Chapter 151 — The First Shot
Blade of Dawn · Page 4 of 4
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...)