I had been running myself ragged with the preparations for the impending attack, which were in the hands of others now, so I decided to take a break in the arms of my sweet Aprilia. I surprised her with an embroidered cloak I had bought in Allonay.
"It's beautiful," she whispered, as tears came to her eyes. "I've never received such a gift before."
"The first of many," I said, taking her into my arms, and gave her a passionate kiss.
I woke up the next morning to a different kind of kiss on my other head, and beautiful brown eyes looking at me lovingly. I smiled and let Aprilia perform her magic, until I saw sparks and burst like a hydrant. She cleaned me up thoroughly and slid on top of me, languidly, until our noses almost touched.
"I have something to show you," she whispered.
"I'm pretty sure I've seen every inch of you."
"No, you lech!" she slapped my chest, laughing. "Something else. Aren't you ever satisfied?"
"Never!" I exclaimed, flipping her around. I spent my time making her moan and whimper and let her go only after I was satisfied she couldn't take it anymore.
When we came out of the castle, the sun was already up in the sky and my guards were smirking like a bunch of idiots.
"Come on you lot." I turned to my thoroughly tucked girlfriend. "Where to?"
"To the weapon workshop."
"Lead the way." I said, with plans to leer at her all the way. I still couldn't get enough of those shapely legs.
---
"Tada!" Aprilia brought out a crossbow from a hidden storage space, with a magazine and an integrated lever built into it. I had drawn plans for one but hadn't gotten enough time to even begin building a prototype, but here it was, in the wood and metal.
"Are you mad at me?" She asked apprehensively.
"Where did you get the plans?" I asked.
"I took them from your chest. That encounter with the brigands and Nanon soldiers gave me a scare. I wanted to help anyway I could to keep everyone safe. You told me how this weapon would turn even the men without years of training lethal, but you were too busy to focus on it, so I worked with Aramid and Kovar to finish it. I made sure no one else besides them got a look at them and kept them with me at all times."
"No, it's fine. I wish you had asked before taking them out but I trust you. I- I think I love you." I said, with my quickly drying mouth.
Those words were as much of a revelation to me as they were to her. We had been together only for a few months, but I couldn't imagine life without her. It wasn't just the amazing time in bed, but companionship; I could trust her to keep my secrets, could discuss my passions, desires and fears with her and knew that she would not dismiss them, and trust me with her own in return. Not only that, but she had figured out what I desperately wanted to finish and done it herself. Maybe it was too early, but I didn't care, since we might be dead within months.
She walked with steady steps toward me, placed a hand on my cheek and whispered softly, "I love you too, Jack."
I pulled her into my arms and kissed her deeply, heedless of the audience. Inside, my heart was a roil of emotions, and I decided to calm it, results be damned. I held her at an arm's distance and looked her in the eyes. "I need to tell you something."
"What?" she asked apprehensively.
"Not here. In private." I whispered to her, and turned to the craftsmen. "Good job, you two. Expect my immense gratitude, if we survive this conflict."
"What is it?" she asked, with fear in her eyes, when we were back inside our house.
"I'm not Jack." I stated plainly.
"What?" she asked, confused.
"Remember I told the Elders that I met God?"
She nodded weakly.
"I did, after I died in a different place, a very different place. Then I found myself in a very weak body, of a man a decade younger than me. Viscount Jack Nobara. The real Jack, the hero of the Cha, is dead."
I gave her time to process the revelation.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" She asked, without anger in her voice.
"Tell them what? 'Hey there, I'm some other guy in Jack's body.' I don't think they would've believed me or taken it well if they did."
"Hmm. I was there when you, Lord Jack, almost died. We thought we lost him. I guess we did, but," she said, looking me in the eyes, "I don't mind the replacement."
"You're not mad I hid it from you?"
"A little, but I understand. You couldn't have told them the truth and expect them to not kick you out or do worse things. As for me, you could've just kept the lie and no one would know. No one here had spent much time with Lord Jack, but you trusted me with your secret."
She approached me and rested her head on my chest. "That's enough for me."
I let out a deep sigh of relief, moistened my dry lips and tentatively kissed her. She reciprocated enthusiastically and deepened our kiss.
With our bond deeper than ever, my relief turned to happiness. We sought each other out every time we were close and free. It took a titanic effort on my part to not pump her full of my man-cream, made even more difficult by her pleas to do just that.
I did manage to do some work between all the fun. The crossbow Aprilia and the craftsmen had built was almost four times as fast as the standard one in operation, though the draw power was slightly weaker. We took the lessons from building that design and upgraded the standard crossbow design to accept a magazine and made clips for quick reloading.
It was a big step up in our soldiers' lethality, but my improvements with the bows and crossbows were coming to an end, as building a proper compound bow was pretty much impossible without modern materials. We needed something a lot more powerful to protect our nascent country against hordes of soldiers.
I performed some experiments to achieve that goal. I had the craftsmen make a long pipe of iron for me, with one of its ends closed. I filled the tube with the crushed pyrite, that had been found along with iron ore.
I then heated the pipe to around 900 deg. Celsius (1652 Far.), which broke the pyrite into its constituents, iron and sulfur. As the gaseous sulfur traveled through the long tube, it cooled down and condensed into a liquid, which I then collected.
Unfortunately, gunpowder was mostly saltpeter. I took the heavily nitrated barnsoil we had taken from the village of Hamfeld, and processed it to obtain crystals of potassium nitrate. Half a cartload of soil yielded a little over two kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of saltpeter, which I then mixed with some sulfur and fine charcoal powder.
It burned up instantly on being lit, proving I could make gunpowder, but I only had a small bag left.
"That's nice." Cyrus said meekly, as if trying to spare my feelings.
"It works just fine, boy." I told him. "Did you notice all the gas it produces?"
"Yes. Smells bad."
"It's not the smell that matters, but the volume. What do you think would happen if I were to burn the powder inside a pipe like that?"
"The gas would escape from the open end."
"What if I jam the opening with a stone? One that creates a very tight seal."
"Hmm… the stone would be thrown out?"
"Exactly. What if I told you that this mixture burns even better and faster inside a closed space." I watched the gears move in his mind, as realization dawned upon him, his eyes expanding wide like saucers.
"The stone will be thrown even faster!" he exclaimed. "Faster than arrows?"
"Far faster and farther than any arrow can travel. Far faster than any man can react, and if we can make it, far too powerful for any armor to withstand. You target someone with it, and they're dead before they know it."
"Wow."
"Wow indeed. I need your oath though, all of you. This will revolutionize warfare, so you cannot reveal what you have seen here to anyone! Not even the Elders." I emphasized.
"I promise to not reveal anything I have seen here. My lips are sealed." Cyrus reassured me, smiling.
"Same here." Aramid and Kovar repeated.
I was glad for their awe at all the new possibilities, but worry irked my mind like a stray stone in a shoe. The soil nitration process took almost a year to finish, so no more gunpowder for me until then. Shit.
Gunpowder alone wouldn't do much without proper firearms anyway, so I focused on the prerequisites to build them. Aramid, Kovar and Cyrus had my complete confidence by this point, so I began teaching them the ideas that led to mass manufacturing.
"You two are craftsmen," I addressed Aramid and Kovar, "but once we are finished, you would have become machinists."
"What about me?" Cyrus piped up.
"I'll try to turn you into a machinist and engineer. You focus on design, they on building. I would like to turn all three of you into proper engineers and machinists, but our time is limited. We need powerful weapons before the Nanon kingdom comes at us with it's full might."
"That is going to happen?" Aramid asked fearfully.
"I'm not sure Aramid, but as they say 'hope for the best, prepare for the worst.'"
"What is a machinist?" Kovar asked.
"The difference between a machinist and a craftsman is that a machinist is focused on extreme precision, with tolerances so tight you cannot even see the difference with naked eyes."
"Why would anyone need that?"
"Remember the experiment we did yesterday?"
"Yes," he replied in a hushed tone, then realized what I was hinting at, "the gas seal between the rock and the pipe!"
"Yes. You need that level of precision and accuracy in manufacturing to create pipes and projectiles that can trap most of the gas. They are the foundation of machining, that we will be pursuing."
"But how can we make anything with precision that we can't even see?" Cyrus asked in confusion.
"You can't. Not with your hands and eyes, obviously. First, we will build instruments that can measure such small dimensions, then we will use them to build machines that can manufacture other machines and tools that can then produce completely identical products."
"That sounds soulless and very complicated." Aramid interjected.
"Regardless, you want your common weapons to be exact copies, not unique piece of craftsmanship." I insisted.
"Why?"
"Because each weapon made from craftsmanship is a little different. So, if anything goes wrong, it requires the attention of an experienced craftsman. A soldier cannot just take out a faulty part and replace it with another. That is a big problem, especially in warfare, where it can be the difference between not just life and death, but victory and defeat."
That gave them pause.
Our quest for micron level accuracy and precision began with flatness. I taught my three students the three-plate method, where we took three identical and reasonably flat blocks of limestone, and ground them against each other, occasionally changing pairs, until all three became extremely flat. That gave us three surfaces to measure anything for flatness.
Similarly, we rubbed their edges together to get straight edges. With simple geometry, I drew a perpendicular on them, and now we could test for squareness.
Next was the challenge of length. If I had my old body it would be easy, as I knew my exact height in centimeters. Jack was slightly taller, but until very recently in humanity's history, both units for length and weight had been defined by arbitrary terms anyway, so I followed suit.
Assuming my height to be 200cm (78.74 inch), we carefully divided a taut thread to define a centimeter and carved it on our flat plates, giving us rulers. Some lessons in engineering drawing from my past life came useful as I was able to use the millimeter scale ruler to make a Vernier scale, giving us precision up to 10 micrometers. We wouldn't be making high performance engines with that level of precision, but 19th and even early 20th century guns should be doable.
Precision wouldn't mean much if our cutting tools couldn't hold their shape. That was going to be a challenge as I knew pretty much nothing about advanced metallurgy. Modern tool steels had very precise amounts of other metals, like vanadium and tungsten, in them, but I didn't even have these metals, let alone the knowledge to make tool steel, so I would be limited to carburized quench hardened steel.
Thus began our arduous adventure to make the machine that makes other machines, the lathe. Unfortunately, it was relegated to the craftsmen's free time, as they focused on arming all the soldiers and reservists as soon as possible. The men watching the border hadn't seen any activity, but I could feel an impending attack coming in my bones.