The forge in the Iron Gorge was not a place of beauty; it was a cavern of soot, scorching heat, and the rhythmic, bone-deep thumping of heavy hammers. Alpagu stood before the main furnace, his face blackened by charcoal, his eyes bloodshot from the relentless smoke. In his hand, he held the third blade he had attempted to forge since returning from the cobalt mine.
It was a failure.
As he plunged the glowing metal into the tempering vat, a sickening crack echoed through the cave. He pulled the sword out only to find a jagged fissure running through the center of the blade. The cobalt-iron alloy had rejected the sudden change in temperature.
"Again," Alpagu rasped, his voice thin from the fumes.
Bögü stepped forward, his massive frame silhouetted against the orange glow of the embers. "My Bey, you have not slept in two suns. The smiths are exhausted. Perhaps the old ways are better. Our iron is soft, but it does not shatter."
Alpagu looked at the broken shards at his feet. "Soft iron is for men who intend to die with a bent blade in their hands, Bögü. The South is bringing Western siege towers. Their plate armor is thicker than our shields. If we do not master this 'Sky Steel,' we are merely delaying the inevitable."
The Alchemy of the Steppe
Alpagu closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the cold stone of the cave wall. He was searching his fractured memories. He knew the molecular structure of steel—he knew that carbon and cobalt needed to sit within the iron lattice in a specific pattern. But he had no thermometers, no lab equipment. He only had the Color of the Heat.
"The charcoal," Alpagu muttered. "It's too impure. The sulfur is poisoning the weld."
He turned to the head smith, an old man named Tunga whose hands were a map of scars. "We need to bake the charcoal again. We need to drive out the impurities before it touches the ore. And the water... the mountain stream is too cold. It shocks the metal. We must mix it with oil and animal fat to slow the cooling process."
Usul 4: The Tempering of the Soul.
Alpagu began the fourth attempt. He didn't just stand back and watch; he took the hammer himself. His body was weak, far smaller than the mountain of a man that was Bögü, but he knew where to strike. He didn't use brute force; he used Harmonic Striking. He watched the vibrations travel through the glowing ingot. If the ripple was uneven, it meant there was a pocket of air or impurity. He would strike that spot until the vibration was pure.
As the sun dipped behind the jagged peaks of the Gorge, the atmosphere in the forge changed. The orange light shifted to a ghostly, pale violet—the signature of the cobalt reacting to the intense, purified heat.
"Now," Alpagu whispered. "The Quench."
He did not plunge the blade straight into the vat. Instead, he lowered it slowly, tip-first, chanting a rhythm to keep the timing precise. The oil hissed, a thick, foul-smelling cloud of steam filling the cavern. The smiths held their breath.
When Alpagu pulled the blade out, it was not black or silver. It had a dull, matte-blue finish, like the sky just before a storm. He wiped away the oil with a rag. There were no cracks.
"Bögü," Alpagu said, handing the blade to the giant. "Test it. Not on wood. On the Southern breastplate we took from the mine."
The Test of Sky Steel
Bögü propped up the gilded Southern plate against a stone pillar. He gripped the blue hilt of the new sword. With a roar, he brought the blade down in a massive overhead arc.
In the old world, a bronze or iron sword would have bounced off or bent. But Alpagu's Sky Steel was designed for Kinetic Transfer. The blade didn't just cut; it vibrated at a frequency that shattered the structural integrity of whatever it hit.
The Southern plate didn't just dent. It split as if it were made of dry parchment. The sound was not a metallic clang, but a high-pitched shriek.
The smiths fell to their knees. Tunga, the old smith, reached out to touch the edge of the blade. It was still cold.
"This is not a sword," Tunga whispered in awe. "This is a curse."
"No," Alpagu corrected, his eyes reflecting the blue tint of the steel. "It is a tool. And we need fifty more just like it by the time the moon is full."
The Shadow in the South
While the Ashina celebrated their new weapon, Alpagu remained at the forge's entrance, looking southward. He knew his limits. He had mastered the steel, but he had not mastered the war.
Ghost trotted up to him, his ears pricked. The wolf-dog gave a low growl, looking toward the horizon. Alpagu felt the ground. A faint, rhythmic thumping. It wasn't horses. It was something heavier, slower.
"The Westerners," Alpagu murmured.
He could see them now in his mind's eye: Great wooden towers on massive rollers, pulled by teams of twenty oxen. These were the "Engines" the South had bought from the Western coastal cities. They were designed to crush mountain forts.
"They are coming with structures," Alpagu said as Bögü joined him. "They think walls and towers will protect them from us."
"We have the Sky Steel now, My Bey," Bögü said, his confidence soaring. "We will cut through their towers like wheat."
Alpagu shook his head. "A sword cannot cut a mountain, Bögü. And these towers are small mountains. We cannot fight them with blades. We must fight them with Leverage. We must make their own weight their enemy."
Alpagu knelt and began drawing a diagram in the soot on the floor. He wasn't drawing a weapon; he was drawing the Focal Points of a siege tower. He was looking for the one beam, the one joint, that held the entire ten-ton structure together.
"I don't know the Westerners' wood," Alpagu admitted, his brow furrowing. "I don't know how they join their timbers. If I strike the wrong place, the tower will simply stand. I need to see them closer. I need to see them move."
"That is suicide," Bögü countered. "They have scouts. Archers with longbows that can hit a hawk in flight."
"Then we will be the hawks," Alpagu said. "Ghost and I will go. You stay and oversee the forging. If I do not return, make sure every man in this tribe has a blue blade. Even if the Gorge falls, the South must bleed for every inch of Ashina dirt."
That night, Alpagu left the safety of the forge. He didn't take a horse; he moved on foot, his senses heightened by the mineral-rich diet and the constant, vibrating hum of the Sky Steel at his hip. He was no longer just a boy from another world. He was the Mimar of a revolution, and the South was about to learn that you cannot build a cage strong enough to hold a man who knows how the bars are made.
.-.-.