Episode-806
Chapter : 1611
"I'm not going to enslave you," Lloyd said. "I'm not going to make you a battery. I'm going to make you the pilot."
He redesigned the cockpit. It wasn't just a seat. It was a interface. The Golem Heart would handle the energy regulation, the balance, the micro-adjustments. The human pilot would provide the intent, the strategy. It would be a fusion. A partnership between a man and a ghost in the machine.
"Infinite autonomous energy," Lloyd noted, drawing the connection lines. "The Heart pulls mana from the ambient atmosphere. It never runs dry. As long as the world has magic, the Aegis has power."
He stepped back to look at the full schematic.
It was monstrous. It stood twelve feet tall. It was bulky, covered in ablative armor plates. It had thrusters on the back. It had a massive, hydraulic pile-bunker on the right arm—a spear of tungsten designed to punch through god-flesh.
It didn't look like a knight. It looked like a tank that had learned to walk. It looked angry.
"It needs a shield," Lyra said, looking over his shoulder. She looked exhausted, dark circles under her eyes, but she hadn't left his side. "If we are abandoning magic barriers, we need a physical shield."
"No," Lloyd said. "No shield."
"But Master," Borin argued. "Defense is—"
"We aren't defending," Lloyd snapped. "I told you. The doctrine has changed."
He pointed to the left arm of the drawing. He drew a massive, rotary cannon.
"We don't block," Lloyd said. "We overwhelm. We put so much kinetic energy into the air that the enemy can't move. We create a wall of lead and fire."
He looked at the hairpin pinned to the paper.
"She was the shield," Lloyd whispered. "She was the Diamond Queen. And she broke. I will not ask a machine to do what she did. I will not ask it to endure."
He picked up the charcoal and darkened the lines of the pile-bunker.
"This machine doesn't protect," Lloyd said, his voice cold and final. "It avenges. It is the wrath of a grieving father made of ceramic and tungsten. It is the end of the argument."
He turned to his team. They looked terrified of him, but also inspired. They saw the madness, but they also saw the genius.
"Build it," Lloyd commanded. "I want a prototype in two weeks. Use the entire budget. Melt down the silverware if you have to. I don't care."
"Two weeks?" Alaric gasped. "That's impossible."
Lloyd looked at him. The [All-Seeing Eye] flared in his socket, a blue ghost light.
"Impossible is what we do now, Alaric," Lloyd said. "Because the alternative is extinction. Get to work."
He turned back to the drawing. He looked at the empty faceplate of the helmet he had drawn. It looked like a skull.
I'm coming for you, Lucifer, Lloyd thought. You wanted to see the Line of Iron? I'm going to show you the Iron Age.
The manufactory lab had transformed. It was no longer a place of gentle alchemy or soap production. It had become a forge of madness. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, burning metal, and the stale sweat of men who hadn't seen the sun in days.
Lloyd stood over a long, flat workbench. He looked terrible. His eyes were sunken, dark circles bruising the skin beneath them. His beard was growing in patchy and wild. He hadn't changed his clothes in four days. But his hands were steady. They moved with the precision of a surgeon and the speed of a machine.
"Fireballs are stupid," Lloyd muttered to himself. He grabbed a piece of charcoal and aggressively crossed out a complex runic array on the blueprint. "They are slow. They are visible. They can be blocked by a shield. I don't want to burn him. I want to delete him."
Alaric, the head alchemist, stood nearby, holding a tray of lukewarm coffee. He looked terrified. "Master Lloyd," he ventured softly. "If we remove the thermal projection array, the suit will have no offensive magical capability. It will just be... a very heavy metal statue."
Lloyd looked up. His eyes glowed with the blue light of the [All-Seeing Eye], which he had kept active for so long that the veins around his temples were pulsing.
"If we remove the thermal projection array, the suit will have no offensive magical capability. It will just be... a very heavy metal statue."
Chapter : 1612
Lloyd ignored him. He reached out with his left hand, his [Steel Blood] ability flaring. The metal on the workbench didn't just heat up; it screamed. He wasn't casting a spell; he was forcing the molecules to align through sheer, hateful will.
"Magic can be silenced," Lloyd hissed through gritted teeth as he fused the chamber of the gun without a welding torch. "Lucifer proved that. So I am building the one thing he cannot silence."
Lloyd pointed to the new design on the paper. It looked like a long, rectangular barrel wrapped in coils of copper and silver.
"This," Lloyd said, tapping the drawing, "is a Railgun. It doesn't use mana to create an explosion. It uses the Golem Heart to generate a massive electromagnetic field. We take a slug of Heavy Star-Metal—the densest stuff we can find—and we accelerate it along these rails."
Borin, the explosion enthusiast, leaned in. "Accelerate it how fast?"
"Mach 7," Lloyd said calmly.
Borin blinked. "I don't know what a 'Mach' is, but seven of them sounds like a lot."
"It means," Lloyd explained, "that the projectile moves seven times faster than sound. It will hit the target before the sound of the shot even reaches them. It doesn't need to be sharp. It doesn't need to be enchanted. At that speed, a pebble hits with the force of a falling castle. A slug of Star-Metal? It will punch a hole through a mountain."
Lloyd grabbed a prototype coil. "Lucifer can invert magnetism to rust iron. Fine. We don't use iron for the rails. We use a superconductive alloy of silver and mythril. He can't rust mythril. And the slug? It's just a rock moving very, very fast. You can't dispel momentum. You can't counter-spell physics."
He moved down the table to the next weapon system. It was a sword, but not like any sword the alchemists had ever seen. The blade was serrated, but the teeth were microscopic.
"Vibro-Blades," Lloyd announced. "Alaric, you know how sound can shatter glass?"
"Yes," Alaric nodded. "Resonance."
"Exactly," Lloyd said. "We are going to attach a high-frequency sonic generator to the hilt. It will vibrate the blade at a frequency so high it becomes invisible to the naked eye. It will destabilize the molecular bonds of whatever it touches."
Lyra, the pragmatist, frowned. "Molecular bonds?"
"It cuts things," Lloyd simplified. "It doesn't hack. It separates matter. It will slide through Devil skin like a hot knife through butter. It doesn't rely on sharpness. It relies on agitation. If Lucifer tries to grab this blade, his hand will turn into a mist of red vapor."
Lloyd picked up a welding tool. It wasn't a magical wand; it was a device he had built himself, using a focused beam of light through a lens.
"We are abandoning the old ways," Lloyd said, turning back to the work. "The Ferrum style of 'create a big heavy thing and drop it' is obsolete. We are entering the age of precision. We are entering the age of kinetic energy."
He activated the [All-Seeing Eye]. He zoomed in on the circuit board of the railgun. To the naked eye, it looked like a mess of gold wire. To Lloyd, it was a city. He could see the flaws in the metal, the microscopic gaps in the connection.
He began to weld. He worked at a microscopic level, fusing the circuits with a precision no human smith could match. He wasn't just building a weapon; he was weaving a masterpiece of engineering. Every solder point was perfect. Every connection was redundant.
"Master," Lyra said softly. "You've been working for thirty hours straight. Your hands are bleeding."
Lloyd looked down. She was right. He had gripped the tools so hard that the skin on his palms had split. He hadn't felt it.
"Blood is a lubricant," Lloyd joked, though there was no humor in his voice. "It helps the gears turn."
He didn't stop. He couldn't stop. If he stopped, he would see Jasmin's face. If he stopped, he would remember the sound of the diamond shattering. So he focused on the math. He focused on the voltage. He focused on the kill.
"Get me more Star-Metal," Lloyd ordered, his voice flat. "And tell Ken to find me a diamond. A synthetic one. Industrial grade. I need a focusing lens for the targeting system."