This led the carver to further believe that there were far better suits of armour out there. She refused to believe that a force as formidable as this Legion didn’t have access to ore that far surpassed this.
The other key advantage was in the way their smiths had worked the final metal. Although she couldn’t completely reverse engineer the techniques used in the forging, she was able to analyse the final result. Then she could try and make educated guesses as to the process that had been used. If she were successful in her work, she might be rewarded with a significant amount of experience toward her Smithing Skill. At the very least, it was going to be a great benefit to the colony to gain some insight into how some of the best out there made their armour.
In terms of unlocking the benefits to their enchanting methods, she was even further behind in that department. Although she worked hard on her enchanting Skills, it was her secondary profession, so she wasn’t the highest Level in the colony by a long shot. She’d have to bring in a few experts to help break down that tangled web.
But all of that wouldn’t require the use of this many suits. The colony had seized over ten full sets, it would be a waste for it to collect dust in her collection—though she longed for it, she couldn’t condone the inefficiency. She couldn’t replicate these materials, or their techniques, but what she could do was hack these suits apart and cobble them back together to the best of her ability. It would be a pretty nasty piece of patchwork, and splicing together the enchantments would be an absolute nightmare, but she was fairly confident she could get it to work. The only question was, who out there was in need of the worst-best armour the colony had to offer?
114. Suiting up
The giant gorilla shifted uncomfortably as Smithant crawled over him, taking measurements with her antennae and trying to work out the best way she could cobble the armour she had onto his massive frame.
Tiny, for his part, suffered through it as best he could. Naturally, his preference would be to smash the stupid sword-people’s faces in, but he’d been ordered to come all the way up to the nest by his Master, and so he had no choice but to do so.
In his own opinion, the previous fight had been a magnificent success. Much face was smashed, many blows landed upon the enemy. Tiny had punched until his fists bled and wrists cracked, the rage within him all but spent. Yet the Master was more concerned with ‘near fatal wounds’ and ‘catastrophic loss of blood,’ things Tiny didn’t deem nearly as important. Still, the Master had heard that there might be a powerful set of armour on offer and so now here he was.
Antennae tippy-tapped on his arm, and he dutifully raised it to allow the ant to measure his arms and shoulders.
It was a good thing the colony managed to haul so many suits back from the battlefield, Smithant reflected, since there were only so many pieces that would be useable in this reconstruction, and she had a heck of a lot of surface area to cover.
The rest of the ants in attendance watched from the sidelines, anxious for the outcome. The pets raised by the eldest had achieved a strange sort of status amongst the colony. They weren’t ants, obviously, but they were still accepted as part of the family. In a sense, they were an extension of the eldest, and therefore deserving of some measure of the respect reserved for that august individual.
The colony stepped carefully and deferentially around Tiny as he sat and sulked during the extended measuring session. In truth, it took hours to complete since Smithant constantly moved back and forth, fetching sections of armour from her workshop and using her mandibles to hold them against Tiny to check their fit.
Gradually, the shape of what she would need to make began to take shape in the mind of the carver. It wasn’t going to be pretty, and it certainly wasn’t going to be something like a full suit of armour, but it was going to provide a lot more protection than fur and skin. With the rough outline complete, she got to work.
Back in her workshop, watched over by the ever-paranoid eyes of the scouts clinging to the roof, she began the arduous task of making the cuts necessary to separate the armour. Hours of painful and careful work followed. She had to cut the armour without weakening it as much as possible, easier said than done. She also had to keep in mind the chunks of inscribed, enchanted runes and what she would need to change and modify to create a working network of her own.
Several of her helpers came to hold pieces and manoeuvre the sections, which helped speed things along remarkably. As the hours progressed, more and more of her team piled into her workspace to assist on the project. Eventually, they were forced to take a wall down to accommodate them all as they worked in a frenzy.
Sections were cut, compared, recut, straps added, bindings tied, and pieces layered over each other in a thousand different combinations.
After a few hours, a trio of high-Level enchanters arrived to study the armour, and within a minute, had been swept into the project. Along with Smithant, they studied the intricate rune script engraved on the armour, large sections of which they couldn’t interpret.
The process of rewriting and editing the runes was a mammoth one, and the ants set to it with gusto, forming a separate team working alongside the first. It was hectic work, but the ants felt their Skill Levels rising rapidly, not stopping until the final product began to take shape.
As pure ant artisans and crafters, it hurt their sensibilities to send out something as rough as what they made. It was crude, a hodgepodge of bits and pieces taken from far finer work, but it functioned. The enchantment matrix might spark a little bit—metaphorically—but it did the job. Despite how rough it was, due to the excellence of the source materials, there was little question that it was the best armour the colony had produced to date.
When Tiny put it on, Smithant couldn’t help but think he looked that much more… eager.
The armour was spotty in places, but it did a good job of covering his chest, shoulders and belly. It was a mismatch of stone and metal plating strapped together and heavily padded underneath with cloth and leather. For the most part, they hadn’t been able to cover his arms and legs, aside from some plating covering the front of his legs.
The hardest piece of work by far had been the helmet. In order to make it, they’d been forced to break apart nearly fifteen of the human head protectors and splice them together in order to fit over Tiny’s much, much, much thicker skull. The final result was enormously heavy and far from the best fit, but it added needed protection to the face zone.
When the armour was at last assembled and strapped on, Tiny rolled his shoulders and swung his arms a few times before grunting in satisfaction. It was uncomfortable and weighed him down, but there was something about the heft to the slabs of metal and stone that he found quite satisfying. More than that, with his task of getting armour completed, he was free to rejoin his master.
His greatest hope was that his new equipment would prevent him from being sent away from the fighting again. He’d lost so much smashing time.