“I know it’s not ideal Thera, but it would really be helping out both me and the clinic if you stop by for just a couple hours a day,” Ben overheard Sonya telling Thera as he got home.
“I’m not… entirely against the idea aunty, I just don’t think it will go well. Do you really not have any alternative?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I did, it will just be a little while as we look for new hands, please?”
“Oh alright, I guess I can do this for you for at least a bit.”
“Am I missing something exciting?” He asked as he entered the kitchen, just in time to see the two of them finish their meal.
“Unfortunately, we just lost another member of the clinic,” Sonya explained while greeting him. “Finding anyone to fill the spots with so many nations beginning to recruit healers for their armies is proving a challenge, but luckily Thera agreed to help out a bit. Anyway, you’re pretty late today Ben, anything interesting happen?”
“I leveled up my enchanting again and was able to make something good. Speaking of, Thera I’ll need to update your enchantment tonight again,” She still looked uncomfortable at the prospect of acting as a town healer, but hearing that brightened her mood. Every level up he got to enchanting was a reasonable bump to how much of her charm could be blocked after all.
The issue was that after this update to it, he’d no longer be able to depend on the effects of his resistances to make his enchantment for her stronger, instead being forced to rely on whatever skills he could find to tie into and enhance its effects. He’d still need to try to blend the ones he already knew would work, but decided to wait until he had higher level versions of the skill since he could expect results to be far more pronounced when he did.
“Sure, we can start when you’re done dinner if you’d like.”
“Works for me.”
“Also Ben, do you mind if I ask you a favour?” Sonya requested as he grabbed himself a bowl of food.
“Hmm? Sure, of course, what do you need?” It was rare for her to ask anything of him like that, but he had no issue as long as it was possible.
“Since Thera’s going to be helping out, could you prepare an amulet for the clinic? One with both dark and life resistances? Since I haven’t needed to do any corrections to the life magic she uses on you recently I think your resistance level at her current skill ensures it’s safe.”
“Is that all? Yeah that’s fine, stop by the shop tomorrow to pick it up, I’ll make sure it’s done first thing.”
“Alright, thank you. So anyway, what did you make that was so good?”
At that he went on to talk about his day, before asking about theirs in turn, learning about how Thera’s practice with Sachel went, as well as Sonya’s time at the clinic, before devoting some more time to redoing the enchantment on Thera’s brace late into the night and getting a bit of sleep.
In the day that followed, he woke up early and left breakfast at the table for the two women before biking to the shop and immediately making Thera the amulet, only to have time to focus on some more personal projects until the store actually opened for the day.
He first created a sheath for the knife, tying in a spacial enchantment that could tap into some of the power in the knife's battery so that the entire thing could comfortably fit into his pocket without him having to worry before he moved onto the next task he’d set for himself.
While he now had two fairly well-made defensive items, as well as one melee weapon, he still had one more thing he wanted for completing his defensive arsenal to leave him slightly less worried about meeting his untimely demise for the second time. A ranged weapon.
When he’d tried before to make a gun, he was stopped by the differing materials in the world and his weaker knowledge of how to make use of them, but now things were different. Along with a great level of knowledge and experience, he also had better materials and his skills in enchanting, leaving him to stop waiting for whatever development Quilith’s people were hoping for to once again try crafting one with his own two hands.
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He sketched a rough outline before getting to work, with his goal being to construct a revolver. While a part of him thought to try for a musket first, thinking it would be simpler overall, he wanted something that would be easy to carry on top of the fact that he didn’t want to have to reload every time. While he might get less power out of it and only six shots, he wanted to trust that Thera would be able to cover things after that.
With his idea firmly in his mind he got to work, creating the handle first, followed by the cylinder for the bullets, making sure each slot was the same consistent size. With that done he focused on constructing the barrel, doing his best to add the rifling he’d heard that gave bullets their spin to improve their accuracy, and immediately exhausted everything he knew about guns.
They simply hadn’t been of much interest to him back on Earth, he didn’t have the obsession with them the way a few others he knew seemed to, and everything he did know stemmed from a combination of documentaries and other media that he was praying had given him at least semi-accurate info.
Of course, given how many changes he’d be making, hopefully that wouldn’t matter too much. Since he still didn’t know how to make anything like gunpowder, his weapon was going to be entirely powered by one of his batteries placed into the handle to activate the enchantments he’d be placing on it, and with that goal set he got to work assembling it to the best of his abilities, compensating for the areas he was less sure of with the skills he’d been working so hard to master.
Once that was done he focused on the enchantments, strengthening each area he thought might need it before moving on to the main one that would allow the tool to work as intended.
Creating a fire enchantment to release a small but powerful explosion between it and the bullet, he linked it to the trigger for the activation condition, and from there the weapon itself was complete, a small mold to create the bullets being the finishing touches to make it truly functional.
“Manage to pull together something interesting boy?” His teacher asked as Ben sighed in contentment, leaving him aware of his presence.
“Potentially, I need to see how well it will work with some testing, but it’s based on a weapon from my homeworld with a bit of a magic flair. The main issue is I’m not too familiar with them so I had to compensate a fair bit as I did.”
He’d planned on seeing how well he’d done with it when he finished for the day, but it seemed his teacher's curiosity was piqued. After all, it wasn’t too often that the smith got to see something completely new related to his field of work.
“Why not test it out now, we aren’t exactly busy this early.”
“Um, I guess it should be fine here, in that case give me a few to make up a target.”
He got a long plank of wood and drew a large target on it before placing it against some metal as he did, thinking that would be enough to stop the bullet if it completely passed through the wood, and stood back to take aim. He was fairly certain he was breaking more than a few rules on gun safety, but he stood about ten feet back from his target, took aim, and fired.
It was quieter than he’d expected, all things considered and chalked it up to the fact that the projectile was being shot off with magic instead of gunpowder. The bigger issue was that he missed the target. Thankfully he still hit the surrounding wood, but it wasn’t the best of starts. Still, he went up to check its penetrating power.
The results were adequate. While it didn’t hit the metal backing, he could see it peeking through the back of the plank, meaning that for something as dense as wood he got about an inch of penetration. On the one hand, that meant he could probably expect reasonable success against more fleshy enemies, but on the other, he probably still needed to fear anything like the stone ape or anyone like him with a defense enhancement skill.
“It’s alright I guess,” His teacher told him, sounding a touch disappointed. “But I think you’d get better results from something like a standard bow.”
“I’ll probably experiment with a few different potential enchantments later to see if I can boost its power, but the point is that this has a low barrier to entry. I don’t need strength or training to get any good results out of this, I just need to be able to aim.”
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“Wow, my aim is shockingly bad.”
“Much, much worse.”
When he finished work for the day he went to the training grounds with his target to practice away from the city without worry, only to find the limits of his skill. While after a few shots he found himself able to get the target somewhat reliably at ten feet, anything past twenty he would miss without question. That wasn’t even considering the fact that he needed time to properly aim beforehand, meaning it wouldn’t have much use if he was on the wrong end of a surprise attack, though he did feel like he’d be fine if he were to give it some limited use while hunting. Still, it wouldn’t be the all-powerful tool he’d hoped.
“I may have underestimated the amount of work it took to get good at something like this,” He said with a groan. “Still, I think I can at least apply some of the principles I’ve learned making it to other projects.”