“You will hear no objections from me,” Zel said.

“Good! So just to ensure we are all on the same page: You have a dying spirit weapon, and young Jorfr requested that I consider aiding you in saving its life. I shall expect appropriate payment, of course. You have ideas as to what the reforged cleaver will look like, yes?”

“I had a few possible designs. Did Jorfr mention it, or did you guess?”

The blacksmith laughed, shaking his head: “It’s only to be expected, I’ve had even the most pragmatic fighters imaginable go off on me for deviating from their specs without telling them - and I’m talking miniscule design changes to account for the customer’s lackluster understanding of what you can do with metalwork. I’ve learned to just assume that my customers have very specific ideas as to what their equipment should look like, and to make it very clear if I wish to make even a small change.”

Long before they had even arrived in Borea, Zel had already run through ten-dozen different design variations for the Butcher’s repaired form. Some were small permutations of its form during the Blue Moon War, others were vast departures based on various different blades she’d seen and tried in her search for a temporary replacement. At the end of it all, she had circled back around to a form factor largely similar to the original, possessing a sawtooth back edge, a concave-curved chopping edge, and a beaked protuberance near the front.

That form factor, however, had been conceived months ago, before she had even created the Arcline technique or recreated the Storm-conqueror’s Mantle. It was outdated before it could even see the light of day - a more flexible, futureproof design would be necessary, one that could fully benefit from Arcline and any of its inevitable future evolutions. A substantial, particularly egotistical part of Zelsys wholeheartedly wished to grasp the realm of flying swords and wrench it into a shape entirely unique to herself. She wished to have the reach to truly cut a mountain if it ever came down to it.

“As I said, I had a few possible designs, but I’ve gotten some ill-advised delusions as to what I can do with my weapon since then,” she said with a grin. “I would draft a new one right here, if you don’t mind.”

The smith smiled, encouraging her: “No, no, be my guest. I can share my own drafting tools if you would like, I even have a LAAD machine.”

“...A what?” she raised an eyebrow.

“Logic Automaton Assisted Design, it’s this big table with armatures and projection glyphs, all sorts of fancy stuff. Helps with mundane aspects of design and glyphwork, indispensable for working with the absolute gobbledygook that some essentech has on the inside. I barely use it but it’s great when I need it.”

“Right. You have experience working with essentech, then?”

“Some. I usually leave it to my assistant - he’s not here at the moment, had to send him down to replace a pipe segment. Why, need some fancy gadget fixed, too?”

“Three of them, and less fixed than rebuilt altogether. Take a look at the blueprint section in the back,” Zel said, retrieving her copy of the Sturmgandr manual. Ingvald took it in hand, flipping through for a few moments before skipping to the suggested spot. His eyes widened and eyebrows rose, half in surprise and half in curiosity.

“I have all of the crucial components in Fog Storage - engine blocks, Thunderchargers, all the guts more or less. Can you build three new chassis for them?”

“Given the amount of stuff that’ll need to get made, not really… But I know some folks who can, I’ll give you a reference to them when you leave here,” he said, handing back the tome. “What I can make for you are the parts to resurrect your weapon, as we were discussing earlier, but I can do no more. You will have to perform the final Rite of Reforged Rebirth, and shoulder the strain that comes with it - we can speak more on that matter later. Now, you wanted to draft the new design for it, no? Come, I have the LAAD machine in the back.”

He glanced over to her companions, somewhat less enthusiastically uttering: “...You may come as well, though there is a great tavern just down the road if you would rather not.”

The room which he led them to was functionally empty save for the LAAD table and a second, smaller table covered in empty tankards and the rings created by their contents spilling over.

Two hours passed. Zel had spent one hour figuring out how to use the LAAD machine. It was, indeed, just a bulky drafting table with tool armatures and projection glyphs, all the arcane and rather loud machinery hidden in its base. A control handle facilitated direct mental control, making much of the operation intuitive so long as she focused on it. Not only did it allow her to draw out the silhouette of something as a projection, it let her rotate it and add in three dimensions.

Zel spent another half-hour reconstructing various objects in an effort to get a good feel for the process before moving onto the Butcher’s relatively complex design. At this point, Vic and Jorfr slinked off to that tavern Ingvald had mentioned. Zef soon followed in their stead, though Zelsys felt that it was probably because the blonde wanted to keep an eye on the redhead.

Two more hours passed, with Ingvald watching intently the whole time. He only asked her one question, right after she had made the first model, which was a replica of the Butcher’s unbroken shape during the Blue Moon War.

“Your weapon was a Captain’s Cleaver and that was the shape it took?”

“Not exactly, but the overall layout was there the first time, yes,” she said, quickly sketching out a second outline to give him an idea of the cleaver’s shape when she first picked it up.

Zel could draw up the Butcher’s base shape in a few minutes even in three dimensions, but she kept iterating on it time and time again with a specific goal in mind: A blade that could at-will split into seven segments and be used as a whip with assistance from Arcline. Its silhouette was designed to facilitate such use; gone was the large, heavy front end, replaced by a single segment that made up the hooked beak at the cleaver’s very tip. The overall cleaver’s inner edge would have a concave curve, while the spine would be perfectly straight to best facilitate the cleaver’s sawteeth.

Then came the key design aspect - how exactly the cleaver would be segmented, and the alterations to its cutting edge that would be made to accommodate the feature. Zelsys made no changes to the model for a solid twenty minutes while she stood stone-still, deep in thought.

Slowly, she retreated into her mindscape, and there the Primordial Self made a suggestion that would prove key to the Butcher's new form…