Bella explained the windlance and the Black Arrow to the dwarven general named Sorgling.
Sorgling had no relation to Thorin, Thrór, or Thráin. It was simply that the names sounded a bit alike.
The reason Dáin Ironfoot had appointed him commander of those two thousand dwarven soldiers wasn't that he was a fine traditional fighter. Plenty of dwarves could swing an axe or hammer well enough to smash an orc's head into its chest cavity. Sorgling wasn't one of them; his combat performance was, by his own people's standards, only middling. But he had a talent Dáin Ironfoot valued highly: Magic Resistance. He was born with a strong natural resistance to magic.
To prevent Bella, that witch, from using foul magic to embezzle his people's pay, Dáin Ironfoot had left Sorgling, whose innate resistance to magic was extraordinarily high, behind to help.
The official explanation was to defend against the dragon's magic. In reality, Dáin had no idea whether that dragon had any magic to begin with.
Bella found this rather curious. "The world is vast, and full of wonders," that saying suddenly had a whole new meaning for her.
In her experience, apart from a tiny handful of individuals who had walked deep down the path of magic, most apprentices, junior mages, ordinary people, and even those superheroes and supervillains had no magical resistance to speak of.
Balrogs and dragons, as magical creatures, possessed magical resistance. Demons did. Angels did. But ordinary people certainly didn't. Elves and dwarves had only the faintest trace, low enough to barely register. But Sorgling's magical resistance was strikingly pronounced. Bella couldn't read his mind without him noticing. This dwarf's resistance was very high indeed.
Unable to see through his thoughts, Bella had to explain her intentions a full three times before he grasped what she meant.
Sorgling turned the Black Arrow over and over, conferred with a few elder dwarves for a while, and finally gave her a definite answer. "We can make it. Forging the windlance isn't difficult. But the Black Arrow... this kind of metal is genuinely scarce these days..."
Bella had more or less expected this. If they could just churn them out, Thorin's grandfather wouldn't have had to flee back in the day. He'd have built a thousand windlances and shot Smaug out of the sky the moment he showed up.
Not a thousand. A hundred windlances, firing a thousand Black Arrows: Smaug wouldn't survive that.
"All right. How many Black Arrows can you forge right now?"
Sorgling held up his left hand. "Five arrows."
Far too few! Bella was distinctly unhappy. But the dwarves swore up and down: with what materials they had on hand, five was the absolute limit. Not a single one more.
Bella tilted her head down and thought for a moment, then picked up the Black Arrow. "Wait here. I'll be back shortly."
Opening a portal, she returned to Earth.
She got her bearings and teleported directly to a spot just outside Red Knight's spaceship. The vessel created severe interference with teleportation, and it took her a bit of effort before she could once again lay eyes on the Guardian Transformer Red Knight.
"Can you scan this metal for me and figure out what materials I'd need to synthesize it?"
When it came to metals, even humans and dwarves combined probably couldn't match the expertise of the Transformers, silicon-based life by their very nature.
Red Knight, who had drunk no small amount of Bella's aviation fuel, didn't refuse what was essentially a trivial favor.
He picked up the Black Arrow. The two-meter shaft looked like a toothpick in his hand. He looked it over a few times, then scanned and analyzed the material composition with his own optics.
A flood of data appeared on the holographic display beside him. Bella wasn't a metallurgist, and she couldn't make heads or tails of it.
"Does this kind of metal exist on Earth?"
Red Knight neither nodded nor shook his head. "That depends on how you understand the word 'exist.'"
Bella tried another question. "Then can it be synthesized?"
Red Knight glanced left and right, then stood up and walked out of the main control room. Bella followed curiously.
She watched as Red Knight peered around now and then, and now and then dawdled about like someone idling on the job, searching for something in the corridors that were one-fifth submerged in seawater. Sometimes he'd pick up a metal plate, hold it to his audio sensor and tap it twice, then shake his head and toss it back into the water. Other times he'd pry irregular metal fragments off the ship's interior walls and examine them carefully.
Finally, he tore a chunk of metal the size of a car from a dented section of the hull, ran a quick analysis, and at last handed it to Bella with a satisfied look.
"Here. This should be quite close in composition to your arrow. Margin of error no more than 0.002 percent."
Bella, momentarily lost for words, took it from him, and discovered the thing was crushingly heavy. Even with the strength to bench press a metric ton, she still couldn't lift it.
"What is this?"
"I don't quite know how to explain it to you. You could think of it as debris ejected from a volcano. It should be the closest match in properties to the material in your arrow. Finding something perfectly identical..." Red Knight made a head-scratching gesture. "...is probably impossible, and synthesizing it with Earth's current technology would take a great deal of effort. This chunk should be close enough."
Half a day later, Bella summoned all twenty-some members of the Snake Eyes clan, and together they hauled the chunk of ore, at least ten tons of it, back to Lake-town.
She suspected that if she'd raised her standards even a little, Red Knight could still have found something similar somewhere inside that derelict of his that looked more like a junkyard than a spaceship. The Guardian Transformers had visited far too many worlds. This kind of ore, though precious, was to them the sort of "clutter" they wished they could clear out from underfoot.
The dwarves didn't initially recognize what Bella had brought them. They were a bit dismissive of it. But after several elder dwarves observed it, wiped it down, tapped it, and one of them bit it (chipping three of his molars in the process), they finally began to take it seriously.
They fired up the furnace, smelted the ore, and forged it. What followed was beyond Bella's expertise. She handed the whole task of building the windlances and Black Arrows over to the dwarves.
The only real problems were the scarcity of the material and the difficulty of smelting it. Beyond that, what was so hard to make? A two-meter shaft, a spiral arrowhead, and that was it. Done.
Bard watched as the Black Arrows he had treasured as family heirlooms were forged in batches by the dwarven craftsmen, and felt something twist in his chest.
Things were valuable because they were rare. Once these arrows numbered in the hundreds or thousands, treating his old one as a family heirloom would just be a joke.
What was a Black Arrow used for? He knew perfectly well. Forging hundreds, thousands of them was clearly not just to create some city calling card. As a member of the Lake-town Governing Council, he felt obliged to caution his sovereign.
When he found Bella, she was wearing her white robe and holding her staff, strolling through a crowd of dwarves sweating away at their work, inspecting their progress.
"Forgive me for asking, but you aren't actually thinking of slaying the dragon, are you?"
Bella looked at him oddly. What a thing to ask. If the dragon wasn't slain, what, let him wake up and incinerate Lake-town?
"That is the idea." She cut off the words Bard was about to say. "I'm confident I can do it. You may not be aware, but I killed the Balrog of Khazad-dûm. A single dragon, with the proper preparation, can absolutely be killed."
For the past few days Bella had been using the Time Stone to observe possible futures. The Black Arrow was the easiest way to deal with Smaug; there was even a sense of inevitability to it. Smaug would be killed by a Black Arrow.