Free Web NovelChapter 231: Chapter 224:The dwarfs idea
Ironbreaker held his idea for three days, which for him was a feat roughly comparable to holding his breath.
He turned up at the hangar on the fourth morning with the look of a man who had lost an argument with himself, walked straight past the taxi-test schedule Lucien was reviewing, and jabbed a thick finger at the finished Fw 189 sitting patient on its wheels.
"I want to put a Vulcan on it."
Gandalf, passing behind with an armful of instrument scrolls, stopped dead. Maerath actually laughed — a short, startled bark — then saw the dwarf’s face and stopped laughing.
"It’s a scout," Lucien said carefully. "It’s built to be light. A Vulcan weighs more than the crew, the fuel, and half the airframe put together. The recoil alone would fold those wings like wet paper, and that’s before we discuss feeding the thing — it eats ammunition faster than any wagon on this field could carry it aloft."
"I know all that." Ironbreaker didn’t lower the finger. "I’ve known it since before I opened my mouth. That’s not the idea. That’s just the part everyone panics about."
"Then what’s the idea?"
The dwarf turned and looked at the aircraft — and when he finally spoke, his voice had dropped out of its usual bark into something slower and more dangerous.
"I watched you build this machine for two weeks. And I watched you cheat, over and over, in the same way each time. You couldn’t draw the wire, so you ran mana instead. You couldn’t make the glass, so you set runes to fix it after the fact. You couldn’t cool the engine, so half the cooling isn’t cooling at all — it’s a spell pretending the heat isn’t there." He tapped the crew cabin with one blunt knuckle. "Every time the iron failed, you handed the job to magic, and the machine flew anyway. So I’ve stood in my workshop for three days asking myself one question, and I can’t make it go away."
"Which is?"
"If magic can carry what the wire couldn’t," Ironbreaker said, "and hold what the glass couldn’t, and ignore heat the metal couldn’t survive — then why in every hell can’t it carry a gun’s weight? Buffer its recoil? Feed its belt?" He spread his scarred hands. "You’re already building machines that are half spell and half steel and calling them aircraftand since you are using so much magic already I’m asking why we keep drawing the line at the one place it would matter most."
The hangar had gone quiet. Even the distant clang of the workshops seemed to have politely stepped back.
Lucien looked at the dwarf for a long moment, and then at the aircraft, and felt the shape of something far larger than a single gun on a single scout — a principle that had been sitting underneath every problem they’d solved for two weeks without any of them naming it aloud. On Earth, the machines of war had waited decades for their electronics, for radar and fire control and guided flight, each one built on a mountain of industry no kingdom here could raise in a lifetime. But Elarion didn’t have to raise it. Elarion could reach past the mountain entirely.
"Say more," he said quietly.
They tried it, because Lucien had learned long ago that the fastest way to understand a big idea was to let it break something small.
Ironbreaker didn’t propose the full Vulcan — even he wasn’t that reckless. He proposed a stripped one: half the barrels, a lightened frame, a shortened belt, and, crucially, every part that had always made the weapon monstrous handed off to magic instead of steel. A mana buffer to soak the recoil before it ever reached the airframe. A mana-assisted feed to spare the aircraft the dead weight of the mechanical belt trays. A weapon that was, in Ironbreaker’s own words, "half a gun and half an apology, held together by a spell that hasn’t been invented yet."
The spell had to be invented. That took Maerath and Gandalf four days, one ruined workbench, and a genuinely alarming quantity of Maerath’s patience.
The recoil buffer came first, and it nearly killed the idea in its cradle. The Vulcan’s recoil didn’t arrive as a single shove but as a savage, rhythmic hammering — dozens of blows a second, each one hunting for a weakness in the mounts — and the buffer had to catch every blow and bleed it away before it reached the frame. The first version did exactly half of that job. It caught the force faithfully, stored it faithfully, and then released all of it at once a heartbeat later, kicking the test rig sideways in a single delayed lurch that tore two bolts out of the floor.
"Worse than no buffer at all," Gandalf pronounced, surveying the damage, "and considerably ruder."
"It’s not rude," Maerath muttered, already reworking the rune sequence. "It’s honest. It gave back precisely what it was given. The problem is that honesty, delivered all at once, is indistinguishable from violence."
"You’ve just described every conversation I’ve ever had with Cedric," Ironbreaker said.
The fix was a buffer that leaked instead of held — a constant working buffer that drained the hammering away continuously, as fast as it arrived, so the airframe felt one long hard push instead of a killing drumroll of blows. The second test bent nothing and the third went the same too. Maerath stopped flinching at the trigger somewhere around the fifth.
The feed came next, and behaved considerably better(good boy-by author). A mana-driven lift carried rounds up to the breach in a smooth glowing ribbon, replacing the heavy mechanical trays that fed the ground mounts — and while it couldn’t match the full Vulcan’s gluttonous appetite, but it didn’t need to either,a stripped gun fired a stripped belt. Gandalf, watching the rounds float upward in orderly procession, remarked that it was the most polite ammunition he had ever seen.
The balance was the cruelest problem, and no spell fixed it. A gun mounted forward dragged the aircraft’s center of weight forward with it, and an airframe that flew nose-heavy was an airframe that wanted, quietly and constantly, to dive. They shifted the mount twice also tried moving ballast until Ironbreaker was threatening to move the crew instead. In the end they simply accepted the truth the arithmetic had been telling them all along: an armed variant would fly differently — heavier in the nose, hungrier for engine, a worse scout in every measurable way, but able to reach down out of the sky and bite.
On the ninth day, they bolted the finished experiment to the reinforced rig, cleared the range, and fired it.
The stripped Vulcan spun up with its familiar rising snarl and spat its shortened belt in a hammering three-second roar that every man on the field felt through the soles of his boots. And the mana buffer held. It trembled. It strained. It bled the absorbed force away in a faint blue shimmer that ran the length of the mount like heat off a summer road — but it held, and when the barrels wound down and the smoke drifted clear, the rig stood exactly where it had been bolted, unbent, unbroken.
The silence afterward rang.
"It works," Maerath said, not quite believing his own instruments.
"It half-works," Ironbreaker corrected, because he was constitutionally incapable of letting anyone enjoy anything. "On a rig. Bolted to the ground. Put it on a flying airframe and every problem we just solved comes back wearing a different hat." But he was grinning as he said it, soot in his beard and something dangerously close to wonder in his eyes, and nobody in earshot mistook the correction for disappointment.
Lucien let them have the moment. Then he took it away, because that was his job.
"This does not go on the Fw 189."
He watched Ironbreaker’s grin curdle, and pressed on before the eruption could gather.
"Hear me out. The scout stays a scout. It flies light, it flies unarmed, and it does the one job we need done before all others — it gives us eyes. Every hour spent arming this airframe is an hour stolen from the reconnaissance we are three years from being able to survive without. Cedric doesn’t need a scout that can fight. He needs a scout that comes home."
"Then what," Ironbreaker said, dangerously low, "was the point of the last nine days?"
"The point," Lucien said, "was never the gun."
He crossed to the test rig, still faintly shimmering as the last of the absorbed force leaked away, and laid a hand on the stripped Vulcan’s warm frame.
"You proved a principle. Magic doesn’t just fill the gaps where our industry is missing — the wire we can’t draw, the glass we can’t perfect. It can carry loads our engineering cannot. Recoil no light frame should survive. Weight no wing should lift. That isn’t a trick for one gun on one scout." He turned to face them. "That is the foundation of every armed aircraft this territory will ever build. Every gunship. Every fighter. Every machine we send up expecting it to fight and come back. They all begin with what happened on this rig today Because the weight is the most important thing a aircraft needs to worry about, it can be costly yes but we can afford it for the aircrafts."
The anger drained out of Ironbreaker’s posture by slow degrees, replaced by the narrow-eyed calculation of a dwarf revising the size of what he’d won.
"So it gets filed," Lucien continued. "Not as a weapon — as a proof. And you get a research line. Small, quiet, funded, and yours. Its task is to turn this half-working miracle into something that works on flying aircrafts — against the day we design an aircraft built from the first rivet to carry it."
"A research line of my own." Ironbreaker rolled the words around like a tasting of good ale. "Away from Lucas and his opinions about my spending."
"Lucas will still see every figure."
"Then it’s not truly away from him, is it."
"Nothing in this territory is truly away from Lucas. He’d find your ledgers at the bottom of the sea."
"He’d swim down personally," Ironbreaker agreed, "to complain about the cost of the bringing it from water." But he was already looking back at the stripped gun with the undisguised hunger of a craftsman handed permission, and Lucien knew the research line would be producing headaches and marvels in roughly equal measure before the month was out.
Across the hangar, past the scorched test range and the scattered tools of nine days’ obsession, the Fw 189 sat waiting on its wheels — unarmed, uncomplicated, and cleared at last for the one thing it had been built for and had never yet done.
Lucien looked at it for a long moment.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we find out if it flies at all. Then you can all go back to arguing about what it should carry."
