Dimitri Solastria, despite his young age, was a master of gold divination and truth seeking. He had been trained from a young age in a branch family, and then adopted into the main family as his talent bloomed. He was considered a genius of divination, but still, he was confused. The attack on the family was devastating, demoralizing, and an insult that could not go unanswered, but for the life of him Dimitri couldn’t fathom who could of done this. He stood in Solastria’s ritual chamber, his eyes closed in focus, analyzing the magics used that day. There were of course hundreds of gold spells, but throughout the chamber and the blast sight the intruder used to enter the estate, there was also silver, phosphorous, mercury, and salt magics throughout.

His first thought had been scrolls, which was still plausible when it came to the mercury and salt magic, but the phosphorous and silver magics were too powerful to have been simple scrolls. The only problem with that was that there were currently no longer any silver families in Astraev and there were maybe two or three phosphorous families in the entire world, and they were all either in southern Afri or the new world. It was a foolishly dangerous magic that no one in their right mind would perform and even less would commit their life to.

All of this made him skeptical that this was carried out by a family at all, but that simply didn’t make sense. Mages without families were rare, it was difficult to become a mage without financial resources and the experience of those older than you, but they did succeed sometimes. However they tended to be very unlike those who grew up in mage families. Some people thought that was simply because those from families were better than solo mages, and sometimes Dimitri was inclined to agree with that, but even a proud Solastria mage can understand that that’s a simplistic understanding of the situation. The real difference between them is politics. Solo mages rarely involved themselves with families and families rarely involved themselves with solo mages. That’s what made this situation so confusing, Solastria has vendettas and grudges, but with families, not with individuals, and there is no family who could’ve done this, unless they hired outsiders, and their enemies were not the types to do so. Dimitri sighed while looking over the magics again, finding nothing. He would have to start from square one, finding every single person Solastria had ever wronged. Unfortunately they were an old family, and they hadn’t gotten to where they were through peace, so that list was very, very long.

Cece woke up and lazily stretched in her silk sheets. It had been an eventful couple of days and she had been taking it easy, less because she needed it, which she desperately did, but more so because Solastria was on high alert. She needed to wait for them to calm down a little before she made any more moves against them, at least if she wanted to keep the element of surprise. So she contented herself with working on a few personal projects.

She started her day, had Lotte make her breakfast, and then made her way to her atelier. On the table laid the bones of an angel. She had, of course, been quite disappointed when Knowledge told her that they weren’t of any alchemical use, but now she could see the potential, at least once she figured out how to cut the damn things. She had spent the better part of four hours trying various magics to cut into the bone, but nothing worked. She didn’t even think the phosphorus blasts that helped kill it did anything to its skeleton at all. By the time she finished trying concentrated light she was fairly sure she was going to have to transmute them into the shape she wanted, but she was still trying to figure out how to do so, considering they weren’t made of anything native to this world. According to her spectroscopic eye they were made out of “Angelic Aggregate Beta-3” which she suspected was a designation made by Knowledge itself, and not anything a human had decided. Still she would have to understand its composition better, luckily she had memorized what few books on angels that existed in Knowledge’s library. She was sure it knew more than what she had available, but it wasn’t as if she could demand it tell her.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Luckily it didn’t seem as if she would have to resort to that, as she plumbed the depths of her consciousness she found the information she was looking for. She couldn’t quite say that she completely understood it, but after studying and considering it for about forty-five minutes she found a way to use what information she did have to set up a transmutation circle. The material the bone was made of was shaped similarly to calcium phosphate, but it expressed itself like a metal and needed the appropriate inscriptions to work with it. Furthermore, she needed to create the transmutation circle as if their universe had eleven dimensions instead of three and she was trying very hard to not to think about the implications of that.

Shaking her head from wandering thoughts, she focused herself on the task at hand. She made the transmutation circles necessary to create every part of a snub-nosed revolver. Each molecule of the bones would be meticulously rearranged into the shapes she needed. When they were done, Cece had a collection of small iridescent white parts, that she enchanted individually. This was not going be a normal firearm, or anything close. The bullets would be large caliber, and fired with a phosphorous blast. It would be partially silenced with silver magics, it would use mercury magic to help it aim true, and it would have a spatial storage to hold extra ammunition. She decided to keep the look of the revolving magazine, in case she could fool someone into thinking she only had six shots.

It took quite a bit of time to accomplish, since Cece was unused to the mechanical side of alchemy, but eventually she was left with a gun that looked like it was made of mother of pearl. She decided to add a bit of gold to the outside to make it look similar to her old pistol. She held it in her hands. It was heavier by a few ounces, despite being a bit smaller, although it did have a wider barrel. She transmuted a few bullets for it and decided to test it out. Unfortunately that meant taking a bit of a trip to somewhere secluded enough that no one saw her, btu she decided to make a day out of it, making Lotte come with her.

“Why are we going to your family’s estate?” Lotte asked in the passenger seat of her car.

“I need to test something.”

“What do you need to test?”

“A new pistol, I made.”

“I see, thank you.” She replied. Unfortunately for Cece, Lotte was learning how to pace her questions so that she could ask more overall. Not that Cece really minded that much, the golem was starting to grow on her.

When they reached their destination, Cece used her daemonic ocularis to scout around, just to make sure no one was watching. When she was sure there would be no witnesses she marched into the clearing and prepared to shoot at a nearby tree. She raised the gun with both hands, and deactivated her ghostly sight boon so that her eyepatch would block her vision in one eye, then she hesitantly squeezed the trigger.

A bullet pierced violently through the tree leaving a small hole through it and splitting the wood for several inches above it. It was a beautiful display of raw power, but that wasn’t what Cece cared about right now.

“Is there something wrong, Cece?” Lotte asked, noticing the look of distress on Cece’s face.

“That’s physically impossible.” She muttered.

“What is physically impossible.” The construct further inquired.

“There was no recoil.”