Still, the lure of the bags drew her in. What could it be? A new mineral or type of metal? It was possible that scouts and miners had turned up something new and unexpected in their explorations. The colony refused to abandon expansion and search efforts during the conflict.
Interest stirred within the carapace of the crafter and she found herself drawn to the sharply angled lumps hidden within the bags. Where the heck did the colony even get bags from, anyway? Tungstant noticed her unspoken question.
“We’ve started making them to help carry stuff. One ant, even a carver, can carry a heck of a lot in two bags slung over the carapace. Now help me get these things open!”
It took a few moments for the two to recognise the bottom of the unfamiliar container and upend it to send the precious contents tumbling out onto the floor. The moment the gleaming plates of enchantment-encrusted armour hit the floor, something magical happened, something remarkable, unexplainable, and unfathomable. It was a lightning strike, an earthquake, an eruption, and implosion all at once, and it took place directly in the centre of Smithant’s heart.
In that instant, she fell in love.
“What… what have you…”
Her pheromones trailed away to nothing as she drew ever closer to the gleaming plates of armour. Her antennae swept forward to caress the curved metal with an almost tender softness as her mandibles clacked together rhythmically.
If she noticed this strange behaviour, Tungstant didn’t seem to pay it any mind. Indeed, she’d been around the carvers long enough to know what could happen to them around the objects of their obsession. This level of strangeness didn’t even approach the kind of things that stupid sculpture-inspired ant had done since she’d started working.
“These are full sets of Legion armour that we seized from the battlefield, one set in each of these bags. The mages have swept over and analysed them to the best of their ability in order to check if there are hazardous enchantments on them, but if there are, it’s far beyond our ability to detect it.”
“I see.”
Tungstant wasn’t confident she’d been heard, but she continued anyway.
“In fact, from what I’ve been told, the technology on display is far beyond anything we have at our disposal. The mages weren’t even able to identify the materials used to make these suits. We can’t even speculate on it, to be honest. Naturally, as the foremost expert on the subject, we decided to bring this to you. Learn whatever you can from them, but be careful, we don’t know what this armour can do if you start melting it down.”
“Melt it down?” Smithant cried, coming back to her senses. “Sacrilege! Who would possibly think of destroying such perfection?”
She snatched up one of the pauldrons in her mandibles as an antenna drooped down to pet the curved metal.
“Noone will hurt you, my darling. My gem… My preciousss.”
“Great! I’ll leave you to it then,” Tungstant said and turned around to hurry back to her own work.
The many guards and sentries remained in place, but Smithant didn’t see them, couldn’t possibly imagine they existed. All of the material things in creation were only herself, and the armour. All else was dust.
113. Heart of Glass
She knew she would have to break it. It was obvious. How on Pangera was she supposed to learn the secrets of this incredible armour without hitting it, breaking it open, melting it? She couldn’t! She knew she couldn’t. And yet… she struggled to bring herself to do it.
She’d examined the armour in intricate detail. Every sense she could bring to bear had been utilised with laser-like focus on every curve and fold of the suits she could access. Her antennae were intimately familiar with every square inch. Her eyes had examined every marking and rune, the entire network of which—that was visible—she had copied onto sheets of metal that adorned the walls of her forge.
Several of the watchful scouts had been yelled at for allowing their legs to pollute those surfaces as they shifted around the room, disturbing her thoughts for seemingly no good reason. What were they supposed to protect her from? The scouts fobbed her off, with generic statements about ‘dangerous enemy technology,’ as they’d been ordered to.
The fact Tungstant had placed them there to protect Smithant in the event something went very wrong, they wouldn’t say. The colony was not about to lose their foremost armour expert so soon after she demonstrated her worth! Not even for Legion armour would that be worthwhile.
So, they carefully watched as the carver interacted with the armour, their cores in their jaws each time she dropped something or started gnawing on the armour with her mandibles, worried that something would explode before they had the chance to throw themselves on top of it.
Eventually, she was forced to weigh her affection for the incredible craftsmanship of the Legion pieces that had fallen into her claws, against her own Skills and knowledge, and by extension, the colony’s. Of course, her own Skills won out. How much more precious would equally stunning works be, if they had come from her own forge? The very thought sent her into a catatonic state of joy for several long minutes.
The decision made, she wasted no time in getting to work. The ants had developed many ant-specific tools for manipulating armour in order for them to manage the process of detailing and enchanting. With the straps undone and the joints snipped, Smithant used her front two claws to lift and mount the armour on the frames she’d constructed and started the painful process of deconstructing the suits.
It took long hours of arduous, tearful toil. The armour was tough. Really tough. The materials were totally alien to her experience and far more durable than anything she’d worked with to date. Not only was the stuff harder to break, snap, pierce, or shatter, it was lighter, responded to Mana better, and held enchantments more than three times as efficiently! The strange stone was a wonder in and of itself. It could detect Mana sources around it and actively tried to consume that Mana.
She nearly had a few cores drained dry when they were placed too close to the stuff. When she tested it on herself—the watching scouts came this close to leaping off the roof in a massive pile-on—she found that even through her carapace and flesh, the stone was able to siphon away a portion of the Mana in her core.
The only logical conclusion was that the mineral was, in some sense, living. The number of experiments she would need to conduct was immeasurable and would likely take years. Reluctant as she was to part with it, she had little choice but to pass responsibility for that investigation over to the mages. She had armour to make and precious little time to take on a task that could instead be done by a dozen teams of mage ants.
The metal was a more familiar material. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find after the encounter with the strange stone, but the steel was, as far as she could tell, inert. A relief. If the Legion managed to find some sort of living metal and learned to shape it, she might have despaired of the colony ever catching up to their craftsmanship.
The material was unknown to her, that much made sense. She could work at identifying and categorising the qualities, but it was unlikely she would be able to do more until they found an unprocessed sample for herself. Where her interest truly lay, and where she stood to gain the most from this investigation, was the techniques used rather than the materials.
And those techniques were, quite literally, next level. She was able to see what had been achieved but couldn’t picture how for the life of her. In reality, this metal wasn’t too much better than what the colony had access to, at least the raw material. Smithant theorised the processing and treatment applied to the ore was what resulted in the higher level of tensile strength and lighter weight. Which took what was a relatively small advantage in raw components and widened it significantly.