Antvance into the Unknown

97. The Hammer of the Future

The hatchling is practically vibrating with excitement as she watches all the action, and I can already sense the thought of running off to explore forming in her mind. This little thing! She needs to chill out, yeesh! Rather than toss her to Invidia for time out, I head off her burgeoning escape attempt by offering to take her deeper into the nest so we can watch the process bear out, an offer she readily agrees to.

It takes a little while to follow the looping tunnels all the way down to the area just beneath the bottom of the ore drop off point. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but the work room here is just as vast and oversized as the area above it. A blast of hot air smacks us in the face at the end of the tunnel, and we find ourselves in a massive furnace room. Carvers are everywhere, running around, operating the many enormous blast furnaces and processing the slag and metal that comes out. Its bedlam filled with the roar of flame, the grind of metal, and the crack of stone.

Trying not to let her get distracted, I herd the hatchling toward the bottom of the cone so we can watch the process from start to finish. I’m super curious to see it myself, not just to show it to the new champion in the Colony.

What my siblings have achieved blows me away and I feel great pride at the incredible things my family has accomplished. It’s not just killing monsters and growing more hatchlings, we build and create, design and develop! It’s exciting what we’ve become capable of, and I’m eager to see more.

To my shock, I find that the ants have invented something else I never expected to see in this world without me having any input or even knowing anything about it. The opening of the cone is still several metres across, and from it pours a constant flow of raw ore. This rock drops a short distance onto a rounded slope that kills the momentum and gathers the ore together before it’s deposited onto, of all things, a conveyor belt.

Have they invented rubber? Nope, that’d be way too out of their league, we haven’t gone quite as far as oil processing. Come to think of it, would oil even exist? Biomass gets absorbed by the Dungeon if it’s left lying about for too long… and this world isn’t exactly solid all the way to the middle, far from it… Forget it!

No, the belt they’ve made is stone. How does that work, you might ask? Magic. As in, literally Earth Magic. A team of dozens of carvers work above and below the belt, using their Earth Magic to constantly keep the thin layer of stone moving until it reaches the end of the line, where the individual blocks drop and rotate back the other way.

Close inspection reveals that guide rails for the blocks have been carved on the other side, glowing brightly with powerful rune magic. Of course, something like this wouldn’t be possible without extensive enchanting. The belt itself is formed of thin yet highly condensed blocks of stone that seamlessly slot together, each one only thirty centimetres or so wide and several metres in length. The other shocking thing is the length of the belt itself, perhaps as much as a hundred metres long, carrying the ore in a straight line past numerous stations, each manned by dozens of ants.

In fact, the entire thing is positively bristling with carvers, quite a few of them on the belt itself, picking through the rock and using their nimble front claws to shift bits and pieces as they run forward to avoid being pulled back as if they were on a treadmill.

Close to the belt is a constant rumble that ripples through the air and sends shivers through my antennae. It’s pretty darn intense and gets the heart pounding. I nudge the hatchling and we shift over to the stations farther down the belt, curious to see what they’re about. At each one, I can smell the carvers talking to one another as they work.

“There, there! Get it!”

“That’s granite, no, no, that one! Send it back, we want iron ore!”

“Is that infused tin? Let it roll down the line, we just process the regular stuff. Read the Mana signature already!”

Quite a few of them turn to speak to me as I stroll over, and I’m forced to wave off the usual accusations of slacking and loafing as we watch them work. It appears each station is part of a furiously paced sorting process as the ants use their Mana Sense, eyes, and highly developed Stone Magic to pick out the minerals and ores they want at their station, magically dragging the rocks in and depositing them into huge iron ‘bins’ that rest beneath them.

I don’t know nearly enough about geology to know which rocks are which, but the carvers appear to have no trouble discerning what they want, sweeping the ore they desire off the belt with minimal trouble, leaving behind that which they don’t need. If by chance they do end up snagging the wrong thing, there are carvers running the lip of the bin itself, inspecting every single stone that falls in to ensure the contents remain pure.

As we watch the iron ore bin, which is definitely one of the busier stations—in fact, I think there are two of them—fills up and we get to see the next stage. After a final check, something is done to release the bin and a team of carvers use magic to direct it along a predetermined path. Farther down, it enters an all-new processing line, where huge numbers of carvers operate all sorts of gear. I decide to take the hatchling down the iron line to ask a few questions and run into one carver who’s happy enough to answer them.

“We learned most of this process from the humans on the surface,” she happily admits, waving one of her claws at the vast setup. “But we’ve taken many steps to refine it further, obviously.”

She points to the bin that just arrived.

“The new ore is a mix of rock containing iron at various purities, and we need to do a ton of work in order to get something usable. Crush it, wash it, filter it, heat it, and after that⁠—”

“You get iron?” I ask.

She laughs.

“No! Then you have ore that’s ready to smelt!”

Holy smokes.

“Sounds like a lot of effort!”

“It is!”

Teams of carvers work to tip the bin, which sits on hinges attached to a base so it can rotate without being tipped all the way over. The ore is dumped into a basin, whereupon the carvers operate huge steel ‘hammers’ that drop from overhead before being winched back up as other carvers ‘stir’ the jumbled rocks using their Stone Magic.

“After crushing them here, we’ll wash them to remove sand, then bake them to eliminate impurities. Only then will they go into the blast furnace over there along with limestone to turn into pig iron. After that, it gets refined further into steel. After that, we imbue it to churn out charged steel.”

“Charged steel?” I ask, confused. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything like that.

The carver nods, excited.

“It’s the latest process we’ve been working on. Normally to produce the truly good stuff, you need to find ore that contains magic already, right? We call that imbued ore, and it’s really rare! The carvers and mages got to thinking, though, what if we could produce steel, regular, plain old steel, and then imbue it with magic!”

“Isn’t that just enchanting?”

“No! This is putting in Mana and bonding it directly to the steel itself! When you take imbued steel and enchant it, you get double the effect of enchanting normal metal!”

Wow!

“That’s crazy! So, how’s the process working?”

She loses a bit of her enthusiasm.

“Not… perfectly. We’re still in the test and development phase. But we’re getting closer to refining our methods! So far, our best has only been about a third of the Mana level found in naturally occurring ore, but it’s a heck of a lot better than normal steel.”