A heavy bronze pestle ground steadily against the inside of a stone mortar, crushing pale white crystals into a powder as fine as wheat flour.
Inside the drafty stone shed at the far edge of the castle courtyard, three wooden tables had been pushed together to form an improvised alchemy bench. On the left sat bowls of yellow volcanic sulfur brought down from the deeper shafts of the North Slope Mine. In the middle sat a mound of black charcoal burned from soft willow branches. And on the right sat the prize that Prince Roland had spent the last forty-eight hours refining: purified potassium nitrate, boiled down from the white mineral crust scraped off the damp stone walls of the castle's oldest cellars and mixed with wood ash.
Standing over the center table with a pair of brass apothecary scales in his hands, Arthur carefully tipped a tiny copper spoon of yellow sulfur onto the weighing pan, watching the iron needle settle into dead-center balance.
— "Ten parts sulfur, fifteen parts willow charcoal, and seventy-five parts saltpeter by weight," — Arthur murmured, reading the balance before sliding the measured pile onto a clean sheet of parchment. — "That gives us the exact stoichiometric ratio for maximum gas expansion without leaving half the carbon unburned."
Beside him, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows and his royal tunic covered by a heavy leather blacksmith's apron, Roland Wimbledon let out a breath of pure relief.
— "Having someone here who actually remembers the exact industrial ratios saves me weeks of trial and error," — Roland said, wiping a smudge of charcoal dust from his forehead with the back of his wrist. — "Formerly, O designed mechanical pistons and structural steel, not explosives. I knew the three basic ingredients of black powder, sure, but getting the burn rate fast enough to propel a lead ball without blowing up the breech is a completely different matter."
Across the table, leaning his broad shoulders against a wooden support pillar with his arms crossed over his black t-shirt, William stared down at the three bowls of colored dust with a skeptical smirk.
— "Still blows my mind," — William said, shaking his head. — "You look at this table and all you see is yellow rock dust, burnt tree twigs, and cellar scraping. It looks like the ingredients for a terrible fertilizer. Yet once you mix them together, this ugly black dirt is going to put every noble knight in Graycastle out of a job."
— "Wait until we finish the second step," — Arthur replied, picking up a ceramic jug filled with clear, high-proof distilled grain spirit from the castle kitchen. — "If we just mix these three dry powders together in a barrel, it creates what early alchemists called 'serpentine powder.' The problem with dry powder is that every time you haul a barrel in a shaking wooden cart, the heavy sulfur settles to the bottom and the light charcoal floats to the top. Worse, loose dust burns too slowly — more like a firework fountain than a bomb."
Roland paused with his hand on the wooden mixing paddle, his gray eyes snapping up to meet Arthur's gaze with sudden, sharp interest.
— "Wait... you memorized the granulation process from that second book too?" — Roland asked, his voice rising with excitement.
— "The foundational principles, yes, Your Highness," — Arthur lied smoothly, keeping his expression calm as he poured a measured splash of alcohol and water into the stone basin containing the three powders. — "By wetting the mixture into a dense black dough, pressing it into flat cakes under heavy stones, letting it dry, and then crushing those cakes through fine wire sieves, every single grain contains the exact same seventy-five-fifteen-ten ratio locked together. The flame jumps between the gaps in the grains ten times faster."
Corned gunpowder!, Roland shouted inside his own head, his heart beating fast as he watched Arthur knead the wet black paste with a wooden spatula. In the history of Earth, it took military engineers nearly two hundred years after inventing firearms to figure out that corning powder multiplied its explosive force! With this, we don't even have to go through the primitive hand-cannon phase!
While Arthur and William spread the wet black paste onto flat wooden trays to be dried gently near the warmth of the brick kiln, Roland walked ten paces across the courtyard toward the second half of their secret project.
There, standing beside a low brick hearth, was Anna.
The witch had her bright hair tied back with a strip of linen, her eyes locked with absolute, unwavering focus onto a cylindrical bar of wrought iron resting across two stone supports.
Over the past three days of testing in the yard, Anna hadn't just been roasting limestone for cement; under Roland's guidance, she had become a living, breathing precision foundry.
In a medieval smithy, forging a gun barrel was a nightmare of metallurgy. A local blacksmith had to take a flat strip of iron, heat it in a coal forge, and hammer it around a rod, trying to weld the seam shut down the entire length of the tube. One microscopic air bubble or slag inclusion in that weld meant the barrel would split open like a peeled banana the third time a soldier fired it.
With Anna's magic, however, those limitations simply didn't exist.
Extending both of her small, pale hands over the iron cylinder, Anna controlled a localized curtain of blinding orange-white fire that wrapped completely around the metal.
Standing three paces back so his eyebrows wouldn't get singed off, William watched the process in genuine awe.
— "Man... look at that heat control," — William muttered to Arthur, who had walked over while wiping his hands on a rag. — "She's keeping the outer skin of the iron right below the melting point while Roland uses that hand-cranked drill jig to bore out the center core. It's a seamless tube."
— "More than that," — Arthur pointed toward a smaller wooden tray sitting on the workbench beside the hearth. — "Look at the firing mechanism Roland drafted."
Sitting on the oiled oak cloth were two weapons in their final stages of assembly.
One was a longer, heavy infantry musket barrel nearly a meter in length — the prototype they would eventually show to their future militia commander.
Right next to it, however, was a much more compact, one-handed weapon that had already been fitted into a carved stock of dark walnut wood: a flintlock pistol.
Instead of a clumsy burning rope like an early matchlock — which would go out in the middle of a winter snowstorm — Roland had pushed Anna's heat-treating skills to the limit to create a curved, hardened high-carbon steel frizzen and a V-shaped mainspring, clamping a sharp wedge of gray flint into the jaws of the hammer.
— "The spring tension on the pistol lock is still catching by half a millimeter against the sear plate," — Roland muttered, frowning as he picked up the walnut-stocked pistol and cocked the hammer back with his thumb, feeling a slight gritty resistance in the metal. — "If our blacksmiths file it down any further by hand, the trigger might slip early. If we leave it as is, the flint won't strike the steel plate hard enough to throw sparks into the priming pan."
Arthur stepped up to the side of the workbench, leaning over as if to inspect the open lock plate with the naked eye.
— "May I take a look at the alignment, Your Highness?" — Arthur asked politely.
— "Go ahead. Tell me if you see a burr on the tumbler," — Roland said, handing the unloaded pistol over while turning back to check Anna's cooling musket barrel.
Holding the heavy iron-and-walnut pistol in both hands, Arthur lowered his head, pretending to squint closely at the tiny gap between the internal steel sear and the tumbler notch.
With William standing squarely between him and the courtyard guards, Arthur took a slow breath and reached into the small pool of Telekinesis inside his chest.
Don't use brute force, Arthur reminded himself, applying the exact theory he had discussed with William the morning before. Focus on a microscopic vector.
Instead of trying to lift the heavy pistol with his mind, Arthur projected a hair-thin thread of kinetic force right into the internal lock mechanism where no iron file could reach. He felt the tiny, jagged metal burr left behind by the castle blacksmith on the inner edge of the tumbler.
Pressing his mental focus against that single millimeter of steel, Arthur pinched and sheared the tiny metal burr flat, smoothing the contact surface down to mirror precision.
A tiny, dull ache pulsed behind Arthur's right eye for a split second before fading away.
Click.
Arthur pulled the hammer back with his thumb. This time, the internal mechanism glided backward as smoothly as oiled glass, locking into the full-cock notch with a crisp, authoritative metallic snap.
— "There was a tiny flake of slag wedged behind the axle pin, Your Highness," — Arthur said smoothly, tapping the side of the lock with a small pair of iron tweezers before handing the pistol back to Roland. — "I cleared it out. Try the tension now."
Roland thumbed the hammer back and dry-fired it against a piece of leather.
Clack!
The jaws of the hammer snapped forward with lightning speed.
— "Perfect! That's the exact snap we needed!" — Roland grinned, his tired face lighting up like a kid on Christmas morning as he clamped a fresh piece of sharp gray flint between the jaws. — "Anna, how are the dried powder cakes looking?"
Having extinguished her flame, Anna walked over carrying a small ceramic bowl filled with dark, angular grains of corned gunpowder that had been dried over the warm bricks of the kiln and sifted through linen mesh.
— "The moisture is completely gone, Your Highness," — Anna reported quietly, setting the bowl on the table. — "And the finer dust we separated at the bottom is ready for the priming pan."
Just as Roland reached for a small brass measuring spoon, the heavy rhythmic clink of steel armor echoed from the stone archway leading into the main castle yard.
Chief Knight Carter Lannis walked into the makeshift workshop area, accompanied by two castle guards who were carrying a crate of rusted spearheads from the armory for Anna to melt down later.
Seeing the Prince, the young witch, and the two foreign scholars huddled closely around the oak table like conspirators, Carter stopped five paces away and offered a crisp bow.
— "Your Highness. The afternoon guard rotation on the outer walls is complete," — Carter reported, his sharp, suspicious eyes immediately dropping to the strange, curved wooden handle and the six-inch iron pipe in Roland's hands. — "Is this... the new military weapon Your Highness mentioned yesterday?"
To a seasoned knight of Graycastle who had spent twenty years mastering the reach of a longsword and the heavy draw of a steel crossbow, the flintlock pistol in Roland's hand looked almost comical. It had no blade, no bowstring, no prod, and wasn't even long enough to use as a decent club.
Roland caught the subtle look of skepticism in his Chief Knight's eyes and smiled.
— "You arrived at the exact right moment, Carter," — Roland said, holding up the pistol. — "I was just about to run our first live penetration test. Walk over to the armory rack and bring me a steel breastplate. Not the cheap iron plates the town militia wears — bring me a heavy, forged steel cuirass made for a front-line knight."
Carter blinked once, his brow furrowing slightly.
— "A knight's steel cuirass, Your Highness?" — Carter repeated hesitantly. — "With respect, even a heavy windlass crossbow fired from thirty paces will only leave a shallow dent in high-grade plate armor. If Your Highness wishes to test a small throwing mechanism, perhaps a wooden target or leather jerkin would be more suitable?"
— "Just bring the steel plate, Carter," — William cut in from the pillar, pushing himself upright with a wide, wicked grin as he cracked his knuckles. — "And make sure you bolt it tight to that heavy oak post at the far end of the yard. Trust me, you're going to want a front-row seat for this."
Exchanging a brief, baffled glance with his two guards, Carter bowed his head and walked back toward the armory shed.
While the knight was gone, Arthur waited until Roland and William were busy pouring the corned black powder into a small leather flask, then casually rested his left hand near the edge of the ceramic bowl on the table.
Touching a small, tied linen pouch containing three ounces of spare gunpowder that had been set aside as a reserve sample, Arthur triggered his [Inventory] in complete silence.
In less than a blink, the linen pouch vanished into his first dimensional slot. Nobody in the yard noticed a thing.
.
.
.
Four minutes later, Carter Lannis returned carrying a thick, curved breastplate of polished gray steel. Following Roland's orders, the two guards strapped the armor tightly onto a sturdy oak training post standing twenty-five paces away against the far stone wall of the courtyard, then stepped wide to the side.
Roland stepped up to the firing line, picked up a paper tube pre-measured with a heavy charge of Arthur's corned black powder, poured it down the muzzle of the pistol, dropped a round lead ball wrapped in a greased linen patch on top, and rammed it firmly to the bottom with a thin iron rod. Finally, he tipped a pinch of fine priming powder into the side pan and snapped the steel frizzen shut.
As Roland raised the loaded pistol, however, William stepped forward and placed a large hand gently over the prince's wrist.
— "Hold on a second, Your Highness," — William said, his joking tone turning serious. — "Let me fire the first live round."
Roland frowned slightly.
— "I designed it, William. The metallurgy is solid."
— "I know it is," — William replied, looking Roland dead in the eye. — "But this is the very first shot using granulated high-energy powder, and we loaded a heavy test charge. If there's even a one- in-a-thousand chance of the breech cracking, I have stamina and thick calluses, whereas if the royal prince loses three fingers today, Border Town collapses tomorrow. Besides.."
Beside them, Arthur nodded in immediate agreement.
— "He is right. A general does not stand inside the blast radius of an untested prototype."
Seeing the uncompromising look on both of his advisors' faces, Roland relented with a quiet sigh and handed the heavy walnut grip to William.
— "Keep your arm extended away from your face, William," — Roland warned, stepping back two paces beside Arthur and Anna. — "Everybody cover your ears!"
Over by the wall, Carter Lannis and the two castle guards watched in confusion as the Prince, the scholar, and the young girl all raised their hands to cover their ears. Thinking it was some strange ceremonial habit from the Kingdom Dawn, Carter remained standing straight with his arms folded across his chest, not bothering to cover his ears at all.
In the center of the yard, William planted his boots shoulder-width apart on the flagstones, dropping into a textbook modern Weaver shooting stance.
Wrapping his right hand firmly around the walnut grip and supporting his wrist with his left palm, William brought the iron barrel up to eye level, lining it up dead-center with the gleaming steel breastplate twenty-five paces away.
With his thumb, he pulled the flint hammer all the way back.
Click-clack.
The courtyard went completely silent.
William exhaled halfway, held his breath, and squeezed the iron trigger.
SNAP—KRA-KOOOOOM!
The flint struck the steel frizzen, sending a shower of white-hot sparks straight into the priming pan. In less than a millisecond, the corned black powder inside the chamber detonated.
A tongue of blinding orange fire and a thick cloud of white-gray smoke erupted from the muzzle, accompanied by a deafening, bone-shaking roar that slammed against the four stone walls of the courtyard like a bolt of thunder!
The violent kick of the recoil pushed straight back against William's palms, making his forearm muscles flex hard as the pistol barrel bucked upward.
Around the castle, absolute pandemonium broke loose in an instant.
Up on the high stone battlements, a flock of black crows bolted into the sky in a frantic storm of feathers. Down by the outer gatehouse, three town guards screamed in terror and dropped flat onto their stomachs in the mud, convinced that the heavens had just split open.
And five paces to the right of the firing line, Chief Knight Carter Lannis staggered half a step back, his ears ringing with a high-pitched whine as his hand flew instinctively to the hilt of his longsword.
Before Carter could even shout to ask what kind of sorcery had just exploded in the yard, his trained eyes snapped toward the oak post twenty-five paces away.
The ringing in the Chief Knight's ears vanished, replaced by a cold, suffocating silence inside his head.
The heavy steel breastplate — armor forged in King's City to stop the lance of a charging horseman — was still strapped to the post, vibrating faintly.
Right in the exact center of the chest piece, where a knight's heart would beat, there was no dent.
Instead, there was a jagged, blackened hole the size of a silver coin punched clean through the solid steel plate, with white splinters of oak sticking out the back of the wooden post behind it!
— "Sweet mother of..." — William let out a low, thrilled laugh, lowering the smoking pistol and blowing a wisp of gray sulfur smoke off the tip of the warm barrel. — "Zero barrel swelling, clean ignition, and it kicked like a mule! Now that is what I call firepower!"
Carter Lannis didn't hear a word William said.
Moving as if he were walking in a dream, the Chief Knight crossed the twenty-five paces of flagstones in rapid strides, stopping right in front of the target post.
Slowly, almost hesitantly, Carter raised a gloved finger and touched the ragged metal lip of the hole in the breastplate.
The torn edges of the steel were curled inward and burning hot to the touch. Peering through the hole, Carter could see straight through the four inches of solid oak post behind the armor to the stone wall beyond.
A cold shiver ran all the way down the veteran knight's spine.
He had trained with the sword since he was seven years old. He had spent decades Conditioning his body, learning footwork, and trusting in the sacred supremacy of plate armor and noble knights on the battlefield.
Yet William hadn't swung a blade. He hadn't drawn a heavy bowstring. He had simply pointed a one-handed piece of iron and crooked a single finger — and from twenty-five paces away, in the blink of an eye, that invisible projectile had torn through knightly steel as if it were wet parchment.
If a peasant child who had never held a sword in his life were given that iron tube, that child could kill the greatest swordsman in Graycastle before the knight even took three steps forward.
Walking up behind the frozen Chief Knight, Roland, Arthur, and William stopped beside the shattered post.
— "What do you think of the penetration test, Chief Knight?" — Arthur asked quietly, watching Carter's pale face with analytical satisfaction.
Carter slowly pulled his finger back from the smoking hole and turned to face Prince Roland, his dark eyes wide with a mixture of dread and solemn awe.
— "Your Highness..." — Carter's voice was unusually hoarse. — "With thirty of these weapons lined up on a wall... neither the hides of Demonic Beasts will ever reach our gates."
— "Thirty is just the beginning, Carter," — Roland said, taking the warm pistol back from William and looking toward the castle's main keep with a fiery glint in his gray eyes. — "Now that we know the powder and the barrels work, we have two problems left to solve before winter: getting the silver to mass-produce them."
As they walked back toward the castle doors, leaving the smoking, pierced breastplate behind in the yard, Arthur adjusted the cuffs of his hoodie with a faint smile.
The first thunder of the modern era had just echoed across Border Town — and tomorrow, when Assistant Minister Barov walked into the Prince's study with Duke Ryan's extortionate trade demands, they would have the exact teeth they needed to bite back.