so whenever the big foundries in the upper rings threw their shavings and off-cuts and bent gear teeth into the scrap bins, I’d wait until dark and go collect them with an iron cart."

She looked up at the towering frame, and her golden eyes softened with a strange bittersweet pride.

"I had to bore out every fluid cylinder on Titan-01 with hand drills because I couldn’t afford a lathe," she said softly, miming the grinding circles with her hands. "I sealed the pressure lines with solder melted off old plumbing pipes, and I hammered the knee brackets flat on a broken anvil head I dug out of a scrap heap... I spent fourteen months fitting every gear tooth by hand and filing the burrs down so they’d mesh without binding. If I’d waited until I could afford proper alloys... Titan-01 would still just be ink on scrap paper."

Thora stood frozen with her hand still resting on the dull welded knee plate.

She looked from the hand-filed gear trains threading through the four arm housings down to the patchwork plates of recycled brass and rusted iron holding the whole huge frame together.

’So she built this in a cave with a bunch of scraps...?’ Thora thought, her jaw hanging slack as a cold prickle of pure awe ran down her spine. ’With hand drills?! In a freezing shed with no crucible, filing elevator gears by hand?! Holy blazing anvils... I’ve got two dozen smiths and three furnaces, and the best I ever managed was a blunt iron shell! This girl’s a monster!’

Thora turned slowly and squinted up at Solenne with intense suspicious bewilderment.

She walked over and circled the tall kitsune like an appraiser studying an impossible antique, tapping her chin with her thumb.

"Listen to me, Fluffy-Buns," she said, narrowing her amber eyes to slits. "Are you sure you’re not related to a dwarf somehow? Maybe we’re distant relatives or something? Only a dwarf’s stubborn enough to spend fourteen months filing scrap by hand in a freezing shed just to build a frame like this!"

Solenne blinked, completely flustered by the theory.

One of her nine fluffy silver tails curled up over her shoulder, and its soft tip scratched idly at the side of her blushing face while she thought about it.

"I... I’m really not sure, Miss Thora," she admitted shyly, looking down at her boots. "I don’t know who my father was."

Thora snorted and crossed her arms over her vest with a sharp nod.

"Well, whoever he was, he had stone in his marrow. You’ve got the craft-fever, girl. That much is obvious."