Sexy Steampunk Babes: Chapter Nineteen (Previously Eighteen) (Patreon)

Among the staff of the academy it was generally acknowledged that, for all that they were impressive displays of wealth, engineering and foresight on the part of the Crown, the Floats and Skeleton were imperfect systems.

The practice environments they provided were little more than pale imitations of real combat.

The most glaring example of which was a lack of offensive spells. Easily the most potent weapons in any mages arsenal, there simply wasn’t any way to safely simulate them on the practice field.

Oh, attempts had certainly been made in the past, often in the same vein as the practice bolts the academy now used. Thrown flasks of harpy venom or clay pots filled with powdered dye launched by handheld ballistae. Each had fallen short enough of the mark of simulating a real combat spell that the continued use of them was considered more detrimental to the learning experience than useful.

Personally, Griffith believed the administration had given up too early, too terrified of harming any of their noble charges by utilizing riskier methods of simulation. And she knew she wasn’t alone in thinking that.

Still, that wasn’t why she found herself currently sat in the viewing area of the academy’s testing range, though she oft found said moniker overblown for what the reality of her surroundings truly were.

Little more than an empty field, the grass stripped bare by decades of experimental spellwork. As a result, the grounds were quickly reduced to a muddy quagmire at the slightest hint of rain. Fortunately for the state of her uniform and those of the cadets of team seven currently lugging practice dummies onto the range, the past week had been rather dry.

Almost as dry as my nethers, she thought glumly as she watched one particular cadet fiddle with some kind vaguely tube shaped device.

Now, it wasn’t like she’d wanted Cadet Ashfield to act… inappropriately after their short lived liaison last weekend – quite the opposite – but she’d not deny that some part of her had been a little disappointed by just how not-inappropriate the boy had been since.

It was a small wicked part of her that she sought to squash any time it came up, but that particular thought was a tenacious little goblin. It seemed to delight in tormenting her with fantasies of what might have been – or what might yet be – at the most inopportune moments.

Gritting her teeth, the dark elf’s grip on the nearby half-palisade strengthened for a moment as she banished another such fantasy, this time involving the cadet in question, a lot of mud and an old crush from her own academy days.

Never mind that Cadet Stevens is now forty, balding and quite happily married to a countess in New Haven, she thought bitterly.

Something her libido seemed to have quite happily forgotten in its attempt to visualize two young men engaged in mortal mud-based combat.

“Targets are set up, ma’am,” a masculine voice called from down below.

Sinking once more into the mindset of a proper instructor, Griffith nodded as the cadets assembled before her.

“Good,” she said. “Now I will hopefully be informed as to why I’ve been called out here. And it better be good. Because you can rest assured that if I feel you’ve wasted my time with your continued secrecy I will have no problem with wasting yours.”

Under normal circumstances a cadet wouldn’t even be allowed access to the Testing Area without first laying out exactly what they planned to achieve and how to their instructor. Only then would the Instructor in question either allow or deny the request.

Because they’d have to attend said test in person, if only to ensure said cadet didn’t accidentally blow themselves up or something equally outlandish.

To that end, Griffith had received a report, but it had been rather light on detail beyond the fact that the leader of team seven wished to display a new form of ‘anti-personnel’ weapon.

Normally that kind of vagary would see a request denied outright.

In this case it hadn’t though. Mostly because the report had also requested a follow-up inspection on the viability of the use of said weapon in practice duels. Which suggested that the boy already knew the weapon worked and that this initial inspection was merely a formality.

That kind of audacity at least merited some interest.

Which combined with the fact that Griffith knew that the young man in front of her had actually been the one to create the ‘flashbang’ spell had her curious enough to allow the request.

So here she was, with no idea as to what she was about to witness.

“As you say, ma’am.” The boy said without a hint of nervousness, even as the rest of his team glanced nervously between him and the covered tray nearby.

There was also curiosity there, too, though.

Were his teammates as ignorant of what they were doing here as her? That was interesting, as it implied that whatever this item was, it was the Ashfield’s alone.

“First though, I’d like you to confirm something for me.” As the boy spoke, he theatrically pulled back on the sheet covering the tray, revealing the items beneath. “Can you confirm for me that none of the items here have been enchanted in any way.”

Glancing over the items in question, Griffith found her curiosity piqued as she gazed at what looked like a bolt-bow sized cannon and a dozen smaller cannon balls. Some were a simple bare metal, while others had a red tip with some kind of nodule.

“A new kind of bolt-bow?” she asked as she strode over to the tray – cognizant of the equally curious stares of the girls behind her.

“Something like that, ma’am.” The boy said, non-committal as she lifted up the cannon.

“Hmmm,” Griffith hummed as she ran her hands along the wooden stock.

The work was crude. Workmanlike. The best that could be said of it was that it was functional. Clearly whatever his other talents, the boy was no woodworker. Which was a little unusual given his gender.

Though given that he’s found himself in the academy, perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised by that, she thought. If he’d been a proper gentleman, I doubt his mother would have foisted him onto us.

Moving on from the stock, she inspected the oversized barrel, noting the telltale smoothness of fae-formed metal. The body of the device hadn’t been formed with either hammer or flame, but rather shaped through a magical contract.

It was good work, devoid of the usual imperfections that tended to mar magically shaped metal.

“Who did this for you?” she asked.

“I did, ma’am.”

She paused. “I wasn’t aware you had training as a mage-smith, cadet.”

The boy shrugged. “I’ve had a few lessons, ma’am. Hardly enough to make me a master craftsman, but I’m decent enough for a little prototyping or repair work.”

“How many failures for this piece?” She asked, as she realized that one could crack open the whole gun down the middle, the barrel splitting open on a hinge, the whole thing making a satisfying click as she did.

“Two, ma’am.”

That was impressive. Mage-smithing required one to effectively visualize the object one wished to craft in their mind so as to convey it properly to the fae who would do the actual shaping.

Of course, the mortal mind was an imperfect beast, as her own recent battles attested. It was given to imperfect recollection and a tendency to wander. Thus, a mage-smith required focus above all else.

That the boy had managed to form the barrel in a mere three attempts at his age was worthy of note.

“And in total?” she asked.

The human paused. “…That was in total, ma’am.”

Griffith froze, even as a small snort came from behind the pair of them. Bonnlyn, no doubt, though the dark elf barely spared a moment of thought toward the short cadet.

Instead her gaze latched onto the leader of team seven like a beam of light through a magnifying glass, just searching for even a hint of deception as she sank fully into her role as an instructor.

Yet even when she failed to find the telltale signs of some lying, she was tempted to name the cadet one all the same.

She’d known women forty years his senior who would struggle to craft a device like this in little more than three attempts. The trigger mechanism alone would require most journeywoman apprentices a good dozen tries.

Yet he stood there, neither looking boastful or ashamed. If he was a liar, he was a damn good one.

“Impressive,” she said neutrally – even as she privately determined to send a letter back to his house asking why she’d not been informed of this skillset.

Though the more she thought about it the more she found she knew the answer.

Mage-smithing was a laywoman’s skill set after all - and not in the fashionable way of a man learning to carve wood. Nor even in the grudgingly useful way of elemental enchanting.

He shrugged. “I’ve been told I have something of a natural talent. Or unnatural, as it was described at the time.”

Griffith could imagine that – though apparently not with the clarity of the young man opposite her.

She shook her head. “So, unexpected talents aside, I can’t help but note that this bolt… cannon is missing a piece.”

The aether-chamber – or failing that, a pair of crossbow limbs, she thought as she glanced over at the tray, to find neither item present.

The boy paused, a momentary hesitation seeming to seize him for just a second before it passed. When he looked at her again, there was a glint of determination in his gaze that had been absent earlier.

“Well, if you’ll forgive me for speaking in a roundabout manner ma’am, that’s rather where the innovative bit of this little mechanism comes into play.” He gestured to the, almost acorn shaped cannonballs. “Please, before we continue, could you inspect the ammunition?”

Quirking an eyebrow, she picked up one of the ‘cannon balls’, noting with a little surprise that it was not entirely solid.

Casing’s too hard to be a kind of canister shot though, as she shook it, listening to the telltale clinking of something moving inside.

Just about all the canister shells she was familiar with made use of a paper ‘shell’ to increase the reload speed. Only once fired would the ball bearings within shred the skin of their container as they were launched at breakneck speed towards the enemy.

She resisted the urge to shudder. Only twice in her career had she had cause to see the effects of canister shot on a line of closely packed infantry and each one was wedged indelibly into her memory.

With that said, she could see no way for the same effect to occur with what she was holding. More than likely the container would fail to burst on firing, refuse to spread, before splattering ineffectively against the hull of whatever warship it was fired at.

Oh, it would certainly still pulp any humans it hit, but a regular solid shot could do the same and at least that could pull double duty against ship hulls.

Ignoring the disappointment she felt, she eyed the recruit as she once more lowered the acorn-shot – as she’d now mentally dubbed it. “If this shot is designed to function the way I imagine you expect it to, then I’m sorry to say that you will be disappointed. And so will I.”

And they both knew what would be happening if she was disappointed. She’d agreed to attend this meeting on the basis of the boy’s confidence in its success. If that confidence proved baseless…

Rather than wilt under her gaze, the boy seemed rather nonplussed. “Then it’s a good thing it’s not what I think you imagine it to be, ma’am. Just for clarity’s sake though, would you confirm that there are no enchantments upon either the shot or the… bolt-cannon, I think you called it.”

She quirked an eye, surprised the boy hadn’t thought to even name his likely defective product, even as she confirmed that she couldn’t feel any kind of ambient enchantment upon either item. Not even the residual sensation of raw aether.

“There’s nothing,” she confirmed.

“Good,” he grinned before taking up one of the grey acorns and sliding it into the open chamber with an ease that spoke of practice. “Girls, behind the wall please.”

Behind them, the cadets of Team Seven cautiously moved toward the protective barrier the testing area had for such.

Though they looked just as puzzled as Griffith felt. Was he worried about shrapnel from his – likely defective – canister shell bouncing back to hit them.

Given the nearest target was a good thirty meters away, that seemed overly cautious to her.

Though before she could say anything, the boy brought the weapon up.

And as he pulled the trigger, against all logic and reason, somehow the bolt-cannon fired.

There was no spell-work involved. No aether, raw or refined. Nor did she feel the telltale tingle of an enchantment taking effect.

Instead, all the dark elf felt was the all-too conventional sound of a dull thunk, as what she could only assume was the acorn was flung across the testing area.

She saw it hang in the air, like a bowshot for just a moment, before it impacted.

And then she had to close her eyes as a second explosion rang out with all the power of a thunderbolt.

When she opened them again, the stuffed training dummy was gone. Reduced to shreds.

Not just that, but so had a number of targets nearby. With perforations that only grew more numerous the closer they got to the initial impact zone.

Canister shot, her mind supplied, for just a moment the stuffed targets taking on the visage of dying women, the hay stuffing replaced by blood and viscera. But… from a distance.

She shook her head.

This was… this was…

Her gaze turned back to where the boy stood, utterly unconcerned as he gazed upon the carnage wrought by his weapon.

His entirely mundane weapon

Enchantments could certainly perform the same feat, but they were a limited resource. And given the inevitable degradation a spell underwent when applied to a medium other than a mage, an explosion like the one she’d just witnessed would take... something akin to three spell slots at a guess.

An entire day’s worth of casting for most. The charge of three lightning bolts to stockpile something with the effectiveness of one.

Certainly, that meant a single mage – if dedicated to nothing else – could theoretically create three hundred and sixty five such enchanted shots in a year, but that was not nearly enough to keep up with the demand.

Any given airship in Lindholm would be expected to carry something to the effect of six thousand cannon balls. Any given Shard dedicated to anti-ship duties required enchanted bombs – and some dedicated fighter craft made use of enchanted ammunition.

A shard could carry twelve hundred rounds of ammunition per sortie.

And then there’s the fact that any mage who is dedicating themselves entirely to enchanting is not helping in the fields, healing or otherwise crafting, she thought.

In short, a nation’s stockpile of enchanted munitions was a carefully hoarded thing – kept to only specialized groups like the palace guard or otherwise only used in the most dire of circumstances.

More than one war had been won or lost by one side of a conflict breaking out their own stockpile at an ideal or ineffective moment.

Which in turn begged the question.

“How? There was no enchantment. No spellwork.”

“Alchemy,” he said simply, as if describing the weather. “Just a bit of alchemy.”

Griffith shook her head, mind still reeling. “That wasn’t alchemy. I’d have sensed it.”

Given that alchemy was the practice of sacrificing physical objects to the Fae in place of emotions, even something as simple as a stamina potion had a bit of the Void about it.

It was also considered to be a wildly inefficient process. One that created effects by the mixing of objects with similar properties. The rarer and more difficult to procure, the better. Indeed, some scholars thought that it was the difficulty in procuring the object that interested the fae, not the object itself.

Enchanting might not have been the most efficient process in the world, but it outstripped alchemy a dozen times over.

Emotions and a little time spent sleeping were a lot easier to come upon than the heart of a salamander or the eyes of an ice dragon after all.

And while the explosion she’d just seen wouldn’t quite require ingredients of that calibre, they still wouldn’t have been cheap.

And she would have sensed it.

Pacing forward, she picked up another of the shells – also grey – and gestured for the bolt-cannon.

Rather than complain or shy away though, the boy simply handed it over, watching idly as she went through the same motions as him.

Yet again though, she sensed nothing. Not a hint of the Void.

Perhaps I simply missed it with the first and this one is a dummy to throw me off-

Even as her mind raced for alternatives, she pulled the trigger and felt the stock of the device slam into her shoulder.

And once more a series of practice targets across the way were shredded.

Slowly, she lowered the gun, willing herself to believe what she’d just seen.

“This… this isn’t alchemy,” she said again. “I didn’t feel anything.”

William simply shrugged, as if he hadn’t just performed the impossible. “Perhaps not alchemy as you know it. Perhaps it’d be easier if I called it chemistry.”

The word was foreign on her tongue.

Something new.

An entirely new branch of… could she even call it magic?

Was it magic?

The early human and orc tribes had believed that the first airships floated as a result of some kind of spell. And while they weren’t entirely wrong they weren’t entirely right either.

A mithril-core’s ability to produce raw aether in industrial quantities was certainly as magical as any fireball spell, but the process by which it made a ship float was anything but. Merely the application of the lighter than air qualities of aether on an otherwise mundane craft.

The same went for gas-cannons. Their ability to shoot cannon balls with power enough to punch through a ship’s hull had little to do with the fae. Merely pressure and focus.

At some point in her thoughts, she realized that her grip on the weapon she was holding had grown white knuckled – an impressive feat given her usual complexion.

“So, is William’s thing good, or are we in trouble ma’am?”

It actually made Griffith feel a little guilty how Verity flinched back as the dark elf’s gaze turned toward the orc at the young woman’s – seemingly genuine – question.

Still, it was hard to resist the urge to snap at her.

Didn’t she realize what this was? This went well beyond ‘passing’ muster for some practice duel.

This could change the entire continent.

Both continents.

Something that was apparently not lost on any of the other team members as they continued to gape. Under different circumstances the sight might have been comical, but in this moment it was all Griffith could do not to do the same.

“How much and how long?” Griffith said, ignoring the orc as her gaze turned back to William.

The boy frowned for a moment, before seeming to let it go. “A few silver? Admittedly I did most of the work myself, and a lot of the cost of this would have been in labour. Especially for the launcher.”

Oh, Griffith was definitely interested in the launcher given that it had somehow propelled its payload without the use of compressed aether or a bow string – but that interest paled in comparison to the prospect of a cheap explosive.

“As for how long? A few hours? A lot of that was carving wood though because I’m not exactly great at it. By contrast, shaping the metal was easy. As for the bit that makes the metal bits go boom? A few hours in the lab? On and off.”

Griffith felt a little faint.

Gripping the launcher even harder, she eyed the young man. “If what you said is true, do you have any idea what this means? For you? For… everyone.”

People would kill for this. People had killed for less. Gods, entire houses had been destroyed for less.

Actually, what if this was some Ashfield secret that the boy had pulled out to gain an edge in a school yard competition.

The idea was so horrifying she actually felt like laughing.

She didn't though, instead Griffith actually felt herself become paler as she realized something.

Sands below, the boys part of the Royal House and set to be married to the Blackstones, she thought frantically.

The Crown couldn’t just take him without risking war with the Blackstones – and as a provisional member of the Royal Navy, the same held true in reverse.

It’d be a game of tug of war between the two greatest powers in the country.

…This went so far beyond the academy it wasn’t even funny. So far beyond her it wasn’t funny.

Yet the boy opposite her showed no real concern, either ignorant or uncaring of the notion – and she didn’t know what scared her more.

“Oh, I’ve some idea,” he said. “If nothing else, things are going to get very interesting in the next few weeks.”

He knew. He knew what was about to happen and he’d done this anyway.

…He was insane.

Genuinely insane.

“So, uh, ma’am?” A voice broke the moment. “Did William’s thingie pass?”

“Yes, Verity.” Griffith breathed through her nose. “William’s thingie is very interesting and I’m not disappointed at all.”

Just terrified out of her mind.