The Dwarves Go Crazy Over New Technology (2)
After returning home, I sat in the yard, working on the parts that would go into the pneumatic hammer.
Usually I could just magic things into shape and be done with it, but trying to form the shape I wanted without magic was no easy feat.
Should I just use magic anyway?
That dwarf wouldn't be able to tell whether the parts were forged by hand or conjured up anyway.
For a moment I was tempted by the devil's sweet whisper, but I held out. If I gave in to temptation, I'd end up as exactly what that dwarf had called me—a man with no idea how the real world worked.
Besides, every now and then a little exercise to clear the head wasn't such a bad thing.
They do say real-world compressed muscle is worth something, so I could think of it as training.
"Phew, it's hot."
The moon had already risen, but summer was still summer. A little movement, and sweat was already streaming from the crown of my head.
Gripping my collar, I fanned it up and down to push some air inside.
And while I was at it, a cool sensation pressed softly against my cheek.
"You're soaked through."
It was Muriel.
Muriel wiped the sweat running down my face with a water-dampened handkerchief, then pulled a dry one from her pocket. Rising on tiptoe, she tied it around my forehead and smiled, satisfied, before settling demurely onto a log lying nearby.
"How is it? Academy life."
"Not bad so far."
Nobles who looked down on commoners were everywhere, after all. And I'd always studied when I had nothing better to do, so attending lectures didn't stray far from my ordinary routine.
As I assembled the parts I'd prepared, I told her what had been going on.
"I'm thinking of starting a club with Lily soon. What I'm making right now is for that, actually."
"Hmm, is that so. Have you asked her yet about her magic?"
"Not yet."
To be sure, the whole reason I'd approached Lily in the first place was her magic. But I had no intention of asking her to show it to me just yet.
Because it felt like watching myself—the me before Muriel picked me up, when I was bullied and couldn't even eat properly.
And because she wasn't buying herself anything expensive, yet she ate it with a smile, so heartily—reminding me of my little sister from back then.
All of that combined, and I found I simply couldn't bring myself to say it.
If I asked carelessly, she'd assume the only reason I stayed around her was her magic. Maybe that had been true at the start, but it wasn't anymore.
So rather than invite a needless misunderstanding, I planned to learn about her magic slowly, in my own time. Keep living like this, and the day would come naturally, wouldn't it?
Crackle— crackle—
With my thoughts laid bare and the quiet settling in, the campfire burned low, and the sound of its sparks felt unusually loud.
Just as I was lost in that thought, Muriel, seated on the moon-drenched log, reached out and plopped her hand on top of my head. Then she mussed my hair so thoroughly it was a ruin.
"You've made a friend. Well done, well done."
She spoke as if praising a small child. Even adding the age of my past life to this one, I was surely still younger than Muriel, but the treatment was a touch humiliating all the same.
"It feels like yesterday you first brought me here. When did you grow up so much?"
"'Yesterday' feels like quite a long time ago, though."
"Back then you barely came up to my waist. You were small enough to fit right inside a piece of my work."
Muriel closed her eyes, lost in reminiscence, and began her old stories.
"It was adorable, watching that tiny thing set the table in the morning and march ahead of me whenever we went anywhere."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Shall we see how big you've gotten?"
With those words, a soft weight pressed against my back.
I had been crouched on the ground, assembling the scattered parts one by one, and my body tipped sideways. Muriel's golden hair hung over my view as she clung to my back, and her small head rose up over my shoulder. Her cheek came to rest against mine.
"I'm covered in sweat, you know."
"I don't mind."
"It's sticky, though. So what do you think?"
"Mmm... there's no fitting you in my arms anymore. Forget carrying you—you barely fit in a two-armed hug. Time really does fly."
Fufufu.
Muriel laughed warmly.
"Well, I suppose it's the exact opposite of how it used to be."
I set my gloves aside and drew up my bent knees. Then I reached behind me and scooped Muriel off my back and into my arms.
The classic princess carry.
In this new position, the difference in our builds became all the more obvious—just how much of her fit inside my embrace.
"Finished with your work for the day?"
"The beautiful must retire early, so I'm calling it here tonight."
For the record, the beautiful one here is me.
Muriel's doll body had skin that could never deteriorate in the first place, so whether she slept early or late made no difference.
She didn't strictly need sleep at all, as far as I knew—the reason she closed her eyes every night was to maintain the doll's condition, or so I'd been told.
"Hehe, go right ahead."
Carrying Muriel, I moved to the bedroom. Before tucking her into bed, still holding her, I pressed a goodnight kiss to her cheek as I always did.
"Good night."
Muriel wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek in return.
"You too, Owen."
Building the pneumatic hammer went through several rounds of trial and error.
Gode and I had made the exterior look presentable enough, but I was hardly an expert in this field, so the problems were unavoidable. Still, they were gradually worked out.
"Owen, lad! Just explain the principle to me! I'll figure out how to build it myself!"
It was all thanks to Gode—so different from me, who'd spent my days sitting down writing circuits and code. With decades of hands-on workshop experience under his belt, Gode could outwork me at every turn, following my explanations with skill far beyond what I described.
"There's no separate power source yet, so the air compressor has to be pumped by foot. Give it a press here, would you? Think you can manage that with dwarven muscle?"
"Hmm... that's a bit rough, that is."
"You need at least this much for the hammer to run. Wait—I wonder if you know the lever principle."
Whenever something was needed, I built it; whenever something could be substituted, I swapped in whatever fit the purpose.
Frankly, I suspect that without him, making the pneumatic hammer might have been impossible.
"Let's keep the control valve manual. Building an automatic system without magic is going to be tricky."
Then, around the fifth day, something shifted.
The dwarves, who at first had grumbled about what some puny mage could possibly accomplish, began to wander over and take an interest now and then.
Kaang! Kaang!
The forge rang with the sound of Gode's hammering. In that hellish furnace of a place—where the fire added heat on top of summer's own—I was wiping away the sweat that poured down like rain when one of the curious dwarves planted himself in front of me.
I could see his mouth moving, and he seemed to have said something, but the noise around us swallowed it up.
"What was that?"
"Ah! I said, how's it coming along?!"
"Coming along nicely. There are still a few things to fix, so it's not finished yet."
At my answer, the dwarf strolled over with his hands clasped behind his back to eye the pneumatic hammer sitting in the corner of the forge.
We'd only tested it when they weren't around, so they hadn't the faintest idea what the thing was even for.
"What in blazes is this contraption for?"
"Hard to say... from the outside it just looks like a big hunk of metal."
Its appearance differed wildly from anything used in the forges of this era, so in a way, the reaction was only natural.
Right.
That was exactly why I'd deliberately kept the test runs hidden from them, and said not a word of explanation either.
Think about it.
The moment Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone to the world.
Before he explained a word, could anyone watching have imagined a phone that wasn't operated by buttons—a phone that added internet communication to a touch pad?
No. They couldn't have.
At the very least, I couldn't have.
It was shocking precisely because no one could have imagined it, or predicted it. That shock carved an unforgettable memory into my mind, and even now I still regard that presentation as the greatest of all time.
Which meant that for an even bigger shock, the work Gode and I were doing had to remain a closely guarded secret.
"Hot as blazes."
My clothes were so drenched in sweat that they sloshed with every movement, so I simply peeled them off and tossed them aside.
"Hkk...!"
At that, Lily—who'd been watching from a seat in a secluded corner—covered her face with her own hands.
Her fingers were spread wide apart. I had to wonder what the point of covering her eyes was, exactly.
"Lily, you can just look."
I downed a cup of water, then struck a deliberately showy pose right in front of her.
Maybe it was the ruddy glow of the firelight, maybe the sweat trailing down my skin—but my already well-defined muscles seemed to stand out all the more sharply, as if I'd just gotten a tan.
Lily peeked through the gaps between her fingers, stealing glances again and again. Red-faced, she watched my posing show—and eventually, she even poked at my abs with the tip of her finger.
Her mouth had gone slack when she suddenly jolted and exclaimed,
"Wow, it's hard..."
"That's not all. Look at this. Nice, well-sized abs, don't you think? And the chest is big too."
"Huh? U-um. They're... huge..."
"The back's good too. Look, look."
"Hkk...! Your back's splitting apart...!"
When I bought her food, she reacted so well that it made me want to buy her more; now that I showed her my body, she reacted just as well, making me want to show her more. That was just the kind of creature she was.
"Ah, dear me. I hadn't meant to show you quite this much."
I hiked my pants up until they were on the very verge of revealing my underwear. Then I flexed my thighs, and the muscles split apart with a snap!
A dolphin-like squeak went wheeee! out of Lily's mouth as she gawked at them.
Embarrassed as she was, she was enjoying herself enormously.
And a few days later, Gode shouted:
"It's done! Owen, lad—it's finally running properly!"