Chapter 151 — The First Shot

Gao Yang looked at those metal base plates, striving to expel every "gun"-related image from his mind, and told himself over and over: This is a magic item, this is a magic item...

Once he had hypnotized himself enough, he picked up the base plates one by one and gestured with them against his arm: "How about we assemble them into an armguard?"

Rebecca imagined it hard for a moment, then suddenly shook Gao Song's arm happily: "That sounds so cool! I kept thinking about how to shape these plates into a staff the whole time—I never even thought of that!"

Amber curled her lip: "Tch, what's the big deal? I thought of it too. Isn't the Shadow's sleeve-arrow exactly that shape? I just didn't get a chance to say it..."

Rare indeed that even Rebecca's train of thought had gotten stuck in a rut once, and Amber had actually outdone her...

Meanwhile Nicoxi Egg, listening off to the side, was completely fogged in: "What's a sleeve-arrow? How do you even assemble it into an armguard? By the way, how are your hands structured, and what's the principle behind them? I still haven't figured that out..."

Gao Yang looked at this iron-sphere star-person with a strange expression, and suddenly realized where this golden thigh's greatest weakness lay: having him make parts according to blueprints was fine, but the moment anything involving ergonomics came up, the fellow was a hundred percent lost. As a sphere, how could he possibly know how hands were used!

But that didn't matter. Gao Yang quickly sent someone to fetch an armguard, then explained his idea to Nicoxi Egg while sketching it on the blueprint: "Like this—put the searing ray base plate at the front, the mana capacitor at the rear, and connect them in the middle with a red copper matrix as the mana conduit. For the rune trigger control, we can run a metal wire out from the side of the armguard, worked by the thumb. Of course, to prevent accidental triggering, it needs a safety device like the one on the crystal grenade. We can put one between the mana capacitor and the searing ray base plate—that's the safest..."

"Simple, simple," Nicoxi Egg said, bobbing up and down as he listened. "What other requirements are there?"

Amber spoke up from the side: "Don't make the armguard a single solid piece—the lower half should ideally have adjustable tightness."

Gao Yang glanced at her, a little surprised. She rolled her eyes: "Don't actually think I'm ignorant and unskilled, all right? At the very least, I've used a sleeve-arrow."

"Fine, fine, fine, your suggestion is genuinely useful," Gao Yang said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Then he nodded to Nicoxi Egg. "That's it for now. The main thing is to make a sample and see if it works. We'll only know what needs improving once we test it for real."

A low humming rose from within Nicoxi Egg, and the nearby metal ingots and the two kinds of base plates on the table floated up with it: "Then just watch me! It'll be done in a moment!"

The iron-sphere star-person wasn't wrong—it really was done in a moment. Since the precision requirements were low and only a few components needed processing, those metal ingots and base plates were shaped and assembled together in less than a minute.

It was an unremarkable armguard, one that even looked rather "clunky" by traditional standards.

To fit the rune substrate into the protective casing while still leaving room for the rune trigger to move, the assembled "thermal ray gun" made the entire gauntlet more than two sizes bulkier than a conventional one. Its upper half rose in a high ellipsoidal bulge, and at the front an opening had been left, beneath which a short metal guard plate extended outward. That plate was in fact the "safety": when pushed back in, the magical flow was cut off, the wearer's hand could move freely, and the thermal ray gun could not fire; when the plate was pulled out, the thermal ray gun entered a ready-to-fire state and the wearer's hand was locked so that it could not tilt upward—thus no one would ever, through carelessness, have a palm pierced by the searing beam...

Since it was only a test piece assembled for the first time, its appearance could hardly be called splendid, but Gao Yang nevertheless strapped this clumsy gauntlet onto his arm with a flicker of excitement, adjusted the fit, and buckled it secure.

With one hand he pulled out the safety device at the front of the gauntlet, and with the other he slipped the metal firing thimble onto his thumb, then pointed the front of the gauntlet at the ground ahead.

Nikolai Egg turned slightly, and an ingot of iron-gray metal drifted over and landed where Gao Yang was aiming.

"How many soldiers do we have on the territory now?" Gao Yang asked Rebecca as he took aim.

Rebecca thought for a moment. "The new recruits in recent training haven't left camp yet. Not counting the two knights, if we count only combat troops... one hundred and six, I'd say."

Gao Yang pulled the mechanism. With a soft "puff," a searing beam shot from the gauntlet and struck the metal ingot dead-on; the small explosion triggered by the magic sent it tumbling across the ground again and again, scattering a trail of sparks and metal fragments in its wake.

By the time it stopped rolling, its surface was already glowing red, and a deep pit had even been melted into it.

"Then we have one hundred and six second-rank transcendents capable of firing searing rays."

(A book recommendation: My Daughter Is a Ghost Officer—light and pleasant, plenty of wild ideas, a story about raising a daughter (no mistake), an effective cure for a book drought. Speaking of which, does this count as the daddy-with-a-brat genre, I wonder...)