I was in my office overlooking the floor, triple-checking the trade manifests for Jasta’s caravan, when the low-frequency vibration forced me to my feet. My immediate thought was a furnace failure. Kaelas had recently been experimenting with unstable Aether-Geode dust in the smelting process, attempting to forge a Magitek Alloy with superior Yield Strength.
Zayla kicked the office door open, her expression grim. She held a snapped heavy-duty wrench in her hand as if it were a broken bone. “The dwarves and the goblins are at each other’s throats,” she said, adding with a dry coldness: “The real kind of fighting—hammers and pneumatic rivet guns. Three goblins have already been tossed into the cooling ponds.”
Five minutes later. The Joint Foundry floor.
The workshop had devolved into a chaotic gladiatorial pit. The air wasn't just filled with sulfur; it was saturated with the smell of black powder and racial friction.
To the left: thirty Deeprock Dwarves, their beards matted with soot and muscles like weathered granite. They brandished heavy forging hammers, led by a foreman named Thorg who was waving a pair of glowing-red hearth tongs as if they were a toothpick.
To the right: fifty Goblins hunkered down behind lathes and high-pressure steam pipes. They were armed with pneumatic wrenches and nail guns. Sarak stood atop a gantry crane, her goggles down, screaming orders like a demented admiral.
In the center: the Bear-kin laborers held massive blast shields, acting as a desperate buffer. They looked like bouncers at a club where everyone was armed with industrial machinery.
“Do you green-skinned runts even know what forging means?!” Thorg roared, sparks flying from his beard as he struck an anvil. “Steel has a soul! It needs a thousand strikes! You want to just pour it into a mold and call it a part? That’s a desecration! It’s garbage!”
“You granite-brained barbarian!” Sarak shrieked from above. “That’s precision casting! It's called Efficiency! Do you even understand the concept of Throughput? And why are your bolts right-hand threaded?! My machine shafts rotate clockwise! You’ve jammed the entire transmission!”
“Screws have been right-handed since the dawn of time! It is the rule of the Earth Mother! The wisdom of the Ancestors!”
“To hell with your Ancestors! It’s a rule of Mechanical Dynamics! You use reverse threads to prevent self-loosening under high torque! You don't even know what a tolerance is, you primitive oaf!”
A heavy wrench flew through the air, sparking off Thorg’s iron apron. Thorg bellowed and raised his tongs.
“ENOUGH!!!”
My voice, amplified by the overhead megaphone system, drowned out the roar of the blast furnaces. The vibration of the horn speakers rattled the window panes.
Everyone froze. I walked down the metal stairs, my face an expressionless mask of engineering coldness. Brad followed, looking bored, while Zayla maintained a perimeter with her hand on her hilt. I stepped into the center of the kill zone, staring at the debris on the floor—a pile of scrap metal that refused to fit together. The dwarven bearings were too large; the goblin gears were too small. The threads were in a state of mutual exclusion.
“Is this your report?” I picked up a bolt that was still radiating heat, staring coldly at Thorg and Sarak. “You shut down a production line because you couldn't agree on which way a screw turns?”
“He wouldn't follow protocol!” Thorg grumbled, lowering his tongs but still bristling. “Dwarven craft has been passed down for three millennia—”
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“She doesn't understand science!” Sarak spat. “Left-hand threads possess a self-locking function under high rotational stress—”
“Shut up.” I slammed the bolt onto the concrete floor. The sharp crack of metal on stone echoed through the dome.
“I don't care if your tradition is three thousand years or thirty thousand. I don't care about your mechanical theories.” I pushed my glasses up, my gaze pinning every craftsman in the room. “In this city, there is only one rule. From this second on, Skyreach has no ‘Dwarven Standard.’ It has no ‘Goblin Standard.’”
I turned to a nearby chalkboard and wrote in heavy, aggressive strokes:
[ISO-SKY-001: SKYREACH INDUSTRIAL STANDARD SYSTEM]
I pulled a stainless steel rule from my System storage. “This is One Meter,” I said, pointing to the increments. “Every length measured in this city will use this as the datum. Any part with a dimensional deviation exceeding 0.5 millimeters goes back into the furnace.”
I pointed to the bolt. “Threads. Common fasteners: Right-hand. Drive-shaft components: Left-hand. The pitch must strictly follow this chart.” I slapped a thick stack of technical drawings against Thorg’s chest. “This is called Standardization.”
“Thorg, you talk about the soul of the craft. But on the battlefield, when a tank’s wheel snaps, do you want your soldiers to wait three days for a master to hammer a replacement, or do you want them to scavenge one from a wreck and bolt it on in five minutes?” Thorg blinked. He was an old warrior; he understood the difference between a legacy and a corpse. That was the logic of survival.
“Interchangeability,” I said, turning to Sarak. “Sarak, if a machine can only be repaired by you, it’s a design failure. I want machines that can be fixed by a trainee with a wrench and a manual. That’s called fault tolerance.”
The workshop went silent, broken only by the hiss of a steam leak.
“To ensure you stop fighting over idiocy,” I announced, “I am establishing the Joint Design Bureau. Thorg, you are in charge of Chassis and Armor. Dwarven iron is the hardest. Sarak, you handle Engines and Fire Control. Goblin brains are the fastest.”
“You will work on the same blueprint. If the final assembly doesn't fit...” I smiled, pointing to the open maw of the blast furnace. “Then neither of your groups eats tonight. Or, better yet, I’ll toss you both in there and melt you into an alloy. That way, you’ll be permanently unified.”
Three days later.
A brand-new steel beast crawled out of the workshop gates. It was no longer the jury-rigged patchwork of the previous models.
The chassis utilized dwarven-style heavy forged plating—thick, solid, with welds smoothed into seamless transitions. The turret and engine compartments were a goblin’s dream of precision conduits, rotating with surgical accuracy. Two vastly different cultures, forced into the framework of standardization, had merged into a terrifying industrial beauty.
[Land Crawler Mk.II - Mass Production Type]
“Beautiful...” Thorg whispered, running a calloused hand over the armor plate.
“So fast...” Sarak closed her eyes, ears twitching to the smooth, synchronized hum of the engine.
They shared a look. They still didn't like each other, but neither mentioned the screws. They knew that by following the "Standard," they could build the most lethal machines in the wasteland.
I stood on the second-floor balcony, watching the tank rumble past. “Look at that, Brad. That’s civilization.”
“Not destroying differences, but forcing them to collaborate under a single metric.”
Brad whistled. “That ‘shotgun wedding’ approach worked better than I thought. That thing looks like it can take a hit.”
“It can do more than take a hit,” I said. “It’s the first modern tank produced entirely by our own infrastructure. And it is replaceable.”
Question of the Day: Now that the Tank is standardized, what should Alex build next?
?? A) Standardized Rifles: Give every soldier the same weapon.
(Result: Logistics Win. One type of bullet for everyone. Training and supply become easy, but individual combat flexibility drops.)
?? B) The Steam Tractor: Automate agriculture and logistics.
(Result: Economic Boom. Feed thousands without needing thousands of farmers. Free up labor for more factories.)
?? C) Precision Measuring Tools: Micrometers and Gauges.
(Result: The Engineer's Choice. You can't improve what you can't measure. Unlock Tier 3 precision engineering and advanced rocketry.)
Follow and Rate for more industrial madness!