Daniel
Daniel had wanted to build a Benelli M4.
It had seemed obvious at first. Guns were natural equalizers and could be used with minimal training. If they were expecting an invasion by a hostile force bent on their destruction, it was only natural for them to develop firearms. And the Benelli M4 was one of the finest combat shotguns ever produced back on Earth. It was gas-operated, semi-automatic, brutally reliable, with massive capacity and unparalleled firepower. The US Marines loved it and used it to great effect.
Daniel loved all sorts of shooting and had studied gun design for years, including the Benelli M4. He had torn the gun apart on more than one occasion and even sketched improvements he had never had the money or facilities to test.
So again, it naturally made sense to bring firearms into this world. It should not have been that hard. Stories did shit like that all the time.
Well, stories were not reality.
He quickly realized that building the greatest shotgun ever made in this world was not a problem of inspiration, materials, or even engineering.
It was a problem of physics.
Or, more accurately, the physics of mana.
Yeah. Consider that shit.
Back home, weapon design for pistols and rifles was simple in principle. A propellant. A sealed chamber to create pressure. A projectile shaped to fly straight and rifling to stabilize spin for a bullet. That was it. Shotguns were even easier, as you did not really need to worry about rifling with buckshot. Sure, firearms had been slow to develop and adopt, but once metal casings entered widespread use in the 1860s, warfare changed. Individual bravery was replaced by logistics and manufacturing. Wars were fought by production and industrial might. Really, by 1918 and the development of machine guns, the battlefield became an unrecognizable place. Five thousand years of martial discipline went out the door, or at least changed substantially.
The great wars of the twentieth century catalyzed a straight line of escalation from machine guns to smart bombs. Now the military had things like Apache helicopters and F-35 fighters and aircraft carriers that were basically floating cities and carried enough firepower to destroy the world many times over.
Seriously scary stuff, but this world did not work like that.
When Daniel first began studying mana methods, spell applications, arrays, and activation sequences, he realized something that instantly bothered him. Any form of long-range combat relied almost entirely on spellcasting. There was a whole host of combat-focused casting, everything from fireballs and lances of force to lightning arcs and elemental golems. But everything—and he meant everything—required casting, intent, and complex array work.
Daniel had expected that, even relished it. It was magic, after all, and magic is freaking awesome.
But this was a cultivation world with distinctly Chinese influence, if not downright inspiration, and yet it also had clear European analogues. The Empress and Sophie had clear influence of a non-Asian bloodline, or at least this world’s equivalent to it. So if there were European analogues, where were the magic longbows? The crossbows? The catapults and giant ballistae? The Knights Templar? Where were the ranged units that did not rely solely on spellcasting? Hell, where were the riding bowmen of the Mongol horde?
This world should definitely have a Mongol horde.
Daniel found time to figure it out after he created the Framework, and eventually he found what he was looking for in the form of the Imperial Bowcasters.
Bowcasters were a fighting unit that was specialized, rare, and quietly terrifying. Their weapons were crafted from a mana-dense tree grown under precise conditions called a Heartline tree. The wood of the Heartline was naturally infused with life-aspected mana through every fiber of its being, channeling it along the grain even after it was removed from the tree. That mana was so deeply integrated that bows created from these trees became extensions of the trees themselves. Wood taken from these trees cycled mana even after removal and replaced lost mana by naturally pulling it from the air.
As long as the tree that birthed—and yes, birthed is the correct word—the bow lived, the bow remained a living extension of the tree and functioned as if it were never removed. It was the same for the bolts pulled from shards taken from the tree. This meant the mana remained bound to the weapon regardless of distance. Bows and bolts made from these trees could carry mana over great distances.
It was a massive advantage for the Empire.
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The Imperial family figured out that if the Bowcasters added their own mana to the draw, they could supercharge the bolts and attach spells or modifications directly to the action, shaping the bolt and its effects upon release.
The result was point-and-shoot destruction that was devastatingly effective.
After a whole lot of study, Daniel understood the problem with bringing guns into this world.
Traditional firearms failed for a host of reasons. Infused mana could not be treated under a gun’s pressure and chemical conditions. A Benelli M4 operates using a unique Auto-Regulating Gas-Operated system, or ARGO for short—a reliable short-stroke gas system with two small pistons near the chamber that directly push the bolt carrier group to cycle the action, reliably handling various loads and requiring minimal maintenance. When fired, gas from the shell itself enters ports, pushing the pistons, which unlock the rotating bolt, eject the spent shell, and chamber a new round from the tubular magazine, making it a fast and adaptable semi-automatic shotgun.
That is real simple when one uses the pressure and explosion of the gunpowder to make the cycle.
Trying to infuse mana into a non-mana substance is possible, but it lacks longevity and resists violent compression. It would probably destabilize anything resembling gunpowder. This was specifically true if the mana was coming from a cultivator, because that sort of mana would certainly be filled with intent—and intent always messes with mana. Attempting to use an infused non-mana substance in the cycling mechanism would almost certainly be disastrous, creating destabilized ammunition that would probably destroy the carriage and mechanics of the weapon.
And even assuming you could figure out the automatic cycling problem, the propellant, and the payload, you would still have to solve range, because an infused non-mana substance—like a lead bullet infused with mana—is unable to carry far from its source without a tether.
So an infused non-mana substance was out, and gas systems were dead on arrival.
Which was why the Benelli M4 was impossible.
But Daniel did not give up.
The first breakthrough came one night, born of irritation and a drink that tasted suspiciously like whiskey.
The answer to the mechanical issue was surprisingly simple. If a semi-automatic action itself created problems, then you simply got rid of that action and turned it into a pump action.
Manual cycling removed timing conflicts. If there was no need to harness gas feedback, then mana and intent became less volatile in the mechanism. No self-actuating systems trying to move mana when it did not want to move. The user controlled the flow. The weapon responded.
That solved the mechanism. Simple is often better.
Which brought him back to the real problem.
What did you use for ammunition and propellant?
How did you maintain the mana long enough to deliver a mana-infused strike to the target?
A normal bullet was useless against even a low-tier cultivator, excluding the most vulnerable places. Natural mana reinforcement would shrug off impacts to most places on a cultivator’s body, and even high-velocity bullets from something like a .50 caliber would not penetrate without some touch of mana to fight the reinforcement. So a non-mana substance needed to be reinforced with mana to even have a chance. Most artificially mana-infused projectiles were of little help beyond a few dozen yards, as they began to deteriorate the moment they left the main source. For something like that to work, mana had to be tethered to the projectile while somehow maintaining connection to that source. The Heartline bows did it through a loophole of natural design. He had not found a man-made or manufactured way to mimic it.
So he went in a different direction. The breakthrough came weeks later, when Daniel and Ethan stopped trying to find a way to tether artificially. The answer was obvious.
If you cannot infuse mana and tether it, then you start with something that already has mana.
Once Daniel and Ethan figured that out, it became easier.
The answer was mana stones.
Mana stones were mana found in nature and existed in solid form. They could be used in many different applications. Mana stones were not just fuel, cultivator resources, or currency. They were mana in its purest form—crystallized, condensed, and sometimes deceptively stable or dangerously volatile depending on the stone itself. They could be empowered and lacked intent. That form took care of the mana requirement for penetration purposes.
It also helped with the propellant.
If powdered carefully, blended with mundane explosive propellants—thank goodness for his chemistry classes—then encased in a warded payload designed to accept and immediately discharge energy, you could create something workable. If you did all this and did not mess up the casing and containment runes on the actual gun, then you really had something special.
It was not cheap or stable, and it was absolutely not practical for mass warfare.
But at close range, when it worked, it was devastating.
The trick was the activation sequence and containment. Glyphs etched into the casing held the mana bound to the mundane just long enough to allow the reaction. Reinforcement runes siphoned ambient mana to keep the powdered mana from destabilizing inside the shell and barrel when the firing mechanism was applied.
The shell started burning itself out almost immediately after firing.
Which was fine, because at ten feet, you did not need longevity.
You needed impact.
The final piece was making mana a natural part of the projectile. That part was simple. Shape the mana stone itself into a slug. There was no need for a tether because the stone itself was mana. Shape the slug carefully, like a bullet, and you had something that could punch through mana reinforcement.
And that was how the Badnelli M2 was born.
A pump-action, mana-reinforced slug launcher—and closer to a magical rocket launcher than a shotgun. Each shell a barely restrained catastrophe. Manual cycling to avoid feedback. Reinforced barrel to apply mana for a supercharged version, with no semi-automatic components to interfere with mana behavior.
Nathan had called Daniel a demon the first time he fired it and then grinned like Daniel hung the moon.
Daniel took that as a compliment.
This was not just a gun.
It was a solution.
And like most good solutions, it was ugly, dangerous, expensive, and completely unfair to anyone on the wrong end of it.
Using it on the bastard who attacked his wife might be the most awesome thing that ever happened.