During his delicious breakfast the following morning, Thomas examined the most recent request list that came with said breakfast. There were some new additions but not many. It seemed like most of the pirates had already made a request. Since he was specifically looking to make some armor today he ignored all the weapons requests and only focused on his goal. As he chewed on some orc bacon he saw a request that piqued his interest. Someone wanted a breastplate imbued with Earth magic to provide extra defense. That seemed interesting and he hadn't created anything with Earth mana yet. How would that work?
As he thought about it he pictured an armor that would create a layer of hard stone on its surface. When the stone is hit it would naturally break and fall off but as long as the user provided mana to it the stone would regenerate. Regenerative armor. Now that sounded like an interesting concept. With his decision made he stored away the list and finished his breakfast. Before making the armor he needed to make his big batch of grenades for Yorik.
Making the grenades had become a simple, if tedious, task. For the majority of the work he just used his Transmutation ability to form the necessary pieces. The only things he had to do by hand were grinding the firestone powder, making the enchantment mixture, and enchanting the pins for the grenades. Clad was in charge of chopping the bar stock into small cubes to line the interior of the grenades while Thomas did the rest of the work. Not exactly a fair division of labor but Thomas didn't really want him to do anything else.
For the first half of the day, Thomas shaped, sealed, and enchanted grenades. By the time he called it quits there were several boxes containing a total of one hundred and twenty grenades. Enough to allow him to make twelve pieces of equipment according to the ten-to-one ratio Yorik demanded. He might make more grenades if he gets bored making other items. He'd also like to head back into the dungeon again. He felt like his mana was currently high enough for the time being so his obsessive-compulsive disorder was demanding that he even out the rest of his attributes to match his Magic attribute. Thanks to his troll murdering weapon he had it wouldn't take more than a few days to get his attributes up.
After he finished lunch, Thomas returned to work. Now he would get to have some fun working on his first piece of full metal armor. Fortunately, the workshop had all the tools necessary for making armor. Though as long as there was just a dishing tool he would be able to make due. A breastplate was essentially just shaped sheet metal. It didn't even require quenching. So, the obvious first step was making his sheet metal. He grabbed two iron ingots and used a bit of Transmutation to make some basic steel. He planned to fold the ingots a few times to even out any impurities and make the armor at least a little better in quality.
The steel ingots were tossed into the forge and the blower was quickly powered by Clad. While the ingots heated up, Thomas made his way over to the extruder and worked on changing out the dies. He wanted to swap in wider ones that would help him create the sheet metal he needed for making the armor. Right about now he would kill for an industrial machine to do it for him. Or hell, a shop he could just buy it from. It wasn't long after he changed out the dies that the ingots were hot enough to work with.
Before he could turn the ingots into sheet metal he needed to add the Earth element to them and fold them a few times to deal with what impurities existed inside of them. The process of adding the Earth element wasn't difficult or any different from adding any other element to an ingot. The only difference this time is he did it to two ingots instead of one. Once both ingots gave off an unappealing brown flash of light the infusion process was completed. The folding process was straightforward as well. As he was inside of a game there were fewer things that could go wrong with his work so forge welding the ingots after flattening and folding them in half was rather easy. He only did so five times for each ingot. He wasn't going to put in too much effort.
Turning the ingots into sheet metal was a simple, repetitive, and a rather tedious thing to do. It wasn't all that different from making bar stock. The main difference was that he didn't rotate the ingot by ninety degrees after every pass through the extruder. Instead, he just passed it through over and over to flatten and spread it out. Thankfully, his Power attribute allows him to speed up the process by using a bit of force. It's also nice that doing so much manual labor doesn't really tire him out at all. He always thought about power tools such as a power hammer but at this point aren't his own hammer blows stronger? He'd have to find a way to make a heavier hammer to maximize his Power attribute later.
Time passed and the two ingots quickly transformed into sheet metal plates that he could work with. The problem was that once they got too large they could no longer be placed in the forge to be reheated. At that point, he was forced to cold roll the ingots. This required him to use more of his Power and the effort actually caused him to sweat quite a bit. Something that hadn't happened in quite a while. Even the heat of the forge didn't really bother him all that much with his beyond super-human endurance. This just went to show how hard cold rolling steel actually was.
Once the steel was rolled out enough he set the rather large sheets of metal to the side and gathered the tools he needed for shaping the armor. A simple way to work with sheet metal to make armor would be to use a blowtorch. Luckily, he had magic that could substitute for that. The dishing tool was really not much different from a large shallow bowl. The sheet metal could be placed over it and when using a ball-peen hammer it was possible to hammer the metal and mold it into rounded shapes. Dishing tools were good for armor and shields.
Thomas picked up the first piece of sheet metal and got to work. The first thing was not immediately using the dishing tool, but instead to cut a rough shape out of the metal. He planned to only make a simple breastplate that was made out of two pieces. A chest piece and a back piece. The two pieces would be hinged at the shoulders and strapped together on the sides. The interior would be enchanted and then lined with leather to protect the enchantment while making the armor slightly more comfortable to wear.
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He actually pulled out a vest pattern used for tailoring and set it on the sheet metal. A sharp scoring tool was conjured from his Metal magic and used to trace the pattern onto the metal. Once it was traced completely, he switched the scoring tool for something rather silly but useful. The scoring tool changed into a thin sawblade with very small teeth. It looked like a circular saw blade with band saw-like teeth. The saw blade began to spin almost silently in the air. Without an electric motor powering it the only sound it made was from the blades cutting through the air.
The silence immediately ended when the teeth of the saw blade started to cut into the sheet metal. Sparks flew while a loud screeching sound echoed throughout the entire workroom. Thomas slowly and carefully guided the spinning saw blade to cut along the scored lines making up the shape of the armor. He was forced to go slowly as the only thing powering the saw blade was his own mana and its strength wasn't all that great. He also had to worry about the metal heating up too much. To help prevent that he dripped drops of the quenching oil to use it as a makeshift lubricant and coolant.
It took several minutes of unending ear torture before the shape had been cut out completely. Once it was done Thomas, Clad, and all of the guards let out a sigh of relief. When everyone heard all of the sighs there was a moment of silence before everyone laughed. No one enjoyed the screeching sound of metal cutting metal so no one was looking forward to hearing it a second time for the back half of the breastplate. Not that anyone but Thomas knew it was coming.
Once again, Thomas changed the shape of his Metal magic reverting it back to a scoring tool. This time he was using it to draw lines on the breastplate. These lines would let him know where he needed to hammer to shape the metal how he wanted. He'd decided to go for a very masculine design on the breastplate by drawing in pectoral and abdominal muscles. This would lead to a design similar to Roman leather armor with its overly masculine design. He was pretty certain the person that requested it was male since he hadn't seen a single woman since he arrived in the cave.
The process of forming the armor really wasn't all that complex. It was just making sure to hammer the right areas to change the shape of the metal. He started by using a ball-peen hammer to do the heavy work and bend the metal out. He was hammering what would become the interior to change how the metal appeared on the exterior. By hammering inside of the lines he'd scored onto the metal and using the dishing tool he was able to quickly bring out the basic shape of the pectoral and abdominal muscles he'd drawn. They weren't perfectly accurate and were more of a stylized depiction but the image would come across just fine.
The ball-peen hammer moved a good amount of material but wasn't very good at crips clean lines. That's what a cross-peen hammer was for. The straight edge on the back of the hammer would help with creating crisp lines. Using both hammers for their appropriate applications. To keep the metal soft and easy to manipulate, he used Fire magic to heat up the seconds he was working on. Thanks to the rank of his Fire magic along with his mana pool, it was rather easy for him to blast out a blowtorch-like flame from the tip of his finger and heat the metal before hammering it.
Thankfully, the process wasn't very complex and only took time. While Thomas was hard at work on the first half of the breastplate, Yorik took a break from what he was doing and came to watch for a bit. To Yorik, Thomas was a golden goose laying golden eggs all day long. Forget the excellent weapons that Thomas had been making for the members of his crew, just the nearly two hundred grenades were an excellent source of easy and explosive power for them all. Their entire crew only consisted of around a hundred people. Right now they had enough grenades for everyone to have one and for half of them to have two.
The one grenade that Yorik had tested let him understand how devastating the weapons could be. Though stronger opponents with a high Endurance might be able to survive the explosion, they would not come out of it unscathed. Even if the living targets would survive, a few grenades tossed onto the same spot on a ship would easily blow a hole into it. Although not designed for it, he'd figured out how to use the grenades as breeching tools to break into locked doors. Yorik hadn't come just to watch though. He made his way to the side and sent a signal to Clad.
As he wasn't busy doing anything, Clad made his way over to his captain. Yorik leaned close and whispered, "How's it going?"
Clad's eyebrows furrowed, "Should we be talking here?" He glanced in the direction of Thomas then back to Yorik, "He's right there."
Yorik waved a hand dismissively, "If he doesn't know what you're doing then he won't figure it out yet. Not like he could do anything about it anyway. There are half a dozen guards watching him around the clock."
Clad sighed and shook his head, "Fine. Long story short. I think I can copy some of the stuff he does but he's got an ability that lets him manipulate material at will. I don't know if it's one that can be learned or an innate ability. There's also the thing he does with his eyes, no idea what that's about."
Clad crossed his arms over his chest and put on a serious look, "As far as replicating the grenades or making other explosives..." He sighed, "I'd need to find a way to learn Enchanting. You know how hard that will be. Still..." He looked serious for a moment, "I'm pretty sure I can replicate the grenades."
Yorik nodded with a wide grin, "Good. Keep watching and get as many secrets as you can from him. I doubt we'll be able to keep him here much longer. Eventually, something will happen. Still, we'll try to keep things from getting out of hand to give you as much time as possible. Get back there and keep watching Cain."
Yorik wasn't an idiot and knew that Thomas would be looking for a way to escape, anyone would be. The only card he had was that Thomas wanted to keep the wolf alive. At some point that might not be enough. None of them could permanently kill each other so the ways to threaten someone into cooperation are rather limited. They got lucky in the case of Thomas. Once that luck ran out something would happen and people were definitely going to die. Yorik gave one last look at Thomas before leaving the cave to find something else to do.
Thomas wasn't oblivious to the meeting. Although he couldn't hear what they were saying over the sound of his own work, he had a guess. It didn't bother him to be spied on. If they tried to make grenades without Magitech Engineering and the proper knowledge well... he could only smile wickedly at the thought of what would happen to them. Firestone was not something you wanted to fuck around with unless you had the proper knowledge. He almost wished he could be there to watch Clad blowing himself and others sky high. He couldn't help imagining the Firestone powder igniting the Firestone ore and blowing the whole cave to kingdom come. For the first time in a while, he gave a genuine smile while he continued to hammer away at the breastplate.