Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - Delivery & Whispers
Pneumatic pressure hissed from the br45 Delivery & Whispers
Pneumatic pressure hissed from the brass intake valves of
Terminal 41, rattling the heavy iron floor plates beneath
Kae’s worn boots.Noon on
Day 26 was loud in the underground transit hubs.
Steam pipes groaned overhead, and automated courier bots zipped back and forth along ceiling rails, dropping sealed lead canisters into encrypted storage chutes.Kae stood wedged in the dark shadow of a concrete support pillar, her charcoal hoodie pulled all the way over her eyes.
She hadn’t slept in thirty hours.
Her throat felt raspy, her left nostril was still dry with crusty, dried blood from the
Star-Alloy furnace blowout, and her fingers trembled slightly as she pressed her thumb against the vault’s biometric verification pad.PING.— INFINITE FORGE :
ESCROW RELEASE —TRANSACTION ID: 00-ALPHA-SPECIALAMOUNT RECEIVED: +10,000 ACADEMIC MERITS TOTAL MERIT BALANCE: 12,295 MERITSThe blue light from her wrist-comm washed over her smudged glasses.Ten thousand merits.
It was sitting in her account, fully cleared by the
Command’s automated escrow server.
Kae let out a long, shuddering breath, her shoulders sagging in sheer, exhausted relief.
Star-Alloy war-axe was out of her hands, sliding down pneumatic
Line 00-ALPHA toward its classified destination, and her workshop wasn’t on fire.She didn’t linger to admire the numbers.
Pulling her sleeves over her palms, she turned on her heel and shuffled quickly toward the residential lift, eager to collapse onto her mattress for twelve straight hours.Thirty yards above the public intake hub, behind a thick pane of one-way, reinforced observation glass, a tall officer in a dark blue
Command tunic stood with his hands clasped behind his back.Captain
Vance—senior commander of the
Division and father to
Cassia—didn’t blink as he watched the small, hooded figure in the oversized hoodie fade into the crowd of cadets near the lift doors.”She didn’t even check the vault receipt,” Vance murmured, his voice deep and gravelly, carrying the quiet authority of a man who had commanded dreadnoughts through the
Rim. “She dropped an
SSS-tier weapon into a pneumatic chute like it was a dry laundry bag.”Beside him, an automated security drone whirred softly, its green optical scanner tracking the progress of the heavy lead-lined canister moving through the facility’s lower pneumatic line.”Canister delivered to
Captain,” the drone’s synthesized voice reported. “Escrow authorization complete.”Vance turned away from the glass, his heavy leather boots clicking crisply against the floorboards as he walked down the private stairs into the vault’s restricted testing bay.The room was built like a battleship bunker.
Reinforced tungsten walls, four-inch-thick blast doors, and a central hydraulic test bench equipped with heavy-duty diagnostic lasers.
Sitting on the steel bench in the center of the bay was the lead container
Kae had dispatched ten minutes ago.Vance unlatched the heavy brass locks himself.The lid swung open.Even in the harsh, white fluorescent lights of the testing bay, the four-foot war-axe looked like a tear in the fabric of the room.
The void-black
Star-Alloy body drank the overhead light, while the razor-thin, violet-green fluid channels running along the crescent edge pulsed with a faint, ominous luminescence.Vance didn’t put on handling gloves.
He reached down and gripped the wrapped hilt with his bare hand.A sharp, electric shock of pure psionic resonance ran up his forearm.
The axe didn’t feel heavy; it felt impossibly solid, as if the gravity around his fist had suddenly tightened into a single, dense point.”Remarkable,” Vance grunted under his breath.He walked over to the hydraulic test rig.
Mounted in the steel clamps was a six-inch slab of battleship-grade
Dread-Chitin armor plate—salvaged directly from an
Vexid hive mother.
Standard military plasma saws took twenty minutes to burn through an inch of it.Vance raised the black war-axe with one arm and brought the crescent edge down in a clean, effortless arc.THUD-SLIT.There was no deafening explosion.
No shower of blinding sparks.
No screech of tearing metal.The pitch-black blade passed through six inches of battleship chitin and the three-inch steel test bench beneath it, splitting both cleanly in two before stopping an inch from the concrete floor.The cut edges of the chitin plate didn’t burn or smoke.
They were polished as smooth as glass, the microscopic fluid channels in the
Star-Alloy having neutralized the bio-armor’s internal density instantly upon contact.Vance stared at the split test bench for six long seconds.
He checked the diagnostic console on his wrist.— IMPACT DIAGNOSTIC —BLADE STRESS: 0.00%THERMAL DRIFT:
NONEMICRO-FRACTURE DETECTION:
ZEROSTRUCTURAL BREACH EFFICIENCY: 99.8%A slow, grim smile spread across the old captain’s face.He set the black war-axe back in its velvet-lined case, pulled up his high-level
Command terminal, and entered his private flagship authorization code.He opened the academy’s internal network directory, navigated to the encrypted node named
Forge, and attached a top-secret classification lock to its digital registry.— ASTRAEA HIGH COMMAND CLASSIFICATION —NODE:
THE INFINITE FORGE [ENCRYPTED]STRATEGIC ASSET LEVEL:
SSS-PRIORITYFLEET PROTECTION DIRECTIVE:
ACTIVEACTION:
MONITORED / PROTECTED / DO NOT INTERFERE”Whoever you are, little engineer,” Captain
Vance muttered softly, closing his terminal as he locked the lead case shut, “you’re not just making toys for freshmen anymore.”