During her first time visiting him after her return, Zelsys delivered a bevy of materials to Ingvald, including Eisengeist’s blade. Massive thing that it was, it demanded its own sled and had to be strapped down in a roundabout manner, as its edges just shredded through anything they touched. It utterly seethed with the same type of incredibly dense magic she had felt from the torn-out dragonstone of Ten Billion Fathoms and from Von Wickten’s entomodragon form.
The visit was rather impromptu to begin with; Zel and Zef absconded from the ongoing feast with the help of Yvonne’s illusion magic, who then went on to recount the ill-fated jungle expeditions which had, in retrospect, foreshadowed the whole incident. Despite the absolute state he was in, half-dead and pumped full of elixirs, Gunnar absolutely insisted on not only representing himself in the play, but transforming to boot. For all his injuries, he managed to do just that - for exactly the duration of the battle against the maddened leshy, after which his transformation messily withered away.
Jorfr took a fairly prominent role in the play, making full use of his newfound draugr powers to make a show of himself at his parents’ behest. As they left, Zel couldn’t help but notice that the norseman seemed awfully fond of his new hair; it was functionally just a smaller, significantly less shiny version of the great mane he had manifested upon his resurrection. She wasn’t surprised. It did look good on him.
Unsurprisingly, Ingvald was utterly beside himself when they brought the blade to him, barely paying any mind to the terrible damage the city had sustained. He acknowledged it, but his mind clearly skimmed over it in favor of the gleaming metal.
“This… With the star’s heart… It will yield more material than I will need. Is there aught else you would ask of me? I shan’t accept the metal as payment.”
He was obsessed, clearly not in his right mind, and neither Zelsys nor Zefaris had the will to oppose him. So, the blonde simply asked: “Can you reinforce my guns without damaging their spirits?”
“Huh? Show me them.”
Zef handed over both guns alongside their manuals, which included copies of their blueprints.
Pentacle elicited a wordless reaction wherein the smith just nodded and grumbled along as he took the gun apart and put it back together. Meanwhile, Tempesta elicited an altogether different, yet nonetheless positive response.
“What in the… Is this a Type-3 flintlock carbine converted to a sparklock converted to a slide… Slide-action? And it looks like the receiver is enveloped in a mildly fulgur-burned piece of ballistic-grade brass,” he guessed, correctly.
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He then looked to Zefaris and gave his verdict: “The handcannon, I can replace the cylinder, put in a better spring, maybe tune up the trigger for better sensitivity. Whatever glyphwork is inside the barrel surpasses my knowledge of kineticism, but I can reinforce it without damaging the glyphs, it’ll just take some finagling. As for the shotgun… I’ll have to replace a large majority of the receiver and internal action. Some of the parts have been worn down more than they rightly should be if the conversion date in the manual is to go by - nothing to blame on the gunsmith, and the metal is good, it just can’t keep up with what you’re putting it through, unlike the revolver. That said… I’ll still have all too much metal left over…”
A sudden glint sparked in Ingvald’s eye. He cast it towards the fancy bullet moulds he had only used for Zel’s pills up until now, then back towards Zefaris.
“...I will create bullets, shot, slugs, and shell casings for you, the likes of which the continent has never seen. Each and every one shall be inscribed with runes of return, oh yes! Runes to manage spin, to change trajectory mid-flight, to become lances of liquid metal on impact only to return to their original forms moments later… Even your bullets will develop spirits of their own, just you wait. And coins, perhaps thirty such ones, with base glyph circles instead of faces; that alone will save you a fortune in no time. Oh, I can scarcely wait! Here, take them back for now. I will call when I’ve finished work on the Butcher’s new body, I will know how much spare metal I have then.”
The smith’s expert eyes thereafter turned to Zel’s arm, and without error, he decided that it was indeed time for his experimental procedure. It proceeded exactly as he had described, yet turned out not an iota as gruelling as Zel had expected, though she hazarded a guess that it was up to her own sensory control rather than the process being any sort of painless.
For hours, Ingvald hammered away at her arm and made her consume several dozen bronze pills in the process. Zef left at some point to await at the Silverhand tavern. Sheet after hair-thin sheet of strange bronze were merged into her skin, increasing in thickness over time until Ingvald switched to broad headed nails. Hundreds of them sunk in and vanished somehow, the only plausible explanation the eerie glow of his charred arm, with whose iron grip he held Zel’s arm still just above the elbow. She came away from the experience feeling absolutely great; any lingering creaking or stiffness was gone from her arm’s joints, and the everpresent itching which she had been suppressing all this time was gone.
The moment she left his smithy to rejoin her lover at the Silverhand tavern, Ingvald was already upon the massive hunk of divine metal.
Ingvald Forgehand worked without rest for days on end. He worked not in his smithy, but outside, tending to an alloying-furnace which he had built solely for this purpose. It was not built using clay, brick, or any other normal forge-building materials, but a complex geopolymer of rare minerals from the Boiling Lake and ground-up skymetal from the Teutobochus Fallen Star. A great deal of hard work had gone into preparing the mixture and building it all by hand, with special accommodations made for all the arcane materials he would use. He had used azoth-auric amalgam as an insulator only where it was absolutely necessary, detesting the G-Kaisers’ flagrant overreliance on the substance.