“Aye, that we will,” the dwarf said as he finished assembling his axe, going on to inspect it with a critical eye before offering it out towards me to do the same. “Hm, looks like we’ve done a fine job with this one. How is your sword turning out?”
“Slowly…and also very sharp,” I replied as I inserted the last of the toothlike shards of metal into the sword’s spine and tried to line it up so I could fix it in place with a rivet, succeeding in slicing my finger in the process. “Gah! That’s the third time this thing has bitten me so far. Just give me a few more seconds…there!”
Snapping the final pin into place as I spoke, I shook my bloody finger more out of habit than actual pain, the wound having healed itself as quickly as it’d been made. Giving the item one quick glance to ensure that there weren’t any obvious defects, I held the finished sword at arm’s length so Thorne could also see it, both its and his axe’s description appearing in a floating tag beside them.
Arcane-Edged Iron Axe
Slot: Main Hand
Item Class: Magical
Item Quality: Fine (+10%)
Damage: 45-60 (Slashing)
Strength: +12 Agility: +12
Durability: 120/120
Weight: 2 kg
Special: Arcane-Edge – Edged with Æthertouched Iron, this weapon is capable of bypassing damage reduction and resistances of the Magical subtype.
Class: Any Martial
Level: 24
Arcane-Edge Iron Longsword
Slot: Main Hand
Item Class: Magical
Item Quality: Fine (+10%)
Damage: 40-60 (Slashing)
Strength: +12 Agility: +12
Durability: 120/120
Weight: 1.5 kg
Special: Arcane-Edge
Class: Any Martial
Level: 24
“Hm, arcane-edged,” I said as I read over the two descriptions, happy to see that the game had not only guessed but also supported our goal in why we’d gone through all the trouble of crafting the weapons the way we did. “Looks like we have an answer for those constructs now.”
“That we sure do!” Thorne agreed in an enthusiastic tone as he moved to set the axe down. “Now all that’s left is to make…how many more of them now?”
“At least five-dozen minimum. That’ll at least give the majority of our melee fighters a weapon. But we’ll need to double that if we want to outfit everyone, and that’s not including arrowheads or other miscellaneous items that’ll be useful too,” I replied in a wistful tone, glancing over towards our collection of æthertouched axe blades, spear tips, and sword teeth. “And I think with what we have here…we might be able to manage another two swords and axes, along with three spears. After that, we’ll need to fire up the ætherforge again and start making more pieces to work with.”
“Which means that it’s time we brought others into the process,” the dwarf said, motioning to the various other players and NPCs working away in the forge. “I’ll see if I can’t bring some here up to speed on assembly and making the weapon cores, while you get a handful of others trained on the quirks of the big forge there. The more hands that we have working on this the better chance we’ll have in hitting that upper goal. Once things are rolling, I can join you all and help too.”
“That works for me,” I agreed, feeling a bit more confident about doing exactly that now that Thorne and I had managed to make a functioning set of prototypes to prove that our idea wasn’t a waste of time. With the time investment that making a single weapon took, we wanted to make absolutely sure that the result was worthwhile before throwing our full effort behind it.
Leaving the man to his work, I motioned for the workers that we’d conscripted earlier to follow me back to the Ætherforge and began the process of teaching them how to work with the metal anew. Fortunately, they all proved to be just as quick studies as Thorne had been, allowing us each to gradually churn out more pieces of the various æthertouched components that we needed. Falling into a steady rhythm from there as we found our stride, the day then turned into a near-endless blur of work, broken up by the rare magical event that inevitably flared up. It wasn’t until exhaustion started to cause mistakes that I finally decided to call an end to the day some hours later, feeling that it was best to send everyone off to rest and regroup instead of pushing any further.
“Okay, everyone!” I called out, pitching my voice over the loud sounds of industry that filled the Foundry. “We’re calling a formal end to the workday here before we burn out! If you want to finish up your current projects and clean up, you’re all free to go! We’ll be back at this first thing tomorrow morning, so be sure to get some rest!”
With that, the activity in the foundry began to gradually wind down as the day came to an end, everyone turning in their projects and cleaning up the workspaces. A process well ingrained into each of us thanks to Léandre, we all made sure to inspect our tools and forges for signs of wear or damage, ensuring that no potential issue had the time to bloom into a full-out problem. The last thing that we wanted to have was a downed forge when we needed it most, or even worse, suffer a catastrophic disaster that would put the entire Foundry out of business for a time.
“It looks like we made it about halfway to our minimum today, Lyrian,” Thorne announced as he took inventory of the day’s work, having noticed me out of the corner of his eye as I came into range. “We got a good crop of weapons to start with, and hopefully, with a full day’s work and more hands to help with, we’ll be able to make a sizable dent tomorrow. With luck, we’ll also be able to start in on arrows and the other things we might need too.”
“Here’s to hoping,” I replied to the man with a smile as I joined him in inspecting the weapons we’d made, happy that everything had gone well for our first day of work. “But that’s still a small part of the battle. Once everyone’s outfitted at least at a base level, I want to start churning out what new armor we can for everyone too. I have a feeling that wear and tear are going to be our enemy as much as anything else.”
“I don’t doubt it,” the man agreed, his head bobbing up and down as he spoke. “Though at least we’ll be able to churn those out faster and have the others in the hall here helping us out.”
“True enough,” I agreed as I looked out towards the now notably quieter foundry, seeing that while the majority had left, a handful still remained to work away on their own projects. “Speaking of the others though, I’m off to meet Léandre and see if we can’t get our other project going. Are you okay to finish up here?”
“Aye, it’s not a problem at all,” Thorne replied, turning to give me a curious look. “And I was going to ask earlier, but we got caught up in our work. What exactly is this secret project that you two are tinkering with?”
“Oh, nothing too crazy,” I replied in a coy tone, flashing a grin at the dwarf. “Just something that we think will even the odds a bit when the orcs come calling.”
Chapter 19
“Hey, Léandre!” I called out as I carefully pushed open the door that led into his workshop, hearing the sounds of industry ringing out from within. “I finally finished for—”
Managing to step roughly halfway into the room, I found myself suddenly coughing as a billowing cloud of sawdust rushed to greet me, causing me to raise a hand to shield my face. Stumbling forward through the entranceway, I quickly closed the door behind me, only then hearing the elder architect’s voice.
“Ah! There are you, Lyrian!” he called out by way of greeting, the rhythmic sound of sawing not stopping as he spoke. “You have good timing! Help me move this off the table.”
“Uh, sure!” I called back to the man as I wiped the dust from my eyes and tried to get my bearings around the workshop.
Set in the very back of the crafting hall, Léandre’s personal workshop had first started its life as a storage area. But as we started to fill out the various wings of the building and more people began to use it, the architect started to get a li
ttle annoyed with the time it took for him to get around and find a workspace. So as a result, he’d decided to take advantage of his status as the town’s chief crafter and foreman and carved out his own workshop where few were allowed to tread. Serving as an all-purpose workshop for anything a crafter could need, the place was a solitary retreat where Léandre planned out and drafted all of his projects, only revealing it to others when they were ready.
Having been in the place often, I was used to seeing the workshop filled with countless projects in various stages of completion, to the point where it was just as crowded as the arcane laboratory. Today, however, the workshop looked completely different than its usual state, with the center of the room completely clear of any obstructions, save for a thick bar of freshly cut wood lying on the floor.
“So it looks like you’ve had a productive day here,” I said as I finished my scan of the room, spotting Léandre standing right before a large sawhorse and made my way towards it. “I hardly recognized the place at first. Where did you even put everything?”
“Away in crates for some projects and the fire pit for others,” the craftsman replied with a shrug, the two of us lifting and moving the length of wood that he’d just finished cutting, placing it directly beside the other plank on the floor. “If we are to see our project done properly, we will need room to work with, and I was not feeling inclined for sentimentality today.”
“I can certainly see that,” I replied as the man beckoned me over towards a nearby drafting table filled with a series of sharply drawn sketches.
“So these are perhaps rougher than I would like, but I have managed to come up with a few initial concepts for us to experiment with,” Léandre said as we arrived at the table, his hand waving to indicate the designs that I recognized as several types of siege engine.
“They are great, Léandre!” I exclaimed as I scanned through the designs, my eye passing across the familiar sketches of trebuchets, catapults, and ballistae before going on to see several others that I’d only ever read of in books or seen in movies. “I wasn’t expecting you to come up with so many different designs so fast! I was expecting maybe one or two them at best!”
“Hrm, thank you, Lyrian, but the designs are the easy portion of our task,” the Tul’Shar said with a shrug. “It is the building portion that will be the greatest challenge.”
“It always is,” I agreed, my eyes flicking between each of the sketches as I spoke. “Though I suppose before we even get that far, we’re going to have to pick one of these to try out. Unless you already have one in mind?”
“Actually, yes, I do,” the man replied, giving me a stoic nod as he shifted to take a step towards a second nearby table. “After hearing about your incident last night with those abominations and how many more of them we stand to face on the battlefield in the days to come, I thought that we would do well to address their danger first.”
Moving as he spoke, the man reached for a large metal rod that had been placed on the table, picking it up with both hands and lifting it so I could see.
Hang on. On second thought, that’s not a rod at all, I realized, correcting my first impression as Léandre turned back in my direction, allowing me a better look at the item in his hands. It’s a bolt. A ballista bolt.
Stretching a little over a meter in length, the bolt was forged from what looked like a single piece of iron, its tip molded into a four-pointed arrowhead. Smooth along the length of its shaft, the weapon bore little other decoration or embellishments, save for a quartet of thick fins at its base, making it almost appear as a massively oversized arrow.
“As such, it is my thought that we would begin first with the ballistae,” he went onto explain as he offered the bolt to me. “While this is one I designed for measuring purposes, I believe that if we were to make other bolts tipped with æthertouched iron, we would have a potent method of stopping the creatures at a distance. Long before they would be close enough to trouble us.”
“That would definitely be a huge help,” I agreed as I turned over the bolt in my hand, trying to imagine it flying through the air towards a distant target. “I know it’s cruel to say to the victims trapped within the constructs, but the more of their number we can thin out, the better. If just the three of them were enough to take out nearly half our group yesterday, I can’t imagine what facing a dozen of them at once will be like.”
“Those were my thoughts exactly,” Léandre said as I offered the bolt back to him and he placed it back on the table. “Nor do we know either what siege weaponry the orcs may bring to the battle themselves. Should they do so, the range advantage and precision of such a device would prove to be invaluable in combating their efforts and keeping them preoccupied.”
“There is that as well,” I said, having considered the same thought, if not the remedy to resolve it. Given how little we knew about the orcs so far and their war preparations, I had a feeling that there would be a number of surprises to come in the near future.
Which was why I wanted to be sure that we had plenty of our own.
“Well, you don’t need to convince me any further,” I stated, motioning towards the wood that I just helped Léandre move. “Where do you want to start?”
“With the framing as you see here,” he said as the architect turned siege engineer stepped closer to me and pointed towards another sketch pinned to the drafting table. “We will need to ensure that its core will be able to stand up to both being moved and repeated use. I was hoping to achieve this by making sure…”
Continuing on with his explanation, the next few minutes passed quickly as Léandre brought me up to speed on the nature of his design and how we would tackle building a ballista. A far cry from the more normal and personal items that I had spent the day crafting today, building something like a siege engine was a much more complicated task. Not only was it something drastically larger than something like a sword, but it was also much more complex and intricate, requiring a variety of different tradeskills in order to see the project to completion. Fortunately, though, the game had a perfectly designed subsystem in place to help handle that process.
Where was that tutorial page again? I asked myself silently at one point as I helped Léandre gather the tools that we would need for our crafting while simultaneously paging through a menu. Thanks to my constant fighting on the plains over the last week, I’d only used the system a single time to help Léandre finish a project, and I wanted to refresh myself before we got started. I think I remember it being somewhere here. Ah! There is it!
Finally finding the entry in my log that I’d been searching for, I expanded the option into a floating box in the center of my vision.
Welcome to Complex Crafting!
As your skills continue to grow and you begin to take on more challenging works, you learn not only how to blend multiple crafting tradeskills together but also work with multiple crafters in completing a single project. Designed as a way to tackle larger-scale projects that may require a variety of specialties, Complex Crafting allows for several crafters, or one highly skilled crafter, to pool their collective tradeskill knowledge together in achieving a single goal.
Allowing for a great deal of flexibility and experimentation, there are two primary methods for beginning a Complex Project. The first and easiest method is to follow a Blueprint that has been prepared by a craftsman who has mastered the design. Should the team have the requisite abilities to successfully begin the project, then they will be able to follow the Blueprint’s instructions to completion, gaining relevant Tradeskill Experience according to their contribution.
The second method, one notably more difficult than the first, is called Prototyping, which does not require a Blueprint to begin. Instead, during this process, a team sets out to build the foundations of what will eventually become a Blueprint, using their own skills, sketches, notes, and other research to embark on a project. Should a team be successful in creating a final working Prototype of their idea, they will gain a su
bstantial boost in Schema Experience pertaining to that project, allowing them to further refine their ideas until they are fully mastered. Depending on the complexity of the project, it can take multiple Prototypes to gain enough experience in order to master the design.
Once a Design has been mastered, a crafter can choose to either create a Blueprint of the project, which can be used by others to replicate their work, or they can choose to Research their design even further. During the research process, the crafter looks for ways to improve even further on their design, increasing various attributes of the finished product, such as Durability, Damage, Range, or any others that may be applicable. Once completed, the crafter can choose to include their discoveries in future Blueprints or omit them entirely.
Okay, this is coming back to me now, I thought with a mental nod as I stopped reading roughly halfway down the explanation, seeing it begin to explain how the research component of complex crafting functioned in more detail. While the information was extremely interesting to the crafter inside me, I unfortunately didn’t have the time to fully page through all of the details as Léandre started to spout instructions my way.
Moving to follow the man’s lead, we began the process of building a working ballista from scratch, both of our higher levels in the carpentry tradeskill allowing us to start off at a quick pace. Beginning by preparing the various cuts of wood that we would need for the siege engine’s frame, the first two hours were spent largely measuring and sawing before progressing to the other remaining pieces we would need. In my case, that had me leaning back on my blacksmithing talents to forge the various brackets, nails, and other associated pieces that would not only help keep the finished ballista together but allow it to be cocked back and fire. Once all that was done and we had everything that we needed, we began the process of actual assembly, slowly attaching all of the different pieces and components together.
Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4) Page 25