When night came, I teleported to where Ariya and I had agreed to meet. Ariya had apparently been using this space to practice her flying. She’d gotten pretty good at it too. You can already do loops in the air... What the heck?
“Wait long?” I asked.
“Not really.”
The conversation felt like a couple meeting up for a date. I pulled my gun out of Shadow Storage and began to prepare to use it, as was necessary for these kinds of antiquated guns.
“You finish the extermination job already?”
“I figured I might as well. I was able to slay quite a few of them. Could I store them in your Shadow Storage for now?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll take care of it later.”
First, I wanted to try shooting the gun without using my dark magic. Most guns here used gunpowder, magic circles, and magic stones—they were essentially small magic tools. But since the magic used was just a simple fire spell and didn’t require that much mana, even normal humans could use them. That meant nothing to me, though, since I wasn’t able to use magic tools whatsoever.
I’d chosen a type of gun that wasn’t a magic tool—an arquebus. Its composition was simple, which made it easier for me to understand how it worked. Feed gunpowder into the tube, insert a lead ball, and then use the flintlock to ignite the powder. After loading the lead ball into the gun with a ramrod, you’d load the flash pan with gunpowder, then close the gun’s apron. Then, all that was left was to light the fuse. It’s hard to tell if their level of technology has progressed quickly or if it’s slowed to a crawl.
“That looks quite annoying,” Ariya commented.
“That’s because it is.” It took a lot longer than any magic incantation. And sure, maybe I just wasn’t used to it yet, but that didn’t change how long it took to get these antiquated guns ready to fire.
These were the same kind of guns that Oda Nobunaga had been famous for using. The magic version of these guns had magic circles strategically built in, which helped to reduce the time that’d normally be spent on reciting an incantation. They were the most common types of guns used in wars, which made sense since this was a world where magic existed. Why wouldn’t they just use magic? But in that case, why did they need guns at all? Weren’t guns pretty much superfluous in the face of magic?
At any rate, I was ready to shoot. All I needed was a target. Hm, that tree will work. The shot’s gonna miss anyway. “Okay, I’m gonna fire.”
“All right.”
I made sure that Ariya had stepped behind me. Though it was unlikely, I didn’t want her to get hit by a stray shot or something. Then I pulled the trigger, making a loud bang. I followed the shot with Absolute Tracking and saw that it hit the far right of the tree trunk.
“Nope, not very accurate.”
“You really are hopeless at shooting,” Ariya commented, playing along.
It was the first time in a while that we’d gotten to banter with each other like this, and I was kinda happy about it. But anyway, the point was that regardless of my skill with guns, the way it was constructed made it hard to hit anything.
“I’ll try it with dark magic now.” I used Conqueror on the round so that I could use Puppet Master on it after it had been fired.
If I used Armament Craft, perhaps I could have used the limited knowledge I had to make a revolver, a rifle, or an automatic gun. But then I’d need cartridges. And a detonator. And neither of those things could be made with Armament Craft. Honestly, it might have been completely impractical to use a gun at all.
This time, thanks to my high DEX and the fact that I’d already done it once, I was able to load the gun quicker than before.
“Here I go again.” I pulled the trigger once more, and then used Puppet Master to move the shot around at incredible speeds.
“Is it working?” Ariya asked. Even if she was able to see in the dark, she couldn’t perceive objects moving at high speeds the way I could with my Eye of True Vision.
I slowed the shot down and had it circle Ariya’s head.
“It’s almost like a bug,” she commented.
That’s rude. But either way, now that I’d shown her what it looked like, I could return it to its original speed. It was almost like a magic bullet. After a while, I got bored and directed it right into the middle of a tree trunk. Bull’s-eye. Hm? Wait, I can’t pull it back out.
“It seems that the test was a success,” Ariya said.
“No, I’d call this a failure.”
“Why’s that?”
“I can’t retrieve it.” I wasn’t able to budge the shot from the tree trunk. “The impact changed its shape. Apparently that counts as breaking it.” Conqueror was dispelled when the object at hand was broken, meaning I could no longer use Puppet Master on it. This wasn’t all too surprising; I’d suspected as much. If I couldn’t retrieve my shots, then I was pretty much throwing each of them away. In that sense, my knives were much more bang for my buck.
“Couldn’t you make them more durable by using adamantite?”
“That’d be a waste of materials. Besides, using adamantite would lower the strength of the shot.”
“It would?”