Chapter 169: 169 – Speedloader

The golem seemed to take the hint, adding one last comment, “Put it in once you’ve got some down time, good idea. It usually takes a while to get used to one of these, so just don’t use it too much early on and you’ll be good. Now…”

Delta looked over to Zelsys, raising his left hand in a prompt to make her choice. She genuinely couldn’t think of anything in particular she wanted for herself at that very moment, but she did have an idea. Before she would put her idea into words, however, she had a question that would gnaw at her mind until it was answered.

“I have a question first,” she said. Delta gave a simple nod, to which she asked, “What did you mean when you said I was “Second Circle”?”

He froze in place, his eye flickering for a few seconds as he made a continuous “Uhhhh…” sound. When it stopped, he conceded that, “I suppose that explaining to you where you stand won’t count as helping you skip ahead on the path. Very well.”

“Fundamentally, it means only that you are fully unified with your Azoth, possessing no single Azoth Stone. You are the lowest form of what could be considered beyond human - whether the surface world’s name for it is Philosopher, Adventurer, Hero, Cultivator, Sage…” trailed off the golem. “You get the idea. Now please, make your choice. There is little time to spare.”

“Can you make a mechanical device out of black-stone?” she asked the golem, committing his previous words to memory as best as she could. 

He nodded, almost boastingly adding, “I can even carve simple glyphs on the spot, yes. Much of what I can do was put in place just to ensure I could fulfil as wide a range of requests as possible.”

Smiling, she pointed at Pentacle with her thumb. 

“The gun,” she said, causing Zefaris to double-take. “Make a handheld device that can reload it in less than four seconds, and do so multiple times in a short span of time. If a hack-fraud self-taught alchemist can make a bottle bigger on the inside, you can pull it off for gunpowder and lead.”

Delta’s eye began flickering again. He looked at her, then looked at Pentacle, then at her again, then at Pentacle. He stared for a few seconds before looking Zefaris in the eye, reaching out. 

“I-I’d like to examine the weapon,” he said with barely-constrained giddiness.

Zefaris hesitantly handed over her precious hand-cannon, to which the golem took it in his hands and just… Held it in front of his eye. Its light flickered, and he turned the gun in his grasp at every which angle. He half-cocked the hammer and lowered it a few times, turned the cylinder, fiddled the ramrod lever, even looked down the barrel.

“Mechanically simplistic, but I must admit it’s an impressive piece of work. The internal glyphwork is beyond even my own abilities, if I am to be honest,” Delta commented, handing the weapon over. Zefaris eagerly took her property back and put it in its holster, just as the golem raised his left hand and snapped his fingers.

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As with the previous one, strange mechanical noises could be heard from the pillar to his left, only they were louder and lasted considerably longer. It brought to mind the sound of a high-precision lathe, and something else. Whirring and screeching, even hissing. 

Then, the pillar opened up and revealed… A cylinder. 

A plain, black-stone cylinder, as wide as a forearm and a little longer than Pentacle itself. Delta took it from within the pillar and brought it to Zefaris, and when the markswoman took it from his hands the object came alive. Its top half split into two halves, each of which had a centimeter-wide circular hole that could be covered by a swiveling shutter piece, a small projection glyph that showed a zero in rectangular text, and a raised surface next to the hole. On one half the surface was a single large bump, whilst on the other it was a number of smaller bumps.

Zefaris began examining the device immediately and with great curiosity, and Detla seemed all too eager to explain how it worked, “Bullets go in the left hole, powder goes in the right one. Slide the recess over the cylinder until you hear a click, then just think about reloading and it’ll do the rest of the job. Oh, and don’t even think about reverse-engineering it. It’ll just turn into black sand if you try to crack it open. And with that...”

The bottom half also changed, folding open and exposing a deep recess that Zefaris recognized as being perfectly shaped for Pentacle to slide into. 

It clearly went far deeper than the cylinder would physically allow, but everything past a certain point was obscured by vague grey Fog - the same was the case when she had looked into Makhus’ Rubedo bottle. What little she saw in the dark interior made some sense, going by the presence of two holes to either side of where the barrel would sit it looked like the gadget would load two chambers at once.

Delta spread his arms and looked to each of the slayers in turn. The pillars behind him fell away into a bottomless pit, and the sound of the cogworks filled the chamber again.

“...My obligations are fulfilled.”

With those words, he took a step back and fell into the grey, foggy emptiness. The moment he vanished from sight, the missing pillars slammed back into their place as the floor, across which the two slayers walked towards their exit from this floor.

It opened without delay to a Fog Gate that also came alive nearly instantly, and a few seconds later, they stepped through. The filth of combat scoured from them and their wounds lessened, they emerged to what seemed at first glance to be an empty Fog Transit chamber. 

The chamber itself was almost identical to the one after floor one, with the only major difference being the number and size of doors. Instead of three on each wall, there was a single utterly colossal gate occupying most of each wall.

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