"Finally, the first one is done..."
Well, when I say "done," I meant the inner Golem — the actual assembly was a joint effort with Kelly, so there was no denying that a big milestone had been reached. Even so, once this was wrapped up, I'd still need to make two more of the same design and one of a different shape, so it wasn't truly finished yet.
"One per week... no, I think I could do five days for the same shape"
Having completed one, I now had a solid grasp of the general workflow. Building the same model again would definitely be faster than the first time. The last Golem, though, was going to be a different shape and a different size from the ones I'd just made, so a week might not be enough to finish it.
"Well, the fourth Golem was never part of the original plan anyway, so I need to prioritize making sure the first three are done for certain"
As a way to kill time between tasks, I'd been working on the core of the fourth Golem here and there, but it wasn't even a third of the way done — and that was just the core, not even counting the point of attaching the armor.
"Besides, I'd rather avoid taking this fourth one to Kelly's shop and getting weirdly resented for it"
By "resented," I of course didn't mean by Kelly herself — I meant by the female Dwarf employees. When I'd first gone to commission Golem armor, I'd worried about how that would go over, but Kelly had pushed through the order as if it were just business as usual, and while there were grumbles, there was no real hostility between us. However, if I showed up with yet another Golem now, I had a feeling all that pent-up frustration might get directed at me instead, so I was keeping the fourth Golem a secret from Kelly and the others for the time being.
After finishing today's batch of work, I went to pay my respects to the workshop supervisor. And in a stroke of bad luck, I learned that starting tomorrow and for the next few days, the workshop would be tied up with repairing the Knights' equipment, which meant I wouldn't be able to use it.
I'd thought about stopping by to say goodbye to the King and the others before leaving, but before I even set out to find them, Kurif came by and told me it was no use. Apparently the King and his group were all buried in work and too busy to see me, and if I showed up, I'd almost certainly end up slacking off with them. For reference, Luna was swamped with academy homework and was being cornered by Maria, Isabella, and Tida.
The King and the others — or rather, the King and Lyle — would regularly drop by my place and lounge around doing nothing, so I'd always assumed they delegated most of their duties to their subordinates. But apparently, contrary to my expectations, they actually did their work. The one time I saw them being so diligent, I couldn't help but mutter something like, "Are these the real ones or replacements?" — which startled everyone nearby and sent a few into fits of laughter. The comment apparently wasn't too amusing for the people in question, but in return, Maria, Caesar, and even Zain cheered me on with things like, "Say that again!"
Since the King and the others were so busy like that, there were times I'd just head home after finishing my work. Occasionally Maria and Luna would be waiting for me, in which case I'd get back to the mansion late, but today I made it home right on schedule.
"We're planning to head toward Seigen tomorrow — what are you going to do, Tenma?"
The moment I returned to the mansion, Jin, who'd been waiting near the entrance, hit me with that opening. He said he'd finished reporting to the King and had grown tired of taking it easy in the Royal Capital, so he was planning to descend to the lowest floor of the dungeon and investigate the surrounding area.
"So with that in mind, make me a ton of that cooked meat and rice from last time!"
The beef bowl I'd made a little while back had apparently become a favorite of Jin and the rest. They'd asked me to make it several times since then, and each time it turned into an eating contest.
"I don't mind making it, but my beef supply is running low. I could make it with boar meat instead, but does it absolutely have to be beef?"
The cattle living around the Royal Capital were essentially off-limits for hunting, so beef was getting harder and harder to come by. That meant I wanted to save what I had for special occasions — beef was incredibly versatile at parties and banquets.
Wild boar, on the other hand, had no such restrictions. They lived in forests a short distance from the Royal Capital, and from the perspective of villages near those forests, boar were pests that ravaged crops, so Guild bounties for hunting them were common. They also tended to travel in groups, making them relatively easy to obtain in large quantities.
"If it tastes good, I don't mind whether it's beef or pork."
And so, I began mass-producing pork bowls using wild boar (well, boar are pigs too, so it's not exactly wrong). Just like with beef bowls, it was basically all simmering work, so after slicing the boar meat and onions, all I had to do was dump them into the boiling pot of broth and let them cook. However, since there was more fat than in beef, it would be better to let it cool in the cold air first and then skim off the solidified fat on the surface... but if I removed too much, Jin would probably complain, so a rough skim would have to do. The cooled ingredients could be reheated, and as for the rice, I'd just scoop it into a large pot as soon as it was done cooking and store it in my Magic Bag. Then when it was time to eat, all Jin and the others had to do was serve themselves, and they'd have piping-hot pork bowls even in the dungeon.
"With this much, it should last half a month. While I'm at it, tonight's dinner will be pork bowls too."
I made tonight's dinner alongside the portions for Jin and the others. I cooked the batches separately from Jin's share, but gathering all the ingredients at once was easier than doing it twice.
"Alright then, I'll eat in my room, so you can handle the cleanup."
Having made a mountain of pork bowls, I retreated to my room to push forward with as much work as I could manage.
"So only the arms are done so far... next up are the legs. But man... this thing is huge."
The fourth golem — its base body was that of a Minotaur. Once completed, it would be a golem standing over three meters tall, so it might not be able to move like the other three knight-type golems, but I figured its striking power as a heavy weapon and its defensive capability as a wall would prove useful across various situations.
The golem's core used multiple Wyvern magic cores and a Minotaur magic core, so in terms of raw output alone, it might rank third among all the golems I had built, behind "The Giant's Guardian" and "Raiden."
Well, that was just an estimate based on the number of magic cores, so even if it had the output, it might not move properly. That meant its actual strength might not necessarily rank third.
"Well, even if it turns out to be a failure, it should still be more useful than a regular golem, and as a wall, its very presence alone might serve a purpose. And if even that doesn't work, I can either not use it or just take it apart."
Taking it apart would be a waste, but I could think of it as an experiment to gain experience. Stuffing my cheeks with pork bowls, I kept studying the simple blueprints (not confident enough in my drawing skills to show them to anyone), and once I had a solid image in mind, I began preparing for the actual work. I really wanted to work on the knight-type golem's armor at night too, but since I couldn't process Mithril at the manor, it would be wiser to focus on other tasks I could accomplish. Well, there was always the option of taking a rest day to give my body a break, but thinking about my schedule going forward, I wanted to get the golem project wrapped up sooner rather than later. So I planned to push through with the work, knowing full well it would be a bit of a strain, at least until the armor Kelly was working on was finished.
"Besides, this is the kind of thing you have to keep going with while you've got the momentum... oh wait, before that, I need to make some revisions to the blueprints."
Muttering to myself, I made corrections to the lower half of the golem on the blueprints. It was going to be an incredibly tedious revision, but without it, the thing wouldn't even qualify as a wall, so there was no skipping it.
"Alright then, let's start building from the lower half."
Using the revised blueprints as my guide, I began laying out the bones of the Minotaur's lower body... from the outside, it might have looked like a macabre scene, but the Minotaur bones were so large that, paradoxically, it didn't come across as creepy... probably.
From there, until the Royal Capital's workshop became available again, I holed up in the manor and kept working on the fourth golem. I was being creative with my approach as I went, so even after three days the legs still weren't done, but that meant the finished product would be all the more satisfying.
Once the Royal Capital's workshop was usable again, I spent five days completing the internal mechanisms of the second golem.
And on the day I finished the internals, Kelly's armor seemed to be done as well. That evening, a female dwarf employee came to deliver the news... but she had dark circles under her eyes so heavy it was almost pitiful. Well, I was partly to blame for that...
She said Kelly wanted me to come immediately and had sent her to fetch me, but there was no way I could ask someone in this state to help with work, so I told her I'd head over after midday tomorrow. The female dwarf's expression visibly relaxed, and she left with a light step.
And the next day, when I stopped by Kelly's workshop past midday,
"You're slow, Tenma! Let's get you looking at the armor right away!"
No sooner had I arrived than Kelly — who'd been waiting right in front of the door — grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the back of the workshop.
"This is the armor you ordered!"
In the back of the workshop, what I assumed was the clay figure I'd handed over sat draped under a cloth. Kelly marched up to it and ripped the cloth away with a grand flourish.
"Oh... this came out great!"
What appeared beneath the cloth was a knight-style suit of armor with a white base. Given its imposing size and the fact that it was fitted onto the clay figure, it radiated considerable presence even standing perfectly still.
I could totally see why Kelly was looking so smug. I was the one who'd finalized the design in the end, so I'd come here imagining what the finished product should look like — but the result blew past those expectations in all the right ways.
There was, however, just one small thing that bothered me — or rather, something I hadn't anticipated that had been attached.
That thing was:
"Kelly, why does the helmet have a ponytail?"
"It's not a ponytail! It's a plume!"
Sprouting from just behind the crown of the helmet was something that looked like a ponytail — or as Kelly insisted, a "plume."
She refused to call it anything other than a plume, but no matter how you looked at it, the material was clearly not "feather," and "ponytail" was a far more apt description.
Or maybe it was more like long hair gathered into a topknot — though in this world, probably only Namitaro would follow that explanation.
"I told you there was no need for something like this, didn't I? What if someone grabs onto it during a fight?"
"Nobody's going to manage to grab a plume while this thing is swinging around! Besides, I built it so it pops off at the root if you pull too hard..."
I gave the ponytail a firm tug, and it came loose with a soft pop.
"See? Even if someone grabs it, it just comes right off — no problem at all. And with armor this magnificent, a bit of decoration makes it look even more imposing!"
Kelly did have a fair point there. As I was wondering, though, why she was being so dead-set on this,
"Hm? That's..."
"Why did you bring those out?! I hid them in the back of the storage room!"
Behind Kelly, the female dwarves held up two helmets shaped identically to the one on the armor before me, along with ponytails (feather ornaments) that could be attached to them—
several
strands,
displaying them prominently where I could see.
"So basically, you got cocky and made just the helmet first, and now you don't want to change the shape?"
"Well... it's not so much that I don't want to... it's just that it turned out better than I imagined, and I'm not sure I could make anything beyond this... you know..."
Not being able to imagine surpassing it was probably true as well, but more than that, she had most likely fallen in love with that particular design. That might be why she'd gone ahead and made the helmet first in the first place. And thinking about the remaining two sets of armor and weapons, the leftover mithril probably wasn't enough to redo everything. The helmet had turned out too well — she simply didn't want to melt it back down.
"Still, six colors for spare ponytails... plus the one already attached, that makes seven in total. How should I put it... it's very colorful..."
The ponytail on the completed armor was black, while the ones the female dwarves held were red, white, blue, brown, green,
yellow,
making for quite the colorful display.
"Like I said, it's not a ponytail—"
"The material is horse tail hair."
The instant Kelly started to object again, one of the female dwarves standing behind holding the spare ornaments revealed what they were made of.
"So it really is a ponytail. Well, at this point the material doesn't matter anyway. More importantly — let's put the armor on the golem."
Knowing the materials didn't change the ponytail impression at all; if anything, it only confirmed that it was a literal pony tail (though I had no idea how big the horse used for the material was). Rather than wasting any more time on this, I wanted to get on with the reason we were here — continuing work on the Minotaur Golem. After putting the armor on and making adjustments, the next step would be to turn the armor itself into a golem, so it would probably be quite late by the time we got back to the mansion, or possibly even past midnight.
"Yeah, let's do that... ponytail or feather ornament, whatever. Tenma, for now, put out a golem to support the work. It doesn't need to be too strong — try to find one that's slender and tall."
There were all sorts of tools, materials, finished weapons, and half-finished weapons scattered around the workshop, so a slender golem that was easy to maneuver would be what we needed.
"Then, shall we have the second inner golem help out as a sort of test run?"
I'd already run basic tests on both of them and confirmed they moved without issues, but I wanted to see if they could handle the finer movements needed for equipping armor — or at least assisting with the process.
"Number One, stay as you are. Number Two, raise a little higher... and stop there."
The two golems moved exactly as Kelly directed. I'd worried they might struggle with delicate work, but thanks to the
tendons
running through their cores, they moved more smoothly than any golem I'd built so far — performing at the level of an untrained person helping out.
"With this kind of movement for fine work, it looks like they'll be able to handle more than I expected. By the way, Tenma..."
"I can't let you have this type of golem."
I'd already guessed what Kelly was going to say, so I cut him off before he could finish. Making a promise to give someone else — another woman — the same thing you were going to give your marriage partner, before the wedding even happened? That would be going way too far.
"Doesn't seem to be any problems. Try moving it around a bit."
I issued a command to the first golem, and it moved to the widest area of the workshop and started to move.
"Hey Tenma... what kind of exercise is this?"
"It's exercise to prevent injuries, but since it moves a bunch of different body parts, it's perfect for checking range of motion."
In short, I was making it do something similar to Radio Calisthenics No. 1 —
some—
thing—
like—
…
…
The reason I said "something like" was simply because I didn't actually remember the details of Radio Calisthenics, and whatever I'd forgotten probably ended up as something close but not quite right.
"Hmm, well, whatever. Setting aside the exercises, there don't seem to be any problems with the Golem's movements. The next thing to figure out is what happens when I try to Golem-ify the armor... but there's no way to know until I actually try. Even if the armor Golem-ification fails, though, the inner Golem alone should still be enough to serve as a solid fighting force."
Kelly seemed to want to say that even this state was sufficient, but in my eyes, true success meant the armor-type Golem and the inner body functioning as one. From here on was the real test.
"All right, let's do it. Number Two, help me take the armor off Number One."
I ordered Number Two (tentative) to help remove Number One's (tentative) armor, then confirmed the positions where the Golem cores would be attached.
"So, how exactly are you going to merge the inner body with the armor? If you Golem-ify the armor carelessly, the inner body and the armor will move independently of each other, and the whole thing will be useless, won't it?"
"I've thought about that."
If you simply combined two Golems into one, the concern Kelly raised was a natural one. So:
"For example, the Golem core attached to this armor's chest has a fragment of the Golem core embedded in the inner body's chest. This way, the inner body's core and the armor's core should be able to coordinate with each other."
The small clay Golem experiment had been a success, so the odds of it working with Number One and the armor were fairly high. Incidentally, the clay Golem used in the experiment had been a palm-sized, hastily constructed thing, and it had broken after several rounds of testing due to strength limitations.
"Let's start with the torso section. The part of the inner body's core that overlaps with this is... right here. I'll mark this spot... there."
After that, I had Kelly apply a coating over the core while it sat in place. The coating was made from a silver-copper alloy. It was softer than Mithril, but being an alloy it still had good strength, and because it contained silver, it was said to have excellent compatibility with Mithril.
"I'll let the coating cool and then fit it onto the inner Golem, but... sure enough, it doesn't quite fit anymore."
"Well, even though I said the coating was thinner, it still added a fair bit of thickness. But something this minor can be fixed by shaving down the armor a little. I'll have our people handle that. In the meantime, Tenma, you can determine the positions for the other cores, and I'll keep applying coatings."
Deciding the core positions and applying the coatings didn't take particularly long, but the armor-shaving involved constant fine adjustments, so even after Kelly and I had finished our work, the female dwarves were still hard at it.
"Well then, why don't we join in on the armor-shaving too? It's not a complicated process, so we can just trade off and take breaks as we go."
The work was detailed but not complex, so according to Kelly's assessment, we could hand things off mid-process without any issues. We took turns working on it, and as a result:
"Finished ahead of schedule. We'll still need to actually power it on and see how it runs, though... but there's no way we can do that in the workshop."
When we'd started, I'd braced myself for the work running past midnight, but we finished considerably earlier than expected—right around dinnertime.
"Then let's call it a day here, and tomorrow we'll take it outside the Royal Capital and test it."
"Sounds good. I think I'll turn in early tonight for once."
The ones most delighted about finishing earlier than expected were undoubtedly the female dwarves. And on top of that, it came with Kelly's own decision that this would be where they stopped.
"Even so, by my old world's standards, this still counts as exploitative overtime..."
"Hmm? Did you say something?"
"No, nothing."
Being happy about wrapping up around dinnertime—by my old world's standards, that was textbook sweatshop behavior—but for the female dwarves, it genuinely seemed like cause for celebration. That alone was proof of just how deadened their minds had become to Kelly's relentless pace.
Setting aside the question of whether Kelly's workshop counted as a sweatshop for now, we settled on tomorrow's meeting place and time before calling it a night. The meeting time was set for after noon, so the female dwarves would at least get a little rest... assuming Kelly didn't go on another rampage, probably.