Ingvald’s attention focused on the Type-1a’s spitzer nose right away, and just as quickly as he took it in hand, he muttered: “As softer main body with a hard, narrow penetrator in the middle. Yes, I can make this. Dragonsteel core, soft starmetal projectile body.”

He looked up at Zel again.

“I could simply tie the return destination to your Tablet and fashion a proxy fog vortex generator artifact so you don’t have to have the big thing out all the time. It will be a trinket about yay wide that you can hang off of your belt,” he said, measuring out around five centimeters with his fingers. He continued: “And tell Jorfr to visit me. I wish to see what became of Serpentkiller; I was, after all, the one who gave it that form. And I feel regret for not being able to work on something of his besides… Perhaps some starmetal armor…”

Despite everything, Zel didn’t feel like she was making a demand of Ingvald. He was the one in a position of power in this negotiation; they had no choice as to whether he would make things from the leftover dragonsteel, the Forgehand was merely being gracious by letting them choose. Were she given a true choice, Zelsys would have taken some back with her… But she knew better than to make that suggestion.

When they departed Ingvald’s forge, he stopped them on the way out, clearly having just remembered: “Oh, and the new chassis for one of your motorbikes is finished; I let the boy use starmetal for all the bits that demanded cold-iron, so it ought to run better, control tighter, so on. I wagered you would want to pick it up, given that the journey to Eldartha would take you days by sled.”

He was right, though Zel had some doubts as to whether using a sturmgandr would be the best idea for such a journey. The Butcher’s instability had been somewhat rectified, so shaving a day or two off of her travel time was no longer a top priority. Moreover, sleds had a distinct advantage over sturmgandrs; the beasts that pulled them could take her back to Oasis City on their own. That alone made them a serious consideration when the possibility of becoming incapacitated by Eldartha’s trials was at play.

All these things did nothing to lessen the impact of first laying eyes upon the glorious beast which now housed her sturmgandr’s engine. The young blacksmith looked utterly manic as he wheeled it out from behind his workshop, he had several substantial arc burns, and clearly hadn’t gotten any sleep… And the reason for all those was absolutely magnificent. It was somehow even more monstrously massive than the original, easily large enough to accommodate three people as well as a decently sized back trunk over the rear wheel. Its most eyecatching feature had to be the miniature metal mammoth-skull at its front, the headlights blazing in its eye sockets. Real mammoth tusks swept down from it, protecting the front wheel on the sides and protruding frontward as rams. They were elaborately inlaid and capped with blued starmetal, thus reinforcing them. The young blacksmith assured her that they were just whittled-down material from an adult animal, and not taken from a juvenile, so they wouldn’t break easily. Zel of course had no way to know that a juvenile mammoth’s tusks were brittle by comparison to those of an adult.

“I took the liberty of tuning it to maximize power output and efficiency with the new center of mass. It screams down the road like nothing else, so it does. It ought to be able to survive however far you push it now, short of something sufficient to just detonate the engine,” he said, patting the monstrous bike.

Everything about it was handmade, and everything was utterly perfect.

“How was it to work with? As far as I know Borea has no direct analogue to this technology,” Zel asked.

He laughed.

“The manual made me wonder how we haven’t come up with this kind of thing centuries ago. Guess there’s been no pressure when beasts of burden more than suffice. The bears down south are something like… Smaller than this thing, no?”

“They’re also generally not smart enough to speak,” Zefaris grinned in response.

“Ah, right,” he nodded. A manic glint - or, at least, one even more manic than before - shone in his eyes. “I’ve never left Borea, you understand. Perhaps I ought to go a-viking after this, see what I might learn from the great smiths of Grekuria and Kargaria…”

“Unless you’re a monster like Ingvald, I would suggest building yourself a means of defense first. Perhaps a sturmgandr that can transform into tank suit-like armour,” Zel thought aloud, only to furrow her brow at the thought as she saw her words sink into the young smith’s head. The cogs spun behind his eyes, trying to collate incomplete information; he had no way to know of how tank suits functioned.

“I would be most glad to do such a thing, but… Know you of where I might learn more about these tank suits? I’ve heard tales of them, of the demonic vampire-armor Bloody Zero and the holy crusader of Iusticia, Chalybes Pontifex, but only as myth. Myth shan’t suffice as sufficient basis for artifice, not for me - my skills are not yet so advanced I’m afraid.”

Zefaris stared a hole into the side of Zel’s head, tacitly pushing her to take responsibility for her own words. Zel not-at-all-reluctantly offered up aid, feeling indebted for services rendered: “We can take you with us on our return trip south, or arrange for you to have a place in the caravan which is to make the journey some time after our departure. The home city of my sect also happens to be the foremost in the development of new tank suits, and I’m sure that with some leverage I can ensure that you receive tank suit mechanic training. Assuming you would be able and willing to undertake such a journey, of course.”