After the Prince let them leave after having received enough assurances that they wouldn’t test anything without his and Leete’s oversight. It left them feeling a little depressed though they couldn’t understand why seeing how they could still develop prototypes.

“So how do we fix the ship?”

“It’s fairly simple. We just patch a hole and rewrite a few magic formations.”

“Oh. Then I guess it won’t take too long.”

“Well… the hole is a simple job but the Array will be difficult.”

“Difficult how? You change magic formations all the time.”

“FOOL! There is a difference between drawing formations with visible mana or chalk and actually creating functioning magic formations.”

“There is?”

Uh oh. That throbbing vein on the Armorer’s forehead was starting to come back again.

“Which irresponsible fool taught you?! Whoever it was should be whipped and beaten with flame enhancements.”

The assistants were quickly putting space between them and Armorer who was once again invading Kohn’s personal space.

Before he could stop it a little voice escaped his lips. “…but you were the one who taught me…”

“WHAT!?” The Armorer roared.

“So the hole is simple right?”

“Idiot! Don’t try to change the subject, boy!”

“So what, we get like some paper, tape it up, and write something like ‘under construction, sorry for the mess’?”

“I ought to kill you.”

Kohn was grabbed by the back of the neck like an angry drunk would to a beer bottle. His whole body went stiff as a board.

Carried into the back area of the armory Kohn saw the assistants picking up long handled hammers from the corner of the room.

Hanging up on the walls were numerous tools, 9 of each. At the base of the walls there were thick, heavy ingots everywhere. Some looked like iron, some looked like cobalt, but there were plenty that he couldn’t tell what type of material they were. There was even a stack of what looked like glowing Jade.

The Armorer picked up two ingots of what could have been iron or steel, tossing them at Kohn.

Kohn worked out a lot on Earth and ever since he came onto the ship he worked out even harder so he thought he was pretty strong. But when he tried to catch the ingots he comically sailed backwards while coughing up a lung.

*cough* Air was slowly brought back into his lungs with a rasping, hoarse sound.

“What the hell is this stuff?”

“Ah? It’s Creaton. You don’t have it on your planet?”

“I’ve never heard of it, what’s it made out of?”

“Ah? It’s not made of anything. That’s a bar of pure Creaton. It’s stronger than most metals found on my planet, once magic is cycled through it of course.”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Must be some kind carbon type metal reinforced with magic. It looked dark grey but if you tilted it you could see a bright shine that belied its true color.

“So how do we fix the hole with this? We could stack them and fill the hole that way. If we had some concrete or other filler it wouldn’t be a problem.”

SMACK!

“FOOL!”

Picking himself back off the floor, Kohn firmly rubbed his face to get it back into the proper shape.

“That would be too expensive! Creaton is incredibly strong but found only in small amounts at a time. The largest nugget of Creaton ever found was only a little bigger than the size of my fist!”

“So you’re sitting on a pile of gold then?”

“Gold? That worthless material is nothing more than a shiny rock! It can’t even begin to compare with Creaton!”

The Armorer really took offensive to Kohn’s casual remark. It made sense if he thought about it though. The only reason gold was considered valuable back on Earth was because it looked pretty and could be used for computer circuits these days.

“How about I just shut up and watch?”

SMACK!

It was amazing how often Kohn was picking himself off the floors these days. He had to stop tripping over his own feet, but he still couldn’t explain why the front and back of his head hurt if his face broke his fall.

“How about you just pick up a hammer? AND shut it!”

Grabbing the hammer held out by an assistant Kohn joined the group around a weird elegant looking table. It was round, but in the center was a square divided up evenly into nine sections. Each part had several overlapping formations on them while the rest of the table all had formations for the elements pointed towards the center.

Fire, water, earth, wind… they were all designed to influence the inner set of formations.

“Follow what my assistants do.”

They took one of the ingots from him, putting it in the center section. Then each of them held their hammers above their heads so with the long length of the handle the head was hanging down behind them.

Imitating them made Kohn feel like a fool posing for a photo op.

Feeling them infuse mana into the hammers, Kohn followed along. Using the precious amount of mana he was allocated every day.

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

One at a time each of the assistants swung their hammer with the full weight of their body, hitting the ingot.

WHAM-WHAM!

Then the Armorer, with a hammer in each hand followed suit after them.

Wonk.

It sounded different when Kohn hit it, but when the head touched the extremely flattened ingot he noticed that all the mana was drained from the hammer directly into the metal.

“Too much mana.” Came a quiet, small hint from his left while radiating heat came from his right. Refilling the hammer with a quarter of the amount of mana he used before he hefted the hammer up again.

They continued taking turns hitting the ingot and when it came time for his turn to hit it again he heard that satisfying sound.

WHAM!

A few more rounds around the table and then ingot was flattened into a nice square plate. The others didn’t hit anywhere but the center of where the ingot was and so Kohn did the same, but for some reason the plate was evenly flat and smooth. Must be some trick of magic, but the only thing Kohn saw was them hitting the metal and some patterns on the edge of the table lighting up on each strike.

Quickly they repeated the process for the other ingot before grabbing both plates and going to the hole in the other room.

“How are we going to keep it on the wall? Is there like some magical glue or something?”

The Armorer spoke disappointedly out of the side of his mouth, “Every time you open your mouth you say stupider and stupider things…”

Kohn was the one getting upset now. “Shove your useless comments where the- Humph-fu-muph!” Luckily one of the assistants clasped his hand firmly over Kohn’s mouth otherwise he’d probably start another fight that would end with Kohn being healed and the Armorer getting yelled at again for nearly killing him.

“Creaton is strong, but a thin spike can still penetrate a thin sheet of it.” He watched as Number Four pulled some bits of metal out of his pocket. They were roughly one inch wide, six inches long and a quarter of an inch thick. Bent twice it looked like a staple.

With a couple quick hits the plates were held in place.

“It’s quick and fairly effective but doesn’t look as good. Unfortunately we don’t have the necessary setup to replace the wall entirely.”

“I’ve never worked with metal before to create something, but don’t we normally need a furnace or something?”

“Fire? On a ship?!” They were all incredulous looking. “Do you want to kill us all?”

“What? Oh yeah, those safety precautions.”

“Yeah, those. It’s impossible to differentiate uncontrolled fires from useful ones so we set up the formations on the table to do nearly the same thing. Every time you hit the ingot the mana in the hammer is transferred into it and depending upon the position and amount of mana a specific pattern is used to give the desired effect. That allows us to make things in space without killing ourselves.”

“So it’s some kind of table that can craft things?”