Chapter 646 - Suiting Up (Patreon)

The giant gorilla shifted uncomfortably as Smithant crawled over him, taking measurements with her antennae and trying to work out the best way she could cobble the armour she had onto his massive frame.

Tiny, for his part, suffered through it as best he could. Naturally, his preference would be to smash the stupid sword people's faces in, but he'd been ordered to come all the way up to the nest by his Master and so he had no choice but to do so. In his own opinion, the previous fight had been a magnificent success. Much face was smashed, many blows landed upon the enemy. Tiny had punched until his fists bled and wrists cracked, the rage within him all but spent. Yet the Master was more concerned with 'near fatal wounds' and 'catastrophic loss of blood', things that Tiny didn't deem nearly as important. Still, the master had heard that there might be powerful set of armour on offer and so now here he was.

Antennae tippy-tap on his arm and he dutifully raises it to allow the ant to measure his arms and shoulders.

It's a good thing the Colony managed to haul so many suits back from the battlefield, Smithant reflected, since there were only so many pieces that would be useable in this reconstruction and she had a heck of a lot of surface are to cover. The rest of the ants in attendance watched from the sidelines, slightly anxious for the outcome. The pets raised by the Eldest had achieved a strange sort of status amongst the Colony. They weren't ants, obviously, but they were still accepted as part of the family. In a sense they were an extension of the Eldest, and therefore deserving of some measure of the respect reserved for that august individual.

So the Colony stepped carefully and deferentially around Tiny as he sat and sulked during the extended measuring session. In truth, it took hours to complete since Smithant constantly moved back and forth, fetching sections of armour from her workshop and using her mandibles to hold them against Tiny to check their fit.

Gradually, the picture of what she would need to make began to take shape in the mind of the carver. It wasn't going to pretty, and it certainly wasn't going to be something like a full suit of armour, but it was going to provide a lot more protection than fur and skin. With the rough outline complete, she got to work.

Back in her workshop, watched over by the ever paranoid eyes of the scouts clinging to the roof, she began the arduous task of making the cuts necessary to separate the armour into the pieces she would need. Hours of painful, slow and careful work followed. She had to cut the armour without weakening it as much as possible, easier said than done. She also had to keep in mind the chunks of enchanted runes inscribed in the armour and what she would need to change and modify to create a working network of her own.

Several of her helpers came to hold pieces and manoeuvre the sections for her, which helped speed things along remarkably. As the hours progressed, more and more of team piled into her workspace to assist on the project. Eventually they were forced to take a wall down to accommodate them all as they worked in a frenzy. Sections were cut, compared, recut, straps added, bindings tied and pieces layered over each other in a thousand different combinations. After a few hours, a trio of high level enchanters arrived to study the armour and within a minute had been swept into the project. Along with Smithant, they studied the intricate rune script engraved on the armour, large sections of which they couldn't interpret.

The process of snipping, rewriting and editing the runes was a mammoth one and the ants set to it with gusto, forming a separate team working alongside the first. It was hectic work, but the ants felt their Skill levels rising rapidly as they continued, not stopping until the final product began to take shape.

As pure ant artisans and crafters, it hurt their sensibilities to send out something as rough as what they finally made. It was crude, a hodgepodge of bits and pieces taken from far finer work, but it functioned. The enchantment matrix might spark a little bit (metaphorically) but it did the job. Despite how rough it was, due to the excellence of the source materials, there was little question that it was the best armour the Colony had produced to date.

When Tiny put it on, Smithant couldn't help but think he looked that much more… eager.

The armour was spotty in places, but it did a good job of covering his chest, shoulders and belly. It was a mismatch of stone and metal plating strapped together and heavily padded underneath with cloth and leather. For the most part, they hadn't been able to cover his arms and legs, aside from some plating covering the front of his legs.

The hardest piece of work by far had been the helmet. In order to make it, they'd been forced to break apart nearly fifteen of the human head protectors and slice them together in order to fit over Tiny's much, much, much, much thicker skull. The final result was enormously heavy and far from the best fit, but it added much needed protection to the face zone.

When the armour was finally assembled and strapped on, Tiny rolled his shoulders and swung his arms a few times before grunting in satisfaction. If was uncomfortable and weighed him down, but there was a satisfying heft to the slaps of metal and stone that he found quite satisfying. More than that, with his task of getting armour completed, he was free to re-join his master once again. His greatest hope was that his new equipment would prevent him from being sent away from the fighting again. He'd lost so much smashing time.