Kaia the Argent Wing Chapter 62 (Patreon)

A week went by in a blur of crafting and hunting. All fighters were out looking for creatures to kill so we could feed our hungry people, but it wasn't enough. To make matters worse, hungry bellies meant angry people, and the friction of several thousand angry people was beginning to spark into real conflagrations.

I tried to keep my head down and just make as much useful gear as possible. That included finally putting my previous dildo-crossbow experience to use by prototyping some normal crossbows for our folks. The wood we dragged back from our excuse excursion turned out to be exceptionally useful in that project.

After asking one of the men with a smoking related cooking class to dry out the logs, I carefully cut and carved three crossbow limbs from the strange alien wood. I was careful to document every step I made, because it was beginning to seem like I was the primary innovator in the workshop and my tinkering would lead to semi-mass-produced goods down the line.

When I had the wooden limbs finished, I carefully shaved and carved pieces of squirrel bone to strengthen the centre and tips of the crossbow limb. Incidentally, the community had finally settled on a name for the Squirrels. They were now known as Ferrels. It wasn't actually a bad name, considering it'd been born from April's desire to smoosh words together haphazardly.

My first crossbow worked exceptionally well, except it had one major and unforeseen flaw. I was the only one with enough strength to pull it back into position, and I didn't know how to make a crank. That led to me adding ‘Book about crossbows’ to the book wishlist.

As for the massive mountain lion we dragged in, it turned out that its fur and armour plates were made of pure copper, but unlike natural copper it had some strange properties. For starters, it was excessively tough. When we took a squeel chisel to it, the chisel struggled to cut it while it got dull and useless in record time. Well, unless I wielded it, and then it sliced through okay, although it still got blunt very quickly.

The fur was crazy too, although we ended up removing the fur from the hide to be melted down. We had a lot of uses for the hide, which was in itself very tough… but metal fur practically funnels heat directly out of you and into the air like a radiator. The poor lion must've been very cold all the time.

It was during that week that we made an attempt to farm the sports field. Turns out, there were a select few crops that could actually grow, if not exactly thrive, in sub zero temperatures. Namely, kale and spinach, with carrots as a third that we decided to try and grow near the forge where it was slightly warmer. All of the seeds came from a hobbyist gardening store that used to serve the herb gardeners of Edgewood.

The spinach went in first, with people doing their best to keep snow off them. It was tough, though. After all, the spinach not only had to fight the frozen soil, snow, and air, but also the eternal cloud layer that hung overhead.

Normally, a spinach plant took 4-5 weeks, according to the instructions on the packet and the gardeners in our ranks. The people who’d chosen a Gardener class said they could halve it, which was good but still far too long considering how bad we needed food.

That led to two unlikely candidates for finding food. First, the river that'd replaced Central Avenue. Wherever it'd come from, it'd arrived with what appeared to be plants experiencing late summer. Two people, a thirty eight year old woman and her husband, had the foresight to choose a Forager class. Using one of their abilities they were able to divine what plants were safe to eat. All our people had to do was brave the blizzard and its hidden killers to dig through the snow for the food underneath.

That food came in the form of a plant with very chunky, wide leaves that grew at the edge of the river, and a strange tuber that seemed to be a sort of underground vine-like parasite. People had taken to calling them, “Breadleaf”, and “Ankletato”. The first was obvious to anyone who ate it—Its leaves were almost a third of an inch thick and had a sort of starchy taste that became eerily similar to the taste of bread when it was fried.

The tuber’s name took a bit of explaining, however. When the couple first came back with their finds, the husband described it as a little potato ankle-biter, because as he put it, “That thing was wrapped around the tree’s roots like a mother with six ankle biters.” Everyone over the age of thirty thought that joke was hilarious and so the name stuck.

Now, once we'd realised that these new areas had edible plants, the Captain immediately sent the two Foragers out to the recently named Castle Woodland. There, they found a fungus similar to a puffball mushroom, and some berry/fruit things that grew on some tall scraggly shrubs. The former could be cut up into large steaks and fried, while the latter was eaten raw or crushed into a paste to be put on the breadleaf.

The novelty of the small supply of new foods managed to settle the hungry, angry crowds a little, but everyone knew it wouldn't last.

While the food crisis was worsening through the week, I wasn’t just making crossbows. The majority of the crafters were busy upgrading all the gear for our fighters, including giving them small pieces of armour. Nothing like the chest and corset piece had been attempted again, because the pinching issue there hadn’t been squironed out yet. Greaves, pauldrons, and bracers were easy, though.

I was not part of the majority working on gear. I was stuck with Charles, April, and a couple of other crafters as we fine-tuned the steam engine. It worked just fine, but it was the general consensus of anyone who knew anything that we were losing a huge chunk of the engine’s input power to inefficiencies in the design. Troubleshooting and consultation with some physics textbooks helped us slightly, but in the end we had to brute force it with trial, error, and the occasional healer on standby.

Now, the steam engine wasn’t all that useful on its own, so we had the lathe and the helve hammer, both of which were fitted with connectors that allowed us to swap them out as needed. It was actually funny how easy they were to create and refine after all the painful effort we went through with the steam engine. Like, ironing out the inefficiencies in the lathe boiled down to putting oil on the fittings around the spinny bit. I had no idea what the correct names were for lathe components.

By the end of the week, we had the steam engine, the lathe, and the hammer all working significantly better, and boy did it make a difference. For starters, I could set the lathe up so that almost anyone could churn out partially completed arrow and bolt shafts. The last part had to be finished by hand, because there's no way something that thin could be made on a lathe. Tess, the bow girl, was especially pleased with that turn of events.

Speaking of her, after she got hold of the books we retrieved from the library, she went all in on studying them. With Cynath’s help, she managed to create a recurve bow out of castle wood with a draw weight of around a hundred pounds. Of course, with her tiny arms, she required a Strength stat of two to pull it, but that was something that levelling, training, and maybe another orb could fix.

It was actually her issues with the draw of her bow that prompted me to do some testing in private. It turns out that although the Strength stat was incredibly important, it could only do so much if you had noodle arms. No, that wasn’t the right way to frame it. A high Strength stat could boost you considerably, but if you already had beefy biceps, it would give you so much more. For example, as Kaia I could lift the fridge in my safehouse pretty well. As Silver, I was fairly confident I could have thrown it a couple yards.

After everything that happened through that long week, it was still desperately apparent by the end of it that our situation was dire. We needed a solution to the food situation. So that's when I, as Silver, requested a meeting with the Captain at Cynath's shrine.

The root cause of our current set of problems needed to be dealt with. That fucking bird had to die.