The arrival of the first fifty axles in the regional capital had not merely satisfied a debt; it had acted as a technical flare, signaling a level of manufacturing precision that the Imperial military had previously considered impossible outside of the high-guild workshops. Consequently, the follow-up was not a courier with a receipt, but a heavy detachment of the Imperial Ordnance Corps. Led by Colonel Varic, a man whose face was a map of scars and whose eyes were those of a career quartermaster, the "Verification Team" arrived at Ashfall to inspect the source of the iron.
Unlike the previous auditors, Varic and his men did not care about tax ledgers or civil administration. They moved through the barony with the predatory grace of soldiers assessing a fortification. They measured the draw-weight of the standardized crossbows on the walls, they touched the seams of the modular brick housing, and they stood in silent observation of the assembly line. To them, Ashfall was not a protectorate; it was a high-capacity armory that happened to be making axles.
Kael met Varic at the primary assembly station. The drop-hammer was in full operation, its rhythmic thud serving as the background noise to their introduction. Kael could see Varic's gaze tracking the movement of the Tier 0 laborers. The Colonel wasn't looking at their productivity; he was looking at their discipline, their physical condition, and their ability to follow synchronized commands.
"You have a remarkable labor pool, Baron," Varic said, his voice cutting through the steam. "They move like a veteran pike square. They don't speak, they don't hesitate, and they maintain a formation even under the heat of the forge. My legions are currently short of three thousand disciplined men for the eastern campaign."
This was the new threat: Recruitment Attrition. Kael realized that to the Empire, his laborers were more valuable as soldiers than as smiths. If Varic reported that the barony was "over-manned," the Chancery could invoke a conscription levy that would strip Ashfall of its specialized workforce, effectively lobotomizing the industrial system.
"They move that way because they are part of a machine, Colonel," Kael replied, stepping in front of a Tier 0 worker who was loading a red-hot billet. "If you take the man out of the station, the station dies. And if the station dies, the Imperial Axle Quota dies with it."
Varic smiled, a thin, mirthless expression. "A man can be replaced by another man, Baron. But a soldier who can read a gauge and follow a technical manual? That is a rare commodity. I want a demonstration of your 'human variable' under stress."
Varic initiated a Tactical stress test. He ordered his own men to disrupt the assembly line flow, creating artificial bottlenecks and "accident" scenarios—dropping crates, shouting conflicting orders, and simulating a perimeter breach. It was a crude, aggressive attempt to see if the laborers would break character or revert to panicked civilians.
Kael watched from the observation deck. He didn't intervene. He trusted the Standardized Response Protocols he had embedded into the training. The laborers didn't look at the soldiers. They looked at their VOP (Visual Operating Procedure) plates. When a soldier blocked a path, the laborer moved to the designated secondary route without breaking stride. When a crate was dropped, the "Safety Watch" triggered a mechanical whistle, and the line halted in perfect sequence until the debris was cleared.
The "grit" of the day came when Varic attempted to "liberate" the Tier 0 workers. He stood before the former mercenaries and offered them immediate Imperial pardons and double pay if they enlisted in the Ordnance Corps. This was the moment of maximum risk. These were men who had been prisoners only months ago; the lure of a "respectable" military life was powerful.
One of the Tier 0 leads, a man named Drax who had been instrumental in the Sinking Trestle repair, looked from the Colonel to Kael. Then he looked at the assembly line—the machine he had ground with his own hands, the system that provided him with a warm home and a share in the output.
"In the legion, I'm a body for a ditch, Colonel," Drax said, his voice raspy from the forge smoke. "Here, I'm the man who keeps the Piston screaming. I'll stay with the iron."
The rejection was a blow to Varic's pride, but a victory for Kael's social engineering. He had successfully turned "labor" into "identity." However, Varic was not finished. He demanded to see the "Iron Road" and the "Steam Piston," suspecting that the axles were only the surface of Kael's technical hoard.
Kael led them to the northern marsh. He showed them the Sinking Trestle, with its ugly, scarred buoyancy tanks and tensioned cables. He framed the entire system as a "desperate, improvised workaround" for the frontier's terrible geography. He made the steam piston at Outpost Alpha look like a dangerous, temperamental beast that required constant, life-threatening maintenance—which, in the cold of the northern winter, wasn't entirely a lie.
"It's a miracle the thing hasn't exploded and taken the outcrop with it," Kael said, pointing to a purposefully leaky valve that hissed violently. "We lose two weeks of production for every week of operation. It's a logistical nightmare, Colonel. Hardly a stable asset for a marching army."
The Verification Team left with the second shipment of fifty axles, their report significantly more nuanced than Corvus's. Varic documented that while the manufacturing was superior, the labor force was "unsuited for traditional military service due to extreme industrial specialization" and the infrastructure was "technically volatile and localized."
Kael had saved his men from the levy, but he had seen the look in Varic's eyes. The Empire now knew that Ashfall possessed something more dangerous than iron: they possessed a different kind of power. Kael walked back to the Iron Works, the thud of the hammer sounding louder than before.
"The Colonel didn't want the men, Elms," Kael said as he reached the command room. "He wanted the blueprint for the Piston. He just didn't know how to ask for it yet. We need to start the Telegraph Expansion. I need to know when they're coming back before they hit the gate."