Blood Shaper

Cindy twirled a pair of pistols around each of her index fingers like an old wild west trick shooter. She slotted them into a bandoleer that crossed her chest, lining them up with two others so that the four guns trailed down her front with every other one facing the opposite direction. “Ready?”

“How is this sparring?” Kay asked, staring nervously at her from down range. “Me being a target does not count as sparring.”

“You’re supposed to be a moving target!” She insisted, while lining him up with a finger gun and mining shooting him, “I’m practicing my shooting, and you’re getting better at dodging and blocking!”

“I get that you think this is going to help us get better, but it’s not sparring. Also, I’m not entirely cool with being shot at!”

Cindy shot him a confused frown, “Why? You’re tier five now; you could probably tank a regular bullet, let alone these training ones I’m using.”

“That’s…” Kay sidestepped so he wasn’t straight in the line of fire, “I’m not going to suddenly get over years of gun safety lectures just because I have superpowers now.”

“On an ‘I’m also from Earth and shot guns a lot’ level, I’m very proud of you; on the newer, ‘you can absolutely take a few bullets without dying because we’re in a fantasy world with overpowered magic’ level, stand still and let me get some experience off of you!”

A small section of Skin on Kay’s palm split open, and blood spilled out, forming a plate that he floated off to the side as he walked back behind the firing line. “Shoot at that for a bit, and we’ll move on to shotting at me if I feel like it’s safe.”

“Fine,” She waited until he was behind her, then drew the top pistol on her bandoleer; she fired, replaced it, grabbed the next one, and fired, then did it twice more. All of the rounds hit near the middle of the floating plate, leaving small cracks that radiated from the point of impact.

“Where’d the rounds go?”

Cindy held up a dark brown bullet. “These are the wooden training rounds we developed for sparring and other tests with live targets. We don’t want to hurt anyone, so I had some of the enchanters and material experts you sent my way work on something we could use.” She tossed it to him, “They aren’t made of the right kind of materials to hold a strong enchantment at that small of a size, but a slight variation of a durability enchantment can be made weak enough that it sticks to these and lets the stay intact when they get fired, after that, the enchantment fails, and they basically dissolve on impact. One of these could still kill a tier zero or a really weak tier one, but they’ll only injure tier twos and up, and at tier five, they aren’t going to do more than break the skin.”

Kay turned his head slightly to look at her, taking his eye off the bullet, “How do you know what it’ll do to a tier zero or tier one?”

“We tested it on animals and monsters, which isn’t a perfect comparison, but it’s close enough. And Meten let me shoot him a couple of times too.”

“Fine,” He said after thinking it over for a moment, “I’ll let you shoot me. But after that, we’re actually sparring.”

“Whaaat?” Cindy whined, “I don’t have half the things I need to actually fight up close yet! I need a way to reload faster, I’ve been looking into Metal Manipulation or straight-up telekinesis to help me there, and I still need more training to develop gun katas!”

“You’re going to make real gun-fu?”

“Why not? We can do all kinds of unrealistic bullshit now. I can dream and see bits and pieces of the future; you’re a vampire, Eleniah can punch dinosaurs so hard it breaks the laws of physics, and so on. Why can’t I do cool martial arts with guns?” She mimed hitting someone with her pistol, “Once we can get some good enchanted ones with higher-end materials that can really take a beating, I want to beat a monster with one!”

“That’s… something?”

She let out a dismissive snort, “Yeah, I know. But I’ve had enough of being one of the people in the back of the caravan, being protected while other people fight. I want to actually help in fights, and now I have my chance. And,” She added, “There’s the actual concerns about the number of Class Slots people have. Most archers or crossbowmen have to switch to a different weapon if someone gets close enough to them, at least at lower tiers. So if we can figure out a Class or Skill that lets someone use a gun as a close-in weapon, it’ll make things a little more streamlined and helps keep parity with other ranged weapons.”

“You think that’ll be necessary?”

Cindy shot him a look, “Of course I do, and you do too!”

“I want to know your thoughts about it,” He shrugged as he leaned against a table, “I know my thought process, but you know a lot more about the history of guns.”

Cindy walked over and hopped up to sit on the table, “Guns aren’t going to be that big a deal here, at least compared to Earth.” She gave him another annoyed look, “I’ve already heard your speech, but I’ll go over those bits too. Magic, Classes, and Skills immediately remove most of the advantages guns have over other man-portable ranged weapons from before guns. Crossbows started outperforming guns because they took less work to train someone to be decent with them, and guns beat out crossbows for the same reason, plus they’re more deadly. The way the System works here, though, you have to train for ages at whatever weapon you’re trying to learn to get a decent level of power. When we get things at a higher production rate and start making guns faster, can we pump out more tier twos than someone training with bows could? Probably, but I’d bet my Title that it’ll take us just as long to get someone to tier five, not including those of us with built-in cheat codes.”

She pulled out one of her guns and started cleaning it, “Then there’s production since I brought it up already. Making a bow takes a lot of time, and making guns takes less, at least if you do it assembly-line style. But producing a bunch of the same thing over and over again to specific tolerances, AKA one of the most important parts of mass production, is shit for experience for crafters. Even if we push through all the bitching and resistance to actually make a group of people mass-produce guns, we’re going to end up with more weapons that are categorically worse than anything made by ‘traditional’ crafters, thanks to the System. So that’s another point not in our favor.”

“The last thing is actual firepower. Modern guns, and the weapons that came after that, are better than bows and crossbows. A machine gun can fire faster, a sniper rifle can hit a target from farther away and do more damage, and so on and so on. But that’s on Earth. Here, a high-tier bowman can probably kill a gnat from a mile away or punch through feet of armor. Then there’s ranged magic, bonuses from related Skills or Classes, and so on and so on.” She shrugged, finishing up the polish on one of the pistols and slipping it away. “All the things that made guns a replacement for other weapons aren’t going to happen here. People are still going to use swords, daggers, bows, spears, and all the other implements of death that are still out there.”

Kay nodded in agreement, “You’re right. Now why are we investing so much money in you and all of this?” He gestured out at the shooting range and the growing industrial area.

“Seriously?” She groaned, “You’re testing me?”

Kay ignored her pouting and the glare she gave him, looking at her calmly with one raised eyebrow.

“You’ve been practicing that,” Cindy muttered. “Fine! I’ll dance to your tune, puppet master. We’re doing it because even with the tech limits we discovered, guns are still a good weapon, even here. We’re still going to be shooting sharp bits of metal at people at very high speeds. Not as high of speeds as I’d like or near as often, but still deadly. You can fire guns from prone much better than bows, too, so that gives us a slight advantage on stealthy attacks. Magic is generally flashy, so we’re beating them out there. Even if we’re only as good as the limited number of stealthy long-distance magical attacks, that’s still a good place to be. Next, there’s the psychological aspect of it being a brand-new weapon. Change is scary to most people, and killing people in a brand new way compounds the fear of change with the fear of us killing people. Even if that wears off eventually, it’s still useful.”

She hopped off the table and started counting reasons on her fingers, “Having a second Class Line Progenitor and also a third, but I know you want to keep that secret if we can, makes us look a lot scarier to everyone else in the world. It paints a slightly bigger target on our backs, but the target was already there, so let’s look at the silver lining. We’re going to be the only major producer of a brand new type of weapon for some time, so that’s going to rake in the money for us and gives us another avenue for our people to get Classes and tier them up, which is always good.” She stopped and stared at her fingers, “There’s a few more, but they’re smaller ones.”

“Cannons is a big one I’ve been thinking about.”

Cindy stopped pacing and turned to look at Kay.

“I’ve been talking to Eleniah since she knows a lot about sea travel, and almost every ship out there uses mages or manipulators to protect their ships. Ballista and the other kinds of big projectile weapons that exist on Torotia right now take up too much space. But there are entire regions of the ocean that have monsters that are highly magic-resistant. Cannon-armed ships would be able to deal with those types of monsters a lot more easily, and that opens up several trade routes that only we would be able to use, at least until cannons become more widespread. Same thing with other ships; most of them are focused on defending from magic, so we’d be able to deal with them much more easily with heavy balls of metal flying at them. They’d also be good for sieges and defending fortifications, although not as much as on the water since people do use physical attacks more often against cities and forts.”

“Huh. I never really focused on naval stuff, but yeah, I can see that working.” Her eyes narrowed as she stared at one of her pistols, “Hey…”

“What’s up?”

“Since you just brought it up, where is all the money that’s getting invested in this project coming from?”

“Well, we have this thing called a treasury, and we-“

“No, seriously,” She cut off his joke with a roll of her eyes, “We’re pumping a lot of money into this; where are we getting it from?”

“Well, besides the fact that we actually tax people now, and Cyrus is some kind of financial genius, Tumbling Rapids is a fucking gold mine.” Kay sighed dramatically as he leaned further against the table, “I get why Nelam is so focused on annexing them. Hell, I want to annex them if we could get away with it.”

“Huh?”

“They’re the heart of the largest trading network this side of the continent. Something like eighty to ninety percent of the trade that goes to the city-states and smaller nations down south goes through Tumbling Rapids, as well as roughly half of the Clans trading and like thirty or forty percent of Nelam’s. That’s imports and exports too.”

“What does that have to do with Avalon making money, though?” Cindy asked trepidatiously.

“We export a lot of stuff there. We’ve got a decent number of in-demand materials and resources in our territory that its hard to find in this region, outside of our lands at least, so we can undercut the people who are exporting those resources from farther away. We’re not making as much per sale since we aren’t jacking up the price to account for transportation costs, but we more than make up for that by selling a lot of materials that people want in a market that has had limited access to those materials in the past. Cyrus has been harping on me that it's all going to balance out eventually, and he’s definitely right, but we’ll make a ton of money until then.” Kay pushed off from the table and headed back towards the firing line, “We also have more normal stuff that we send their way, but we’ve been making normal amounts of money from those.”

“Oh.” Cindy looked mildly stunned from that short lecture.

Kay chuckled and started forming his armor over himself, beads of red liquid pooling across his skin and hardening over him in layers. “C’mon, I’ll let you take some shots at me, and then I get to smack you around for a few hours.”

“A few hours!?”