Another week passed.
While I was driving the Caterpillar Golem to test-fire the machine gun that would become the Cyclops’s main armament, Noel looked at me from beside me and smiled faintly.
“Lord Aizen, you seem to be enjoying yourself these days.”
“Do I?”
I had been thinking that work felt more satisfying than usual, but was it showing on my face?
“The craftsmen are dying every day, but he’s the only one coming back to life.”
“No one’s actually died, so isn’t it fine?”
“That’s not something someone who made them work without rest should say.”
She said that, but Mina herself looked even happier than I did.
Well, she was the employer.
Employers generally prefer it when the people they hire work without rest.
“Still, who would dislike things going smoothly?”
“Agreed.”
If I had been in a good mood lately, it was because after about another week of work, we had succeeded in making the equipment for the arms and torso as well.
The head, in truth, served more to protect the magic stone that functioned as the main camera than as a frame, so the frame facilities were more or less complete.
Now all that remained was to make the most important engine, the precise magic tools that would fill the interior, and finally the armor plates—and if they could do that without me, it would be a success.
“Besides, if it’s just the armor plates, quite a few of Mina’s craftsmen worked with me on them, so as long as we standardize the specifications, it should be fine.”
“At Aizen’s pace, the facility research should be finished in about two weeks.”
So now that I had some time, I was planning to proceed with research and mass production of the armaments as well.
In truth, since the Cyclops involved far more precise and intricate workmanship, I didn’t think the weapons would be that difficult.
“Our stay should be over in about three weeks.”
After that, I would have to return to the academy.
I would have been away for nearly two months, but apparently plenty of academy students left for several months to act as proxy lords, so this much was nothing.
So I had to enjoy it while I could.
We arrived at the designated site, and I got down from the Caterpillar Golem.
Then Count Phoenix, Professor Reina, Erika, and the others began disembarking from the Caterpillar Golem’s trailer.
“Huh. The road wasn’t paved, but we still came smoothly.”
The count muttered as he looked at the path the Caterpillar Golem had taken.
It was a mountain area slightly far away, somewhere carriages couldn’t reach, but all were equal before treads.
Still, I had to apologize.
“I’m sorry for making you ride somewhere not originally meant for passengers.”
“Not at all. If I forced my way along, I have to accept that much.”
Originally, it was supposed to be me, Mina, Noel, Erika, and Professor Reina going, but the count had requested to accompany us.
The Caterpillar Golem’s cockpit could not exactly be called spacious, so we had hurriedly furnished the compartment that Mina’s trading company people had used and had them ride there. Fortunately, it seemed he had not found it unpleasant.
“You said you embedded a bit of floating stone, didn’t you? The impact was light. If you reduce the shock a little more, nobles would likely make good use of it for travel or sightseeing.”
“I’ll keep your valuable opinion in mind.”
Mina replied, her eyes sparkling.
She had smelled money.
Since the count looked like he wanted us to begin, I climbed back into the Cyclops and activated it.
The Cyclops began to rise from the trailer, and those who had not yet seen it began exclaiming in admiration.
I rode down along the mountainside a little.
Then I lifted the machine gun with both hands and fired.
—Kwa-ga-ga-ga-gak!
Perhaps because it was so large, the firing sound was different from what I had imagined.
However, the Cyclops did not sway from firing, and it was hitting the cave on the opposite mountain that we had chosen as a target with considerable accuracy.
Due to technical issues, what it fired was not a separated bullet and casing, but something closer to pushing and launching similarly shaped lumps of iron, yet it succeeded in emptying one magazine without jamming anywhere.
Then I picked up the magazine hanging at the unit’s waist, inserted it into the top of the machine gun to reload, and repeated the firing.
—“He’s inserting that from above and just keeps shooting? And that’s a method he changed to because the original didn’t go as planned?”
—“At that size, he’s practically firing cannons indiscriminately….”
The accompanying people were greatly shocked as they watched the Cyclops’s machine gun, while the count was nodding.
Even though this was a structure I had heavily compromised on because I still couldn’t properly reproduce what I wanted, he seemed to regard it favorably.
Even if there was a better method than this, reproducing it right away would require an enormous amount of time and research, so it couldn’t be helped.
Though it was fun precisely because I kept seeing room for improvement.
‘I can take care of the rest little by little.’
I would coax Professor Rodelini into working on the improvements again, and at this level, it seemed good enough to mass-produce as an initial production model.
So I decided to move straight on to the next test.
The dagger equipped at its waist, the Cyclops’s close-combat weapon.
When I transmitted the engine’s mana into it, the blade of the dagger began to heat up.
I gripped the dagger’s handle, made to fit the Cyclops’s giant hand, and swung it. I could see trees and grass being scorched by considerable heat.
“The grip strength is good.”
The Cyclops could make a fist, but I had not been certain whether it could properly hold and swing a close-combat weapon without the weapon slipping from its grasp. Fortunately, thanks to the various measures we had taken, it was possible for it to hold and swing it.
When I took the dagger I had been swinging and stabbed the hill in front of me, I saw it dig in easily.
‘And it still didn’t drop it.’
The thought that I had never expected to get this far crossed my mind, and I smiled without realizing it.
It had not been the weapon I had originally planned, but because the incident with Galed last time had brought an unexpected gift, the machine imbued with the soul of the Space Duchy had finally taken another step closer to completion.
‘Heat metal, huh.’
A kind of rare metal said to occasionally appear among mana metals.
At the point when I had confirmed that the leg frame made purely by Mina’s craftsmen operated normally and immediately begun working on the equipment to make the arms and torso, the metal Erika delivered to me as a gift from the count had been reborn as an excellent close-combat weapon.
Of course, there was the issue of unit cost, so if we were to use it as an ordinary mass-produced weapon, I would have to think of something.
‘And I was able to make an unexpectedly interesting function too, so I suppose that’s fine.’
While researching heat metal, I had discovered an amusing method of use while making a kind of safety device, or something like that.
In any case, the gift the count had given me had truly been a great help.
There was still a path ahead that needed a little more polishing, but—
‘Once I can see the path, all I have to do is move forward.’
Thinking that all I had to do now was believe in myself and advance, I climbed back up the mountain and returned to where the Caterpillar Golem was, then laid the Cyclops down on the trailer.
—“Splendid.”
—“With that much power, as long as the mass-production system is established….”
When I came out of the cockpit, I saw the excited faces of Count Phoenix and his vassals, as well as the somewhat uneasy expressions of several knights.
And then—
“You did it!”
I saw Noel and Mina approaching with smiles, and Erika a little behind them.
The Cyclops was taking one more step toward true completion.
****
And on a mountain not far away.
Two men dressed in ordinary peasant clothing were watching Count Phoenix through a long-distance magic tool.
‘Dangerous. That thing is dangerous.’
As they watched the scenes unfolding below the mountain, the two men had no choice but to stare wide-eyed, their gazes fixed.
An unnamed giant, under Count Phoenix’s watch, was firing a huge cannon in rapid succession and swinging a dagger.
The tremendous sound that echoed out, the cave on the mountain being destroyed, the giant dagger that dug in lightly, and the heat emanating from that dagger.
And the giant that performed all of it with disciplined movements.
At first, they had thought the count had tamed a monster, but upon closer inspection, the giant’s body was made entirely of metal.
‘That’s not a monster.’
The men checked the note in their possession.
They confirmed the words written there once more and looked at the giant again.
—There is a rumor that the kingdom’s new weapon experiment is being conducted in Count Phoenix’s territory. Confirm it.
“It was true.”
The men were convinced that this was the identity of what they had read about in the note.
“That is the very weapon that will threaten the Argent Empire.”
The two spies thought it had been a good thing they had come to Count Phoenix’s territory to verify it.
Count Phoenix’s territory bordered the Argent Empire, and the count had once used a bioweapon to secure a military advantage.
But the bioweapon had ultimately gone berserk, and fourteen of Count Phoenix’s knights had sacrificed themselves before it was barely defeated. After that, for a while, the count had merely gathered soldiers and built up his strength, without any active movement to create something, but…
“So behind the scenes, he continued researching weapons and finally produced one.”
Or had that bioweapon been a deception operation?
Many thoughts came to mind, but judging that was not the spies’ role.
What mattered was the enormous giant now lying in the box.
Judging by its metallic body, its identity was…
“A golem.”
Considering common sense about golems, it was absurd, but there was no other way to explain it.
Golems made of rock, because of their huge and heavy bodies, became tremendously weighty and inevitably had many legs and sluggish movements.
However, there was no other way to think of an existence with a body made of inanimate matter that obeyed commands.
And when the giant’s chest opened and a black-haired man climbed out from inside, the two men in peasant clothes nodded.
“We have to investigate who that man is.”
“If possible, we bring him in. If not…”
They had to eliminate him.
“As it happens, I heard one of the Empire’s Sword Saints has come near the border. They say he came intending to use that item in the count’s territory.”
“Then this is convenient timing.”
The spies thought of one of the weapons the Empire had developed to oppose the kingdom.
With that, surely they could respond to that enormous giant.
They had to.
“To be honest, I’m uneasy…”
“If we want to eliminate that threat early, we have to move as quickly as possible.”
For the future of the Empire, the spies nodded.
Once their course had been decided, all that remained was action.
“Until every road beneath the sky leads to the Empire.”
Reciting the Empire’s slogan, the spies hurriedly began descending the mountain.