Chapter Forty

Loysa didn’t say anything to me when I got up, at least, not about my dream, or my visit. She didn’t ask if a God or Goddess spoke to me, or if I heard a voice or saw a vision. With anyone else, I’d have thought she didn’t care, or had her mind on her own things.

The last part, that was probably true.

But even so, the thing is, I think she figured I probably ‘had’ some experience. Maybe it came off of me, because she only gave me a wink and rolled up her bed to make ready to go.

I cannot emphasize enough how strange it felt to enjoy the outdoors this much. Long walks? Outside? I mean, look, I know I asked for adventure, and you don’t have a lot of adventures sitting in one place all day, unless of course, you’re crafting a story of some sort.

When I was thinking about adventures, I was thinking about the climaxes. The moments of victory when a quest is completed and the drinking and backslapping can begin.

Loysa’s story however, brought home to me how dangerous the moments of triumph can be, or at least, chasing them, and that even triumph can be defeat. I suppose that’s why she told me about it. And in that same vein, my sore legs and sore feet brought home just how much there is in between the exciting bits in all the stories I enjoyed. The heroes didn’t just ‘appear’ in the villain’s castle after leaving the town of beginning adventurers, they had to ‘walk’ there. And all we saw was a montage or a fade to black.

Now I was experiencing the middle part, and finding out something unexpected about it.

This was where the living was.

Loysa and Dwarguy, for the moment at least, had set aside their issues, and the dwarf even tried his hands at telling jokes.

“...So then the goblin says… that was not a sock!”

“Ewwww.” I wrinkled my nose at his ecchi humor, but the dwarf and even Loysa seemed to enjoy it.

“I don’t get it. Was it not obviously something else?” Tess asked and scratched her head. “Why would he think that was a sock?”

That was the third joke she hadn’t really gotten.

“Lassy,” Dwarguy said as he wiped a tear of laughter away from his face and slowed his odd gait to look over toward the elven woman, “if’n ye plan on travlin with a dwarf, ye had best learn ye some dwarven humor. A lot of it’s right bawdy if I do say so meself,” he jammed his thumb against his chest and exclaimed, ‘an ah do!”

“You do what?” Tess asked with a raised eyebrow.

“So so meself, what ah said!” He exclaimed and threw up his hands.

“I like dwarf humor more when I have dwarven beer first.” She said as the silence stretched out.

“Ah, ‘bout that.” He said and rubbed his chin, “these undead, ye did nae say how ye got away from them. If’n they turn on us, we need a way out.”

“Oh… right.” Tess’s cheeks blushed a soft rose red, “It’s kind of embarrassing. I was trying to cast a speed spell, only it didn’t work. I ended up teleporting.”

“Teleporting?!” Dwarguy and Loysa shouted at once.

“What?” I asked. “Is that a big deal?”

“Aye!” Dwarguy shouted.

“Nobody can teleport!” He shouted and flung up his hands in disbelief, then looked over to Loysa who stood beside me and asked, “Right?”

“Aye… I mean, yes! I mean… No! I mean, nobody can teleport like that!” Loysa shouted, “That’s why those ‘gates’ even exist! If we had magic that could just teleport people, just ‘all willy nilly’ anywhere from anywhere, nobody would need fixed gates. How did you manage that?!” She shouted at Tess, who took the question passively.

“Surprisingly.” She answered. “In theory it should be possible to do of course, but all I wanted to do was run fast, but when I tried it, I just ‘wasn’t there’ anymore and I found myself way up above a lake in Steelven instead. I’m lucky it was a lake, I guess.” She shrugged it off. “I’m sorry, if they turn hostile, there’s not much I can guarantee about my magic.”

There was a thought. So far I’d seen her conjure up a pair of underwear and evidently she’s done quite a bit else… none of the rest of which worked out quite right either.

“Um, so… I hate to ask this but… if we can’t rely on your magic, do you have any way to defend yourself?” I asked.

“Oh yes, yes I do.” Tess’s blank face broke into a big smile, “There is one spell I can cast that always works.”

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“There is?” We all asked at once.

She reached into her belt in the left and right pouches and pulled out…

“I can cast ‘gun’.” She held the pistols up beside her head and pointed toward the sky.

“Are you any good?” I asked.

“I’m alive.” She said and spun the two pistols on her fingers.

“I don’t-” I started to say, but Loysa cut me off with an explanation.

“It means she has to be, she goes out alone to find what she needs to work.” Loysa whistled.

Dwarguy whistled too, and this was a dwarf who went out to fight in a mech.

“I used to have mercenaries, but they were an unreasonable expense and… I’m not that good with money.” She snorted, “Alright, I’m awful with it. So I bought a pair of magipistols and practiced a lot. Since I’m an elf, it’s really easy to just feed mana to them directly, and I got pretty good.”

“Even if ye say that, an not that I don’t believe ye, but we should probably have ye show us. We may have to trust those pistols in a fight an-” Dwarguy didn’t finish what he was saying.

Like she knew what to do, Loysa in one swift, smooth motion, bent down, scooped up some stray rocks from the ground, threw them up ahead of us and shouted, “Shoot!”

I froze.

Tess did not. Instead in a motion every bit as smooth as the throw, her pistols were leveled and she was shooting. A magipistol had neither the crack of a handgun from my world nor the laser sound effects of our entertainment media. If I were to say it sounded like anything, it sounded like the crack of a heavy door knocker on hardwood.

I think I was expecting that these would be big blasts of magic, like something out of an anime from a staff or something. But that wasn’t the case.

There was a flash, and then…? Well the little rocks more or less ceased to be. A series of quick flashes in rapid succession as Tess fired over and over again, destroying ‘most’ of the impromptu targets, though not all of them.

And while that was happening, I reflexively used my Insightful Inventor skill. ‘Ohhh… they’re firing tiny stones, like bullets… the magic acts like gunpowder and adds continuing force to make for stronger shots, and the pistol itself ‘creates’ random bits of matter…’

“See.” Tess said and put her pistols away again.

Loysa looked suspiciously at the pouches they were kept in. “Those didn’t look like normal magipistol shots.”

“They’re not.” Tess said at once.

I wondered what a normal one was, but Tess didn’t give me the chance to answer.

“Normal magipistols only shoot bits of concentrated magic, that drains it quickly and it means you can’t fire much. I’d rather not run out of mana when I’m in trouble.” She answered, and I piped up.

“Right, so that pistol creates an object, and the magitite ore powers the projection. It’s clever, but it doesn’t create the same kind every time.” I wasn’t guessing, but Tess turned her eyes toward me with a spark alight in them.

“Exactly!” She said and put her weapons away. “It’s a real problem because if it’s say, too soft a metal, it won’t pierce anything, but if it’s too hard, it takes more mana and drains faster. I want something consistent but…”

“Want me to fix it for you?” I asked, I could feel my fingers twitching. ‘I have, to fix that… I have to. She created a goddamn gacha gun. What the hell happens if she accidentally shoots unstable uranium at something?!’ I was filled with horror at the idea that she might fire off an accidental nuclear weapon at short range.

It would be a destructive mystery this world might never solve.

“If you fix them both, I’ll give you one.” Tess promised.

I could see why she was bad with money. But turn down a free magic gun? No sir. Not me.

I felt a bit bad about that, just a bit. But I figured I could buy her another out of the budget when this quest was over. So I grinned, “I want to cast ‘Gun’.” I chuckled, “I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get good at magic, so it’d be a good idea to have a backup anyway.”

“Lassy, if ye want to cast ‘gun’ get yerself a mech! It’s a wee bit hot in these things but,” he tapped the pocket holding the crystal that contained his mech, “there’s no gun magic like a big ole cannon!”

I grabbed my tails and pulled them out away from my body, “Afraid I can’t use those. But… maybe I’ll figure it out some day.” I winked. I did want to try to do that, but I got the feeling that it would take more than a look at a mech to change the fundamental laws of this world.

That very night, I settled down to tinker with the magipistols, under the close observation of the trio who hovered around the stump I set them on, I had the tools of my world spread out in front of me. The screwdrivers, multitool, and tiny magnetic tools of an experienced model tinkerer, all served me very well in this.

But more importantly was the eye of my Insightful Inventor skill, I could see the way the mana flow was ‘jagged’ it was like putting together glass that had been broken into pieces, the cracks remained and the result was an irregular pattern that was absurdly random. It reminded me of a lesson from high school about how radioactive decay was unpredictable, that it was random molecules that decayed, but in reverse. The mana actually ‘added’ random numbers of protons and electrons to create different chemical chains for various ores.

Granite. Iron. Even gold to name a few. By infusing my tools with the mana of my body, I was slowly ‘stitching’ the frayed mana flow back together.

You’d think I’d be nervous being watched like this. But the truth was, I was in my element, this was just more tinkering, model building, or fixing a broken model, if you will. The whole world vanished and I didn’t even notice when I was working in the dark, not until Loysa brought out a light for me to see by. Thank you kitsune vision.

And in the end… first one, then the other… they were done. I put the casing back together and sealed them up tight, pointed the pistols at the stump and fired into the surface a few times in dual lines. I then dug the fragments out with my multitool, scraping around in the wood, and under the light of Loysa’s torch, I gathered them into my hand and dropped them into Dwarguy’s waiting palm for inspection.

He looked closely, holding the little pieces up to his eyeball before twitching his beard and saying, “Aye, it’s iron, all of it. Got ye a pair of iron spitting magipistols.”

“Not exactly. I just stabilized it to make it selectable. By focusing my mana on ‘iron’ I shot iron. But I could have also used something like lead or granite or maybe adamantine or something else.

I handed one back to a grinning Tess, and pocketed the other one.

“A deal’s a deal.” She said, “Thank you. That will make this much easier, but… I really want to know more about that skill of yours…”

And just like that, I could now cast ‘gun’.