Chương 91: 062 – The Materials Research Foundry

The next level of the research facility where the demonstrations were conducted looked like a strange combination of a gym and a mechanic's garage. Half of the floor space was padded and seemed to be spring-loaded, while the rest seemed to be made of thick wooden planks that shone like metal. There were pulleys fastened to hard points on the ceiling, large metal weights were lined neatly against the walls, and there were more pulleys, ropes, chains and cables neatly arranged on…

well, various metal bins on the floor. There was a barbell setup, with large weights fastened to either end. Several people eyed the wooden floor curiously, clearly noticing the lack of visible seams despite the grain of the wood showing it had originally been made from separate planks. Loren noted it herself. Someone among the Kaedekin was very talented at using Change, to be able to fuse wood together without any char marks… unless the charring was underneath. Actually, that made more sense.

"This barbell currently weighs a thousand kilos," one of the Kaedekin researchers—Loren did get her name this time: Celestia—said cheerfully.

"While not impossible for very muscular girls, most people wouldn't be able to lift this without magic. Doctor Namine, as an active Star Ranger, could you lift this without magic?"

"No. Most of us top out at around three hundred," Namine said.

"Some can make it to five, but those are the ones who lift weights for fun." Loren could feel her own sense of physical inadequacy telling her she needed to get in shape, and valiantly argued she didn't do any of that because her magic let her laugh at health problems.

"However!" Celestia declared, and if Loren hadn't been feeling for it, she wouldn't have detected the miniscule sensation of heat from the woman as the Kaedekin used her Flame.

"With the research we've been conducting here, we've been able to develop a passive strength enhancement spell based on pseudo-vampire principles. It's not perfected yet, since from archival evidence we haven't managed to reach the levels of enhancement, duration and energy efficiency of Frozen Garden's version, never mind Black Queen's, but it's passive and doesn't require active micro-adjustment. You just use your muscles normally, like so!"

The researcher bent her knees and kept her back straight—satisfying every supervisor who never actually picked up anything that way but yelled at everyone else to do so—and grabbed the barbell with both hands. There wasn't even a grunt of effort as she straightened, raised it to shoulder height… and then began to extend her arms forward, parallel to the floor.

"Now, as you can see, proper lifting technique doesn't matter when I hold it like this," Celestia said.

"This is enhanced strength holding it up. So far, we've managed to attain about fourteen times strength enhancement at high efficiency, although we've managed four times enhancement at negligible expenditure. The research goal is twenty at negligible." Loren wanted to ask. She really wanted to ask, even if it was in front of normies…

"How are you doing that?" Ben asked eagerly.

"For, uh, reference, of course." Well, better the other quantum engineer than her.

"It's mostly what we call Life Flame," Celestia explained as she carefully put the barbell down, making sure to bend her knees.

"It's the part of magic that we use for healing, but also for animating things like motors and golems, interfacing with a living body, and when we need a spell to have basic logic, be self-sustaining, or autonomous.

In this case, it's doing a little bit of everything: interfacing with the body's muscles to both enhance them and read when they need enhancement, regulating Change to reinforce the muscles to keep them from tearing, animating the body's limb directly like a golem's or puppet's to augment the muscles with another motility system, combining with Energy to provide fuel for the muscles and using lactic acid as fuel. I'm afraid I can't get more specific than that.

The ratios seem to change the stronger the level of enhancement, and so the sweet spot for maximum effectiveness and negligible energy consumption keeps moving, and it needs each user to specifically finetune it for themselves. We've toyed with the idea that it's all animation since vampires are basically corpses, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening with pseudo-vampires."

"Does the same principle hold for other enhancement spells?" one of the rakido asked.

"Different ratios are needed for different levels of output for maximum efficiency?"

"To a degree," Celestia said.

"We eventually realized that the speed and agility enhancements were using similar ratios, only the majority of their effect targeted fast-twitch muscles, while the strength enhancement focused on slow-twitch muscles." She took a step, and then she was running, reached the other end of the room, turned, and in the blink of the eye had run to the opposite end.

The Kaedekin ran back and forth, and while she wasn't inhumanly fast, she was definitely moving at a speed that people didn't usually reach outside of an athletic field. Celestia slid a little to stop just short of where she'd started. The Kaedekin wasn't even winded, which Loren knew was possible but she'd always needed a second of deliberate preparations to pull off herself.

"Both can run at the same time, but there's a little inefficiency when the muscles are switching from using both kinds of enhancement to just one," she said as if the burst of athleticism hadn't happened.

"We've been working on trying to put it together into a single spell, but so far running both enhancements at the same time is still more efficient than a unified spell." The Kaedekin sighed.

"Debugging… debugging never changes." Loren found herself nodding along, as did most of the excursion party.

"So, we were told you wanted to watch one of our manufacturing processes in progress," Princess Megumi said as they left the artificial island.

"Therefore, the next stop is the Materials Research Foundry! They say they're ready to make a small batch of chramecirum alloy for Irorimachi, and there's enough space in the foundry for you all to watch the process."" Chramecirum… that's the alloy of transparent steel, I believe?" Falling Stillness said from inside her power armor, and Loren could feel everyone suddenly get interested.

"It's the class of alloys that transparent steel belongs to," Princess Megumi corrected cheerfully.

"Any kind of metal can be made into a chramecirum alloy, even sodium! Although it's not a good idea to make chramecirum sodium. Its melting point is so low and it's so soft the only thing to do with it is raise its melting point and increase its structural rigidity, and we still haven't found a use for sodium that doesn't involve having it chemically react to something. So we don't make chramecirum sodium. The foundry will be making transparent steel today." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road.

If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"How much of the process will we be seeing?" someone asked.

"Oh, the whole thing. Though we will be starting from iron ingots and not raw ore. Smelting from gnuts, knugrind scales and deadfall would take hours because we'd need to separate out all the different metals. Unless you all want to see that too?"

"Starting from iron ingots won't be a problem," Commander Bronze said.

"We're thankful you're giving us the chance to observe the process." Megumi waved her hand dismissively.

"Well, it's not like the process is some big secret. From their transmissions, it's pretty obvious that the rakido, pajhadin, Changers and tiwada have been making chramecirum alloys for centuries, though they probably don't call it that." That seemed to shock Bronze.

"What?"

"I mean, we can't be sure unless they tell us one way or the other after they see how we make chramecirum and confirm it's the same process," Megumi said.

"But from what we've seen from their public tv, we're fairly sure that chramecirum alloys are the result of what the Changers call spirit forging, the pajhadin call nightshaping, the rakido call dream quenching, and the tiwada call blood-binding." She frowned.

"Or did we translate those terms wrong?"" No, you translated spirit forging properly, though the translation is a bit too literal and leaves out a lot of the context and poetic nuance,"Falling Stillness said into the lull that followed." But the most literally accurate translations always do.

'Spirit forging' is fine, as translations go."

"Oh, good. Well, as I said, we can't really be sure it's the same process. There are lots of different processes you can put metal through."

"Is that what you do in Materials Research?" someone asked.

"Sometimes," Princess Megumi said.

"But mostly, we experiment to see what effects can be applied to chramecirum alloys with new kinds of magic, and how multiple combinations can interact. It's really fascinating, and we find a use for the new combinations eventually…" The Materials Research Foundry was… well, a foundry. From the outside, it looked vaguely like a warehouse or hangar, except the walls were made of large blocks of stone that had been fitted together but not fused.

The building was ten meter wide and thirty long, with a roof another ten meters high at its peak. At one end were sliding doors that allowed almost the whole width of the building to be opened. There were ventilation fans blowing in air, as well as what looked like vents that could be maneuvered to direct their air towards specific places. That said, the foundry was conspicuously bare of the sort of heavy equipment one would expect at a facility that produced metal alloys.

There seemed to be no furnaces for melting metals, and the area over the foundry floor was bare of tracks for lifting and moving heavy crucibles filled with said molten metal, though there was a crisscrossing network of catwalks. However, there were crucibles. At least, Loren assumed they were crucibles.

They were certainly crucible-shaped, being large cylinders with a spout on one side and thick metal arms sticking out from their sides, though their insides were surprising clean and not covered with slag or hardened metal. The state of their insides was easy to see because they were transparent, save for numbers that had been inlaid onto the side of each crucible with some kind of stone or ceramic. Loren noticed those second, because the first thing she noticed were the robots.

Standing six meters tall and human-shaped, the robots were far bigger than any power armor that Loren had ever seen in the military or her family's security forces. Despite their size, their thin-looking limbs and vaguely feminine narrow waists gave them an air of being light despite the fact their size meant they were obviously very heavy.

Each sported a different color scheme and had subtly different heads, although they all shared a transparent front torso that revealed some kind of control chamber, which currently seemed to be empty. Their arms all terminated at articulated human-like hands, and folded against each forearm was a large hook. Naturally, everyone was staring at the robots, even as one of the Kaedekin approached them with a big smile on her face.

"Welcome to the Materials Research Foundry!" she said cheerfully.

"I'm Homura, and I'll be overseeing this production run. If you'd all please follow me up to the catwalk while we're waiting for the rest of the materials? Up there you should all be able to have the best view of the process while we work." Very fortunately, there was a staircase up to the catwalks rather than just a ladder, and while the space between the handrails was rather narrow it wasn't narrow enough to be a problem. At least, not for humans and pajhadin.

The suited rakido were much too big to use the stairway safely, never mind the weight of their suits, and the power armors had no chance at all. However, this was the planet of the Kaedekin, so a few just used their magic to lift up the rakido and the power armors on solid surfaces of… vennplate? Vennplate. They were elevated up to the level of the catwalks, and the Kaedekin showed no signs of strain from maintaining the spells.

Normally, this would have prompted the engineers and intelligence officers in the excursion party to try fishing for new information on the Kaedekin's 'forcefield technology', but unsurprisingly, everyone was asking about the robots.

"Oh, those are just utility mecha," Sera said.

"We use them for moving the crucibles around and pouring out the metals. Other places don't need them because there are always girls around who can just use their Thaumaturgy to do the heavy lifting, but most girls here are Pyrotheurgists or are busy doing other research."

"Are they common?" Loren asked, watching as one of the mecha started walking towards something towards the back of the foundry, still unpiloted.

"Oh, yeah. Farm work, logging, dirt-moving, quarrying… You just need to put the right equipment loadout on them and keep their weight capacity in mind."

"Huh…" Loren 'huh'-ed.

"I'd have thought you could do all that with your magic."

"We can, but buddies like doing things too. And sometimes you just want to sit in a huge mecha and be a pilot, you know? And if you need a golem, making one from a mecha is a lot more energy efficient, since they already have things like hinge joints, computers, stabilizers and cameras. No need to brute force all that with magic." Huh, she supposed that explained the lack of visible pilot, if it was being operated by a possessed computer. Loren had never thought of it like that.

She'd made golems before with little stick figures made from children's play clay, so she knew the basic theory, but had never really considered expanding her knowledge in the field. It was something to consider when she had time to do her own research again…

"Oh, the venecite is here! Now we can get started!" Loren blinked as her thoughts were interrupted, her eyes looking to where Sera's—it might be a while before she could even think… her name—finger was pointing, and didn't freeze, because freezing implied unexpected shock. Most of what she felt was disappointment in herself that she hadn't expected this. And also shock, but mostly the disappointment. Someone had just walked in pushing a cart with what looked like a meter-tall glass… drum? Bin? Container?

A meter tall glass cylinder that looked like a massive oversized kitchen container, complete with glass lid. Loren knew it was glass because it had a brightly colored band under the lid that read "Careful! -! -! Made Of Glass! Do Not Drop! Keep Dry At All Times!" The same warning was repeated on the lid itself. A larger sign at the midpoint of the cylinder, where the hypothetical kitchen container might read something like 'cookies' or 'risotto rice, instead read 'venecite'. And it seemed to be full to the brim.

Yes, Loren was disappointed in herself for not seeing this coming.