Seras was currently sitting around the campfire and was using the last but daylight to clean her rifle. It had done well today in its first real combat experience. The debut of guns on Pallimustus and she had killed two bronze rank monsters.


    Well killed one and crippled another for Dustin to finish off.


    She even got a chance to try her new ability while moving. Ordinarily the galloping of a Heidel would have been too much for ordinary shooting. But Control Bullets proved its worth. Granted it took her moment to reach out and mark the monster with her ability, but that was easy enough to fix.


    She just needed practice.


    Right now there was a radius where she could guide a bullet with pretty good accuracy, she could hit any target with three or four meters with pin point accuracy. As she chose further targets however the target grew wider, at ten meters she could guide a bullet into a fist sized zone. It would always hit within that zone whether it was the edge or dead center. Further out the landing zone became large and larger, until it was almost entirely useless.


    The best she could figure the power sort of corrected the bullets path, adjusting the errors in her shooting in little nudges.


    There were also more generalized limitations. She couldn’t make the bullet swerve, she needed to be at least facing the right direction, and it the less accurate she was with her non-magical aim the more mana it required. There also seemed to be an increased cost for large bullets.


    The first rifle she had was made roughly like a six millimeter, she figured it was a good starting point. Unfortunately while the gun did work, it would only be good on normal ranks creatures. Iron ranked ones needed several bullets to drop with that caliber, and Bronze didn’t even acknowledge the shot. So she had to redesign the whole thing with a wider and longer cartridge in mind.


    Even then it was barely a bother to the bronze rank monsters.


    When she rode out to retrieve the corpse of the monster she had first shoot she found that the bullets were only a few centimeters deep, and she had only been firing from a hundred meters out.


    Seras checked the firing mechanism and grimaced. Dusk and black power gunked up the inside. And the new firing pin she had made was cracked. Well, there was reason she had bought fine bristle brushes. She immediately got down to business.


    As she was brushing, she was mentally tweaking the design with her blueprinting ability. The ability worked like highly advanced engineering software with a large catalogue of similar designs. She could three dimensionally render the designs, digitally stress test certain components and even model the actual firing of the weapon. All very useful.


    Unfortunately, there were large gaps in what she could make versus what she had the designs for. While Seras had occasionally used a cheap gun from time to time she was more intimately familiar with high tech precision made weapons. None of which she could make here since she couldn’t reproduce half the parts.


    She had to go back to designs from over two centuries ago to get a working product on this world, which meant she had to guess about some of the designs. The companies that made these guns didn’t even exist anymore.


    Movement at her side caught her attention and Seras looked up to see the dark-skinned Martin had approached her.


    His skin was nowhere near as dark as a Smolders, but it was still darker than anything Seras had seen. It was like dark, rich, chocolate. Seras found the appearance quite stunning matched with the man’s short, cropped hair and warm brown eyes.


    “Ma’am.” Martin greeted.


    Seras snorted “No need for that, just call me Seras.”


    He seemed taken aback by what she said, but eventually a smile frowned its way to his lips. “Alright, Seras. I just wanted to thank you. If you hadn’t been there today, then I’d be dead.”


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    Seras smiled, she had saved people before, but usually only if it was convenient. But today wasn’t like that. Dustin had somehow felt the man’s panic and came to the rescue.


    “Its all-good Martin. Glad we made it in time.” She answered.


    “A second longer and I would have tried to throw myself at the monsters to buy my men time. If you hadn’t shot that one Ostryx I would have been killed before Dustin could ride in. that tube of yours is mighty impressive. Is it a modified magic staff or-“


    “It’s a rifle. No magic involved.” Seras explained.


    His face lit up “Really? Then how does it work?”


    Seras smiled “I use small cartridges of an explosive powder to accelerate a metal slug. The slug flies out at incredible speeds and buries itself in the target.” She had learned that when it came to Pallimustan’s she needed to greatly dumb down the process. While these people had a firm grip on magical theory and even a bastardized concept of space-time and string theory they didn’t have a periodic table, nor a solid understanding of reactions and the laws of conservation.


    It wasn’t because they were ignorant, but just that the presence of magic made what Seras considered fundamental concepts hard to observe in nature. The existence of magical materials made any sort of periodic table impossible to compile on their own, and magic had the seeming ability to bend the conservation of mass and energy.


    But Seras knew that those concepts had to exist. Magic may have proven then to not be fundamental or unchangeable like her world had thought, but that just meant their understanding was lacking, not that the theories were wrong.


    “That’s impressive. Is the powder some sort of rare alchemical concoction?” Martin asked, genuinely intrigued.


    “Nah, I had a small-town alchemist whip up the gunpower in an afternoon. The primer took a bit longer, but it wasn’t hard once we knew the trick. Guy said he was using the byproducts of cheap health potions, which makes me wonder just how safe those potions really are if I can use the byproduct for a primer cap.”


    “And the weapon itself.” Martin said as he leaned over to look into the mechanisms Seras was cleaning.


    “A bit trickier. A magic blacksmith was able to forge the barrel with the rifling in less than five minutes. The smaller pieces are my touch, however. I have an essence ability that lets me shape metal. Came in handy with making the firing pin and trigger.”


    Seras demonstrated the claim by holding up a bit of metal and using her ability to make it fold in half before moving back into shape.


    “Still, that is impressive. To make all of this from common materials. Did you come up with all of this or-”


    “Nah, I’m good, but there’s far too many little fiddly bits for one person to invent on their own. The primer cap took centuries of refinement before proper breach loaders could exist. I’m an outworlder and I’m just trying to recreate the kind of weapons I was most familiar with back home. Not that it worked.”


    Martin stared down at the gun with a raised eyebrow. “It seems to have worked just fine to me.”


    Seras shook her head. “The rifle works, but its got a lot of flaws. I can already see that there’s too much powder in the cartridge, which is leaving a black residue on the barrel. And right now I can only load one bullet at a time. Need to figure out how to get a magazine to work. More than that it just isn’t strong enough. Those three bullets in the first monster were only skin deep, and Ostryx are rated pretty low for durability and defense. I couldn’t even kill a rune tortoise with this thing, and that’s an iron rank monster. And most importantly this isn’t what I was trying to recreate, this is my back up.”


    Seras then concentrated and summoned up and handheld object.


    It was a pistol with a revolving chamber, it had a wooden grip and a hammer on top that she could draw back with her thumb. “Weapons like this are what I used back home, it’s called a pistol. The idea behind the design is that its small enough for more close-range fighting and can fire six times before it needs to reload.”


    She passed it to Martin so that he could examine it. It wasn’t loaded so she wasn’t worried about him shotting himself as he stared directly down the barrel. Not that it would do much.


    “Did it not work?” he asked.


    “It does, in a sense. The problem is that if I shot you, a bronze rank human point blank in the face, it would do jack all. It doesn’t have enough power behind it. We had ways of making the pistol better on my world, but I can’t recreate that here.”


    A magnetic railing inside the barrel to accelerate the bullet was out of the question here. Her attempts to make any sort of battery had been unreliable. Somehow the current would fluctuate wildly, either burning out the wire, or not generating enough current. All within the space of minutes with the same wire. Obviously magic density had an affect on electrical fields and the flow of electrons.


    “Right now the pistol would only hurt a normal ranker, which isn’t saying much.” Seras said dejectedly.


    “Not to poke my nose into stuff I don’t understand, but have you considered adding magic to any of these contraptions?” Martin said as he handed back her gun.


    “I have, and I do plan to. I just don’t understand the magic well enough to safely start experimenting with it. Besides, I want to have a better rifle before I throw magic into the mix. This is just the best I can do right now, I need my Metal shaping ability to rank up more to make the small parts.”


    What she left unsaid was that every minor threshold she breached brought her closer to death and would worsen the constant soul deep pain she felt.


    She had done the math, each minor threshold she reached added 2% to the Soul/body disconnect. She had confirmed this when she reached Shape metal 2. That meant she had 49 levels of minor thresholds before she died, with each additional level putting her in greater and greater pain. She needed to be judicious about where those advancements happened. If she ever wanted to find a fix she would need all the power she could get, but with the limitation of only 49 levels across the maximum 25 abilities Seras would only be able to get so strong.


    Her plan at the moment revolved around only ranking up the abilities that would be the most useful to her survival and eventual cure. But the issue with that was that she couldn’t be sure what other abilities she might awaken. Or which would the most helpful.


    “Still” Martin said, breaking Seras out of her dark musings on her struggle against fate. “That’s a potent weapon. I’ve not even heard of an normal rank weapon that could wound a bronze ranked monster. If I could get a few of these I’d be able to equip some of my men with a real means of fighting back. Can normal rankers use one?”


    Seras smirked “Well that depends on the normal ranker. The issue with flinging out a slug at high speeds is that the force of the explosion goes both ways.”


    “I don’t follow.” Martin.


    Seras smirked and finished reassembling her rifle. “Then how about a demonstration? Lets go shoot some stuff.