Four days later, the train of bone-framed sleds finally departed, leaving the lower slopes of the mountain...
Jax and his escort of ten armed spearmen marched alongside the Salt-Gatherers, setting out toward the eastern gorges.
During the days of trading, Frodo and the nomad chieftain, Orok, had come to a groundbreaking agreement.
Jax was granted the authority to draw upon Orok’s eastern caches for any amount of furs, dried meat, or obsidian he needed to bribe neutral hunters and build his spy network.
The exact cost of whatever Jax consumed would simply be deducted from the tribe’s future shipments of the summer-scent balm, with a slight surplus added to satisfy Orok’s trouble.
This time, the amount of raw copper ore and unworked obsidian left behind in Frodo’s cavern was double what he had initially calculated.
With the deposit of luxury balm traded away, Frodo had secured enough raw materials to completely bypass years of agonizing mining.
It was a staggering wealth of resources that the boy-leader couldn’t have dared to dream of during his first few weeks in this freezing hell.
Even if every man in the tribe had dug at the permafrost for a full year, they wouldn’t have unearthed a fraction of the heavy green stones currently sitting in the storage alcove.
As Orok’s caravan faded into the white horizon, the day for Mika’s temporary departure from the mountain also arrived.
In accordance with a desperate strategy to outflank Kael, Mika would travel to the distant Southern Ridges, bringing news of the mountain’s uprising.
Frodo had spent hours carving an intricate, detailed message into a piece of mammoth bone for Mika to carry.
In addition to expressing his wish for a unified military alliance, he hoped that the High Chieftain of the Elk Clan would dispatch some of their specialized flint-knappers and auxiliary scouts to help fortify the mountain.
On the bone tablet, Frodo did not mark his identity as a mere surviving boy, but as the Lord of the Mammoth Mountain.
Although the possibility that the proud, distant high chieftain would bow to his requests was minuscule, Frodo still wanted to give it a try. Carving a few symbols into a bone cost him nothing but time.
The farewell took place near the cave’s heavily fortified entrance, with most of the Reconnaissance and Logistics teams present.
Lyra gave the young scout a small, tightly wrapped pouch of dried, smoked river fish, while Vash pressed a bundle of spicy roots into her hands.
The other youths of the tribe were also deeply reluctant to part with her.
They stepped forward to pat her white-furred shoulders and pull her into fierce embraces.
"Do not fear the wind," Mika said, raising her chin. "I will be back before the next moon."
"What if the Elk Clan does not allow you to leave their camps?" Orin asked, his eyes filled with genuine worry.
"Well..." Mika shrank her neck slightly, pondering the danger for a moment, before shaking the snow from her furs. "In that case, I will just slip past their watch-fires and sneak back in the dark!"
"Then we have a blood-pact," the young girl promised earnestly.
"If you make it back, I will set snares for a dozen fat rabbits and roast them for you," Jax’s younger brother chimed in. "There is also a frozen honeycomb Silas found near the lower pines. We will wait for you to come back so we can crack it open together."
What better words could a commander offer?
Frodo, standing at the edge of the crowd, was also overtaken with a profound sense of emotion.
It had only been a few weeks, but Mika, a shattered refugee, had already become an irreplaceable pillar of their new family.
"May the mountain spirits hide your tracks!" Mika called out, turning on her heel.
After running a few swift steps down the icy incline, she seamlessly blended into the snowdrifts, disappearing into the vast expanse of the southern horizon.
"She will reach the ridges smoothly," Frodo muttered.
"Yes, there won’t be any predators fast enough to catch her," Silas agreed without hesitation, though he immediately crooked his head, a frown breaking his confidence. "At least... there shouldn’t be... right?"
After sending Mika away, Frodo walked back into the depths of the cavern.
This time, he wanted to draw the complete set of blueprints for a stationary defensive weapon for the choke point.
They were going to build the Paleolithic era’s first true mounted ballista!
Because they lacked forged steel gears, Frodo designed it to use a single lever-ratchet system.
By anchoring the chassis to the stone floor of the cave, a single defender could use their entire body weight to pull back a thick, braided sinew bowstring.
To fire, they would only need to knock away a wooden wedge, releasing a spear-sized bolt capable of piercing three men at once.
The tension would be immense, making it incredibly lethal at close range.
The principles behind a basic tension-bow were not complicated, so Frodo was able to draw out a rough schematic on the flat slate fairly quickly.
But if he wanted an accurate production model, he would have to go down to the lumber pile and measure the precise tensile strength of the pine logs Orok had left them.
At this time, Orin entered the alcove, carrying a flat stone.
"What is going on?" Frodo put down his piece of charcoal, unable to restrain a proud smile.
"I finished the logic patterns," Orin said quietly, placing the stone covered in binary dots, dashes, and basic geometric equations onto the dirt.
Seeing this, Frodo’s smile suddenly became somewhat stiff.
This was simply too exaggerated! In just a matter of weeks, the Paleolithic teenager had absorbed the fundamental principles of mathematical leverage and information theory?
Frodo didn’t even need to ask if the boy had truly understood it, because when Orin said he finished something, his obsessive mind meant he comprehended the very soul of the concept, or he would have asked questions until he did.
"Are you drawing the plans for a giant spear-thrower?" Orin’s sharp attention was attracted to the charcoal sketch laying on Frodo’s desk. "But..."
"But what?" Frodo asked, leaning back.
"Are these two ends of the wood meant to bend backward like a normal bow?" Orin pointed at the arms in the drawing. "When the wood bends, it produces a pushing force, yes. But half the energy is fighting the thickness of the log itself. That is a huge waste of tension. So why not just cut the wood in half and twist the ropes instead?"
"..." Frodo stared at the lanky teenager with his mouth slightly open, not knowing how to reply.
Since people born with innate modern engineering knowledge did not exist, did that mean that just by looking at a charcoal sketch for a few seconds, Orin had deduced the limitations of tension mechanics? Read the latest chapters at novelping dot com.
Thinking about this terrifying possibility suddenly spiked Frodo’s interest...
"Then can you draw how you would improve it?"
For a moment, Orin pondered the slate. Then, he picked up the charcoal and began to draw.
Frodo supported his chin with his hand, appreciating with keen, academic interest the teenager’s careful drawing attempt.
Orin’s brow was furrowed in concentration. His eyes darted back and forth across the invisible angles.
"Do you want a piece of roasted fat?" Silas suddenly scrambled into the alcove, shoving a skewer of dripping meat between the two of them.
"Yes," Orin nodded, barely breaking his focus as he took the offered snack. "Thank you."
With his line of sight blocked by the bulky Head Scout, Frodo cleared his throat twice and shifted his attention back to the new paintings on the slate.
Initially, Orin had tried to anchor the twisted ropes into the stone floor.
However, this meant it would become impossible to rotate the weapon to aim at different targets, making it easy for Blood-Walkers to simply run around its line of fire...
Orin then drew the twisted rope bundles at the very front of the chassis but the binding mechanism became much more complex.
After all, securing massive amounts of twisted mammoth sinew required a heavy, perfectly carved wooden frame that wouldn’t buckle under the pressure.
When Frodo saw the final drawing of Orin’s newest concept, he once again couldn’t help but exclaim in deep admiration for his counterpart’s terrifying thinking capability.
The sketch Orin was considering came infinitesimally close to a Roman Scorpio layout.
"I do not know if the bone-pegs can hold this much twisting force," Orin hesitated, scratching his head. "But it is reasonable to say that by twisting the sinew instead of bending the wood, it can store far more energy. However, by reducing the solid bow to just twisted ropes, I do not know if the wood will snap when we pull it back."
"Of course it would be possible, it just needs a slight modification in the housing frame." Frodo took the charcoal out of Orin’s hand, and drew a box around the coils. "Compared to an open twist, sealing it in a box stops the frame from collapsing. Your train of thought is brilliant. But," Frodo paused, tapping his original drawing of the bent-wood ballista.
"The requirement is to build a weapon to defend the cave *tomorrow*," Frodo explained. "Carving the torsion frames requires tools and time we do not have yet. So, we will still keep with the first method, the tension bow. This has nothing to do with superior technology; it is simply a survival strategy." He paused, wiping the charcoal from his hands. "I am going to the lower cave to measure the pine logs. Do you want to come with me?"
Orin blinked his dark eyes, his face lighting up. "Yes!"
Mastering the theory on stone, and then putting it into practice with wood and sweat, was the absolute best way to learn.
...
"Silas?"
When Orin followed the boy-leader toward the tunnel, he saw that the Head Scout was still standing by the flat stone, staring down at the blueprints with a furrowed brow, making it impossible for Orin not to open his mouth.
"Ah, you can go first," Silas muttered, scratching his beard. "I will follow right behind you."
While holding the stone slate in his hands, Silas repeatedly compared Frodo’s drawing with Orin’s drawing, eventually arriving at a very confused conclusion: *Didn’t they just cut the stick in half and turn it sideways?*