This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ApertiV on 2025-06-26 14:49:32+00:00.
This was heavily requested from overwhelming support in the first and second chapters.
Read them here now!
The explosion took Oswyn's eyebrows.
Not a dramatic, building-leveling blast that would have brought every instructor running. It was merely a sharp WHUMP that sent a gout of yellow-white flame straight up from the ceramic crucible, painting shadows on the armory's vaulted ceiling.
The acrid stench of burnt hair and nitrated compounds filled his nostrils as he stumbled backward, blinking away afterimages.
"Shit. Shit shit shit."
His hands flew to his face, patting frantically. Still there. Still intact.
The thick leather apron had caught most of the flash, though he could feel the heat on his exposed skin. His notebook, left too close to the reaction vessel, smoldered at the edges.
Three weeks. Three weeks of careful experimentation, and this was attempt number forty-three.
Each failure taught him something new about the volatile chemistry of nitrocellulose, but at this rate, he'd be bald and fingerless before winter's end.
The Scrapper population had learned to avoid his corner of the armory. Smart, cunning little bastards.
"Temperature spike during nitration," he muttered, scribbling notes with shaking hands. "Need better thermal control. Ice bath. Maybe salt-ice slurry..."
"Having fun, are we?"
Oswyn spun, his hand instinctively going to the knife at his belt. He hadn't heard the door open, hadn't heard footsteps. But then, he never did with her.
Daeharice stood in the doorway, her twilight form barely distinguishable from the shadows. She wrinkled her nose at the chemical reek.
"Instructor Thalien told me you were on cleaning duty," she said, stepping into the light.
Her violet eyes swept the workshop, taking in the glass apparatus, the lead-lined containers, the blast shields he'd cobbled together from old tower shields.
"This is a peculiar interpretation of 'cleaning.'"
"I'm cleaning out the old munitions," Oswyn said carefully. "Disposing of dangerous materials."
"By setting them on fire?"
"Controlled combustion is a valid disposal method."
A ghost of a smile touched her lips.
"You're a terrible liar, Oswyn Dunmire. Your pulse just jumped. Your pupils dilated. And you're still smoking."
He looked down. Sure enough, wisps of smoke were rising from his scorched apron.
He yanked it off, beating at the smoldering leather.
"What do you want?" The question came out harsher than intended. Three weeks of isolation, of chemical burns and ringing ears, had worn his social graces thin.
"I was curious," she said, gliding forward with that unnerving silence.
"The other students think you've been broken. That Thalien is working you like a beast of burden, making you scrub floors and oil armor as punishment. Khestri tells anyone who'll listen that you spend your days weeping into dirty mop water."
"Sorry to disappoint."
"I'm not disappointed."
She picked up a glass rod, examining the crystalline residue clinging to its end.
"Nitric acid. Sulfuric acid. Cotton. You're trying to create guncotton."
Oswyn's blood ran cold. "How do you..."
"My grandmother was Selenna Nox. Perhaps you've heard of her?"
Everyone had heard of Selenna Nox. The Gloomkin alchemist who'd nearly ended the Scouring Wars single-handedly with her poison clouds.
The woman who'd been executed by the Concordance for 'crimes against the natural order.'
"She left journals," Daeharice continued, setting the rod down with delicate precision.
"Hidden ones. She was fascinated by human chemistry. The idea that power could be distilled, bottled, shared. Democratic destruction, she called it. The Aelvari hated her for it."
"And you've read these journals?"
"Every word."
She moved to his notebook, scanning his failed formula.
"You're overnitrating. The reaction needs to be slower, cooler. And you're using raw cotton. It needs to be purified first. Washed in alkaline solution to remove the natural waxes."
She picked up his quill without asking, scratching corrections in the margins. Her handwriting was precise.
"Temperature control is critical. Ice bath. Rock salt to drop it below freezing. And the acid ratio..." She scribbled numbers.
"Sixty-five percent nitric, thirty-five percent sulfuric. No water. Water is death with this reaction."
By evening, following her corrections, he had his first stable batch of guncotton. The sharp CRACK of a test detonation rang through with no billowing smoke.
"Finally," Thalien's voice rumbled from behind him. The Orc had entered silent as a ghost despite his bulk. "Took you long enough."
"Smokeless powder," Oswyn said, trying to keep the pride from his voice. "Well, guncotton. The first step."
"The first of many."
Thalien picked up one of Oswyn's sketches. Complex designs for gas-operated actions, detachable magazines. "Too ambitious. You're trying to run before you can walk."
"But with the higher pressures from smokeless powder..."
"Will blow apart your revolver if you're not careful. And these designs?" He tapped the semi-automatic sketches.
"Beautiful theory. But can you machine the tolerances? Do you understand the metallurgy required? The heat treatment?"
Oswyn's silence was answer enough.
"As I thought."
Thalien set the sketches aside. "Start simple. Build up. Your revolver is a dead end - the cylinder gap bleeds too much pressure with smokeless loads. You need a sealed breech."
The Orc pulled out his own sketch, rough but practical.
"Single-shot break-action. Like a hunting rifle. Strong, simple, safe. Test your ammunition without losing fingers. Once that works, we talk about repeaters."
It was humbling, but Oswyn saw the wisdom. He'd been drunk on possibilities, forgetting fundamentals.
"There's an old lathe in the back," Thalien continued.
"Pre-Concordance. Still works. You'll need to turn your own brass cases - the black powder cartridges you've been using won't handle smokeless pressures."
The next few days blurred together. Oswyn learned to operate the ancient lathe, turning brass stock into precisely dimensioned cartridge cases.
Each one took an hour of careful work. He made dozens, testing different wall thicknesses, different primers.
The single-shot rifle came together slowly. He salvaged a barrel from an old wall gun, reboring it to a consistent .45 caliber.
The break-action was crude but robust, held closed by a massive locking lug that could handle twice the pressure he planned to generate.
His first smokeless loads were conservative. Black powder charges generated maybe 20,000 PSI of chamber pressure.
His calculations suggested smokeless could easily double that. He started at 25,000 PSI, working up slowly.
The difference was immediate.
Black powder pushed a 300-grain bullet to maybe 900 feet per second from his revolver. The same bullet, with a moderate smokeless charge from the rifle's longer barrel, exceeded 1,600 feet per second.
"Better," Thalien approved, watching him test-fire. "But you're still thinking like a pistoleer. Rifles are different beasts. Smaller bullets, higher velocities. Try this."
He handed Oswyn a different projectile. Not a round ball or a blunt cylinder, but a sleek, pointed bullet with a boat-tail base.
"Spitzer design. From the old wars. Two hundred grains instead of three hundred. See what your powder does with that."
The crack of the rifle was sharper, angrier.
The lighter bullet left the barrel at over 2,200 feet per second. Downrange, the iron plate they used for testing didn't just dent. It cratered, the metal splashing outward like water.
"Velocity is the key," Thalien lectured. "Kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity. Double the speed, quadruple the impact. That's why arrows kill despite weighing nothing. Speed."
"So lighter and faster is better?"
"To a point. Too light and the bullet lacks sectional density. Won't penetrate deeply. Too fast and it fragments on impact. Balance. Always balance."
Oswyn's notebook filled with ballistic calculations. Different bullet weights, different powder charges, different barrel lengths. He was mapping the boundaries of this new technology, finding the sweet spots where accuracy, power, and practicality intersected.
After two weeks of single-shot success, Thalien judged him ready for the next step.
"Repeating rifles. The Dwarves had lever-actions before the Concordance. Tube magazines under the barrel. Workable, but limited. The pointed bullets you're using would detonate primers in a tube magazine. Need a different approach."
Oswyn had been thinking about this. "Box magazine. Spring-loaded. Bullets stack vertically, not horizontally."
"Show me."
The design came together painfully slowly. Oswyn had to hand-forge springs, learning their temper through trial and error. Too soft and they wouldn't feed reliably. Too hard and they'd snap under compression.
But the real challenge was the action.
A lever-action was mechanically complex, with multiple moving parts that had to time perfectly.
His first attempt locked up solid after three shots. The second wouldn't extract spent cases. The third launched its locking block across the room on the first shot, nearly taking his eye out.
"Maybe..." he studied the failed mechanisms. "Maybe ...
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