The Imperial Armory Forge of Iron Bastion smelled of stale coal smoke, burnt bone meal, and atrocious heat inefficiency. Inside the cavernous stone hall, forty muscular apprentices were stripped to the waist, their skin slick with sweat as they heaved on massive leather bellows. The roar of the flames was ear-splitting, yet the heat spreading was a textbook disaster.
At the main anvil stood Forge Master Ouyang, a 2-Star Blacksmith Master whose leather apron was scorched black by thirty years of flying embers. He held a glowing red sword blade in heavy iron tongs. He hammered it with wild, arrhythmic blows while shouting curses at his exhausted apprentices.
CLANG! CLANG! PSSSSSHT!
Ouyang plunged the red blade into a wooden barrel of stale well water. A thick cloud of acrid, rotten-egg steam rose into the stuffy rafters. When Ouyang pulled the blade out, Frank winced. The edge had warped three tiny fractions of an inch to the left. A web of hairline heat shock cracks spiderwebbed across the ricasso.
“Seventy percent martensite with zero ductility,” Frank remarked, leaning against the timber doorframe. “You’ve got steam blankets forming against the steel during the cool, creating nearby soft spots. That sword will snap like a dry pretzel the moment it hits an insect back shell.”
