Seraphine stood rigid and composed across from her Sire and the chief engineer.
Both women had leveled an intense, measuring stare at her - gazes so piercing they seemed bent on scrutinizing the very bottom of her soul. The exceedingly sharp, calculating eyes of the seasoned master artisan, in particular, seemed to pick apart every flaw and hidden secret buried beneath the young heir’s youthful veneer.
Finally, the crushing tension shattered as a warm, genuine smile bloomed across Sabine Keller’s weathered, heavily lined face. The woman offered a bow of appropriate deference. Despite wearing a plain leather artisan’s apron cinched tightly at the waist by a broad belt, the coarse fabric failed to conceal the thick, powerful shoulders forged by decades of manual labor, nor the broad, mature physique of the veteran futa.
"My lady, I am Sabine Keller, a humble servant of your house. Your Sire summoned me here to verify the authenticity of these technical drafts."
Seraphine inclined her head with dignified grace.
"It is a pleasure to meet you, Sabine. Something tells me we will be seeing a great deal of each other in the very near future."
While the words carried a slightly cryptic edge, Sabine instantly correctly diagnosed them as confirmation of her silent theory: these revolutionary blueprints hadn't come from some mythical merchant from the Far East.
They had been authored by this supposedly useless, sickly heir whom the court had treated with barely concealed contempt up until now. Clearly, the young futa possessed a mind infinitely sharper than anyone had dared suspect.
The cunning forewoman, however, kept her swirling deductions entirely off her face, simply returning the courtesy:
"I certainly hope so, my lady."
Seeing that her daughter and her most trusted artisan had immediately found common ground, the very corner of Adelgarde Karsfeld’s mouth twitched upward. She instinctively sensed that throwing her heir into the deep end alongside this stubborn, brilliant futa would only yield excellent results. Adelgarde herself understood absolutely nothing of engineering - complex technical drawings bored her to tears - so she routinely deferred to Sabine's absolute judgment on such matters.
"I still have a mountain of administrative parchment to butcher," the Baroness announced coolly, rising from her heavy desk. "I suggest you answer any questions Sabine has to the absolute best of your ability."
Seraphine bowed with flawless poise.
"Of course, Sire."
Adelgarde escorted both futa out into the corridor and pulled the heavy oak door shut behind them. The very second she was alone, she stalked over to a wall cabinet, yanked out a leather skin of strong wine, and took a massive, burning swig - indulging in the time-honored ritual of drowning absolute frustration in alcohol. After dealing with that pompous idiot Petra Holtz, a stiff drink was practically mandatory.
Out in the corridor, Seraphine was left entirely alone with Sabine. She met the master artisan’s gaze and proposed a change of venue:
"Let us relocate to the library. I will have the servants fetch us a platter of food and a pitcher of excellent wine. I promise to answer every single question you have."
Sabine nodded in firm approval. The young heir was proving to be vastly more tactful and resolute than the castle’s vicious rumor mill had claimed.
Upon reaching the sprawling library, they secluded themselves in a quiet, heavily shadowed alcove. The serving maids arrived promptly, bearing heavy platters of food. Two buxom young girls bustled around the low table; their feminine gowns, tightly laced with plunging corsets, swayed invitingly with their hips, their heavy cleavage spilling forward enticingly every time they leaned over to fill the goblets with dark wine.
For the first half-hour, Seraphine and Sabine simply ate and drank, exchanging idle, guarded banter about the weather and the daily grind of castle life.
It wasn't until the alcohol had spread a warm, pleasant buzz through their veins and the servants had thoroughly cleared the room that Sabine finally dropped the hammer, asking the exact question that had been burning a hole in her mind since she walked through the door:
"Now tell me the truth, girl. Where did you actually get these blueprints?"
Seraphine chuckled softly, taking a slow sip of the ruby liquid. She had fully expected the cunning veteran to slice right through her fabricated merchant story.
"I drew them myself."
Sabine’s expression immediately hardened. Exactly as Seraphine had calculated, the master artisan didn't look entirely surprised, nor did she dismiss the claim as outright lunacy. But Seraphine’s next words momentarily knocked the wind out of her:
"Though I suspect you already knew that perfectly well..."
Clever little beast... Sabine thought with a surge of genuine admiration.
Is this truly the same fragile, mousy waif everyone has been whispering about in the shadows?
Has she simply been hiding her terrifying genius from the world all these years?
Taking a deep, greedy gulp of wine, the engineer leaned forward, a hungry gleam sparking in her eyes:
"Do you have more ideas like this locked away in there?"
Seraphine tapped a manicured nail against the rim of her goblet three distinct times, tilting her head slightly as if weighing the question heavily.
After a calculated pause, a dangerous, secretive smile curved her lips.
"I might have a few laying around..."
Sabine nearly shot out of her heavy oak chair, her broad chest heaving violently with raw excitement. Throughout her entire life, she had harbored only one true passion: engineering and raw mechanics. The absolute certainty that this young aristocrat was hoarding revolutionary technological breakthroughs inside her head made the old forewoman’s blood boil with anticipation.
Before Sabine could fully stand, Seraphine raised a slender hand, halting her with a gentle, yet commanding gesture.
"I will hand over the next set of schematics when the proper time arrives. For right now, our absolute priority must be the construction of the blast furnace and the converter."
Sabine furrowed her brow for a split second before the heir's ruthless logic clicked into place. Revolutionary designs looked gorgeous on parchment, but dragging them into reality required staggering capital investment. And capital was the one thing the Barony of Karsfeld, in its current stagnant state, completely lacked. She sank heavily back into her chair, interlacing her thick, calloused fingers.
"So, I take it you already have a strategy to finance this?"
Seraphine brushed the rim of the goblet against her lips once more. A predatory, supremely confident grin spread across her face. She answered the question with one of her own:
"What do you suppose a shipment of five tons of pure, top-grade steel ingots is worth on the open market?"
While Sabine couldn't rattle off the exact sum in thalers off the top of her head, she knew one absolute truth: it wasn't pocket change. It was a small fortune. Granted, the more steel they flooded the market with over time, the further the price would plummet, but that very first wave...
In that moment, she fully grasped the sheer scale of the girl’s ambition.
"You intend to liquidate the first batch and funnel every single gold coin straight into expanding the deep mines?"
Seraphine’s smile widened. Her initial read on Sabine Keller had been absolutely flawless. Despite being born to the muddy commons, this futa possessed an incredibly sharp intellect honed by decades of unforgiving practical experience. She was going to be an invaluable ally.
"Precisely. Once our mine shafts hit maximum operational capacity, the raw ore dragged from the mountains will exclusively feed our own domestic industry. Every single ingot of surplus we produce will be aggressively exported to the Alarian Empire at a staggering profit margin."
Sabine just shook her head in sheer disbelief. Iron by itself was a desperately prized resource perpetually in short supply across the empire; high-carbon steel, on the other hand, was regarded as a hyper-elite luxury, strictly reserved for forging exceptional weaponry for the highest-ranking knights or, in exceedingly rare cases, bespoke plate armor for the wealthiest magnates. Her mind struggled to even compute the concept of "surplus steel" existing after their own military demands had been met.
Seraphine’s ambitions were nothing short of colossal.
She fully intended to weaponize the dormant resource potential of the Karsfeld valleys, violently propelling the barony straight into the era of mass manufactories and smoke-belching factories, all while aggressively draining the neighboring duchies of their gold reserves. Forging an industrial empire of that magnitude would take years of grueling labor, but Seraphine was absolutely convinced she would see it realized within her lifetime - dragging this stagnant world of women kicking and screaming into an entirely new epoch.
Naturally, she didn't reveal the full, terrifying scope of her vision to Sabine. Without seeing a sprawling factory floor with her own two eyes, a medieval artisan simply couldn't comprehend the true scale of a fully mechanized world. Instead, Seraphine extended her bare hand across the table in an open, radically egalitarian gesture of true partnership.
"Will you help me drag Karsfeld into a new industrial era?"
Sabine froze.
The firstborn heir of a major noble house was offering her hand to a common forewoman from the muddy dregs of society, explicitly asking for her support rather than barking down harsh, unyielding orders. In this rigid feudal world, even though Baroness Adelgarde respected her technical prowess, the aristocracy writ large still treated craftsmen as disposable, lesser beings - a social cancer that exactly mirrored Evelyn’s previous world. Even though humanity's underlying genetics had radically mutated in this timeline, their ugly, tribal mentality had remained completely identical to Earth's.
A single, hot tear pricked the corner of the hardened, soot-stained futa’s right eye.
If only those arrogant, powdered courtiers knew how catastrophically wrong they were about the young Karsfeld.
Sabine reached out her massive, calloused hand and gripped Seraphine’s with iron-crushing force.
"I will do it, my lady. With the utmost honor."
And just like that, within the shadowed confines of the castle library, an unbreakable alliance was forged between the young heir and the veteran master of mechanics.
A partnership that, in the grueling months to come, would unleash an absolute avalanche of technological innovation, pouring unimaginable wealth and raw military might into a forgotten mountain barony, right in the heart of an empire violently tearing itself apart under the rule of increasingly weakened Futa lords.