They started the mock-fight with testing strikes—light cuts and quick parries. Alden edged forward, Roderic drifted back, and the wooden blades tapped and slid with dry, hollow sounds. Alden tried a high cut. Roderic caught it easily and answered with a short return that Alden barely turned aside. Another few similar exchanges followed, Alden never getting any good openings. Roderic’s footwork was annoyingly smooth, always half a step away from where Alden wanted him, always balanced like he could do this all day.

  Alden exhaled and changed the rhythm. He feinted left, then snapped forward with a rapid straight thrust aimed at Roderic’s ribs. The captain turned his torso and still got tagged. A few guards hissed through their teeth. Alden didn’t let up. He stepped in again, faster, stabbing straight toward the chest, then the shoulder, then the thigh—clean lines, quick recoveries. Roderic could only block the first two strikes and took one more light touch to the forearm before he could adjust, and his grin disappeared for a heartbeat.

  “Cheeky,” Roderic muttered, eyes narrowing.

  Alden’s lips pulled into a tired smile. “You’re the one who wanted to show off.”

  Roderic pressed in, and Alden felt the shift in the fight immediately. The captain stopped giving ground and started taking space, forcing Alden to move back. It was like the captain had just been playing with him until now.

  Alden’s first few steps were sharp, but the burn in his legs came soon enough, and his arms started to feel heavy like the sword had doubled in weight. His timing slipped by a fraction, and Roderic punished it with a hard tap to Alden’s wrist that made his hand sting. He tried another thrust, but it was slower this time, and Roderic slapped it aside and clipped Alden’s shoulder with a controlled strike that made the watching recruits murmur.

  “Not bad,” Roderic said, breathing steady. “Now stop yawning with your feet.”

  Alden’s vision blurred for an instant when he blinked. He retreated, tried to reset, but his lungs were already working harder than they should have. He parried one mock-cut, then another, and the third one shoved his guard wide. Roderic stepped in, fast and heavy, and Alden felt the wooden blade slide down his and trap it. Before Alden could wrench free, Roderic twisted his wrist and knocked the sword clean out of his hand. It hit the packed earth with a dull thud.

  Roderic’s sword came up smoothly and stopped at Alden’s neck. Close enough that Alden could see the shallow nicks in the wood from hundreds of such practice bouts in the past.

  Alden froze, then raised one hand with a short, breathless laugh. “I give up.”

  Roderic nodded, then removed his sword from Alden’s neck and looked at the other guards. “You see? That’s how you fight! Lord Alden managed to last this long against me when he didn’t sleep a whisker last night because he was working on a project to improve the village. When he’s fresh, he even gives me a mighty challenge. But you all…” He scoffed. “None of you can last half of that time against me at your full strength. So practice! Practice until your arms burn and your legs feel like stone. Practice until you can do this in your sleep—until you have the confidence and the skills to stand alone right in front of a pack of fearsome monsters to protect your friends and family.”

  The recruits nodded, before the experienced guards started breaking them into groups to organize more mock fights.

  Alden noticed that Vusato had joined the onlookers and had been watching the fight along with the carpenter and the blacksmith. He started walking back to his sister. Roderic handed his sword to one of the guards and joined him.

  “Good fight, milord,” the captain said. “You can do much better, though. Not getting any sleep will do that to anyone.”

  “Boo…” Lira groaned as they reached her. “That was a bad fight, Roderic. You really should’ve put him on his butt. I’ve been waiting to see that again for weeks!”

  "You won't change, will you, brat?" Alden chuckled and messed up her hair again, making her glare at him.

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  Roderic laughed. “Trust me, I could have if I wanted to. It just wouldn’t be a good idea to make the baron fall on his rump on the very first day the recruits joined us.”

  "I wouldn't mind it!" Lira giggled as Vusato reached them.

  “Milord, Coltan and Garrik are here,” he reported.

  Alden yawned loudly, then nodded. “Come on. Let’s go to the meeting room.”

  ***

  Once all of them were sitting inside the small dining room—except Lira, who had stayed back to sit in the sun—Alden looked at the craftsmen.

  “So what’s the progress?”

  The redheaded carpenter, Garrik, jerked his head to the side. “We just gave another crossbow to the guards outside for testing.”

  Alden nodded. “That’s the fourth one. Vusato will pay you for it before you leave. But it’s still going way too slow…”

  The bald blacksmith, Coltan, shrugged. “Well, I’ve already made the spare parts for a few more of them, but the carpenters just can’t keep up with us smiths.”

  “The crossbows are mostly made of wood,” Garrik scoffed. “Or did you forget that, you oaf? You just have to make a few tiny parts, and we have to do all the remaining work!”

  Coltan laughed. “I’d say it’s just a skill issue..."

  Garrik crossed his arms and huffed.

  Alden chuckled, knowing that the two craftsmen were good friends and it was only a friendly ribbing. “Well, that’s the problem I’ve been working to solve for the past week. And now I have the design ready.” He passed the large parchment with the full blueprint of the lathe to the carpenter, then handed a few smaller blueprints of the specific parts.

  As the craftsmen looked over their relevant blueprints, Alden began, “This is called a lathe. It’s a machine that’ll revolutionize basically every kind of crafting work in the village—including for you both. With this, you both can increase your productivity by at least ten times of what it is right now. That means the same person who made, let’s say, two tools in a day can make 20 tools with the help of a lathe, or probably even more, as long as it’s of the same type. If he changes what he’s making, then the process will slow down, but it’ll still be considerably faster than doing everything by hand.”

  “That sounds very… profitable,” Coltan said with a grin. “How does it work?”

  The guard captain and the majordomo were listening curiously, too.

  Alden explained, “A lathe is basically a way to spin a piece of wood while you hold a sharp tool against it, so instead of carving by chasing the shape around with your hands, the wood ‘comes to you’ as it turns. You fix the wood between two supports so it stays steady, then you make it spin smoothly, and you gently press your cutting tool to it to shave off thin layers. Because it’s spinning the whole time, you naturally get clean, even, round shapes—like handles, pegs, rollers, bowls, or anything that needs to be straight and symmetrical—much faster and more consistently than carving it by hand.”

  Garrik frowned. “This kind of sounds like the bow drill I use to make holes in a piece of wood.”

  “It is,” Alden nodded. “A potter’s wheel is also an example that works on a similar concept. You can consider a lathe a much, much more advanced version of a bow drill. We'll also need some precise gauges to measure the parts accurately. One of those blueprints describes how a Vernier calliper is made and Coltan will work on that side-by-side, although later we'll even build a micrometer." He grinned. "Those calipers can measure dimensions more precisely than the width of a human hair, while the micrometer is 20 times more precise than that."

  Everyone's eyebrows kept rising higher and higher as he continued. "Now we don't have any good power source here—for now—so human power will have to be enough in the beginning. A simple up and down movement of a treadle under the carpenter’s feet will move a crankshaft on the side of the lathe, which'll turn the spindle—the rotating part. If it needs more torque and less speed, we add a pair of reduction gears between the crank and the spindle. If it needs more speed, we change the ratio the other way. That will allow you to use the lathe however you want. The best part is, once the first lathe is ready, you can use it to build a second machine much faster. And then you can use both of them to build the third one even faster and so on.”

  “That sounds incredible,” Coltan said, “but I wonder why I’ve never heard of this lathe. If there was such a thing in Garitus, I would’ve seen it for sure, and even if it existed only in the capital in the south, I would’ve at least heard about it.”

  Alden gave a quick glance at the captain and the majordomo before he answered. “No, a lathe of this design doesn’t exist anywhere else in the kingdom, as far as I know. And let’s just say I know a lot of things others don’t. This is just a small example of that.”

  The redheaded carpenter laughed. “Obviously, you know far more than us. You’ve studied way more books than I can even imagine. So should we work on this lathe next? That’ll mean stopping the making of any crossbows.”

  Alden nodded. “Yeah, that’s fine. We still have two months before the start of winter, and once this lathe is ready, you can make crossbows and even scorpions at a much faster rate. Anyway, most of its metal parts can still be made from iron, but the drill bits and some other small parts will need to be made from steel. Daelus should be arriving any day now with a small amount of steel, and that’ll be used for this. Once we have a lathe working in both your workshops, any remaining steel will be used for making the metal parts of a scorpion. Of course, we’ll need a lot more steel in the future, but I also gave an order to the sailboat captain who left a few days ago to buy a much larger amount of steel from Garitus. You don’t have to worry about the supply of steel and iron ingots. That’s on me.”

  “That’ll cost a lot,” Coltan remarked. "Steel doesn't come cheap..."

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