Vol.6 Ch.6.1 – Firepower I

Chapter 6: Firepower

“Ah, Tailor,” Hephaestus said, placing the musket down and reaching for a sword. My sword. Helios Edge. “There we are, all fixed up again,” he said as he handed it back to me.

“Thank you,” I said as gravely as I could. With most Olympians I would be extremely wary of explicitly thanking them lest I incur some kind of debt, but Hephaestus was different. Not only did I doubt he would play those kinds of games but even if he did, after repairing this sword I would gladly owe him a debt.

Eleftheria was an amazing weapon, capable of amplifying my Qi in ways I was sure I hadn't even scratched the surface of, but sometimes a white-hot lance of heat or a broad swathe of fire were just the right tool for the job.

I inspected the sword, running a finger along the edge, feeling its edge and the soft warm hum of the fiery personality imbued within it, and then put it in its scabbard, right next to Eleftheria. “So,” I said, turning to Selene. “Why did you want one of these muskets?”

Selene looked a little sheepish. “If you don't think it's the right item for me...”

I cut her off quickly. “I'm not critiquing you. I think it's a great pick, but I'm curious why you wanted it.”

She sagged in relief. “I wanted some way to be effective at range,” she admitted. “You and Anna have ranged weapons you can use. You and Yume are great at using Qi Projection. Alisha and Yume can use magic. But me?”

I pressed my lips together. While Selene could use Qi Projection, it took her way longer to pull off than it did Yume and me. According to Yume Selene was still pretty good at it compared to the people of her homeland but in critical moments those two extra seconds she needed compared to us were still too much. “How long have you been thinking about this?” I finally asked.

“Ever since we found that flying boss in the Crystal Crown's dungeon,” she admitted. “It was dead by the time we arrived, sure, but ever since then I kept wondering how useless I would have been if we had ended up fighting it.”

That giant winged serpent whose corpse we'd found had been a majestic beast, sure, but according to the notebook written by Anna's great-grandfather it never truly landed, making it impossible to hit with melee weapons except when it swooped down. “I see,” I said.

“And so I kept thinking what weapon I wanted to use. A bow is too cumbersome for me. Your crossbow isn't that strong, especially against the things we're now facing, and it takes way too long to reload. My aim with throwing weapons is atrocious compared to you. And a dwarven musket takes even longer to reload than your crossbow. But when I saw these muskets...”

I nodded. “I suppose something good has to come out of being invaded by an army from another world.”

“Exactly,” she said. “So I asked Athena if I could have one.”

“And how does that lead you to Hephaestus?” I finally asked, turning to look at both Selene and the blacksmith.

“I confiscated all of these after we locked those knights up,” he said. “Wanted to know how they work. And I wanted to make sure they didn't use any Outsider powers.”

“And do they?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Pure technology, only so far advanced it took me almost a day to make sense of them.”

I frowned. “It's a musket. Sure they're a brilliant piece of gear but I doubt it's that complex.”

He gave me an odd look, part annoyance and pity at my ignorance but also part excitement that he could talk about these weapons to someone who was interested. “This weapon is a musket in the same way that your crossbow is a slingshot. They're based on the same idea but one is so far beyond the other that even comparing them would be an insult.”

I waited for him to elaborate on that.

“Do you know how a musket works?” he finally asked.

I had read this once years ago and then decided never to bother with it. I hoped I got it right and that I wouldn't embarrass myself.

“The musket itself is essentially a long pipe that's closed off at one end,” I said. “You stuff a bunch of black powder down the pipe, then place a musket ball in front of it. From the closed end you apply fire to the black powder, either through a lit fuse or a mechanism that strikes a piece of flint against it. The fire ignites the black powder and causes a controlled explosion that propels the metal ball out the pipe.”

“A very crude description,” he said, “but not wrong.”

“And how do you advance that?” I asked. “Short of using force magic to simulate the explosion I can't think of anything.”

His eyes widened. “Now that's an interesting idea,” he muttered, pulling out a little notebook and scribbling into it. When he was done he put it away and said: “But no, that's not it at all.”

I tilted my head. “Then how does it work?”

He pointed down at the musket and I looked at it properly for the first time.

The whole thing was matte black, though I got the feeling this was only the outer shell of the weapon and that there was metal on the inside.

The thing had a long barrel and a stock, same as the muskets I knew. I couldn't see any kind of flintlock contraption and not even the opening of a breechloader. Was this thing muzzle-loaded?

What the musket did have, however, was a trigger like my crossbow, which implied that the weapon did have some equivalent of a flintlock mechanism.

I was about to voice a stream of questions when Hephaestus took pity on me.

“It looks confounding, doesn't it?” he rumbled, then pointed at the barrel. “Even I can only guess how this thing functions but I do know how it works.”

That doesn't make any sense, I carefully didn't say.

“The weapon does not have a flintlock mechanism or anything like that,” he said. “Neither does it use black powder. What this thing does have is a bunch of copper coils.” He pointed at the trigger. “Pull this and controlled lightning flows through the copper coils for the tiniest instant.”

“And what does that do?”

“It makes the coils act as magnets for less than a blink,” he said. “Instead of a controlled explosion blasting the metal ball out, the magnetic field yanks on the ball, then turns off when the ball is at the height of its acceleration, making it shoot out of the barrel.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And where does the lightning come from?”

“The weapon sucks mana out of the air and uses it to cast a lightning spell,” he said. “Somehow they found a way for an unfeeling gadget to manipulate mana.”

“That's impossible,” Alisha whispered.

“With our current understanding of mana,” he said, “yes. But they found a way to make it work.”

“Alright,” I said, “so it uses a mechanism we can't even replicate to launch its ammunition. But how do you load it? All this fancy technology just to build a muzzleloader?”

“That's the wildest part,” he said with a laugh. “You don't load this at all. It uses mana to create musket balls out of thin air. It tries to keep fifteen balls ready to go. Whenever you're not firing the weapon it passively creates musket balls until it reaches fifteen.”

“How long does it take to create the full set?” I asked.

“When I tested it, it took fifteen minutes to go from empty to full,” he said, “but keep in mind that mana is denser in Olympus than in the outside world so it might be slower out there.”

“Even if it takes twice as long, that's still pretty good,” I said. “How strong is it?”

He grinned. “Strong enough.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Do you want me to show you or should I just tell you?”

“You decide,” I said.

“Alright,” he said, then explained: “The projectile speed is only slightly higher than a normal musket, which means the range is also slightly higher than a normal musket. However, the... let's call it a bound spell, that creates the musket balls also enchants them for armor-piercing at the same time, so while they don't hit much harder than a normal musket ball, they do not care about armor.”

My eyes widened. This was brilliant. A self-loading, armor-piercing ranged weapon that required neither ammunition nor black powder and could fire multiple shots in rapid succession? It was everything Selene could want and more. “Is there a downside to this?”

He winced. “You don't want to use it against lightning mages.”

“Can they make the weapon explode?” I asked carefully.

“Nothing that drastic,” he said. “But once they realize how it fires they can counter it, making it useless.”

“How does it handle water?”

“It's built very well,” he said. “Just don't fire it in water and it should be fine.”

“So, Selene can have this as one of her three legendary items?” I asked.

He chuckled. “So long as you run it through the royal family's duplicator and bring one back to me she can have it for free.”

Well we weren't going to pass up that deal. Although that meant we were already at two duplicator uses. I looked over at Anna.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I'll talk to mother.”

“Thank you.”