Ch. 25 Experimental alloys
The work continued on multiple fronts. Févre was busy testing the new hammer Jaune made for him and despite the rough edges, the tool was performing admirably. Unfortunately, as Cobalt quickly found out, enhancing the strike with aura was costly.
While Cobalt had his aura unlocked for most of his life, he wasn't a trained huntsman. His aura capacity was smaller than a Signal trainee and while it was enough to use his semblance and enhance his strength, it took a lot out of him to activate the gravity dust alloy.
An experienced aura user would be able to pull their aura from the tool efficiently but Cobalt let a lot of it dissipate. Overall, he had enough for ten or so good blows before feeling his aura diminish. Though that was enough for a skilled craftsman like Cobalt Févre. A well placed strike could move a lot of material in one go.
Jaune meanwhile had little issue hammering away on his new project. His aura control wasn't perfect either, but due to a combination of ridiculously large aura capacity and his semblance enhancing his understanding of Percusio Gravi, the huntsman could keep up the work for days. Or rather until he needed to sleep.
As for Ruby she was currently scribbling down a third set of calculations. The metal Jaune was working right now was quickly softening under his blows, or to be more accurate it was liquifying, the molten metal splashing against his aura.
They were currently trying to apply the process Ruby perfected with gravity dust and apply it to other kinds of dust. Specifically burn and electric, the two most commonly used types of dust.
Not that they were having much success with burn. Despite the copious amounts of stabilising agents, the dust still activated when working the metal.
Jaune scraped the molten metal off the anvil before it started solidifying again.
It was time to try again, this time with electric.
=O=O=O=
Another failure. The dust burned out and all they were left with was a hunk of mundane metal.
"I don't get it, this should have worked. Crescent Rose doesn't have this problem after years of use."
"Goes to show how special the alloy you came up with is. Though I guess it's to be expected. Both burn and electric are way more volatile than gravity."
"But we compensated for that. The stabiliser should have prevented the activation on the first try, and five ingots later and all we've proven is that above certain amounts of stabiliser the dust just separates from the metal instead of alloying."
"And that burn dust's partial activation is enough to liquify the steel."
"It shouldn't have activated in the first place!"
"How about we try something else. How about we try a damascus pattern?"
"What, like combining two metals by folding and stretching?"
"Yeah! Here's the thought, we increase the initial amount of electric dust and weld it with a different metal, the partial activation of the dust will still happen but if we use a high dust alloy to weld with the electric alloy the inert dust should be able to contain it for a while. The forging process will remove some of the dust and stabiliser but it shouldn't matter if we put in enough and hopefully should allow us to shape the metal for long enough to make something."
"Do you think it'll work?"
"Don't know, working elemental dust into alloys is an unexplored frontier, so a solid maybe."
"I wish we had more time to work on this."
"We still have all of today to get it right."
"Don't you mean tomorrow?"
"It's after midnight so… today."
Ruby pulled out her scroll to look at the time and her eyes widened.
"...oh no! We forgot to message Ren and Nora!"
"They'll be fine, mom already all but adopted them. Same with my sisters. If anything I'd worry about the older sisters being a bad influence on Nora. Particularly Lily."
"Still we said we'd let them know if we stayed the night."
"Ok, maybe we should text them before we continue." conceded Jaune.
As Ruby started typing out a message to their friends, Jaune looked over her notes. There were upper limits to how much additives they could put into the elemental alloy and it would take some time to prepare the ingot of high dust alloy to weld it with, but Jaune was silently confident it was a step in the right direction.
=O=O=O=
Ruby watched Jaune as he pulled the welded ingot from the forge. The ingot glowed with both heat and the barely stable dust. Jaune looked at Ruby, her eyes looked almost amber as the glow that illustrated the smithy reflected from her silver eyes.
Jaune wasted no time and started drawing out the ingot on the anvil. The ingot got longer with each strike of his hammer and soon it was long enough to fold over. Heperiodically reheated the ingot in the forge, but as he worked the metal the stabiliser slowly but surely scaled off along with the other impurities.
Every time Jaune's hammer fell upon the ingot sparks of electricity arced from it. Each strike lit up the workshop in a flash of lightning, the arcs getting progressively longer, reaching for any metal in the vicinity.
Ruby watched the whole process with a keen eye. This might have been their first taste of success since they started this experiment, but it was still just a proof of concept. This wasn't going to be a weapon or a tool, just a test. And that meant she had to take note of every little detail to make sure nothing got overlooked.
Jaune felt it was time to stop forging the piece. He drew out the ingot into a rod and forged the ends into a pointed tip. The metal felt right under his tools, but that didn't mean they succeeded in doing what they set out to do.
Jaune quenched half of the metal rod and small sparks of lightning arced through the steam. They were in the home stretch, all that was left to do was to try sharpening the metal and seeing how well the damascus steel handled aura and what effect the dust would provide the tool.
Jaune started the process of grinding the tip of the rod down to a fine point. It wasn't quite as bad as the high dust alloy he was used to working with since a lot of the dust was spent during the forging, but the metall was still brittle.
The quenched side was… well it wasn't great. Without aura the high dust alloy just flaked off and the electric alloy kept sparking up as he tried to take material off. Eventually, when he was down to one of the finer belts, he finally managed to sharpen the tip into a proper spike.
The other side of the tool was fairing a bit better. It was less flaky and had less issues with the rougher belts. In exchange though it was harder to sharpen into a point. Once the tip got thin enough the metal would rather bend than get any thinner when pressed against the belt grinder. That was fine though, it was to be expected.
As the forge cooled down, Jaune noticed that it wasn't as dark as when they started. Unlike the previous ingots, this one didn't fail right away. They had worked for hours on this piece and the sky outside was getting brighter. Unfortunately it was overcast, so even though the sun was coming up the morning was dark and grey.
"Looks like rain. We might want to take a boat back to Noreia."
"Yeah…"
Whatever it was Ruby was about to say, she was interrupted by an involuntary yawn. Ruby did her best to stay alert during the forging process, but unlike Jaune she didn't get to keep her body busy. She was about to fall asleep and Jaune noticed that.
"Maybe we should take a nap before we continue testing."
Ruby was struggling to keep her eyes open. Now that the loud and flashy part was over the allnighter was getting to her.
=O=O=O=
Ruby woke up to the pitipater of raindrops against the window. She was laying in bed cuddled up to her boyfriend with only a vague recollection of them both collapsing from exhaustion.
She found herself in Jaune's bed for the second time ever and was admittedly a little upset that it was exhaustion that brought her here. Not that she didn't like being here, she just wished she took the step herself rather than having circumstances make the decision for her.
She was hyping herself up for this ever since the possibility of sleeping over in the smithy came up, but in the excitement of the previous day she pretty much forgot about the sleeping arrangements until she was too tired to care.
The room was quite a bit cooler than the workshop was last night. The rain provided a nice background noise and the clouds made sure that it wasn't too bright.
There was a feeling that she was forgetting about something though right now she was too comfortable to think about much of anything. In the end though she decided to make the most of the situation. She cuddled up to the source of warmth that was Jaune and went back to sleep.
It wasn't until Jaune awoke some time later and she woke up properly that she realised what that nagging feeling she had was.
She was still wearing clothes from yesterday and thanks to working by the hot forge for hours on end she felt gross and sticky from the dry sweat.
A shower was in order as well as a change of clothes.
=O=O=O=
After refreshing themselves and greeting Cobalt in the workshop they went outside. It had stopped raining some time ago, though the ground was still muddy.
Jaune held the pointy metal rod in his hands, since it was the reason they went outside.
The dust in the alloy was volatile enough when they worked with it in the forge and there was no reason to risk breaking something with a stray lightning bolt.
"Are you ready to do this?"
"Yes… you might want to back up a bit more though. Just in case…"
"It can't be that bad, I'm already like fifteen metres away."
"Make it at least twenty."
"Fine… okay, you can begin."
Jaune nodded and focused on his aura. He started slow. Slowly letting a trickle of his aura to seep into the metal rod.
He could feel his semblance reacting to it. The sharp poker seemed to count as a weapon, but that wasn't what Jaune was after. This wasn't something he intended to add to his Arsenal.
Soon he could feel what he was looking for. Hair on his arms stood up as a static charge built up in the rod. Strangely it didn't seem to flow through his aura, the electric charge simply building up in the metal.
Slowly he increased the aura flow and kept going until a bolt of miniature lightning jumped from the bolt to the ground.
Startled by the flash and loud zap sound he nearly dropped the rod.
He stopped adding aura and inspected the material. It didn't seem any different but perhaps some of the dust has been spent. So far it looked good though. No visible chipping and the tip from which the lightning bolt came wasn't even hot.
"It looks fine… Do you think I should go all out and see if it holds up?"
"I don't know Jaune, thas seems kinda dangerous…"
"The electricity doesn't seem to want to go through my aura so I should be fine. What's the worst that could happen? I get hit by lightning from the sky?"
"I mean… yeah, that is probably as bad as it could get… So you're sure it's fine?"
"I'm positive that I won't die…"
"Jaune…"
Ruby pinched the bridge of her nose as she shook her head. He could be such a child sometimes. Then again, that was one of the reasons she liked him.
"Fine, but if you get hurt I'm never going to let you hear the end of it."
Jaune grinned wildly as he raised the rod to the sky and let loose. His aura flowed through his arms and into the electric dust alloy. Where before he limited it to a trickle, this time he actively pushed as much as he could.
There was about a second of silence as the rod glowed a pale yellow before a blinding flash of light announced the deafening boom of a lightningstrike.
Jaune could feel the electricity snake down his aura and into the ground. The rod was now glowing red hot but he could still feel the remaining static charge that made small arcs of electricity jump along the metal.
"Whooo! I feel like a comic book superhero!"
Shouted Jaune, much to the dismay of Ruby and the few people who witnessed the lightning.
Eventually Ruby just smiled wryly and came over to Jaune to examine both him and the metal rod for damage.
=O=O=O=
Author's note:
Can you guess what weapon is going to be electric? I'll give you a hint, it ain't gonna be a hammer.
As a side note, I'm currently house sitting for my family while they went on vacation and it has been raining for literally several days nonstop. The dog literally went outside, turned around and was like "NOPE!"
We went from a borderline drought to flood rain... the weather is whack these days.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed and are looking forward to the next chapter: Ch. 26 Bloodlines and legacies