She knew she would have to break it. It was obvious. How on Pangera was she supposed to learn the secrets of this incredible armour without hitting it, breaking it open, melting it? She couldn't! She knew she couldn't. And yet… she struggled to bring herself to do it. She'd examined the armour in intricate detail. Every sense she could bring to bear had been utilised with laser-like focus on every curve and fold of the suits she could access. Her antennae were intimately familiar with every square inch. Her eyes had examined each marking and rune, the entire network of which (that was visible) she had copied onto sheets of metal that adorned the walls of her forge.
Several of the watchful scouts had been yelled at for allowing their legs to pollute those surfaces as they shifted around the room, disturbing her thoughts for seemingly no good reason. What were they supposed to protect her from?! The scouts fobbed her off, with generic statements about 'dangerous enemy technology', as they'd been ordered to. The fact that Tungstant had placed them there to protect Smithant in the event something went very wrong, they wouldn't say. The Colony was not about to lose their foremost armour expert so soon after she had demonstrated her worth! Not even for Legion armour would that be worthwhile.
So they carefully watched as the carver interacted with the armour, their cores in their jaws each time she dropped something or started gnawing on the armour with her mandibles, worried that something would explode before they had the chance to throw themselves on top of it.
Eventually, she was forced to weigh her affection for the incredible craftsmanship of the Legion pieces that had fallen into her claws against her own Skills and knowledge (and by extension, the Colony's). Of course, her own Skills won out. How much more precious would equally stunning works be, if they had come from her own forge? The very thought sent her into a catatonic state of joy for several long minutes.
The decision made, she wasted no time in getting to work. The ants had developed many ant-specific tools for manipulating armour in order for them to manage the process of detailing and enchanting. With the straps undone and the joints snipped, Smithant used her front two claws to lift and mount the armour on the frames she'd constructed and started the painful process of deconstructing the suits.
It took long hours of arduous (and tearful) toil. The armour was tough. Really tough. The materials were totally alien to her experience and far more durable than anything she'd worked with to date. Not only was the stuff harder to break, snap, pierce or shatter, it was lighter, responded to mana better and held enchantments more than three times as efficiently! The strange stone was a wonder in and of itself. It could detect mana sources around it and actively tried to consume that mana. She nearly had a few cores drained dry when they were placed too close to the stuff. When she tested it on herself (the watching scouts came this close to leaping off the roof in a massive pile-on) she found that even through her carapace and flesh, the stone was able to siphon away a portion of the mana in her core.
The only logical conclusion was that the mineral was, in some sense, living. The number of experiments she would need to conduct on the stuff to test it was immeasurable and would likely take years. Reluctant as she was to part with it, she had little choice but to pass responsibility for that investigation over to the mages. She had armour to make and precious little time to take on a task that could instead be done by a dozen teams of mage-ants.
The metal was a more familiar material. She wasn't sure what she'd expected to find after the encounter with the strange stone, but the steel was (as far as she could tell) inert. A relief. If the Legion had managed to find some sort of living metal and learned to shape it, she might have despaired of the Colony ever catching up to their craftsmanship.
The material was unknownto her, that much made sense. She could work at identifying and categorizing the qualities of the metal, but it was unlikely she would be able to do more until they found an unprocessed sample of the stuff for herself. Where her interest truly lay, and where she stood to gain the most from this investigation, was the techniques used rather than the materials.
And those techniques were, quite literally, next level. She was able to see what had been achieved but couldn't picture how for the life of her. It reality, this metal wasn't too much better than that the Colony had access too, at least the raw material. Smithant theorised that the processing and treatment applied to the ore was what resulted in the higher level of tensile strength and lighter weight. Which took what was a relatively small advantage in raw components and widened it significantly. This led the carver to further believe that there were far better suits of armour out there. She refused to believe that a force as old and established as this Legion didn't have access to ore that far surpassed this.
The other key advantage was in the way their smiths had worked the final metal. Although she couldn't completely reverse engineer the techniques that had been used in the forging, she was able to analyse the final result. Then she could try and make educated guesses as to the process that had been used. If she were successful in her work, she might be rewarded with a significant amount of experience towards her smithing Skill. At the very least, it was going to be a great benefit to the Colony to gain some insight into how some of the best out there made their armour.
In terms of unlocking the benefits to their enchanting methods, she was even further behind in that department. Although she worked hard on her enchanting Skills, it was her secondary profession, she wasn't the highest level in the Colony by a long shot. She'd have to bring in a few experts to help break down that tangled web.
But all of that wouldn't require the use of this many suits. The Colony had seized over ten full sets of this superb stuff, it would be a waste for it to collect dust in her collection (though she longed for it, she couldn't condone the inefficiency). She couldn't replicate these materials, or their techniques, but what she could do was hack these suits apart and then cobble them back together to the best of her ability. It would be a pretty nasty piece of patchwork, and splicing together the enchantments would be an absolute nightmare, but she was fairly confident she could get it to work. The only question was, who out there was in need of the worst best armour the Colony had to offer?
