Morning dawned in a grey fashion, clouds covering the sky to match my mood. Heading out of the room, I went down and had some—thankfully warm— porridge. After filling my stomach, I waited, but neither Iosyo nor Lilya came out of their room. The rest of the day was spent around town. I bought some new books, traded in the cores I’d acquired for the chips, and ate some mystery meat and vegetables on skewers. Before heading back to the inn, I picked up some steel boar bones for some experiments.

By the time I got back, Iosyo and Lilya were both out of their rooms, but they seemed to be in no mood to talk. Lilya had this lost, wistful look on her face, while Iosyo seemed to be simmering in anger. I hadn’t known Alya as well as the two, and I hadn’t ever figured out their relationship, though I had some suspicions.

I sat with them for a bit, and asked what we were going to do in my slightly broken way of speaking. Lilya didn’t seem to have any answer, simply shrugging, but Iosyo said

“Fight.”

I shook my head, I needed to become stronger before I would be of any use. I tried to convey that to them, but got the feeling I didn’t quite get it across. I sighed. Leaving them sitting at the table, I mentioned I’d be back, and headed out of the city to do some experimenting.

It didn’t take long until I was far enough away from the city to do some material testing. There were two very important requirements for anything I made my guns out of. First was durability, so the bullets didn’t tear apart the barrel of the gun, as that would just be asking for trouble, and second was mana conductivity. Mana conductivity was simply a measure of how much energy from a core the material could handle at once.

If it could let more energy flow, my bullets would accelerate more, and if it let less energy flow, there probably wasn’t any point in using it. There were a few different ways to test this, and I’m sure there were very efficient ways to measure it in this world, but I just used a crude method. I would create small wands of the same size out of different materials, have them accelerate vertically anything I touched with them, then see which of them would send an object higher in the air.

I’d done some testing with the material the Tesser wands were made of, and they had been able to channel far more energy than the mana sculpted stone I used for my guns, but even if I added some of it to my weapons, the mana would be bottlenecked at the barrel, where all the acceleration runes were. It’s not like I could make the barrel out of wood.

The day was spent experimenting. Unfortunately, almost every material that was harder than the mana strengthened stone I used was a worse conductor of magic, and there would be no point in making tougher guns that didn’t accelerate their bullets as well.

The day ended with frustration, I needed better weapons, but had no clue how to make them as of yet. When I arrived back at the inn, I saw Lilya in the tavern portion of it utterly drunk, with Iosyo seeming a bit more sober, brooding over his own tankard of alcohol. I sighed. I may have joined them if I didn’t need a clear head to do my experiments. It wasn’t too late to have some of my own though, and I waved over the serving girl, asking for some alcohol of my own.

I joined the only two left, and we sat there, Lilya drunkenly talking about stuff I could sometimes understand, while Iosyo brooded over his alcohol. I let myself fade into the pleasant buzz from the drink, but couldn’t get my mind out of its ruminating. Eventually we all went to bed, Iosyo and I helping Lilya to her bed before we went to our own rooms.

I woke the next morning in an abrupt manner, the way I always seem to do after having alcohol. Getting up with a dry, nasty tasting mouth, I went to go rinse out my mouth. I wished I had toothpaste instead of just baking soda, though I had actually found a decent toothbrush.

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After cleaning off and taking care of my bodily needs, I grabbed my things and went back out, this time to do some hunting. The day passed with me not finding anything, and I wasn’t willing to go a few days out to hunt, so I went back to the same inn we’d been staying at to see both Lilya and Iosyo still drinking. I sighed.

I tried for a while to convince them to do more hunting with me, but they simply shrugged me off, turning back to their coping mechanism. I passed on having any alcohol that night, and went to bed with a faint hope of getting Iosyo and Lilya to come hunting with me. I didn’t want to go hunting wyverns alone.

The rest of the week was spent hunting and procuring different materials to use in my experiments I planned on doing. Eventually, I gathered enough different materials that I began to attempt my next goal — making grenades.

My initial experiments didn’t go well. I tried to make them of solid metal, then out of a shell of metal with a different material inside of it, but I couldn’t get it to properly explode. The ones made of the same wood Tesser wands were made of exploded just fine, but the metal ones seemed to only have external explosions rather than exploding from the inside like I’d intended. Without the shrapnel flying everywhere, they just didn’t seem like they’d be nearly as lethal.

My next attempt was explosive cubes with thin outer shells of mana enhanced stone and metal, and I was quite hopeful, except the metal would just burst at a weak point and it turned into a jet rather than just being a proper explosion. The Stone shell had more luck, but it only shattered into a few large fragments rather than sending deadly shrapnel flying all around it.

The next few days passed in a similar manner, filled with explosive experiments. Eventually, I gave up on making a fragmentation grenade, and went with something much simpler. My final design would simply fill the surrounding area with massive amounts of fire. Something interesting I noted, was that the trees here seemed very flame resistant, the fire that would fill the area would flicker out quite quickly once the core fragment ran out of energy.

In response, I make a freezing version, but it seems to do no more damage to the trees, which frustrated me for some reason. Neither of my grenades get nearly as much of a kill zone as a fragmentation grenade would, but they’d at least cause some serious issues for anything within a couple meters, or more in enclosed spaces.

Once I’d developed it, I was really confused as to why such designs weren’t in more common use. I could see the flame wands as a reasonable replacement to guns, as there wasn’t much reason to develop long range weaponry with the forcefields the Tesser used, but not having a grenade analogue seemed odd to me.

I dismissed the thought, and made quite a few of the grenades for future use, putting them in individual cases. The ones I leave in my backpack, I take the core fragments out of so as to not risk them going off on me, but the ones I attach to my new bandolier, I make their activation almost as annoying as those push down to open caps.

After I’d gotten my grenades to a point where I was happy they wouldn’t turn me into a pyre or popsicle at random intervals, I went back to the inn a bit early. Even showing up early though, I still saw Iosyo and Lilya in the same places they’d been staying for the past week, Lilya drunk already, and Iosyo still simmering over a drink, though not nearly as bad as Lilya.

I want to show them my new toy, but neither of them are willing to go out with me, and I start thinking that maybe I’ll have to complete my next goal on my own. I grit my teeth, they’re the only people I really know, though I suppose you could count the innkeeper at this point, and I was still very lacking in my knowledge of the language.

I spent the next couple of days trying to get Lilya and Iosyo to go with me in my next endeavour, but had zero luck. Eventually, I got fed up with it, and went to go get my own cart, if I was going to be hunting on my own for now, then I was going to need some way to transport my kills. I eventually found a shop that was selling carts similar to the one my group had, and picked it up for less than my clothes had cost. I was seriously starting to be confused, why were clothes so expensive? This particular cart was made so that I could either ride upon it or have it follow me if I loaded it up with carcasses.

Dismissing the confusion, I dragged my cart back to the inn, and went to bed after trying to get across to the remains of my group that I’d be going out hunting. Taking their lack of reaction as agreement, I went to bed worrying about what they were going to do, reaffirming my decision of what to do.

The next morning, I woke, ate a simple breakfast, and waited for Lilya and Iosyo to wake up so I could say goodbye, hopefully only for now. I was getting ready to leave, when Lilya came by, not yet drunk, and handed me a piece of wood with a massive amount of runes carved into it. I gave her a questioning look, when she took out what seemed to be a carbon copy of it, pressed down onto one of the runes, and spoke into it.

Her voice echoed out of the one I was holding, and I realized that I now had the equivalent of a magical walkie talkie. I took mine up, and played with it, and once Lilya had recognized that I had figured it out, she nodded, and went back to her perch at the bar. I smiled a bit at the walkie talkie, at least I’d have a way to contact them again.

I headed out, sitting atop my cart, looking over the multitude of people as I slowly trundled out of the city.