Chapter 132: I Explained Guns to a Blood Mage…

Kharad was roughly one hundred and twenty kilometers from Velis.

Under normal conditions, that would have meant two days of travel on horseback.

Raven’s ribs turned it into three.

Predatory Regeneration had reduced the two partial fractures to something considerably less concerning during the first night, but "less concerning" did not mean "pleasant whenever a horse decided to step on a rock."

Raven discovered that approximately thirty times during the first day.

The thirty-first happened during a particularly bad descent down a rocky hill.

He clenched his teeth as a sharp pain ran through his side.

Valeria rode to his right.

"That hurt."

"I’m riding a horse with two ribs that are still finishing their repairs. It was fairly likely."

"We could have stayed another day."

"We could have."

She waited.

Raven kept riding.

"And you chose not to."

"Correct."

"Sometimes I feel like our conversations exist solely so you can confirm decisions you already made."

Raven looked at her.

"Not always."

"Can you give me an example?"

He thought for several seconds.

"Not immediately."

Valeria laughed softly.

Roland, riding several meters ahead, turned his head slightly.

"That was almost admitting defeat."

"Don’t exaggerate."

"He’s definitely improving," Valeria said.

Raven decided not to ask what she meant.

He probably wouldn’t like the answer.

The landscape had begun changing several hours earlier. The open grasslands of Velis were falling behind them, and the terrain was becoming progressively drier and more broken. Yellow grass still grew in patches, but reddish stone outcroppings appeared more frequently now, along with shallow ravines and layered hills that looked as though they had been sliced apart.

Mountains were beginning to rise in the distance.

They weren’t the Iron Spine yet, nor the great fortresses of Khardun that appeared on some maps. Kharad still belonged to Asteria’s eastern corridor, near the disputed border with Varkess, but the terrain was already beginning to look less human.

Stone.

Cracks.

Caves.

Exactly the sort of place where a creature called the Blastback Burrower had apparently decided to evolve.

FORGE kept the objective open in one corner of Raven’s vision.

[PROJECT: PROTOTYPE RIFLE.]

[Completion: 74.1%.]

[Core Components: 4/6.]

[Activation System: AVAILABLE.]

[Stable Mana Storage: AVAILABLE.]

[Structural Barrel: AVAILABLE.]

[Projectile Acceleration: AVAILABLE.]

[Projectile Stabilization: MISSING.]

[Recoil Regulation: MISSING.]

[Recommended Next Acquisition: Recoil Regulation.]

[Compatible Biological Analogue: "Pressure Chamber."]

[Known Source: Blastback Burrower.]

[Primary Habitat: KHARAD.]

Four of six.

Raven closed the interface.

He didn’t need to look at it every ten minutes.

The number remained the same.

Impatience wasn’t going to build the rifle for him.

The first respectable inn they found was a little more than a day from Kharad.

It was a low stone building constructed beside an intersection where several trade routes split toward smaller mining settlements. It wasn’t elegant, but it had private rooms, a decent stable, and food that hadn’t been dried until it lost any recognizable connection to the animal it came from.

Raven considered those sufficient qualifications.

Valeria considered it an opportunity to force him to rest.

"We’re staying tomorrow," she said as they climbed the stairs.

Raven opened the door to the room.

"We’re staying tonight."

"Tomorrow too."

"No."

"Your ribs are still repairing themselves."

"They’ll continue repairing themselves while we travel."

Valeria followed him inside.

"It’s remarkable how much faith you have in a Trait that, less than a month ago, closed a wound over something you first had to remove manually."

Raven placed his pack on the table.

"That’s why I control it better now."

"That wasn’t what I asked."

"You didn’t ask a question."

Valeria closed the door behind her.

"I hate when you do that."

"I know."

Roland had taken another room.

An intelligent decision.

Raven removed his coat and checked the bandaging around his torso. There was no blood and no obvious deformation.

The ribs were fine.

Good enough.

He sat at the table.

Valeria watched him.

"Are you going to sleep?"

"Not yet."

"Naturally."

Raven opened his pack.

Most of the ordinary equipment went to one side.

Then he removed the first case.

Small.

Reinforced.

Inside was the organ harvested from the Arc Needle Queen.

The High-Density Impulse Spark remained suspended in an alchemical preservation medium FORGE had specified weeks earlier. The oval structure still held its blue veins and the three small internal crystals that had first caught Raven’s attention in Sablewood.

Activation System.

The first real component.

Raven placed the case on the table and took out another.

The Crystalline Reservoir harvested from the Deepwell Toad was larger and considerably more delicate, a semitransparent mass crossed by filaments that could still retain mana even after being separated from the original organism.

Stable Mana Storage.

The third container held Black Mithril.

Not an organ.

A refined bar of 84.6% purity that had caused more political problems than some assassinations from Raven’s previous life.

Structural Barrel.

Finally, he placed the fourth case on the table.

The Stormhorn Courser Pulse Core.

FORGE indicated that preservation remained within excellent parameters.

Raven opened the lid.

The oval organ rested among carefully severed silver fibers. The blue crystalline structures no longer pulsed with the same intensity they had immediately after the Courser’s death, but they still reacted whenever Raven brought mana close.

Projectile Acceleration.

Four components.

Four functions.

Still no weapon.

Valeria removed her gloves and sat opposite him.

"It looks less impressive when you put all of it on a table."

Raven looked at the organs.

"That tends to happen with weapons before they’re assembled."

"Did weapons in your world also begin as animal parts inside boxes?"

"No."

"A shame. That would have made your explanation much easier."

Raven picked up a clean cloth and began checking the Pulse Core’s container.

He didn’t need to literally disassemble the organ. FORGE handled part of the preservation process, but the Authority didn’t clean dirt, replace damaged containers, or stop careless handling from ruining something.

That was still Raven’s responsibility.

Valeria rested her chin on one hand.

"Do you already know what it will look like?"

Raven continued working.

"Approximately."

"That does not inspire confidence."

"Weapons in my world normally didn’t contain organs."

Valeria smiled.

"So you are improvising."

"Adapting."

"That’s a more elegant word."

"It’s also more accurate."

Raven cleaned a small accumulation of residue from the edge of the container.

Valeria’s question had a more complicated answer.

He did know approximately what he wanted.

A stock.

A long barrel.

A firing mechanism.

A proper point of support.

Something he could shoulder and manipulate under pressure.

But that didn’t mean Raven could simply draw a modern rifle and tell FORGE to make it.

FORGE didn’t work that way.

Raven understood weapons.

He had fired thousands of rounds.

He had stripped and reassembled different platforms in darkness, wearing gloves, while injured, and under pressure. He knew how to recognize feeding failures, correct certain extraction problems, maintain a weapon, and adapt its use to range and terrain.

That did not make him a weapons engineer.

Valeria seemed to notice something in his expression.

"What part don’t you know?"

Raven put down the cloth.

"Many parts."

She raised an eyebrow.

"That inspires even more confidence."

Raven ignored her.

"I know how the finished weapon should function. I know what each system needs to accomplish, how it should feel when fired, which failures are likely, and which sections will take the most stress. But I’ve never built a rifle from raw materials."

"Never?"

"No."

"I thought Black Hound would have people for that."

"It did."

Raven picked up the Black Mithril bar and turned it beneath the light.

"Armorers. Engineers. Technicians. People whose job was to build or modify equipment. My job was to use it and keep it functioning afterward."

"So FORGE is filling in what you don’t know."

"To a point."

"But not completely."

"No."

That distinction mattered.

FORGE could translate a biological function into usable architecture.

It could tell Raven that the Pulse Core was compatible with projectile acceleration.

It could design isolation between Black Mithril and magical organs.

It could adapt dimensions Raven would never have calculated on his own.

But if Raven didn’t understand what he wanted to build or why each system needed to exist, the Authority wouldn’t invent the entire answer for him.

Valeria looked across the four components.

"So you’re building something you understand well enough to describe, but not well enough to manufacture without help."

Raven considered that.

"Yes."

"That sounds uncomfortably similar to magic."

"Don’t insult firearms."

Valeria laughed.

"You’re definitely better."

Raven looked up.

"This again?"

"A few weeks ago, you would have answered with one word and forced me to guess the rest."

"A few weeks ago, you were trying to hire me."

"That was considerably more than a few weeks ago."

"Then time has damaged your memory."

"No. Your conversational ability improved."

Raven returned to the Pulse Core.

"Don’t turn that into a personal achievement."

"Of course it’s a personal achievement."

"It isn’t."

"I’ve invested considerable effort."

"Mostly into irritating me."

"Exactly. Proven method."

Raven slowly shook his head.

There was something strange about the fact that conversations like this no longer felt exhausting.

Not enjoyable all the time.

But not exhausting either.

Valeria let several seconds pass before returning to the subject.

"When did you learn to shoot?"

Raven looked up.

It wasn’t a question about Black Hound.

Not exactly.

"Before."

"That narrows the possibilities very little."

Raven closed the container.

"Military training."

"Did you go directly into Black Hound?"

"No. That would have been a fairly efficient way to manufacture corpses."

"So you were a normal soldier."

Raven considered the word.

Normal.

It wasn’t entirely accurate.

"For a while."

"Infantry?"

"At first."

Valeria waited.

Raven knew she wanted more.

For some reason, he gave it to her.

"I learned basic weapons during training. Service rifle. Pistol. Then other platforms depending on the assignment. Once I started standing out, they moved me into more specialized units. More shooting, entries, urban combat, reconnaissance. Black Hound came later."

"Because you were good at shooting?"

"Because I was good at doing several unpleasant things without requiring much supervision."

Valeria smiled.

"That does sound like you."

"It wasn’t a compliment in my world either."

She looked at the Black Mithril bar.

"How different was a real weapon from this?"

Raven took a moment to decide how to explain it.

"Simpler in some ways. Much more complicated in others."

"That didn’t help either."

"We didn’t need mana."

"That already improves the explanation."

Raven pointed toward the Pulse Core.

"We didn’t need to preserve momentum inside an organ. A chemical charge produced pressure. That pressure propelled a projectile through a barrel. Depending on the weapon, part of the energy also operated the mechanism and prepared the next round."

Valeria looked at the components.

"And all of that happened without magic?"

"Yes."

"How many times could one of those weapons fire?"

"Depends."

"Raven."

He considered what number would be understandable without beginning a lecture on magazines, belts, cooling, and logistics.

"One I used frequently could fire thirty rounds before needing another magazine."

Valeria went still.

"Thirty."

"Yes."

"How quickly?"

Raven looked at her.

"That depends on how badly I wanted to waste ammunition."

"Don’t change the question."

"A few seconds if all you want is to empty it. Considerably longer if you want to hit something."

Valeria slowly looked over the project spread across the table.

Impulse Spark.

Reservoir.

Black Mithril.

Pulse Core.

"And you’re trying to build that?"

"No."

She visibly relaxed.

"Good."

"That would be too complicated for the first prototype."

The relief disappeared.

Raven continued.

"First, I need one stable shot."

"One."

"One."

"Then manually reload."

"Probably."

"And if that works..."

"Then we improve it."

Valeria watched him for a long moment.

"I think I’m beginning to understand why FORGE might be more dangerous than Predation."

Raven didn’t answer immediately.

Because she was beginning to understand.

Predation could make him stronger.

FORGE could let him create something he could build again.

And improve.

That was an important difference.