Toward Progress
“*Heh, heh.* I’m sorry. I didn’t show the women the respect they deserve.”
“Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t be able to. That’s why I’ve been sitting here like this for ten whole years.”
“…….”
Noman felt offended, but the moment he opened his mouth, nothing came out.
“Have you ever dated a woman? No? You really do look that type.”
“Hmph. Since I serve the Nebula, I’ve never once thought about such behavior.”
“You’re bald, so you’d probably just wear a wig.”
“…….”
“Bullshit? It’s real. With a little more hair on your head, you’d look plenty handsome.”
“*Hmph,* in my youth—”
“Bullshit.”
“…….”
“Enough of that. Stop getting off on weird tangents. Don’t you remember what we were even talking about?”
“No, you’re the one who steered it into the weird direction!”
“Before Abaddon-nim, are you even allowed to talk like this? We’re supposed to be worshipping him, over and over again!”
Lee Dam pointed at Abaddon and shouted. Noman sighed, then nodded.
After the past few days she’d been here, he’d gotten a rough idea of what kind of woman she was.
*Is this just another side effect of serving those people?*
The cultists who worshipped the Nebula were supposedly beings humans couldn’t handle.
They often went insane, lost their minds, or pulled off bizarre pilgrimages.
In the Nebula, anyone who could still show real faith while watching such madness was praised as “truly worshipping” or “the pinnacle of faith.”
“Oh! Worship! Abaddon worship!”
“…….”
She looked far less solemn and far more unhinged than the holy figures Noman had seen, but he still decided to trust her.
After all, nothing about her behavior could possibly be normal.
“*Hmph,* first off, drop the idea of shaping Abaddon-nim. Even if you’re a true follower, you know you’re not allowed to carve images of him.”
“Then what does Abaddon-nim actually look like?”
“Ugh, you’re so anxious your knowledge just can’t keep up.”
Noman was about to call her crazy, but Lee Dam held back.
She even gave herself a quiet pat on the back for showing restraint.
“I’ve never actually met Abaddon-nim, so how could I possibly describe his true form? All I know is that his hands are said to grasp clouds themselves.”
“……Then he’s more than eighteen meters tall.”
“Too specific?”
Noman blinked in surprise, but when he saw her eyes sparkling like a child’s, he nodded.
She looked like the purest, most earnest kid in the world, and that alone told him how deeply she adored Abaddon.
“Yeah, that’s right. He must have something even bigger. Just his footsteps alone would rule the world.”
“*Keh! Da-Baddon!*”
“Wh-what?”
“Nothing. So when is he coming? He should get here soon.”
She needed a reason to build her eighteen-meter Knight Armor.
Noman chuckled and tried to calm her down.
“*Hmph,* calm down. Every big thing needs careful preparation. We should prepare the path for Abaddon-nim to come, shouldn’t we?”
“…….”
“Just wait patiently. I’ll handle everything.”
Noman patted Lee Dam’s shoulder while laughing.
Lee Dam let out a frustrated sniff, then started thinking about what to do next.
* * *
Iron Magic Tower—Knight Armor project!
Beldora’s declaration that this would bring a new paradigm to knight armor.
But the project was already paralyzed.
In just a few days, the Knight Armor project had quietly vanished.
Even the other towers had heard rumors of Lee Dam’s talent, but stories about the Knight Armor had disappeared completely.
Beldora and Lee Dam sat face-to-face in the Tower Master’s office, talking.
The only reason:
“Once I actually try building it, it just turns into some modified knight armor.”
“…….”
“Well, the design itself is revolutionary—I like it. No matter what, good design matters.”
“…….”
“But chasing after that design kills the practicality. *Sigh,* I must have been too hooked on the idea. I feel like I’m coming back to reality.”
Looking at Beldora grumbling, Lee Dam crossed her arms. She wasn’t wrong.
They had decided to abandon the eighteen-meter Knight Armor and switch to knight armor instead.
Starting small and scaling up would be fine.
They had needed support to build the giant version in the first place, and that required results.
Lee Dam knew exactly why things had gone this way.
“Steel is too crude.”
At least the steel in the tower was better than trying to forge weapons in a village with a hoe and a sickle.
But in this age, the steel itself was full of impurities, inconsistent in strength and durability, and shockingly weak.
The processing itself was basically just a blacksmith’s forearm and hammer—or a mana-forged steel crystal that crumbled the moment you looked away.
“We need to invent new steel.”
Lee Dam’s usual crazed eyes finally calmed. As she muttered with her arms crossed, Beldora sighed beside her.
“We’ve always been thinking about steel too. The tower even has a whole research team dedicated to it.”
“But that’s not that easy,” Beldora added.
Lee Dam stood up and walked straight out.
“Where are we going? Let’s go.”
“Huh? For real?”
“Let’s go. Talking to them will be faster.”
Rarely did Lee Dam look this serious, so Beldora was flustered as she followed her to Theodore’s laboratory.
Theodore.
The very first victim of that last bathroom-cleaning incident.
Among the official mages, certain special roles existed, and Theodore was one of them.
His title was Tower Guardian.
Even in the Iron Magic Tower, he ranked among the top three strongest fighters.
“Ugh, crazy bitch.”
“Why did she come here?”
“The Tower Master’s here too.”
Even though Beldora had come with her, more was said about Lee Dam.
The stories of her crimes had spread through the tower like wildfire, and the rumor that even a mere apprentice mage couldn’t be touched had grown louder.
“We greet the Tower Master.”
The golden-haired handsome man, Theodore, greeted them politely. The other mages followed and welcomed Beldora.
“*Erhem,* okay.”
Beldora answered awkwardly.
In the past, Lee Dam would have replied with something like “Good greetings” or “*Oh, relax.*” But today she looked quite serious, scanned the room, and asked:
“You use marsh iron, right?”
Using the informal speech with an apprentice was now routine.
Theodore sighed and replied.
“Yeah, we usually use marsh iron.”
Exactly as Lee Dam had expected.
There was magic, sure, but this was still basically the Middle Ages.
Back then, impurities were high and iron content low, so they had no choice but to use marsh iron.
“Switch to magnetite or hematite. They have much higher iron content.”
Theodore glanced sideways at Beldora.
Beldora stood quietly with her arms crossed, listening to Lee Dam.
At that moment, Theodore treated her not as an apprentice but as an equal mage and began arguing.
“Magnetite and hematite are hard to process. Not only that, mining is difficult too. Nothing’s as accessible or easy to use as marsh iron—”
“So the iron we’re supplied is complete garbage. Let’s tear everything down and start over. First, we’ll build a dedicated blast furnace for the Iron Magic Tower.”
“……A blast furnace?”
“Leave a wide enough site and what are you going to do?”
“That’s—”
Lee Dam raised a hand to cut him off.
For some reason, that madwoman was suddenly controlling the entire flow of the laboratory.
“Listen up. From now on, what I say is the future manufacturing process. If you think anything I say is impossible, memorize it, and when I finish, answer.”
Theodore looked back at Beldora, his eyes showing clear disbelief.
Was this the same madwoman who had caused a bathroom riot just the other day?
Beldora had never seen Lee Dam this serious either, so she was stunned.
*An apprentice mage?*
*What does she even know?*
*She thinks she’s hot and can do anything…*
*She’s hot, sure. But…*
*Tower Master-nim, what the hell do you even like about this?*
While grumbling to herself, Beldora and Theodore stayed silent, so the other mages reluctantly began listening.
“First, we need coal, iron ore, and limestone. We’ll remove impurities from the iron and produce the cleanest steel possible.”
“First, use the blast furnace to melt the iron ore into big chunks. It’s similar to what we do now, but we’ll also melt the coal into chunks.”
One mage tried to object.
“Why coal?”
“For smelting?”
Lee Dam’s eyes instantly went back to their crazed state.
“Shut the fuck up and don’t interrupt. To turn iron ore into iron, you need a reduction process that removes oxygen, and the carbon in coal is what does that, you idiot.”
“……”
What the hell did she just say?
The other mages looked horrified, but Beldora and Theodore’s eyes flashed.
“We can use charcoal!”
“Charcoal is more efficient.”
The mages tried desperately to push back, but Lee Dam jabbed a finger and shouted:
“Fuck, charcoal is hard to mass-produce. Since we’re using a blast furnace, there’s no need for charcoal at all. Melt coal at high temperature and you get coke—impurities are low and it can handle high heat. Shut your mouths and wait until I finish.”
“……”
“Big chunks of iron ore are called sinter. Sinter mixed with coke and heated above twelve hundred degrees becomes molten metal.”
Theodore had quietly brought a blackboard. Lee Dam picked up chalk and began writing seriously, explaining like a proper instructor.
“After five or six hours, we enter the steelmaking process. Then, to remove impurities from the molten metal, we blow in oxygen wind along with the limestone we talked about earlier.”
Many mages were completely lost halfway through.
No, probably everyone except Theodore and Beldora didn’t understand a word.
*Her chest is huge.*
*Whoa, it’s moving.*
*She didn’t clean the bathroom again, did she?*
*She’s actually kinda pretty.*
“Once that happens, the limestone and impurity sludge get filtered out. By continuously cooling and solidifying the molten metal, we can produce steel of our tower’s own high purity.”
The lecture ended. Everyone sat there with blank faces. In fact, most of them hadn’t even realized the lecture had ended.
“Listen. Among what I said, point out the impossible parts.”
Instead of checking if something was possible, she had chosen the impossible parts.
Rather than going through everything one by one, she listed the whole process and then pointed out and corrected the parts that looked impossible.
Beldora opened her mouth.
“If we follow your plan, the blast furnace itself would be enormous. But we don’t have the resources to build something that big.”
“If it’s impossible, we can just take a piece of the tower and make it.”
“……”
“By raising the quality of the steel itself, not only can we make the Knight Armor, but the entire Iron Magic Tower will advance several stages.”
That was exactly it.
If the Iron Magic Tower could process steel a new way, it would trigger a revolutionary change.
“Assuming we build a blast furnace.”
Theodore raised a hand and asked.
“How are we supposed to produce heat at twelve hundred degrees?”
“The Fire Magic Tower has mages who do that.”
“……”
“Once they make it, we’re good.”
It wasn’t completely wrong, so the mages fell silent.
“Then what about wind? From what I heard, removing impurities requires—”
“The Wind Magic Tower has mages who do that.”
“……”
“Once they make it, we’re good.”
Lee Dam’s eyes were already swirling with madness again. The way she looked at the mages—like tools instead of people—was pure insanity.
The Q&A went on similarly after that.
“Why can’t we do this?”
“Mages exist.”
“This one looks difficult.”
“Mages exist.”
“This one looks hard.”
“Mages exist.”
*She really treats us like expendable tools.*
*What is a mage, some kind of consumable?*
*Please don’t let this go through. If it does, we’re all screwed.*
With a bright smile, Lee Dam looked at Beldora. Her crazed eyes seemed to already know the answer.
“Let’s go! Into a new era! The Iron Magic Tower leading the way to a great world!”
Beldora’s mouth went dry.
From the very start, there was no stopping it.
She didn’t even have confidence that it could actually work.
After all, it was all just theory.
But why?
Why?
*Do you really think this will succeed so easily?*
Beldora, uneasy, asked one last question.
“How the hell did you even come up with this?”
At that, Lee Dam grinned and answered.
“Because I chased after ridiculous dreams with all my heart.”
Chasing dreams?
She had no idea what she meant, but…
Magic was a challenge.
Mages always explored the unknown.
If this succeeded…
The Iron Magic Tower would be completely changed.
A person who could only walk would suddenly be able to fly.
“From now on—”
As she listened to Lee Dam’s words, Beldora felt a flicker of possibility.
“Iron Magic Tower—every project, full stop.”
Beldora clenched her small fist with resolve and declared.
“Everyone, we’re advancing toward progress.”
“Huh.”
Lee Dam’s mouth curved into a wide grin.
Her crazed eyes sparkled brighter than ever.
Before long.
Inside her pupils, the mages began to look not like humans, but like tools to be used.
The world would change.
Under that changed world, mages’ tears, sweat, and blood would fill the land.