My Servant System

Anput PoV

"Now it is time to begin understanding you little beautiful things... you beautiful, beautiful little things..."

I murmured quietly to myself as I stared down at the various bones and scales that I had laid out on the workbench, the silvery bones and dark blue scales glittering beneath the light of the many fires inside the forge as I inspected them, trying to envision just what these materials could alloy with successfully.

To understand what the material was like, I was going to run a few tests on a few smaller pieces to figure out what the properties of the Fiend's bones and scales were specifically, so that I could better alloy it with different metals based on said properties.

The mana inside the materials, the density and toughness of the materials, if the materials are good 'partner' materials...

There was a lot that I needed to consider, and like with many things, I wanted to start simple... after I took a small scale and a broken bone and began to experiment a little on them.

Sometimes a hard metal alloys best with something softer to make it less dense and more moldable; sometimes a metal needs to be alloyed with something similar in strength so that it can create something stronger.

There were a lot of things that could happen during these initial tests that changed my thought process, so I started with the scale first, picking it up with some tones and moving over towards the forge.

Placing it atop the embers, I lowered the door and began to stoke the flames with some more air, heating the furnace up and watching the scale with interest, keeping the furnace at a consistent temperature that I used for most of my forging.

The deep blue scale was surrounded by a sea of red and black as it rested atop the charcoal, but it eventually began to glimmer as the heat did its job quickly, so I pulled it out as soon as that glimmer grew a tad bit stronger before taking up my hammer and observing the reaction to a single, average strike.

Its curved surface flattened as the hammer struck it, and I nodded as I raised the scale up and inspected it, not seeing any damage from that and noting that it hadn't really changed much despite the high heat and decent hit while softened.

Scales were less resistant to heat by quite a large margin, so it would make it easier to alloy compared to the bone, but I needed something softer to make the material more pliable and workable; anything denser and the alloy would be too difficult to shape, and unless I wanted to spend hours simply hammering a slight curve into the alloy, I wasn't planning on doing so.

Now, doing the same process with the bone took quite a bit longer, the melting point for it being far higher than the scale but still much lower than most metals, and when I pulled it out and hammered it, the bone flattened somewhat, making me nod to myself as I let the two cool off for now, retrieving some other metals to try alloying it with.

I examined their cool states and tried to see if the heat made them brittle, or if it damaged them in any way after being cooled, but I saw nothing and went to the next test; reheating them and trying to mold them.

Using a pair of pliers, I tried to bend them and see just how pliable they were, before moving on to the final test; just using a file and testing the surface hardness of the materials to further understand what I was working with.

All of this gave me a rather rough idea on what I could do to alloy these materials into something excellent, and to start I took the scales and started with one of the most common metals to alloy things with: Iron.

Just simple, raw iron to start, and I began the process of merging the two together as I heated them up, before hammering away and wrapping the scale around the small bit of iron, eventually flattening it out and folding it over itself before flattening it again.

I repeated this process a few times and made sure that it was completely and utterly solid, moving onto the shaping process as soon as I could and forging a rudimentary dagger that could give me something to test later on.

Next, I took another scale and tried something a bit lighter and more flexible, wanting to see just what the scale needed to toughen it up.

Aluminum was next, though I did alloy it with some iron to begin before moving onto the real process, repeating what I did before and forging out another dagger, which I could tell was much easier to shape than the one made from raw iron.

I repeated this a few more times with a few different metals; copper alloy, silver alloy, bronze, and steel were the others, and I laid them out before turning towards the bones, taking one of the longer ribs and separating it into six chunks, which would mirror the six daggers I made with the scales; I wanted to test the cutting edge of the alloys and their usability as tools, since that was the more prominent use for them at the moment.

Armor was something that Shell Stone could cover for a long time, and with Kat eventually improving them with enchantments, I wasn't in a hurry to forge immaculate armor sets, since whatever physical weakness they had would be made up by our mana, which would boost our defense even more.

Obviously I wasn't going to ignore the potential wonders of these materials on armor, but for the time being getting some weapons made was the first priority, and depending on the tests that I wanted Kat or Leone to run, perhaps these would be excellent magical tools for them as well.

Either way, I toiled hard inside the forge, hammering away at the anvil and creating twelve total knives that I needed to go sharpen and prepare for practical tests, which I wanted everyone to witness so that I could get multiple views on the materials; besides, some alloys might be better for one person whereas a different alloy would be better for someone else.

Jahi would like a harder, heavier alloy compared to the lighter alloy that Kat would prefer, while the mana conductivity of the alloys would also come into play as well.

If an alloy was incredibly strong but couldn't hold or accept mana, then we needed to weigh its value and determine if that was okay or not; it could be incredibly strong on its own, but if it couldn't take mana, did we still want it, and if not, what was the next best thing?

So many questions that I had, but I was making progress slowly and steadily.