The first and most apparent of Silenos’ shortcomings during the ambush by the Necromancer had been a lack of massed killing power. His cannon was a devastating weapon, against singular targets, but its rate of fire was too limited to be functional against larger crowds. Even five or ten enemies at a time were beyond its efficiency. He experimented with several hypothesised fixes.

Creating an automatic firing mechanism was beyond him. Silenos could, after some time, intuit the ways in which his own world’s gatling guns functioned of course, but those held particular issues for use with Fleshcrafting.

To chamber several rounds at a time, each one propelled by its own portion of blasting oil, Silenos would need to synthesise chemicals and substances with a combination of sub-second speed and millimetre-scale precision. On top of that, he would have to exactly position each newly crafted bullet within a scaled-down gatling mechanism that had been made small, and thus space-sensitive, enough to fit within the meat of his arm. On top of everything else, he would be doing so while accounting for the fact that the barrels and chambers in which he was carefully placing his projectiles and propellants would all be rotating at high speed, which itself would almost certainly be made variable based on the amount of pressure attached to the walls of the rotating mechanism by surrounding muscle.

Other options presented themselves, and most were flawed in different ways. A multi-barreled mechanism eventually proved an inferior prospect entirely, as Silenos realised shaping one would force him to spend precious seconds de and reforming his arm if the need arose for him to switch to larger, anti-individual shots. What he needed was a weapon that could fire both powerful armour-piercing projectiles as well as smaller, more numerous ones for crowd control, with no long delay between them.

It was an archaic idea that finally struck him, but that did not make it a bad one. Silenos shaped the end of his cannon to give it a protruding bell-shape, then made minor tweaks to the rest of its structure. The keratinous material he’d made it from yielded better than steel, and so having it spread outwards by a few degrees was no great exertion. Silenos was ready to test his new design in under a second.

Sure enough, it worked well. Silenos fired off one shot after another, experimenting with area coverage, velocity, and projectile mass. Soon enough he settled on bullets of a spherical shape, as the barrel’s width and dimensions removed the acceleration advantages typically gained from a longer configuration.

Around Silenos, the room was made of steel. It had been Ensharia who had told him of the place, and he’d quickly headed down to find that she’d spoken true when describing a chamber fit to test all but his most destructive magics in.

Dents appeared where organic matter met steel, the metal proving its inferior construction by surrendering easily to Silenos’ work. Fissures centimetres long and deep appeared where the finger-wide projectiles struck, sparks flying as kinetic energy bled into the thermal range.

The blunderbuss had been invented for a reason, he supposed. Silenos felt a stab of appreciation for the genius of his ancestors. He had always climbed upon their shoulders to pursue his research, wielding the knowledge of Shaiagrazni ancients both living and dead, and now he’d explored yet another facet of his great inheritance.

All the doubt, the fear, slowly oozed out of him. He’d scarcely even noticed it, but now it was shrinking even from that insubstantial quantity. Silenos had nothing to fear from this world of fools and animals, not when he wielded the knowledge of minds greater than their entire race had yet yielded.

His next challenge was mobility, and that was an issue half-solved already. Silenos had proven to himself the benefits of propulsion- proven them enough that he almost regretted not further lightening his new body to make it more effective, in spite of the increased effect his cannon’s recoil would thus have- but what he needed was a means of guiding himself. Yet more velocity in his directional launches would hardly hurt.

Blasting oil was an excellent means of eviscerating otherwise sturdy targets, but it was hardly the only explosive he knew, nor the easiest to use for simple locomotion. Silenos experimented with various other formulas tucked away in his memory, dredging up recipes he’d learned so long ago that he cringed at the inferior mnemonic methods utilised in storing them. The one he landed on was another hydrogen compound.

It had a low detonation velocity, which suited him perfectly fine, and was near-effortless to produce. A simple blend of hydrogen and oxygen, substances readily supplied by water, let alone the spectrum of atmospheric elements made available to him with every inhalation. More promisingly, he realised its total energy yield was remarkably high.

By compressing the chemicals prior to detonation, Silenos could ensure that as much of their chemical energy was turned to kinetic discharge as possible. The speed at which this energy would be released removed any threat to his body’s integrity, and the volatility made even the effort of igniting it a point of cost-reduction.

Soon enough, he was lurching from one end of the hall to the other without even straining his magic, conjuring kilograms of the explosive at once and feeling the wind hit him like a wall as it tossed him around. Silenos made a note to properly test his limits of distance in a more open area, and focused on guidance.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

That much was easy, nature had long since coined means of gliding once velocity had been obtained. Silenos added crevices to his armoured plates from which sheets of protein-woven tissue could protrude, bound to ceramic frames and maximising both area and lightness to catch the winds. It was far from perfect, but with but a half-metre of protrusion and a few dozen potential points for his guiding fins to emerge, he was confident he had rendered himself capable of almost swimming through the air. With practice, of course.

His mind and magic being capable of engineering such a thing did not give his body any inherent mastery over its use, stronger casters than he had learned that lesson at the cost of broken bones and leaking veins.

Indeed, he had learned such lessons too. Twice he’d contested an enemy he was ill-suited to beat, and on the second occasion he’d already had one chance to know better. Named of House Shaiagrazni did not make mistakes often, and should he make one he’d already suffered from before, there would be many of his peers calling for his immediate suicide. They would be right to do so.

The hydrogen compound’s energy was released largely as heat, which was why it yielded so little kinetic energy outside of gaseous compression which allowed its thermal discharge to be converted into atmospheric motion. That had other uses. Silenos took a while longer experimenting with combinations of carbons and silicons before eventually finding a suitable mix.

Of course there was an issue, carbon was not nearly so abundant in the air as the elements he’d been previously using in his explosives. Silenos took a while to consider searching for some substitute, however unlikely he found the prospect of stumbling upon one. Then paused.

Sometimes, even after fifteen decades of life, he could be an idiot beyond description. Virtually all soils had some measure of carbon within them, even those too infertile and barren for life to possibly blossom. Silenos stepped out of his steel chamber and extended a nervous tendril down through the stone of the floor, stopping only as it embedded itself in the dirt beneath the castle. Within moments he found himself able to extract more carbon from it than he could possibly need, and quickly shaped it into the blend he needed.

After a second of thought, he assembled a target for himself, too. A block of solid keratinous armour just as tall as a human body and twice as thick. Experimentally he fired his cannon into it, finding the smaller, crowd-controlling projectiles bouncing harmlessly from the material, then watching as the larger shot ricocheted violently across the room. By the time its kinetic energy was exhausted, the target had been forced back against the far wall and left with a good handful of cracks. Save for a centimetres-deep crater, however, it remained undamaged.

That was when he unleashed his newest weapon.

It was not so hard to adjust his cannon’s internals from its blunderbuss configuration, which already resembled a nozzle more than enough. The hydrogenated propulsion served Silenos’ new purposes perfectly, for a supersonic muzzle velocity would only diffuse his new attack more than was effective, and the additional heat served to ignite his carbon blend as it was fired at just the right velocity to both remove itself from his person before releasing the full extent of its deadly flames, and travel several dozen metres before gravity and air resistance forced it to a stop.

He watched as his newly-made flamethrower engulfed the statue with thick, viscous fuel. The substance clung to it like tar might, and burned so brightly he knew his eyes would sting to behold the flames, were they not long since polarised against such photonic excess. In mere moments the target started to crack as it absorbed

Sometimes Silenos pondered the idea of life, where it began, at what place the line in the sand was drawn for his magic to determine something as being either within or beyond the confines of its powers. The incendiary devastation he now bore witness to was not one to beg that question. Its construction was purely inorganic, and thus not something his powers could simply devise directly. Fortunately, indirection was something any good caster became well acquainted with.

He had worked various bodily cavities within him into glands and organoids capable of forcing the kinds of conditions needed to synthesise his new compound naturally, and the raw materials they required, largely glucose, were things his Fleshcrafting was more than able to provide. It was not as fast as if he made it directly, and thus his new weapon was far from as functionally limitless in ammunition capacity as his cannon, but it was at the very least a new kind of attack. Such things were worth developing, one never knew when an enemy might be unexpectedly resistant to any single one.

Before him, the keratin statue cracked further, quivered, then collapsed. Bathed in flames just shy of melting iron, the material could hardly have been expected to last much longer. Silenos was almost tempted to take the time to conjure some of the kinds he used in his personal armour, but decided against it. Blends as perfect as that took time and energy to make, and he’d long since verified his own defences would stave off iron-melting heat without failure.

It was good enough, for now, to know that he could reduce men in plate to mere puddles. That its cohesive properties would let it cling to anything it struck, and that even water would be unable to extinguish it short of completely submerging the stuff and denying it breath. With luck, he’d soon find something deadly enough to expose further shortcomings in the weapon.

House Shaiagrazni valued innovation and progress above all other things after all.

Silenos was interrupted as he left the hall by a face which he likely should have expected. Arion Falls, looking much like a man who’d recently spent several hours in a coma.

“May I speak with you?” The boy asked. Silenos considered it well, weighing the infuriating experience of speaking with the primitive against the miniscule chance of missing something worthwhile by not doing so.

“You may.” He nodded.

Falls was not slow in speaking, thankfully.

“I heard you healed me.” He volunteered.

“I did, you are valuable to our mission.”

Falls nodded, weighed his answer, looked for a moment like he’d say more, then just nodded again and turned. Silenos did not call him back as he left.