Forging the Blades of Izanami

[Kitsune]

Kitsune stood inside the forges of the Izanami Ironworks. Although the manufacturing equipment and production machinery were the finest and highest caliber within the market, Kitsune took painstaking effort in handcrafting and creating her own manufacturing equipment and production machinery. The creation of this would be elucidated on another occasion, but for now, Kitsune focused on the task at hand:

Creating custom weapons for herself and her personal bodyguards.

 

[Kitsune]

One of the most crucial aspects of the blade is the metal ore used in its construction: Kitsune took an extreme amount of effort into obtaining raw songsteel ore from the Cularin System Asteroid Belt for this very purpose.

Then, of course, the other most crucial aspect would be the forger and smith themselves. Only through their work and expertise could a blade of the highest caliber be created. Although inefficient, handforged blades would often lead to superior weaponry and furthermore, in the hands of Kitsune, they would become godly.

 

[Kitsune]

The method of creation she would be utilizing would be the labor-intensive and extremely costly bladesmithing process which involved unique smelting, forging, assembly mechanisms in order to construct the ideal blade.

The first step, the smelting process, is completely different from traditional methods. A one hundred and twenty centimeter tall, three hundred and sixty meter long and one hundred twenty centimeter wide vessel, called a tatara, of duranium would be constructed. As duranium boasts resilience to high temperatures, it would be ideal vessel for the entire smelting process, which requires extremely high amounts of thermal energy for prolonged periods of time in order to complete.

 

[Kitsune]

Utilizing a combination of duskwood charcoal refined to the point of being composed of one hundred percent carbon and purified anthracite as sources of fuel, a charcoal-coal fire is ignited and then constantly monitored and modulated in order to constantly be at the ideal temperature. At this point, the songsteel ore is to be added and further purified and refined: as the songsteel ore melts, interstitial layers of charcoal/coal is added as more songsteel ore is added.

This entire process continues for the next seven days, requiring sixty engineering experts to constantly work on this process. This process takes an entire month, including the time to build the tatara, reach the correct temperature, and complete the purification and melting of raw songsteel ore into usable and pure songsteel.


The songsteel is not allowed to become fully molten however, as this allows both high and low carbon materials to be created and separated once cooled. This is necessary, as blades of the Inari Shogunate are created in multiple layers and furthermore, composed of both soft and hard steels in their compositions. When complete, the tatara is carefully broken to remove the songsteel bloom, known as the kera.

 

[Kitsune]

At the end of the entire process, the tatara will have consumed to remove the steel bloom, known as a kera. At the end of the process the tatara will have consumed twelve metric tons of raw songsteel ore and twenty four metric tons of charcoal and coal, leaving three tons of kera. This kera can only produce approximately one and a half metric tons of high quality songsteel for blade construction, with the excess material being purified into armor construction.

A single kera of durasteel can be worth thousands of credits, and a single kera of songsteel can be worth millions of credits, making it extremely more expensive than standard durasteels and songsteels respectively.

 

[Kitsune]

Now with the refined songsteel that she needed, Kitsune began segregating the kera by their carbon-density: low carbon steel to be used for the core of the blade, or hocho-tetsu, and higher carbon steel, called tamahagane, and high carbon steel, nabegane, to be used to form the outerskin of the blade called kawagane. She could finally begin the main, arduous process of swordsmithing: forging through continual folding.

Kitsune gently gripped the low-carbon songsteel with a pair of tongs and thrusted it within a plasma forge of thousands of degrees Celsius, with the specific temperature a trade secret, heating the songsteel to a semi-solid malleable state. She then quickly placed it on the smith and used a vibrohammer, tuned to a specific frequency to maximize the amount of force onto the songsteel without compromising the integrity of the steel, to begin hammering and folding the metal. This was to further improve the strength and remove impurities within the songsteel to tap into the highest potential of a blade. She repeated this process several times, constantly heating, hammering and folding the songsteel until it formed into a soft metal to be used for the core of the blade.

 

[Kitsune]

Kitsune then took the tamahagane and nabegane are repeated the process of forging in alternating layers. This process, known as age-kitae, forge welded both the tamahagane and nabegane into a single block that was elongated, cut, folded and forge welded again into its originally shape. The songsteel itself was folded numerous times, forming millions of subatomic layers of songsteel and making the songsteel almost homogenous. This process was repeated to form numerous blocks of hard steel for edges, hagane, and slightly less hardenable spring steel, kawagane, which would then later be forged into a singular blade.

The entire forging process was also facilitated by a highly reducing environment caused by a mixture of chemicals coated on the songsteel block between each heating and folding. These chemicals promoted the formation of a wustite layer, which would then react to form pure fayalite in the reducing environment. The fayalite would act as a flux, attracting impurities as it is squeezed from between the layers. This would leave the surface of the songsteel pure, which would facilitate the forge-weilding process as a whole. This would reduce the kera to ninety percent of its initial weight due to the loss of such impurities.

The forging process itself would create alternating layers of differing hardenabilities, allowing for the perfect balance between the hardness of high carbon songsteel and the ductility of low carbon songsteel to form the property of toughness. Furthermore, any voids would be eliminated and the homogenizing of the metal was so superb that the effective strength of the blade would be flawless, lacking any potential weak points and shatterpoints in the blade.