Chapter 70
The Volkov family is a house built beneath the frozen soil of the north.
Accordingly, its efforts to ensure the survival of the family and its territory were more thorough than those of any other house.
“You’ve worked hard.”
Aisherel, the only daughter of that family and a Swordmaster, heard those words of encouragement when she went north this time.
“……Father, what did you just say─?”
“Ahem. I said you’ve worked hard. That’s all.”
From her biological father, Arctic Volkov.
He wasn’t the sort of man who praised Aisherel’s efforts.
He was a cold father who looked only at the final result and said, ‘Well done’ or ‘You failed.’
“Mmm, hng, mm….”
Both Aisherel herself and Duke Volkov himself had been like that.
Volkov was gradually softening under Eneresis’s influence.
In that respect, Aisherel felt indebted to Eneresis.
- Squeeze~!
As a result, lately she had begun to look forward to the engagement.
More precisely, it was a mixture of her indebtedness to Akion and her affection for him. Anyway.
- Rub rub
In short,
It had started as an engagement for the sake of the family, but now it was something she herself wanted.
And Akion wasn’t some worthless man, either.
His hair was always messy because he never took care of it, but he was still handsome.
Above all, he had willingly sent people from his workshop to her hometown, even on free service calls!
He did have to promise Eneresis business cooperation here and there, but that was what Volkov had wanted from the start.
- Squeeze~!
“Guegh.”
In that sense, Aisherel had been fond of Eneresis lately.
She liked Akion, too… but, honestly, it annoyed her that he never showed his face except at mealtimes because he was always busy.
- Rub rub!
“Urgh, gek.”
That didn’t mean the boy was a bad person.
Basically, he tried to take care of anyone who took care of him.
She found that side of him rather cute, too….
- Squeeze~!
“Cough, cough! Air! Air!”
There were times when she wanted to squeeze Akion tightly in her arms until he burst.
- Tap tap tap!
But, as if to prove that very point, someone was pounding frantically on her forearm.
“Huh?”
Only then did Aisherel realize that this wasn’t a dream.
Warm winter sunlight was streaming through the window….
- Tap tap tap!
“Tap, tap, tap!!”
“……….”
Only then did Aisherel notice Akion, buried in her chest and suffocating.
So hugging Akion, rubbing against him, and squeezing him tightly hadn’t been a dream?
And she had definitely said she would only nap for a moment, but it was morning now, and they were in bed… Had she actually slept while holding Akion like this?!
“……Kyaaaaaaaaa!!!!”
Aisherel exploded with embarrassment and lifted Akion up as he was,
“Waaagh?!”
- Crash!!!
“Kyaaaah!!”
She threw him out the window with one hand.
With Master-level strength.
“A-Ah?! Akiooon!?!!”
Only then did Aisherel realize what she had done.
She hurriedly leaned out the window,
“Gek, geh….”
“Phew…….”
Fortunately, Aisherel’s room was on the second floor.
And directly below it was a large, leafy tree.
Thanks to that, Akion was caught in the tree and remained unharmed.
*
As he felt every time, Akion was terrified of a Master.
“There, there, Akion. Good boy?”
“Eek, she bites…!!”
When it had been Clad, he had spent several seconds flying through the air from Clad’s tossing him up,
and this time, he had been thrown out a window while being held in one hand.
“She’s a biter! A Fawks biter!”
“Indeed! How dare you throw my precious Akion away by force!!”
Thanks to that, Goldie and the Tower Master were delighted to have new material to tease him with.
“You Fawks biter!!”
- Bonk!
“Whiiine!”
“That’s enough, Goldie. You too, Tower Master.”
“Ahem. All right.”
Of course, both of them fell silent after Aisherel’s terrifying chop.
“Ahem, Akion. I’m truly sorry for throwing you out this morning. I’ll do anything, so couldn’t you forgive me?”
Anyway, Aisherel wanted to make up with Akion.
More precisely, she wanted to persuade the terrified Akion.
“Biter!”
“You can’t say that to your fiancée!”
“Grrrr!!”
“Don’t growl at me! Sit!”
“Is this truly how engaged couples are supposed to converse?”
“Goldie doesn’t know either.”
Even Goldie and the Tower Master, who ought to have been accustomed to the madness unfolding around them by now, could only shake their heads.
Everyone around Akion had one thing in common: they grew softer. Was madness perhaps the side effect?
“Ngh, fine! A wish ticket! I’ll give you one wish ticket! Then can you forgive me?!”
“Then break off the engagement─ Gack, I’m kidding!!”
“You should know better than to joke about that, you little bastard!!”
Thus, Akion was put in another headlock as payment for his joke,
then returned to his seat while rubbing his throbbing head.
“I have no one on my side. No one.”
“Young Master, you did bring that anger upon yourself.”
“Indeed. Playing with a woman’s romantic feelings deserves more than death.”
Although all three women standing before Akion had no romantic experience whatsoever. Anyway.
“Sis, are you coming with me to the capital now?”
“Yes. I’ve taken care of everything that needed handling. And Count Delford asked me to, too….”
Aisherel had officially been assigned as Akion’s guard.
Akion really was threatened fairly often,
and from Delford’s perspective, he wanted the woman he liked, Aisherel, to prosper,
“I suppose we’ll have to live together in the capital, too. Hehe, take good care of me?”
Thinking, ‘Might as well do everything while I’m at it,’ Aisherel would now be working alongside Akion.
“Is it really appropriate for a Master to guard one ordinary human…?”
Of course, Akion thought it was a waste of manpower.
A Master providing close protection for him twenty-four hours a day, if not literally?
Wouldn’t it be more profitable to hunt more monsters with that time?
“What about the fifth-tier mage maid beside you and the Tower Master?”
“……Yes.”
Regardless, Akion’s argument was dismissed as nonsense.
To begin with, Goldie was already a dedicated maid who even handled his security, and then there was the Tower Master.
Akion gave up and decided to accept it.
“Then when you go to the capital, will you only be my guard?”
“Who knows? Honestly, Goldie and the Tower Master will be there, too… As you said, adding me would be excessive protection.”
“Then… while you’re at it, would you like to become a professor at the academy? You could earn some pocket money, too.”
He also made a proposal that would benefit the academy, the Emperor, and his sister’s pocket money, all at once.
Aisherel waved her hands at Akion’s sudden proposal.
“No, no. It’s fine. My family sends me living expenses. Besides, you know how people would talk if someone like me were appointed through favoritism, right?”
“That’s what she says, Tower Master.”
“The Master will shut up and accept the conscription order for professors.”
“…….”
Of course, it was a leading question.
The Tower Master loved the Empire, and Akion sought to strengthen imperial authority. How could they pass up a Swordmaster professor?
“Heehee! Professor Master! You’ll gather tons of new students!”
“That will bolster the imperial treasury as well! Heh heh heh!!”
“I hate these people….”
“Goldie feels that way sometimes, too.”
Aisherel had to pet Goldie and calm her anger.
* * *
So what became of the aluminum?
“Whoa…….”
They had thrown in the Tower Master, Goldie, the Eneresis mages, and even Delford,
“It’s finished.”
and finally managed to produce aluminum in ingot form.
In massive quantities, too!
“Everyone, you’ve worked hard!”
“Groan, urgh.”
“Good grief, I did use a lot of power.”
Instead, most of the mages collapsed with groans of mana exhaustion.
Even the Tower Master was sweating slightly and was now sitting in a chair to rest.
“Why does it consume so much mana….”
“It does use quite a lot of electricity. Anyway, you’ve all worked incredibly hard.”
Finding the proper voltage,
and then maintaining it,
until a ton of aluminum had been produced—
the difficulty was enough to make even a dragon break out in a cold sweat.
“We have to do this every time…? Akion, even I can’t be tied up with this one task forever.”
“That’s why I’m planning to find an alternative.”
For that reason, Akion was considering something like a generator to replace this process.
“A mana power plant.”
“Hmm?”
Mana seemed to possess properties similar to electricity anyway,
so Akion was wondering whether they could build a power plant, make batteries, and store the energy in an ESS.
The Tower Master carefully considered the possibility of this idea.
“It should be possible, but… is there really anything with greater energy-storage efficiency than a mana stone?”
“Then we’ll make it. Isn’t that what engineering is?”
A power plant’s generator operated on principles similar to a motor, so modifying one would be easy,
and a generator needed a turbine to turn.
They would simply have to choose an energy source for the turbine and adapt it accordingly.
“But not right now.”
“Hmm. If you say so….”
The problem was energy storage.
There was no material capable of storing mana more efficiently than a mana stone,
and, more importantly, mana stones could not be recharged.
Recently, magic circles capable of gathering mana and storing it for a certain period had appeared… but they had limits, too.
“Huff, then, Young Master. If you had that, huff, could Goldie fire lightning magic over and over, huff, huff?”
“Who knows? I don’t think we’ll know whether you can use the power until we make it. And for now, rest.”
“Huff, y-yes, huff….”
Of course, for now, they only needed to make enough aluminum for immediate use,
and since they had prepared the processing facilities while they had the chance, they could simply start them up again once they found an energy source.
“Sir Clad. Shall we start rolling it?”
“Ha ha ha! I’ve been waiting!”
From here on, it was the blacksmiths’ domain.
Just as they had pressed steel between rollers to make iron plates, they now had to press this aluminum flat and wide into sheets.
Of course, they would have to intersperse other rolling methods along the way.
“Hey, be careful!”
“Goodness, that looks rather dangerous. Don’t worry. The difference in thickness from rolling steel plates is practically nothing!”
First, they used hot rolling, heating and pressing the ingot to turn the aluminum into a thin sheet.
By gradually narrowing the gaps between the rollers, the aluminum ingot soon became a thin sheet about two millimeters thick.
Of course, they also had to heat it between each set of rollers so it wouldn’t tear from internal stress, which made the process quite difficult,
“Heh heh, this is softer than I expected, so it’s hard to handle!”
“But the moment it falls into our hands, it has no choice but to spread out. Heh heh, you little thing! Look at you lying there, lewdly spread wide!”
“Stop saying strange things and focus on your work.”
They were craftsmen who had already mastered rolling technology.
Thin aluminum sheets poured out from their hands.
Next came the long-awaited part….
“……You want us to compress it forty times thinner than this?”
“Young Master, are you in your right mind?”
“I’m perfectly sane, and do I ever ask you to do something impossible? If I tell you to do it, then do it.”
“Ugh.”
Pack rolling.
They placed two neatly rolled aluminum coils, each two millimeters thick, facing each other, then fed them into the ultra-precision rolling mill they had prepared in advance.
- Snap!
“Wh-why did it break?!”
“You crazy bastard! Do you know how much this costs?!”
“I told you there’d be some trial and error. Don’t panic; just try again.”
The key was pulling it taut without letting it tear.
“You bastard, this time it tore!!”
“Damn, I was definitely pulling carefully…!”
“If it really won’t work, I’ll make a wind-up machine to pull it for you.”
“Ngh, we don’t need that! I’ll do it through sheer stubbornness!”
Unlike steel, it tore easily, so the workshop staff were rapidly worn down.
“Heh heh, I wonder what we can make with this…!”
“It’s incredibly light… and sturdier than I expected! It may not be useful for swords, but it’ll be good whenever we need to make something light!”
Even so, everyone focused intensely on the new metal, their eyes shining.
They wondered what the young master intended to make with it that he would go to such lengths to make it this thin.
After all, anything Akion made… produced an astonishing result.
Thus, after several days of working through the nights,
“Ha, h-heh, hahahaha, hahahahaha!!”
the workshop staff found themselves facing an unbelievably thin aluminum sheet wound around a wooden barrel.
“To think it could be this thin…!!”
Akion Workshop had finally completed aluminum foil.
Technically, merely producing a metal sheet this thin was already beyond belief to them.
But they had done it, right?
With their own hands!
“Young Master, what are you going to make with this first?!”
That accomplishment had filled the workshop staff with such exhilaration that they asked Akion,
eager to know what incredible thing he planned to make with it!
Of course, if Akion revealed his true purpose, they might be put in danger, so he decided to give them a different purpose.
“I’m going to use it when I roast food.”
“……Huh?” Seeing Akion suddenly put firewood into the iron cylinder with a grill on top, the workshop staff could only stare in utter bewilderment.