Solomon had messed around enough with fireworks to know a little bit about black powder. He'd never really done much with that knowledge—which was probably part of the reason he'd had all his fingers until the system hit—but he knew the basics of how it worked. Essentially, black powder burned really, really, quickly. If you made a little pile and lit it off from a safe distance you'd see some impressive but short lived flames. When packed in tightly, that quick burning would result in an explosion.

Magical powder was just like that. But different.

The biggest difference was that you couldn't set it off with ordinary heat, friction, or impact. Instead, it had to be lit with magic. Solomon's Firearm Engineering grid had provided him with a set of utility spells. One allowed for the creation of magical powder. Another let him set off magical powder by touch. The last let him enchant a piece of metal so that it would set off magical powder on contact.

Once the magical powder was lit, it burned just like black powder. In addition to the usual heat and gases, some sort of magical energy was released that was enough to sustain a chain reaction.

For the most part, it was an improvement over black powder. He could mess around freely with magical powder without having to worry about accidental explosions. The problem was that he still had to come up with a way to turn deliberate explosions into dead enemies.

The obvious long term plan would be to use an enchanted metal pin as part of the firing mechanism of a gun. Once he had a gun.

He could scavenge the metal from his shield to build a gun barrel. One problem with that plan was that he might end up needing the shield. The other was that what he was going up against was something the system was calling a boss monster. Odds were, it was going to be big. Big enough that a single bullet wasn't going to be much of a trump card.

No, he was going to need something with a little more kick to it.

Solomon started by pulling his collection of boar tusks from his inventory. Bone was a reasonably strong material, and it was easy to mold it to his liking with his system-granted ability. He used his shield as a convenient work surface to help him squish each tusk flat. He was able to use his molding ability to trim the edges of each little disc and turn them into little squares. The extra he balled up like play-doh and set to the side.

The next step was to use his attachment ability to stick the squares together, then his molding ability to roll them into a cylinder. One more use of the attachment ability capped off one end. His project was starting to look a little like a pipe bomb, although the bone-based material gave it a unique aesthetic.

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Next, he started pulling beast cores from his inventory. The process for making magical powder wasn't too MP intensive. The cores also expanded to fill more space as they were converted to powder. It made him wonder what kind of catastrophe might take place if a core were converted to energy directly.

Eventually, the cylinder was mostly full. He took some of the extra tusks and used his molding ability to make them into little marble sized pyramids, enchanted them for extra toughness, then added them to the mix. Once it was full, he capped off the open end with another plate of bone. He then applied the molding ability one last time and did the best he could with one hand to compress the container around the explosive contained within.

The end result was lumpy and misshapen, but he was pretty sure it would at least take a chunk out of the boss's HP if it detonated anywhere near the monster.

Controlling the detonation was going to be the tricky part. Solomon set the bomb down in one corner of the room and retreated to the other corner to work on his next project.

This was going to take some experimentation. He knew it was possible to make a fuse out of black powder and paper, but he didn't know exactly how it was done. He also didn't have paper. That part, at least, he could do something about.

He took a hunk of wood off the end of his spear using his molding ability. Keeping the ability active, he pressed the piece of wood into his shield. Again he was reminded of working with pizza dough as he used the heel of his hand to spread the wood out as much as possible. It took some doing, but eventually he had a sheet of wood that was paper thin. If that wasn't a good enough substitute for paper, well, he'd have to come up with something else.

He set the paper-wood to the side. First things first. He'd read the system's explanation of magic powder, but he wanted to see how it worked with his own eyes.

He took a small core that he had taken from one of the dead monkeys and converted it into powder, moving his hand along the shield as he did to leave a thin line across the face of it. It was less than a foot long, all told. The powder took on the same violet color as the beast cores, and seemed to glitter just a bit more than it should in the torchlight.

He braced himself and touched one end of the powder trail, then activated the ignition ability. He flinched back as a purple flame jumped to life and raced down to the other end of the trail. His finger was lightly singed, an injury that went away at a tiny cost to his HP.

He nodded. Testing this stuff well out of range of his bomb was the right call. The magic powder was pretty feisty once it got going.

For his first attempt at a fuse, he cut out a rectangle of the paper-wood, about as wide as his little finger was long. He took another monkey core and converted it into powder, moving along the length of the paper-wood. This left a trail of powder down the middle of the rectangle. He then folded the paper over and used his shaping ability to fasten it together above the line of powder and tear off the excess paper-wood. In the end, he had a little paper-wood straw, stuffed full of magical powder.

He cut the straw in half. He could use one half to see how quickly it burned, and then hopefully use the rest with the bomb. He was feeling pretty good about it. It definitely looked like a fuse.

He touched one end of the fuse and ignited it. The good news was that thanks to the wooden sheath, his finger didn't get burned. Solomon still winced as he saw the flame run down the length of the fuse in less than a second.

If he tried that with the actual bomb, he could say goodbye to his remaining hand.