The rain and the mud and the chilly wind made for a sublime backdrop for the business Pechorin, Sofiane, and the cadre of Non-Heroes were up to. All involved had expressions of deathly seriousness so that the moment gained a transcendent gravitas. Even Pechorin’s poem felt appropriate to the occasion:
“Little droplets
On a cold steel barrel
Run lightly down.”
Sofiane looked at the poet, then down at his guns where the raindrops so-mentioned were indeed running down its shiny surface. For all of Pechorin’s deliberate absurdity, Sofiane could tell he was as serious as he was going to get.
Sofiane gestured at a line of boxes. “As far as we can tell, your guns use one bullet that respawns back inside its chamber instantaneously. So, the first thing I want to see is if both guns firing simultaneously will jump both targets.”
Any attempt to make logical sense of the bullet matter was moot. Pechorin himself wasn’t even aware until the research team dissected them that both guns shared one respawning bullet. This was no doubt something the Yishang had done to fix Pechorin’s fire rate assuming he would fire one gun, then the other. But once he was made aware of this aspect of his weapon, Pechorin conceived the revolutionary idea of taking both guns and firing them at the same time. Whether this worked with the one bullet chiseled to have a dimension-jump surface on it was undetermined.
Sofiane cleared the range and then yelled for him to start. Pechorin fired. As Shuixing discovered, his bullets had no airborne trajectory but simply checked to see if there was a straight line between the gun barrel and the target and then summoned a bullet at the end point. This made what happened next rather interesting:
Two bullets impacted the crates and sent them through the ground. Then there was a clink sound as two bullets respawned where one was supposed to be. Half of a bullet protruded through the side of the gun like an aborted dimension-jump.
“Uh… Can you try to fire that again?” Sofiane asked.
Pechorin took aim at the next crate and the gun made the exact same gunshot sound but without a bullet firing..
Sofiane shook his head and muttered, “gods-damned Yishang physics...”
Pechorin handed the distorted gun to Sofiane who took it over to the members of the research team waiting in a small tent behind them. No one had time to put up coverings over the training area outside the tent city, so the only cover was the small, packed tent set up to keep the research team’s papers dry.
Having no interest in fighting for a spot, Pechorin walked off in the rain. He periodically fired his other gun which emitted the same gunshot noise as its partner but without a bullet to fire. He felt like he could make a pretty good poetic image out of the ghost gun but, for once, he wasn’t in the mood for poetry. Instead he was beset by another ghost, this one being a figurative anthropomorphization of his mental state like all good ghosts (he found the killable mob ones lacking in symbolic meaning).
If this ghost had a name it might be ‘ennui’ or ‘discontent’ or ‘malaise,’ and its preferred method of haunting was to whisper to Pechorin that even now, at the end of everything, there was something incomplete. This ghost had been absent while meditating out on his private Shikijman island, but upon reuniting with his old friends, he was beset by this strange specter whose grasp upon him seemed to grow and grow and which could be no more sated by poetry than a festering wound might. The pressure felt analogous to when he had been preoccupied with Use-Rankings.
“We fixed it.”
Sofiane held out his gun for him, but it now had a rectangular indentation carved into the barrel. Pechorin touched the indentation and it clicked under his finger. Looking closer, he saw an outward-facing hinge. Sofiane tapped it with his fingernail.
“It’s an ejector slot. What’s happening whenever you fire both guns simultaneously is that two copies of the same bullet are hitting a target, but the gun reads them as the same item for the purposes of resummoning them to the chamber to fire the next shot, resulting in a jam. The eggheads said the ejector slot is supposed to pop out the duplicate bullet so you can keep firing and duplicating bullets endlessly.”
“Eventually the world will drown in bullets,” Pechorin said, looking wistful.
“Good luck drowning us in the next four days, buddy. Now, let’s have you try the ejector method and then we’ll move on to the other two things I wanna check.”
As the two returned to the range, Sofiane looked up at him. “Something up, big guy?”
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“Should they ever be down, I will let you know,” Pechorin replied.
“Yeah, okay, but your brooding seems different. Did something happen while you were hermitting it up on the island?”
Pechorin shook his head. “Quite the contrary. All the dirt of my soul settled to the bottom of the pool leaving crystal clear water.”
“Uh-huh. And has anything happened since you got back?”
“Much,” Pechorin said, leaving it at that.
He wasn’t sure whether that answer was actually intended to end the conversation, or to set up the scenario of being asked repeatedly to reveal a dark secret he secretly wished to confess, yet refusing to divulge it until the inquirer made their desperation known, allowing him to play the situation off as though he did not actually wish to reveal it at all.
“If you wanna talk, I’m all ears,” Sofiane said, deftly avoiding Pechorin’s social trap with a single sentence.
Pechorin cursed himself for being so short-sighted. Now, more than ever, he wanted to talk about the ghost eating away at him. But they spoke no more until they were back at the range, and then only for Sofiane to tell him where to shoot.
Once more Pechorin raised his guns and fired and the duplicate bullet ejected out the side of his gun with a ping. At Sofiane’s request he sent a few more boxes to their demise before Sofiane was satisfied with the FDJ guns’ performance.
“Now I wanna see how the bullet works with your Flak Cannon ability,” Sofiane said. “I think it spawns a whole new damage source, so our special bullet probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try.”
Pechorin suspected otherwise but said nothing so he could savor Sofiane’s reaction. He fired the Flak Cannon at a group of crates and the ones hit by the roaring cloud of shrapnel were sent through the ground.
Sofiane slapped Pechorin’s arm. “Oh baby! I don’t know how the hell we pulled this off, but apparently you’ve got a big ass AoE dimension-jump! You… don’t seem surprised though?”
Pechorin nodded. “I knew the Flak Cannon uses the same bullet. The Yishang created me underpowered, so I spent a long time trying to maximize whatever small advantages I had. Somewhere along the line I figured out I could fire slightly faster than my base attack speed if I shot a bullet, used Flak Cannon, and then shot again. That told me Flak Cannon was tied to the same weapon cycle, which we now know is that one bullet.”
Sofiane was impressed with Pechorin, but not for the reason he expected. What he was impressed by was the hustle Pech had put in to compete on the Use-Rankings through sheer ingenuity rather than Yishang favoritism. Considering the Use-Rankings system had by now collapsed entirely, it felt strange to be moved by an attempt to stay relevant that had, ultimately, not succeeded.
“You’re marveling at the efficiency of the attack reset?” Pechorin asked, amusement creeping onto his neutral expression.
“I guess I am. Though, it’s really the same spirit we’re putting into developing FDJ weapons, non?” Sofiane said.
Pechorin stroked his chin. “The same ingenuity repurposed…”
“You ready for our third test—”
“Sofa, honey…”
Sofiane looked over at Gomiko. Bundled up in a heavy coat, mittens, and a Sibe-Lander ushanka for her fuzzy round ears, Gomiko waddled out of the research tent and over to them. On contact with the chilly rain, her cheeks and nose turned crimson and she gestured at the pile of duplicate bullets on the ground.
“We should get those cleaned up,” she said. “Before anyone steps on them.”
“Don’t worry about it, Frizzy, walking on them won’t build up enough speed to induce a dimension-jump,” Sofiane said.
Gomiko pulled a half-eaten apple out of the folds of her coat and chucked it at the bullet of bullets. The apple disappeared into the ground.
“Yeah, yeah, okay. I’ll have someone mop them up after,” he said.
The last test was to figure out how the FDJ bullet interacted with Pechorin’s Desperation Art. At the outset, everyone assumed it would be a resounding success, but with the ejector slot thrown into the mix, this was no longer a guarantee. Non-Heroes milling about nearby noticed the gravity with which their brothers and sisters on the training field were setting up a long line of crates and came over to see what the fuss was about. The researchers, no longer content to hear of the success of their inventions second-hand, came out to watch too. And by the time Pechorin was ready to begin the crowd had swelled to a couple hundred.
“Now let’s think about how to get your Desperation Art activated,” Sofiane said.
“No need,” Pechorin replied. “It’s active.” The ghost gnawing away at his sanity had seen to that.
Pechorin stepped up to the dirt line marking the range as Sofiane forced everyone back twenty feet to prevent a stray bullet duplication from clipping a spectator. The brooding recluse was alone in the formed clearing with all eyes on him. He tried to take advantage of the moment to declaim a poem, but his throat choked. A trick by his personal poltergeist, no doubt.
“Fire!” Sofiane yelled.
Pechorin felt the surge of adrenaline accompanying his Desperation Art flood his veins and surrendered to it, allowing the rush to overwhelm his thoughts and replace them with effortless action. He pressed the trigger in his right hand, then the one in his left, then the right, then the left. The first crate disappeared, but the auto-locking that came with his Desperation Art didn’t trigger. Adjusting for this, Pechorin manually aimed and swept down the line of crates in a gatling volley. A waterfall of duplicated bullets spewed forth from his gun, leaving a trail of flickering lights where the bullets fell on their brethren and created a secondary dimension-jump.
Amid the ear-splitting roar of gunfire, Pechorin’s lips formed words his brain had no hand in creating. Words he himself could not hear, as though they were a secret his body was keeping from his mind. By muscle memory alone he knew one of the words was a name.
Half a minute later, the line of a hundred crates was gone. Sofiane jumped up and down, cackling maniacally.
“Pech, how much HP do you have?” Sofiane asked.
“I have 14,246 HP,” Pechorin responded numbly as his brain reclaimed his vocal cords.
Sofiane slapped him on the back. “My man, there has never been a glass cannon more glassy than you, but if we can keep you alive, you’re gonna be one hell of a cannon.”