thomasdarkrose
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Vol. 6 - Captivity - Chapter 17
🕑 Added 2019-11-06 21:55:34 +0000 UTCFor the sword breaker meant to match the rapier, Thomas had decided to do something sneaky and mean. He took the rest of the Damascus metal he'd created from steel and Icebound Platinum and put it to the side. Since the sword breaker would not be ice-based using that material would be a complete waste. A sword breaker was a special type of left-hand dagger, or main gauche, that had slots in the back. The idea was to catch and control your enemy's sword in one of the slots. Actually breaking the sword would require enough force to simply pull the sword out of the enemy's hand, at least in reality. However, Thomas had thought of a simple trick to make the sword breaker actually break the enemy's sword. Heat.
Since the sword breaker was meant to be partnered with the rapier he could use sharp changes in temperature to cause metal fatigue and break any weapon the sword breaker catches. The icy cold of the rapier could be used to chill the metal of a sword then the sword breaker could catch the sword and provide a sharp spike in heat that would help to shatter it. A simple, but nasty, one-two combo punch to rob the enemy of their primary weapon.
Since he couldn't use the Damascus he'd made he decided to make a new ingot of steel to use for the sword breaker. The process was simple and easy so within moments a steel ingot was sitting inside of the forge warming up. Thomas glanced at where he'd been standing when he activated the ability of the rapier and could see that the snow was slowly beginning to melt. The cold the rapier could generate was really quite scary. Though, it did eat through his mana pretty rapidly.
He turned back to the forge, which was being powered by Clad at the moment, and plucked the ingot out with a pair of tongs when it was ready. The first step was to forge mana into the ingot. This time he intended to try something different. He'd used fire multiple times to make weapons and felt that, while okay, fire wasn't what he needed for this build. Instead, he started to channel his mana while converting it directly to the heat element. He didn't want the sword breaker to produce continuous flames or deal fire damage. What he wanted was for it to produce sudden high spikes in temperature when clashing or binding the enemy's frozen swords.
As the heat mana flowed into the ingot through the tongs and into his hammer, he started to hammer on the hot steel ingot. He activated his 'All Seeing Eyes' about half-way through the process and watched the heat mana within the ingot. Shortly after he hit the ingot with the final strike and released a red flash of light. He observed the mana within the mangled ingot with interest. Like fire mana the heat mana was pretty active but it wasn't nearly as chaotic. The heat mana arranged itself into 'waves' that rolled through the interior of the steel. It sort of reminded him of how he would see heatwaves rippling above a hot road.
After studying it a bit he deactivated his eyes and placed the ingot back into the flames. Clad silently channeled mana into the blower to heat the ingot back up. Once it was hot again, Thomas started to hammer it out. Each powerful blow of the hammer moved a large amount of material and after just a few heats the ingot started to take on the form of a knife. The blade of the knife reached a length of around twenty-four centimeters while the tang was drawn out to nearly thirteen centimeters. The tang was a bit long but he planned to trim off some of it and use a bit of it to peen the handle on tightly.
As he hammered the knife he kept it pretty thick and only hammered one side down into what would become the slicing-edge. For the tip, he hammered in a slightly curved shape reminiscent of a bowie knife. He didn't spend a whole lot of time on the flat or spine of the blade, only taking the effort to make sure it was as even as he could get it with the hammer. The grinding wheel would be used to true it up making it flat and smooth. With the majority of the hammering completed, Thomas set the weapon down to let it finish cooling before he could begin grinding it.
To pass some time while he waited, he tossed a pair of iron ingots into the forge. He planned to make more bar stock for the shrapnel cubes inside of the grenades. They took the most time by far so having a large stock of them would be helpful. With having to stick to the ten-to-one ratio of grenades to other items having more grenades wouldn't be a bad thing. He was already on his fourth item, fifth if both portable stoves counted as two items, so he would need to make more grenades soon anyway.
Once the first ingot was ready he ran it through the extruder a few times before switching to the other ingot. He went back and forth, occasionally cutting the bar stock in half when it got too long. He only stopped when the sword breaker was cold enough to handle with his bare hands. With the blade in hand, he went over to the grinding wheel to begin the process of grinding it down to refine its shape. Some people might find the process repetitive and annoying, but Thomas found it to be therapeutic and calming. It helped him keep his mind off of worrying about Snowlily.
To outsiders, Thomas seemed to just fit into the job of making items for the pirates without a care in the world. The truth was, he was forming his plan for his rescue of Snowlily and his escape. As long as the pirates had their guards up against him he wouldn't be able to pull one over on them. To help build a relationship with them and become a 'friend', he did the work that was asked of him. He'd already managed to gather some information from them and planned to continue to chat with the guards to get more. Once he knew enough he would strike. However, the most important piece of information would also be the hardest to acquire, the location of Snowlily within the caves.
As Thomas plotted his intel gathering and eventual escape, the sword breaker finished cooling down on the anvil and the two iron ingots had become a loose collection of various sized bar stock. He set the bar stock off to the side for the time being and focused on the sword breaker. He carried it over to the grinding wheel and began the process of grinding it into a refined shape and beginning to put the edge on it. At the moment the sword breaker simply looked like an oversized oddly-shaped bowie knife. That would change soon enough.
As he was grinding he paid special attention to the flats of the blade and its spine to make sure they were as smooth and even as he could get them without precision machinery. This would be important for the durability and uniformity of the spikes that would make up the spine. Fortunately, he had a cheat for making them quickly and easily. Otherwise, he would likely have to file them out by hand and that could take hours. Once he was happy with the shape of the sword breaker he carried it back over to the anvil for the next step, making the spikes.
He carried the blade over to the workbench and set it down so he could look through the engraver's tools for a bit. He finally found one that he could use as a scoring tool to draw the design of the spikes for the sword breaker. There were many different styles that could be used for the spikes, Thomas chose a design that looked similar to an arrowhead. This design would have angled tips on the spikes to allow swords to more easily be captured while the ears would be slightly angled to make it harder for the captured sword to be withdrawn. The spikes were spaced approximately five centimeters apart and only a few centimeters deep. Any deeper and he would compromise the integrity of the blade.
Once he drew out the design for the spikes, he set the engraver's tool back where it belonged and observed his work. He was far from a great artist and his hand-drawn design looked bland and unimpressive. He could easily do better by utilizing his blueprint system to drawn out a perfect pattern and copy it. He didn't simply because this was for one of the pirates. If it was slightly flawed, all the better. He'd briefly contemplated adding tricks or traps into the weapons and armor he was designing for them but with how the item descriptions worked he was pretty certain he couldn't hide it. Even without a deliberate trap in it the flaming cutlass he'd made carried a warning about using too much mana on it.
With the design scored into the blade, all he had to do was use his Transmutation ability to start changing the shape of the spine. The metal moved like liquid and slowly shifted shape as the design he created was slowly hallowed out. The excess material gathered at the tip of the spike and left behind a thin metal spur that still connected it to the rest of the blade. It was impossible for him to completely sever something with his transmutation but making it as thin as a needle was easy. With a little wiggle and twist, he snapped off the excess metal and was left with a nice clean gap in the spine o the blade. One down, more to go.
For the next thirty minutes or so, Thomas kept shifting the metal out of the lines he'd drawn and breaking it off in small chunks. When he was done the sword breaker looked like a sword breaker. The spikes looked mostly uniform and gave the spine of the blade a comb-like appearance. As long as the person wielding it was skilled they could capture and restrain any blade that wasn't more than five millimeters thick. Of course, given that the sword breaker was meant to work in conjunction with the Icebound Rapier, it didn't necessarily matter if they could catch the sword or not. The plan was to use thermal shock to cause metal fatigue leading to the destruction of the opponent's weapon. Catching it within the spike would just make that a bit easier.
With the spikes finished he carried the blade over to the forge and stuck it in. Clad immediately stepped up and channeled mana into the blower. Though he didn't talk much, Clad paid close attention to everything Thomas did. Half the time he didn't really understand what was going on and it wasn't like Thomas was explaining everything step-by-step to him. Clad did understand that Thomas was using special skills or abilities to make the work faster and easier. He even wondered if it would be possible for him to learn such things himself. Watching Thomas work was inspiring him to become a blacksmith himself.
Once the blade reached critical temperature, Thomas pulled it from the flames and dunked it into the trough of quenching oil. Honestly, though the trough was originally designed just for the massive flaming greatsword he'd made, it was pretty convenient for everyday use. It was long, wide, and deep making quenching just about any shaped blade a piece of cake. Once the sword breaker blade had been quenched he checked it for warping very carefully. Unlike most weapons, the sword breaker had a rather weak and thin spine so warping was more of a concern than usual. Sure enough, the blade had slightly warped.
There was a short window of time after a quench to fix a warped blade as long as it wasn't too badly warped. Since the warp was just a rather gentle curve on the spine it would be easy enough to fix with pressure. Once the blade was straightened it would remain that way after it completely cooled and hardened. To straighten the blade, Thomas summoned up some of his metal magic and clamped it on the blade below the tip and above the tang. The metal magic tightened and force the blade to straighten out. He would need to maintain it while the blade cooled but it wasn't a big deal. He considered it good training for his metal magic.
While the blade cooled and he maintained his spell, Thomas returned to making bar stock for the grenades. He decided to do this anytime he was waiting for a weapon to cool down as it would allow him to stock up plenty of material for shrapnel. He felt the shrapnel made the grenades far deadlier but there was still a limit to the power of the Firestone powder. He started to think of different things he could substitute for the powder to make the explosion more powerful. His first thought, naturally, was to purify Firestone and use that for the explosive. He had no doubt that the purified Firestone would be much more powerful. However, the thought terrified him as it seemed rather dangerous. Perhaps... perhaps he would try with a very small amount first and see what happened? Not just yet though. He'd wait until his two days off and give it a try within the dungeon. Just in case it caused a massive explosion...
That was the plan for now. Even if it didn't work he was certain he could figure something out using enchantments and magic. Hell, just a simple water explosion could cause a lot of damage. If he powered it up using a mana crystal amalgamation fully charged with mana it could probably reach the level of 'devastating'. With a few thoughts in mind, he worked on the iron bar stock until the sword breaker had finished cooling down. All that was left was to give it a handle and a sharp edge. He deliberately skipped the tempering process. He might not be able to get away with enchanting issues into the blade, but that didn't mean he couldn't do something almost as nasty. Why else would he not temper anything he made for the pirates?
Comments
MeepGod
thx
Dax
Thomas takes the swordbreaker over to the grinding wheel twice and then takes it back to the anvil at the same time he takes it back to the worktable in the following sentence. Just a bit of tidy up from moving bits around i assume :)
