Chapter 332 - Crossbow
After finishing the items for the Tank Golem, Eisen moved on to work on the rest of the items for the Damage-Dealer Golem, with the exception of the hood, because he would be working on a special little piece of cloth for that later on.
So the first thing that Eisen had to make was a Crossbow that could be hidden inside of the Golem's arm. The structure of a crossbow was relatively simple, actually. It was basically just a small bow with a handle, even if it worked a little differently.
First, Eisen threw some steel into his forge, although it wasn't the steel that he regularly used. Instead, Eisen was now using 'Spring Steel', a specific type of steel that was able to easily return to their original shape despite significant bending or twisting, which was perfect for a crossbow.
Usually, while it was a very cheep and readily-available material, Steel in general was very heavy and as such tough to carry around with you or actually properly steadily hold to prepare for a shot. But considering that the Golem was completely made of Steel anyway, that wasn't an issue to begin with.
And on the other hand, due to the natural stiffness of steel, it was able to more easily store energy compared to other materials, allowing crossbows made of steel to be used with bolts with similar dimensions that a regular bow's arrows would offer.
When the Steel was hot enough to be forged, Eisen swiftly grabbed it out of the flames and began to hammer onto it, basically just shaping it into a long flat bar, although at this point Eisen had a choice to make.
Should he give the Golem a smaller compound crossbow, which would allow for quicker re-load speed but lower range and strenght, or should Eisen give it a recurve crossbow, which took a bit longer to handle and reload properly, but would end up giving the bolt a lot higher speed and strength.
And in the end, Eisen figured out which he should go for, although that would require a few changes to the initial plan.
At first, Eisen was planning on hollowing part of the arm out to create a place for a crossbow to be stored and then be pulled out, but instead, Eisen would do something a little different, which would end up saving him some time as well.
And that meant that he had to change a few things about the shape of the limbs, the parts at the front of the crossbow, to make them more ornamental. When Eisen was done with that, he grabbed the Damage-Dealer Golem's arm and swiftly began to work the metal a little bit, trying to 'carve' a little bit out of the lower arm, because he was going to simply turn the arm into the crossbow directly, instead of adding a crossbow to the arm.
Considering that the crossbow was directly part of the Golem's body, that meant that it was able to control it nearly perfectly anyway, and would be able to control the pull-back of the string and the release automatically.
Of course, that meant that Eisen had to remove one of the ornamental armor-plates on the lower arm, although he already had a good replacement for that. And the replacements were the limbs.
It would be visible that there was a split in the middle of the plate, but that didn't matter all that much in Eisen's opinion. The thing that mattered most was that they two 'plates' could properly switch to the 'limb' mode, which he did by making it possible for them to first twist by 90° across the surface of the arm, and then flip upward by 90° while setting themselves properly in place to be used.
To his luck, it seemed like the relatively simple system worked pretty easily, and the two plates couldn't be twisted until a small pin was removed from inside the turning-mechanism, which was only accessible from inside the actual arm, meaning that you could only activate it with abilities like transmutation or through the Golem itself.
And while making sure that Eisen was properly out of the way and couldn't be injured, he slowly used his mana to try and pull the pin a little bit back, immediately releasing the two limbs, making them basically spring forward into their proper position. "Alright, that works well enough, huh?" Eisen muttered to himself and moved the pin back to the spot it was before to make sure the bow would stay in place now as well.
Then, Eisen started to get to work on properly putting the string onto the crossbow, for which he would simply use the same string he would use for the cloth. String with a ratio of 1:1:1, of mana-crystal to steel to flame of the earth mythril. Eisen had to fiddle around with the spinning wheel he was using to make magic string before now to be able to put the three types of thread from the spinnerets inside of it and have the spinning wheel automatically twist it into string.
And Eisen then used that string for both the crossbow, and would then later turn it into some proper cloth to use. And after Eisen twisted one end of the string around one end of the limb and attached it there properly, pulled it through the pin that would be used to actually draw the crossbow, and then back around the end of the other limb, the old man pulled on the pin a few times to see if everything worked properly and then smiled.
"Alright, should be good." The old man muttered to himself and then swiftly used transmutation to pull back the small pin inside the twisting-mechanism to turn the limbs back into the simple ornamental plate, although he swiftly placed some of the wind-enchanted wind gems inside of those plates for later, and then moved on to the next item he would be making for the Damage-Dealer. The sword.
It would be a relatively simple straight longsword. It had a similar design to the sword that Eisen made for the Tank Golem, just a lot smaller.
And as Eisen was working on the blade, he once more used the folding-technique on the metal. The blade itself wasn't all that hard to create either, and since the handle was once more completely metallic as well, Eisen didn't need to switch to any other crafting skills but blacksmithing either, which also saved him a little bit of time.
Once Eisen set some fire-enchanted flame-gems into some parts of the blade, he then moved on and had to switch his crafting skill anyway, because he was now starting to make some leather bags and a quiver for the golem to keep some useable items like bolts in.
In and of itself, that didn't take long either, because Eisen only worked on the basic items for now, and would get to enchanting later when everything was done and he could concentrate on it properly.
The bags got some simple metal hooks as well to be able to be attached to the small holes in the sides of the Damage-Dealer's hips, before Eisen finally moved on to the last Golem, the Support-Golem.
And for that, Eisen stepped over to one container where he started infusing steel with Support-Elemental Mana before, in order to create materials for a proper staff.
It seemed like the Steel just barely reached Lowest-Grade, but even then, that was better than nothing, and because the staff was going to be made nearly completely of steel, it would be possible to simply remove the few gems and place the staff into an infuser to have it slowly rank up a bit more, because such things needed to be done with each individual material of an item.
But instead of using purely the Support-High-Steel, Eisen chose to intertwine it with another magic material, completely normal High-Steel, to make it possible for the Golem to cast other general spells more easily as well, ones that didn't necessarily have much to do with support.
And so, Eisen swiftly created the spear-like shape of the Staff and set the support-enchanted gems into it together with some regular mana-infused gems and crystals.
Just like that, Eisen finished nearly all of the different items for all the golems, and all that was needed to be done now was to add the steel-mythril-magic cloth to the Damage-Dealer and Support Golems and then enchant the bodies of the three golems. At last, Eisen would then just need to place the Golem Cores into their chests, and they would be finished!
So, Eisen quickly hurried and brought the large amount of the special string he had been preparing out of the dungeon. More specifically, Eisen made his way to the cloth-making machines and started to hook the rolls of string up to it. He didn't need much cloth anyway, so Eisen figured he could just wait for it to finish then and make sure that the machines could handle it properly.
And while he was doing that, it seemed like Brody had something he wanted to talk about. So of course, Eisen accepted the Demon happily. But while Brody slowly started to speak, Eisen could only notice something else… something that he hadn't seen at all from the Demon-Orc in front of him at all so far.
"Brody… Did you polish your horns?" Eisen asked with a light smile, and Brody looked up at the old man confused and surprised, before crossing his arms while fletching his teeth just so slightly.
"Yeah, and what if I did?" He replied, but Eisen simply shook his head with a chuckle. "Nothing, just that I would appreciate some tips of how to take care of my own demon-form horns later then. But sorry, I didn't hear what you said until now, can you start again?" The old man asked with a laugh as he moved his fingers through his beard, and Brody replied with a sigh.
"To sum it up, we all are acting weird as fuck." He pointed out, and Eisen looked down at Brody confused.
"What do you mean? How are we acting weird?" The Giant-Dwarf inquired, and Brody replied with another deep sigh.
"I only noticed through meditation myself, because it lets me concentrate pretty well, but didn't ya notice it yet? The thing Xenia started doin' with her ears, me carin' for some dumb horns, some of the stuff that Evalia sketched is from the wastelands even if she couldn't know about it, and Jyuuk suddenly does some really weird stuff with the souls and his monsters. Nothin' inhuman, ya know, just stuff that doesn't seem logical from the way he acted 'till now. And most importantly, you." Brody started, and Eisen looked at him with a frown, trying to figure out what he meant.
"You're definitely not 'roleplayin'. You might think you're doin' that, but ya ain't. Ya keep talkin' about shit that supposedly happened in this world even if ya couldn't know about it, and you know how to do shit suddenly without any logic behind it. Like with the Mana-String." Brody pointed out, but Eisen looked back at him and started to feel slightly dizzy all of a sudden, while Brody continued to speak.
"And to be honest… That idea you had seems to make a lot more sense the more I think about it." Brody explained, and then scratched his head confused. "To be honest, I'm startin' to get some weird dreams as well, ya know? They ain't nearly as vibrant as the ones you spoke about, but I sometimes just end up in some wasteland-area… I heard that I was the second to peak, and maybe…" After a few moments, Brody's speech seemed to slow down and then just stopped completely, and he just stared forward for a few moments, and at the same time, the same happened to Eisen as well.
And now, there was something that Eisen couldn't really ignore in the corner of his sight, although he still couldn't recognize what exactly was written on it.
But what Eisen could tell was, that it was a blood-red notification.