She said it with a straight face. I couldn't tell if she was joking. Vale made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been indigestion from my stolen burger.
Yumi stood and walked to a different workbench, this one covered in technical drawings pinned down with chunks of raw ore. She rifled through the papers until she found the one she wanted and spread it flat with both hands. The drawing showed a weapon I didn't recognize. Not a sword or spear or any standard academy-issue configuration. The silhouette looked like someone had taken a Japanese naginata and crossed it with something from a fever dream. A long haft terminating in a curved blade, but the blade had gaps in it, channels running through the metal like veins in a leaf, and at the base where blade met haft sat a circular housing about the size of a golf ball.
The housing was drawn in blue-white ink.
