After my little shows of the morning, I took the follow-up liberties to personally work on the weapons I’d promised the elves. In a certain light, this was a rather huge step of trust I was exerting. In another, at any given time I had no fewer than five of my hunting spiders ready to attack any of the elves in my base, and was always escorted by at least a pair of them myself directly. I knew without hesitation that they’d sacrifice themselves for me without even needing to be ordered to do so -- such was the loyalty my biopunk knowledge had instilled in the creatures.

Although, I wasn’t entirely stupid -- I did only make the weapons out of white ossium. Well, white ossium and chitinite-reinforced bamboo-reed for the spear shafts. It wasn’t necessarily as strong as a true hardwood, but it made up for that in spades with its sheer flexibility, and as long as it was relatively well cared for it should last pretty much indefinitely. I was interested to see how the elven warriors’ fighting style would adjust to the use of the more-flexible weapons. A chance that I didn’t even really have to wait all that long for.

I suspect that the most impressive aspect of the ensuing sparring match between the elven spear-warriors and my spiders wasn’t the coordination or speed of my spiders, but rather the complexity of the orders I was able to give them and the speed with which they learned afterward. At the very least, my hunters’ capacity to learn was something that outstretched even my own imagination. After a few bouts they went from three being knocked out of the fight for every four that participated, to losing only one for every elf they knocked out. It was actually pretty intense to see my hunter’s learning curve when it came to play-fighting.

I could see that I’d need to start including basic training of my spiders against myself wielding a spear as part of their overall training regiment. At the very least, I wouldn’t have to worry about training each one individually; even the ones that merely witnessed the spars showed significant improvements. I would have been more shocked at this if I didn’t know just how intelligent birds could be. I recalled having watched videos, back on Earth, of crows actually making tools in order to obtain new tools to get at the food they wanted. Two tiers of separation. In primates only chimpanzees and gorillas exhibited that level of intellect outside of, well, humans.

If only I could find some way to actually capture and transfer memories from one organism to another, I could rely far more heavily on the hunting spiders to do general work that right now only my homunculi could perform. But I currently lacked the means to make such an improvement, and I certainly couldn’t do so while playing escort and diplomat to Her Leafiness. I was thinking about the possible ramifications of how intelligent I had really made my hunters when I realized that Trisaldan was looking at me expectantly. I hadn’t even noticed he was talking to me, before.

“I’m sorry -- could you repeat that?”

Trisaldan shook his head in what was clearly a common gesture of chagrin. “I said -- this is an interesting weapon you have crafted for Lady Annaka and I. Few of the alfar have such weapons; the materials we work do not lend themselves to such, and trade is always fairly limited. Would you care to give a demonstration of its use? So that my men can be more familiar with how such weapons are wielded.”

I sighed, dusted my knees and forearms off, and squared off my shoulders in his direction. “Certainly. I assume you wish to pit your skills against my own? I won’t insult you by offering you better armor than you now use, but if we’re doing this I will certainly don my own then.”

Trisaldan merely nodded his assent, his eyes showing neither hesitation nor malice. Whatever he was playing at here, I had the gut feeling that it wasn’t a bid to, well, gut me like a trout. This was confirmed even further when he asked for leather or linen wraps to blunt the blades. My knowledge of weapons that I had gained from my tech levels demonstrated to me how to properly wrap a blade such that it could be used for training purposes without ruining the balance, and it was clear he had a similar degree of knowledge in the topic. The thing that was curious about that fact was that it meant he had a lot more familiarity with swords than his statement had led on -- though to be fair the only real surprise there was that he'd claimed he didn't have much knowledge of them.

With little fanfare, we settled down in a relatively cleared area to begin our sparring session. I thoroughly expected to get trounced, as all the weapons knowledge in the world didn't compare to actual experience using them. Color my surprise, then, when I decided to exert myself enough to put a small dent in my stamina pool and the result was that I almost immediately knocked the weapon out of Trisaldan's hands. It was as if he had been moving in slow motion. I just stood there, looking at my own blade with more than a little bit of shock.

This had to be a trap. He had to be baiting me. There was simply no way I was that good with a blade. I waited for him to pick up his sword again, and let him make the first move. This time, I tried to limit myself such that my exertion drained no more stamina than I regenerated. The result was still that visible "slowdown" effect but I felt like I was moving through molasses as well. Still, I found it fairly easy to try to pay attention to his center mass and his eyes, as my knowledge informed me I should. When he began an over arm downwards sweep, I stepped in his range and elbowed him back, bringing my own blade across my body to land on his upper arm.

Had our blades not have been blunted, it would have been a strike that could have disarmed him -- literally. He grimaced at me but his eyes were, if anything, smiling. I found myself less and less sure of myself. After another four more rounds I finally allowed myself the lull of only dipping into my stamina when attempting to change my actions, figuring that it would give me time to think in a fight but let me recover stamina all the same. Something had to be very wrong with my assumptions, though, as I saw that even though I was still breathing no heavier than I had been all along, Trisaldan's chest was practically heaving.

I raised my hand up, at that point, and called out, "Do you seriously not have stamina? You know, the green bar?"

The elves all looked at me with a puzzled expression. "What do bars have to do with stamina?", Annaka queried after a few seconds.

Oh. Oh dear. It couldn't be, could it? I had to confirm. "Annaka… what do your people see when their eyes are closed?"

Her reaction was just vexing, as she actually hopped into the air and clapped her hands like a schoolgirl winning a prize at the county fair. She even ran over and hugged Trisaldan, stage whispering loudly enough for me to hear, "On my watch, old friend! On my watch!"

I was seriously getting annoyed, now. Letting my peevishness enter my voice, I spat out, "Would somebody explain to me what the hell is going on?"

Annaka, of all things, laughed at me. It wasn't exactly mean spirited but it didn't sit well with me. Before I could further express my annoyance, she raised her hands in a placating gesture and began to do just as I had asked. "The signs were not entirely certain, Sir Vincent, but your story is not too dissimilar to ones we have heard of over the centuries. Strangers delivered to our world through means they do not understand, with strange gifts and abilities. The one thing the stories all agree upon is that the strangers all have visions that only they can see; visions tied to their feats of great strength or talent. The races of this world call them Voidborn.". I literally heard the capitalization of that word.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

I narrowed my eyes at her. "And these Voidborn, they are causes of celebration?"

Her smile faltered and she nodded at me. "Rarely. Very often they are mad, callous beings that slaughter indiscriminately. Or attempt to subjugate all around them to their will. Ones such as you -- who simply seek to build and live in peace? It is considered a sacred duty to respect such Voidborn, for surely they have been delivered to us by the gods themselves to fulfill their plans."

Well. I… cannot say I had been expecting that. "Okay, this is totally going to become a 'thing' now, isn't it. Are you people going to start, like, having temples in my base? Because I'm not okay with that. Just this morning one of your men practically blew us all up because he didn't know what he was screwing around with. I know I agreed to let you lot have ishuata near me to make sure I don't destroy the balance of nature or whatever, and if we're being honest I do like having company again, but… I don't like people getting all up in my shit. You can make your treehouses or whatever next to my places, and we can do the trade visits, but I don't want you lot within my walls permanently. A man can only take so much."

Annaka nodded her assent. "All perfectly reasonable. May we call upon your guardians to protect the places we grow as well as your own?"

I blinked at the request before realizing that my hunting spiders were certainly more expendable than any number of spear-elves. "I don't have a problem with that… so long as the training sessions continue."

She smiled winsomely at me, and I could already feel the headache growing behind my eyes.

~~------------~~

After another round of sending out a pair of spearmen to have another pair be sent back in, just to reassure the elves outside of my base that all was well, I decided to leave the damned point-ears and their holy vows or whatever to themselves for a bit and check on the state of the mines below.

Heading over to the slag pile where the mining ants were leaving most of their debris, I started sifting through it to see if any chunks of material stood out as particularly "unmelted", as those would most likely be the ones with the most mineral value as I understood it. I was particularly hoping to find chunks with a red or dark grey hue. After a few hours of sorting through the rubble, my homunculus finally made an excited chirp at me and pointed at a heap of dark rust-stained chunks with clear marks from having been worried away at by ant mandibles.

I pumped my fist into the air at the knowledge that I was about to make my first advancement in quite some time, if all went to plan. I gathered up the material, which was almost certainly iron ore, and headed to the workshop with a cartload in stow. Meanwhile, my homunculus was calling upon the brain ants to start retrieving more of the red indigestible rocks.

One of the things I recalled from back on Earth was that the process for obtaining the iron from the red-colored ore was that it was much harder to do than for copper or tin. It melted at a much higher temperature and as a result required more fuel to produce the necessary heat. One of the things I recalled about this, however, was that ancient blast furnaces had a difficult time getting made correctly without cracking in the process, but I had a few cheating points in my favor there. To that end, I had long since sent over from the manor a working schematic of a blast furnace design for my homunculi to have constructed using ossium-rebar and "antcrete". The only major problem with the design as I now saw it was that it had the "old" model of heat crystals, before I'd worked out the fibrous conduits to connect crystals together. But that was an obstacle of only a short redesign and I'd need to wait for the ore to go through the black ossium crusher to be reduced to sand anyhow, so I could entirely double-task it.

The biggest issue before me was that I had no idea how much crushed charcoal I should add to make proper steel. I knew there were different processes involved, different carbon values to make different kinds of steel -- and unfortunately I wasn't going to be able to get ahold of manganese any time soon so I was even further limited in what I could do, here, but that was just a matter of experimentation once I had the basic proof of concept at hand. And that experimentation was something I would need to do quite copiously anyhow considering how heavily I was now reliant upon the alchemical and biopunk tech trees. Even as I was working on installing the new, enlarged, crystals and their connectors, my head was filling with visions of rock outcroppings in the ant colony where special cultivars of shelf fungus grew with various metallic sheens in the subtle light blue of the heat-transferring crystals that managed the temperature of the caves. Magical mineral mushrooms, because why the hell not? Nothing else about this world seemed to entirely play by the old rules I knew, so why should I?

But to even get to that point, I would first need to successfully produce said metals. And to accomplish that, I needed to get this blast furnace to successfully melt the iron ore I had successfully obtained and pour it into molds. The combination of the six heat crystals constantly pouring the energy from the oil braziers directly into the concentrated column of the three blast furnaces I had took more time than I would have liked to get to the point I was after, but get there it did. I felt like a bad chef constantly checking to see if his water was boiling. But as the ground up red sand -- and in two of the furnaces charcoal as well -- began to literally glow under the immense accumulated heat within the confined space, I felt a burgeoning sense of excitement. It was beginning to work!

It must have been an hour later that the sands actually melted enough to be poured out. I had no real idea how the removal of the slag would work out, but on the premise that it would be lighter than the iron I had set aside inflammable-treated black ossium scoops to sift or divert off the slag as the melt ran through its channel into the molds I had prepared for the purpose. Looking at the eye-searing yellow-red glow of the fluid in the nine total separate ingot molds I had prepared, I felt an immense sense of pride at having accomplished what I was looking at. That sense of pride was mildly diminished when I took the ingots to my alchemical lab for analysis and realized just how many impurities were left in the metal, and that none of my approaches had made decent steel in any appreciable amount -- but thinking realistically I hadn't really expected my first run through at this to even work a quarter so well as it did. Re-armed with the new alchemical essences at hand to try to further reduce the impurities and improve the specific qualities of the steel I was after -- including a treatment for resisting oxidation for both, as well as establishing both a stronger but less brittle steel and a more brittle but far harder steel to go along with the cast iron, I gave the alchemic infusions a go in the blast furnace along with the smelted metals, and was far happier with what my second round of alchemical analysis told me. Enough so that I recorded the processes and my thoughts on how to utilize the materials in all manner of devices. I also made a point of trying to graph out the differences I had noted in the types of steel I had generated along with the projections I could anticipate for other types, along with the possibility of using the new metal for machine purposes as it was far more flexible than my ossium. After stowing the new texts away, I finally got the messages I was hoping to get.

<< Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Iron Era. >>

<< Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Early Classical Era. >>

<< Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Middle Clockwork Schizotech Era. >>

You'd think, after so many times of having gone through this, I would have thought ahead to place a pillow or something to catch me when I fell as I blacked out from the information overload. But… no. No, I apparently had too much love for the traditional faceplanting onto the cold stone floor.