Book 4: Chapter 4

Book 4: Chapter 4

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!”

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!?”