Chapter 206: 204 – Believe in the Forgemother

The Smithy stood far in the fields, far from prying eyes or would-be interference, the G-Kaisers having had it walk itself down the side road they had initially parked it by. In addition to this, they’d asked several Iron Brotherhood tankmen to barricade the road, the mercenaries fully aware of what this meant and more than happy to do a favor for the originators for so much of the equipment they relied upon.

Sarz’s white-haired, resolutely silent countenance presided over the ritual circle, gripping the massive handle of a rune-etched skymetal hammer. It was at the tip of a huge machine arm reaching down from the ceiling, black essentia cables snaking around its mechanized frame and into the reactor. This hammer - held in Sarz’s hands alone - was among the few means of creating new artifacts in the modern age.

With this hammer, the skeletons of the three tankman prototypes had been forged.

He was The Smith Among Smiths, he who had forged blades for the Revenant King’s guard, for Kargaria’s noblest houses, for nameless warriors from far-flung lands. 

He, within whose breast beat a skymetal automaton in place of a heart, who had reinforced the bones of his hammer-arm with the sacred metal.

It was his peerless skill with a hammer that acted as the final piece - the gestural aspect - of this ritual.

Upon the great anvil in the center of the smithy had been placed the circular frame whose three outer rings held eighteen split-up Jade Dragons in the appropriate trigrammatic arrays, and in its center were affixed the armored sleeve’s individual components, already arranged in the finished configuration and merely waiting to be joined together.

It had three major parts - the gauntlet, the shoulder piece, and the frame, concealed within a harness of hollow Fog-infused leather straps. The gun was its own, separate item, which the G-Kaisers had not dared try to remake - despite the additions and changes they’d made to it, it was fundamentally still itself, and would thus be attached to the greater whole only after the sleeve was finished.

The sleeve’s structure incorporated a great deal of what the G-Kaisers had learned from working on the Tankman project, to the point that Sarz had already decided to give it a similar name to those prototypes - a title mimicking Ikesian military naming conventions, and a name appropriate to its artifact status. What that name would be, however, would be determined once the sleeve was complete.

Meanwhile, his comrades chattered amongst themselves. He was used to this. They used such idle patter as a means of dealing with the immense stress. Wait… No, that wasn’t empty talk. 

“Output at ninety-nine percent. One hundred. A hundred and one… Two… Three… Four… Five… One-hundred and ten… Engaging control glyphs and directing output…” muttered Damaya to himself. “Ritual circle energized… Incantation automaton activating… Trigrams stable-”

“Why is the output still rising?” questioned the eyepatch-wearing Gen. “The dial is completely off the scale, but she looks stable. Think you might’ve gotten some of that amalgam on the essentia meters inside the reactor?”

Damaya dismissed him, “Not a chance, I couldn’t reach those from the inside even if I tried, they're only accessible through the outer maintenance panel. Sure the dial isn’t coming loose again?” 

The reactor’s observation window emitted a blinding flash of blue light. The figure within no longer floated idly, was no longer undefined, but had changed into a very distinct female silhouette made of blue fire with eyes of seething white and a flame-like mane as long as she was tall that trailed around her. 

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She stared at Sarz through the window as a white flame in the center of her chest grew to envelop her entire form and all of the reactor’s alerts went off at once, dials spinning uncontrollably.

“SHIT, ENGAGING THE CUTOFF-” panicked the youngest, rushing to the reactor to try forcefully ending the reaction.

“Don’t,” Sarz interrupted, holding out his left arm to obstruct the valve. He glanced through the window and nodded. The figure nodded back. 

“Believe in the Forgemother, Damaya. Open all exhaust valves and release all control glyphs, if you would. Give her some breathing room.”

Damaya stared at Sarz, glancing over to Gen for a moment, then back to Sarz. Gen had known the white-haired blacksmith for quite a bit longer, and he had assisted him in such seemingly suicidal endeavors. 

Indeed, Gen had helped channel similarly grand powers into achievements of the craft, and he trusted Sarz’s ability to repeat those impossible feats of physical and spiritual resilience. He nodded at Damaya as he himself reached for one of the two control handles required to disengage the control glyphs.

Reluctantly, Damaya grasped the other handle and both men worked them at the same time, first pulling them out of their cylindrical housings, then turning them ninety degrees, then pushing them back in.

---

From the G-Kaiser smithy’s chimney erupted a blinding light into the sky, a geyser of deiform essentia that in the span of moments shaped itself into the upper body of a gigantic woman, tens of meters tall, casting the surrounding fields in light as bright as day.

In her right hand sat a smith’s hammer, and behind her back there floated three concentric circles of five, six, and seven trigrams respectively, the innermost rotating clockwise, the middle counterclockwise, and the outermost clockwise yet again.

She raised up her hammer and brought it down upon the G-Kaiser smithy, a flash of blue erupting from within the structure’s doors and windows. The force of the first hammerblow threw the youngest of the three smiths into the half-closed door so forcefully as to open it and make him skid across the cut wheat outside.

With the first strike did the five-trigram circle vanish, and with the first strike the myriad parts of the armored sleeve joined together.

With the second blow did the six-trigram circle follow suit, and by its power were the sleeve’s many disparate enchantments grafted at the seams.

With the third blow and the disappearance of the seven-trigram circle the sleeve was granted arcane life, its myriad runes and arcane mechanisms brought alive as a cohesive whole…

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