"So, Carla made the plunge, did she? I imagine Bonney must be preeetty upset~" hummed Rias, smiling contentedly atop a prenatal massage table with cushioned grooves for her face, breasts, and belly.
"The only times Bonney isn't at least mildly upset is when she's eating or in a position to tell others what to do..." sighed Vahn, massaging Rias's voluminous butt and thighs. She had been experiencing lower back pain as a result of her pregnancy, so massaging her had become a pivotal part of their morning routine.
"She's cute, though," countered Rias, leaving Vahn a little taken aback as she appended, "If I believed there was even a remote chance she would accept, I might have invited her to join my Peerage. Her Devil Fruit and that feisty nature of hers would be a force to be reckoned with in a Rating Game."
"Feisty is an apt descriptor..." agreed Vahn, moving from Rias's thighs to the backs of her knees and calves. When he got to her feet, she giggled a bit but offered no resistance as he gave them a thorough massage.
"Alright, that about does it. Help me sit up..." said Rias, waiting for Vahn to assist her before rising to a seated position with him deliberately standing between her legs. From there, he placed his hands on her belly, their eyes meeting as they slowly but surely drew closer for a kiss.
kick
"Mmn...it seems our son has a feisty side to him as well..." hummed Rias, exhaling a throaty chuckle as she and Vahn exchanged several additional kisses. Vahn experienced a wave of unease at the thought that his son would be even half as headstrong as Bonney, but with Rias as his mother and a grandmother like Venelana, he should develop into a proper young lord. If nothing else, he should at least be healthy...
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True to her words, Bonney was wearing a black bikini top when Vahn concluded his morning routine and made his way over to the workshop. More accurately, she was wearing the outfit he discovered her in the first time he found her there—contrasting the more conventional clothing she wore in the presence of others.
"See, what did I tell you? You can't censor reality," said Bonney, leaving Vahn at a loss as she abruptly pulled the elastic band of her top over her breasts, readily exposing them. At the very least, that's how it appeared at a glance.
"Ahahahaha! You should see the look on your face right now~!" hummed Bonney, looking extremely pleased with herself as she merrily juggled her growing but already sizeable breasts—veiled by a slime biosuit that had been adapted to emulate her skin tone. She didn't ordinarily wear one, but since she knew Vahn would make a fuss or close his eyes in exasperation if she flashed him, she especially ran over and picked one up from Central that morning.
'I pray to whatever Gods can hear me that none of my daughters end up like this...' thought Vahn, resisting the urge to close his eyes and release a profound sigh. Instead, he forced a smile, nodded slowly, and remarked, "It's good to see you're growing well..." before shifting his gaze to the rest of the workshop's occupants. Besides Bonney, there were Ghislaine, Riko, and, as she virtually never separated from Riko, Prushka.
"Papa Two! Good morning~!" greeted Prushka, her ears flapping as she zipped across the workshop like a bird and crashed headfirst into Vahn's chest without even trying to slow down. She actually enjoyed the feeling of her momentum being negated, and now that she could fly in short but explosive bursts, she impacted him like a cannonball.
"And a good morning to you, too, Prushka..." responded Vahn, wrapping the diminutive Narehate in his embrace and nuzzling the top of her fluffy, feather-adorned head.
"Papa Two! I heard something amazing...!" exclaimed Prushka, causing Vahn's brows to rise as he set her down, prompting her to stare up at him with her wine-red eyes glistening and hands balled fists.
"Oh? What did you hear...?" asked Vahn, believing Prushka had found an interesting insect or something similar before she excitedly clamored, "I heard you let Carla try your papa pole! Can I try it next!? I promise not to break it...!"
"That...might be difficult..." responded Vahn, feeling a sense of panic and urgency as, despite her cute, fluffy, and diminutive appearance, Prushka was technically an adult. However, while she was unnervingly competent when it came to fighting and dismembering monster corpses with surgical precision, Bonedrewd's years of dosing and purposely grooming her to be dependent on others left her mentally and emotionally stunted. Misla had tried deprogramming her, but without directly influencing her memories, she concluded it would take years for Prushka to understand and come to terms with the fact she had been manipulated.
"Difficult...?" asked Prushka, tilting her head and flitting her ears with a completely innocent, unabashedly curious look as she placed her hands on her belly and added, "Papa Two just needs to stick his papa pole in the sticky hole below my pee hole. Then we hug and cuddle lots and lots until my belly becomes round and a baby pops out."
"Just give it up, pipsqueak..." interjected Bonney, gently chopping the top of Prushka's head as she added, "I'm ten times more mature than you, but Mr. Principles here won't lay a hand on anything but my head. For starters, you can stop saying things like papa pole and pee hole."
"But it's the hole where my pee comes out. What else should I call it...?" asked Prushka, turning her head nearly a hundred and thirty degrees to stare back at Bonney. The latter frowned deeply at the peculiar sight and awkward question, but Vahn promptly stepped in, sparing her from having to answer by lowering himself to Prushka's level, grabbing her shoulders, and calmly, carefully explaining, "Bonney is correct in that you're not quite mature enough for the things you're describing. For now, I'm going to take you to Misla. She will do her best to answer whatever questions you may have."
"Did I do something bad...?" asked Prushka, her ears drooping and her lower lip quivering as she didn't believe she had said or done anything wrong.
"You have done absolutely nothing wrong..." assured Vahn, his voice low and soothing as he pulled Prushka into his embrace and gently caressed her upper back. Then, though it caused Bonney to snort and roll her eyes, he picked up the confused ball of fur and feathers and carried her back to the cottage as she clung to him and gently sobbed into his chest...
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Returning to the workshop roughly an hour later, Vahn discovered Bonney and Ghislaine working together to shape a piece of metal using a manual hydraulic hammer while Riko used an oil rag to clean and polish the metal components of a catalytic trench gun.
Though he was curious about what both groups were up to, Vahn turned his attention to his workstation and equipped his PPE(personal protective equipment). They weren't strictly necessary, but he figured he should set a good example for others who used the forge in the future. With that in mind, he swapped his usual yukata for a pair of brown pants, an off-white short-sleeved shirt, a soot-black apron with leather straps, leather boots with metal caps over the toes, a pair of sleek, shock-resistant dragon hide gloves, and circular, tinted goggles.
'Alright, where were we...' Vahn mused to himself, unfurling the blueprint of a blacksmithing hammer he had carefully designed after referencing a ton of others. Its design was relatively simple, as his Blacksmith Skill was only E-Rank after reviewing numerous manuals. But since he agreed with Bonney's assertion that a proper Smith forged the tools of their trade, he figured he could start with something simple and move on to increasingly complex designs as his skill improved.
With such thoughts in mind, Vahn began preparing the head of his first hammer, using steel as a base and strengthening it with a 7:3 blend of coke(refined carbon) and granulated Fire Crystals. The latter materials were typically combined with others to produce explosives, but if heated gradually to just under 2,700°C, they could bond with steel to create an alloy known as Pyroclast Steel—a reference to its discovery in the caldera of an iron mine converted to a volcano lair by a Red Dragon.
After placing everything into a bucket-sized crucible, Vahn used a pair of metal clamps to carry it over to a cylindrical furnace roughly the size of a small water tower. Its exterior was ceramic, and for working with extreme temperatures, it used graphite electrodes to heat materials in a tungsten-lined refractory basin that fed into a secondary crucible from a tap.
Fortunately, although it wouldn't affect him nearly as much as some, no heat was released when Vahn opened the circular hatch that permitted materials to be placed inside the furnace. A paper-thin but durable one-way barrier had been put in place to prevent people from inadvertantly burning their eyebrows, melting their faces off, or spontaneously catching their hair on fire, but Vahn still had to be careful when removing the tongs and crucible as they were nearly white-hot despite only a few seconds of exposure.
With everything in place, Vahn slowly increased the furnace's temperature from 1500°C to 2700°C by inducing an electrical arc between the graphite electrodes. It took nearly a full hour due to the volatility introduced by the granulated Fire Crystal, but even if it had exploded, it wouldn't have been the end of the world. The furnace was rated to contain a blast equivalent to 100kg of TNT, and the amount of granulated Fire Crystal he used could produce an explosion comparable to 300 grams at most.
Seeing the needle and digital thermometer both displaying a temperature of 2700°C, Vahn counted to sixty in his mind before opening the furnace's tap using a specialized wrench. What flowed into the waiting crucible was a white-hot, almost translucent liquid that would cool to resemble opaque ruby before shifting to dark blue with a distinctive ruby sheen.
"I'll never understand how you can stay completely still staring at a bunch of meters..." remarked Bonney, having approached more than half an hour earlier to observe Vahn alongside Ghislaine and Riko.
"I can both accelerate and slow my perception of time so that hours can pass as seconds," revealed Vahn, picking up the half-filled crucible using a pair of tongs and carrying it over to his workstation as Bonney, sporting an annoyed frown, complained, "Well, that's fucking bullshit..."
"Language," said Ghilsaine in her usual flat monotone, causing Bonney to grimace and click her tongue. In truth, Ghislaine didn't care what kind of language others used, but since Vahn did and she worked for him, she felt a duty to uphold the rules, policies, and practices of the Dragon's Pavilion.
"What are you planning to make today...?" asked Riko, following after Vahn with her large green eyes full of curiosity. He could have done without her wearing only a brown and black apron to cover her upper body, but since it wasn't much different from her Delving attire, Vahn didn't comment on it and instead responded, "I've already completed my Cross and Ball-Peen hammers, so this will be used to complete my actual Smithing Hammer. I have the blueprint laid out on my drafting table if you want to go over and take a look."
"Awesome...!" exclaimed Riko, flitting over to the aforementioned drafting table instead of walking. However, as he was the one to encourage them to use Bukujutsu whenever possible until it became second nature, Vahn just shook his head with a faint smile. Then, under the watchful gazes of Bonny, Ghislaine, and eventually Riko, he emptied the liquid metal into an awaiting mold, waited for it to cool a bit, and then pulled it out to hammer it into its final shape with a hole at the center to accommodate a straight, hand-carved wooden handle...
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