Chương 94: 064 – Chramecirum Alloy

Watching one of the Kaedekin robots move was impressive from an engineering perspective. Humanity had been making walking robots for as long as they'd been making robots, and it had been a never-ending effort. Even after all these years, there was still something… inhuman about the things. The way they walked wasn't how a human would walk. The way they recovered their balance, how they navigated stairs, just how they walked forward…

they were clearly machines that walked at a mechanical approximation of a human stride. Serviceable, reliable, but approximate. There were pauses as servos and hydraulics reversed direction, limbs that didn't move as much as one thought they would, and instances when a robot would need to pause to recover its balance when a human wouldn't.

Humanoid power armor got around this problem by synching with their wearer's movements, but even then it took a lot of practice to be able to make them move with some degree of grace. The Kaedekin robots moved like a living thing. Every step had the whole body move to dynamically shift its balance, and when it walked it took long strides instead of little shuffles that kept its center of gravity above its feet.

When two walked to either side of the crucible and inserted the bars sticking out from either side into the hooks that extended from their forearms and bent their knees to lift the weight, Loren recognized the Kaedekin's body language. There were murmurs among the normie engineers—and the pajhadin, for some reason—at the robot's movements, and she heard someone talking rapidly, using their suit's camera and audio to record their thoughts.

The robots poured out the molten steel into a mold of amber vennplate that had reappeared on the foundry floor, and there were exclamations as one of the Kaedekin reached inside the crucible with a spatula-like scraper to get all the iron out… while hanging upside down from one of the robot's hands, glowing metal underneath her as she casually made sure the crucible was empty.

Loren could hear Ornsted recording what sounded like a list of workplace safety violations, and she couldn't even fault the engineer, that was really unsafe. Even if falling into a molten steel wouldn't burn the Kaedekin alive, risking doing so upside-down was just asking for a head and neck injury, and Flames weren't any more immune to those than anyone else. The Kaedekin worked blissfully on.

"All right! Now that all the steel is in the mold, we're going to forcefully cool it," Homura said.

"This is only done in the quality control step, since it hardens the metal, and we don't want it too hard. Outside of the college, they do this with freeze rays, but here we have other options. Since Rekka was the one to put the heat into the metal, she gets to pull it out so she can recover her energy." Rekka waved up to those in the catwalks, then knelt down and visibly pressed her palm onto the surface of the iron.

The area immediately under her hand quickly went from bright yellow to orange to red as the iron solidified, the color change moving outward from the point of contact as Loren felt her pull the heat from the metal. The Kaedekin had never relinquished her claim on the magic she'd imbued, so it was easy for her to pull it back into herself, leaving only cool, dark metal. When Rekka stood back up, she left a clear handprint on the now-solid metal. Other Kaedekin quickly stepped forward.

About half of them held hammers, kneeling next to the mold at even intervals and striking the metal, then pausing after every hit as they listened for something. Others were holding some kind of scanning devices consisting of a handle topped by a screen with a long antenna on top of it—Loren doubted the resemblance to a wand was an accident—that they began to systematically wave over the large metal plate.

The Kaedekin finished in a surprisingly short time, sending nods towards Homura before putting away their tools and… kneeling and putting their hands on steel plate again. This time Loren felt multiple sources of heat on her soul. The metal soon began to glow under their hands, liquifying as it did so.

"The correct steel composition has been made. We're now moving to the next step, which is preparing the spell we want to integrate into the alloy," Homura said, as one of the Kaedekin opened up the container of QEC and started measuring out the crystals. For some reason, they were pouring the crystals into a large vat of purple vennplate, which appeared to be filled with…. Uh…

"Sera, what's the liquid form of your forcefield magic called again?" Loren asked.

"Oh, you mean vennfluid?" Sera said.

"Ah, thank you." The purple vat of vennplate was filled with purple vennfluid, and unlike the usual reaction of QEC when placed into most liquids, the crystals were simply sinking down to the bottom while the vennfluid level actually rose. Usually a pure oil was needed, since any liquid with even the smallest amount of water content would cause the crystal to dissolve into it… though she supposed that since vennfluid wasn't really matter, it was actually the ideal fluid for QEC to be immersed in.

"Right now, Kyle is measuring out the venecite needed for the process," Homura explained.

"The amount needed for alloying is a volume-to-volume ratio, and using maximum saturation allows for layering multiple effects as well as maximum effectiveness of the anchored effects. For the moment, we will only be anchoring two effects onto the venecite: transparency and increased surface hardness to prevent scratches. The difference between the latter and simply quenching it is that quenching hardens all of the steel.

Surface hardening allows for a hard exterior while the rest of the metal itself is still soft and malleable." Anchoring an effect? Could you… do that with QEC? Loren knew it could be consumed for magic, but given how expensive it was she'd never really actually done so. As to anchoring the effects of their spells, Pyrotheurgists used flammable and burnable substances because it gave the spell something to consume to fuel itself. Though… huh, she supposed QEC might be good for that.

It was solid magic, after all, why wouldn't it work? She'd just never heard of anyone actually doing it. While it wouldn't require using family resources to afford a large enough sample of QEC, it would still be a large amount of money, so it was doubtful anyone would even consider experimenting with it like that. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. Though… if it was possible to use it like that… who would know? … Probably the old monsters.

The needed amount of QEC was reached as the vennfluid in the vat had risen nearly to be brim, and the purple vat changed into a very large basin, about five meters across, still filled with vennfluid. What happened next made some people—and Loren included herself in that—distinctly uncomfortable as the Kaedekin used sticks with bulbous heads to carefully crush the QEC to a powder, helped by the fact the vennplate vat was able to change its shape to something with more surface area.

While crushing it like that didn't affect the substance's usability, being rendered powder made it much easier to lose, and every gram was valuable.

"To better spread through the molten steel, the venecite will be crushed into smaller pieces," Homura explained.

"The pestles have ceramic heads because if they were metal the venecite would end up imbuing the vennfluid and get smaller, and the vennfluid keeps the venecite powder from being blown away. Oil works too, but it's not really practical to use oil for something like this, at least on this scale."

"Why not?" someone asked.

"Because oil is really hard to make," Homura said, and all the Kaedekin present nodded.

"There's a limit to the number of flowers we can pick, trees we can cut down or nests we can collect, and everything we're making is already meant for more important things, like for food and mechanical lubricant. Using oil when we have vennfluid would just be wasteful." Loren was pretty sure that she wasn't the only one confused by that.

"Umm, what exactly do flowers, trees and nests have to do with where you get your oil from?" she asked.

"Uh, it's where we get our oil from," Sera said from next to her.

"Flowers produce seeds that we press for oil after we filter out the trace metals and particulates. There are animals in the woods that make nests from wax-like and tar-like substances their bodies produce. They keep growing out of them, so there's always a lot of the nests to collect and melt down. And we process wood into oil in the pressure cooker."

"That's where you get all your oil?" Falling Stillness said, the Changer's voice sounding confused and disbelieving.

"Yup!" Sera said, since she was the one being addressed." Not… from the ground?"

"No? Why would oil…" Sera paused, her eyes becoming unfocused as she tilted her head slightly.

"Oh, you're talking about fossil fuels. No, we don't use those. Tapping them is bad for the environment, and we don't want to accidentally awaken some kind of primordial nature god or buried eldritch being who'll hate us because we messed up the planet and create some kind of monster to eat us." Everyone nodded like that was somehow a legitimate concern.

"Are you telling us that over the past five hundred years, your civilization somehow got to space without every using fossil fuels?" someone said.

"Because if you are, I'm calling bullshit. No one gets to space without using fossil fuels. There's nothing else that could have possibly had the energy density to let you get anything up there." Sera pointed down toward the glass container of QEC.

"Ah. My apologies, I retract my statement."

"Apology accepted!" Sera said cheerfully.

"I… don't really understand why you're apologizing, but it's accepted!" Down on the foundry floor, Homura made an obviously fake cough.

"Cough cough," she 'cough'-ed.

"Now that the venecite's been crushed, we'll be adding it to the molten steel. The venecite will mix into the molten metal, and the spells still anchored to them will integrate into the metal. When it solidifies, it will be chramecirum alloy." A little bit to the side, what had been a steel plate was golden and molten again, and the vat of QEC had moved to float above it, changing shape to equal the dimensions of the mold below, still full of vennfluid.

The Kaedekin reversed the sticks they'd been using to crush the QEC, putting the other ends in play, which had wide bar-like heads that the Kaedekin used to spread the crushed QEC evenly across the purple vennplate. Once the Kaedekin finished—just stepping off the purple vennplate and onto the foundry floor, to the continued recitation of more workplace safety violations—the sides of the mold below rose.

The purple vennplate seemed to shatter into shards as the vennfluid disappeared, and it all fell into the molten steel. The Kaedekin who'd been controlling the purple vennplate stared at the metal for a moment, then gave a self-satisfied nod and sent Homura a thumbs up, while other Kaedekin began to scoop out the slag that had formed… with their bare hands. Loren heard Ornsted make a strangled sound when he saw that.

"And that's it!" Homura declared once the last of the slag had been removed.

"We have chramecirum alloy! Once the metal cools enough to solidify, we can run it though the rollers to make it thinner."

"Are the rollers at another location?" someone asked.

"Oh no, they're right here," Homura said cheerfully. As if on cue, a section of the foundry floor began to rise, before flipping over to unfold, revealing a long machine of massive cylindrical rollers and rolling track. Fully unfurled, it took up half of the foundry's floor space. Loren couldn't help it. She had to ask.

"What's under the other half of the floor?"

"The continuous casting machines, the hydraulic presses, and the power hammers," Homura said immediately.

"A bunch of other equipment too. Other places don't need them, since they can just do it with Thaumaturgy, but here… well, we need the machines when we need to make metal parts for repairs or projects." The rolling machine came on, and the still-glowing—but now solid—metal slab began to move through the machine, the rollers visibly making it longer as well as presumably thinner.

The process proceeded surprisingly quickly, and Loren realized that no heat was being transferred to the rollers, allowing the steel to remain relatively soft and pliable. Once the metal got to one end of the machine, there was a pause as the rollers in the middle of the machine adjusted, and then the metal reversed, growing longer again as it did so.

When it became too long, a guillotine blade of purple vennplate materialized and cut the pane in half, which was then removed from the machine by several slim blades of vennplate that rose up between rollers to lift the metal plate off the track and proceeded to just float above the rolling machine while the remaining metal was rolled several more times.

When metal seemed to have reached the desired thickness, it was moved and floated onto the floor of the foundry, where it was laid to rest on an amber vennplate sheet while the portion of metal that had been removed was placed back onto the rolling machine.

"Now that the alloy is the right thickness, we're letting it start to cool, which is happening quickly because of its surface area," Homura said. Indeed, Loren could see the glow going from yellow to orange to red, even without any assistance from the Kaedekin Pyrotheurgists.

"There's some danger of warping, but its thickness means it should cool evenly, and if there are any warps we can adjust it using Change Flame." Even with the red glow, the color of the vennplate beneath the steel was growing increasingly visible. Soon, the excursion party found themselves looking at the rough surface of a very transparent pane of steel. One of the Kaedekin stepped forward, a hammer in her hand. Raising it, she struck the hammer onto the pane, a short and measured impact.

It rang with the same metallic note of steel.