Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

God, it was way too hot. Jack had already taken off his jacket, leaving him in the thinnest of shirts, but even that was covered in his sweat. Just about every part of him was wet, too hot, and leaving him like he wanted to collapse.

“You sure he’s made for this, Aleksi?” the smith asked the giant who’d led him over to the smithy. While the owner of the place wasn’t as physically large as Aleksi, Jack could still see muscles that rivaled strongmen from the old world. “Kid’s falling apart just being in here.”

“I wasn’t better at the start, Lugh,” Aleksi defended. Jack ignored the two men's laughing that ensued. “Okay, maybe I was a smidge more resistant to the heat, but even you needed a bit to get used to it.”

How the hell did either of the other two handle the heat so easily? They were sweating and covered from head to toe due to the moisture, just like Jack, yet they could work and chat without a moment’s pause. The smith’s hammer pounded the red metal on the anvil with enough strength to make sparks fly, and for Jack’s ears to hurt at the sound that came from it, yet they kept on going without worry.

He was an ant compared to the giants.

“Kid!” the smith shouted, getting Jack’s attention before he could even try to distract himself from the heat. “Hammer furthest to the left with the rough steel handle.”

A new one for a different type of job. Jack didn’t understand all the steps yet, not even sure what they were making, but finding hammers was something he could do. Following the instructions, he went to the leftmost part of the rack before finding the one with the handle of steel. The hammer-head was longer than the first one, but still maintained the round sides that—

Jack nearly fell forward as he took out the tool and held it on his own, the hammer stupidly heavy.

“Come here with it, before I have to put this slab back in!” Lugh shouted, making Jack hurry up and take the ten steps needed. The smith took the hammer with one hand before seamlessly putting it to work, hitting the metal as if it weighed nothing at all. “Kid needs some muscle as well if you want him helping out here.”

“Muscle appears with time,” Aleksi replied, the smith looking at the giant with an amused look.

“Some twigs break instead of growing thick.”

“Come now, that is a little rude.”

“No offense taken,” Jack assured the smith as he kept looking at the work. “And if it counts for something, I used to have a little more on me.”

Not something at their level, but definitely enough to work with. Carrying around heavy equipment wasn’t an unusual task in his old line of work, with how many changes the higher ranked constantly wanted. Too many orders without the understanding that fulfilling them took time.

“What changed? Forgot to keep it up for a year?” Lugh questioned, not sounding like he believed him.

“Something like that,” Jack said, leaning over to see better before noticing something at the other corner of the work area. “You’re making sheet metal here?”

“Aye, we got a thinner over there,” the smith replied, before putting down his current work in the tub of water next to him. Blazingly hot steam shot up into the air, making Jack take a step back. “Proper axe head there, don’t you think?”

“Not bad at all,” Aleksi agreed. “The first of many?”

“Of course!” Lugh shouted, the two old men laughing once again. Jack couldn’t say he was following their conversation after that, though, the sheet metal dragging him in with its alluring promises. “If you want, kid, we’ve got too many of these sheets. The bastards didn’t give me the right number needed and refused to pay for the extras. If you know how to cut them without breaking my stuff, you can use them.”

Of course, they had the tools here to cut metal. And there were all kinds of different sizes!

“You sure that’s a good idea, Lugh?”

“You’re the one that wanted me to give him a chance. Here’s the chance,” Lugh said, ignoring Aleksi’s worrying. “So? What exactly are you fantasizing about making?”

“A pistol,” Jack replied, not looking at the smith as he considered his options. Making the frame and side plates, trigger guard, most of the magazine, and the side rails would be relatively simple to do, but the smaller hammer pack parts, trigger, the magazine spring, and the rifling for the barrel would be a bit more complicated. Though… Even trying something like that out as a first attempt wouldn’t be too good if it didn’t work, so wouldn’t it be better if he went as simple as he possibly could? A cylinder closed up in one end, with a small hole on top and a handle to stop his hand from getting burnt. Basically just a handheld cannon that had to be reloaded like the founding fathers did it. “... What? Did you say something?”

The smith and Aleksi were just looking at him as he looked at the sheet metal, making it all work in his mind. Was he supposed to explain himself or what?

“You really bring strange people here sometimes, Aleksi,” Lugh commented. “I thought Elijah wasn’t all there, but he seems mighty normal in comparison to this.”

Rude.

“Sorry, I was lost in thought,” Jack apologized. “What was the question?”

“What is a ‘pistol,’ kid?” Lugh said, each word said loudly and clearly. “We don’t have all of those fancy things you might have in whatever place you came from, so you have to use more common words around the uneducated.”

Right. He was being made fun of. Not a first for Jack, but certainly a first when it came to guns.

“A pistol,” Jack repeated, getting the ‘look’ in response. “A gun, you know? You point it, pull the trigger, and a bullet shoots out?”

“Is he talking about those boomsticks the dwarves use?” the smith asked Aleksi who could only shrug. “What, is he some kind of half-and-half like you?”

“Still fully human, Lugh,” the giant said, before prompting Jack to continue with the explanation. Something he wasn’t too sure on how to go about, since these people had never heard much about guns before.

Pistols, of the flintlock variant or even older than that, had never been seen much of. Jack, for lack of a better description, was confused as hell about that fact. These people had magical powers, the ability to manifest so many materials, and simplify so many tasks that would normally be so complex, yet never had they thought to put together black powder and a cylinder.

“We have many types of crazy people around these parts, kid, but I can say for certain almost all of them wouldn’t touch something that’s meant to make small explosions while you hold it,” Lugh retorted, shaking his head at the thought. “Dwarves might trust their hands to withstand it, but we’re a bit less dense. A dose of black powder is going to take your fingers off clean if you let it.”

Aleksi didn’t come to his defense this time around, but neither he nor Lugh actively stopped him from trying it out. While they thought him mildly insane for wanting to do it, one understood that he had years of experience handling them while the other wanted to see what would happen.

And Jack was meant to be the crazy one.

He didn’t reject the offer to have free reins though, taking up the chance to work to his heart’s delight. It almost made the sweltering heat in the room bearable, as he got one of the thinner sheets up. Good weight to it, more than durable enough for the first test, and not impossible to get into a cylinder shape after he found the proper tools for the job.

Working with a thinner size at first seemed responsible, so Jack cut it so that it could use around 9-millimeter projectiles. It wasn’t exact, as doing anything precise was downright impossible, but he got it close enough to be satisfied.

Closing up one end without a welder or anything close to it nearby was a little harder, which required help from Lugh and Aleksi who used the forge. Since keeping the shape precise wasn’t the highest priority, making use of rough forge welding allowed them to get one end closed up tightly. While they were at it, they also added on a handle that was only a little too thin after the smith was done with it.

The last hole on top only needed a few minutes of patience from Jack’s side to bore, and… there it was, barely an hour of work before he had a working prototype.

“So where are you planning to find the black powder, kid?”

“Oh, I’ve planned ahead, actually,” Jack said, pulling the airtight glass filled with near-magical goodness from his pocket. “Give me a second.”

The annoying thing about standing around in a room of pure moisture was the ability for it to ruin the past day’s worth of gunpowder, and Jack wasn’t emotionally prepared to lose that much without seeing some results in response.

So he went out into the front part, where the air was nice and dry, before starting the actual loading of the handheld cannon. This luckily wasn’t as complex a procedure as the preparation of cartridges in modern weapons, but it still took a while to do. The fuse used had to be put into place, and then the gunpowder could be carefully added into the barrel before being shoved all the way down to the end with a small rod. After that came a small separator made of paper he crumpled together before shoving it in as well. When this was done, and it all had settled nicely, he could put in the main star of the show. The small metal ball that fit snugly into the cylinder, was just barely able to go through without getting stuck on anything.

Because if it did, and it could sit in place under more pressure than the cylinder could, it wouldn’t be fun.

But there was no such issue here, from what Jack could tell, and he entered back into the main area of the smithy where the two others had aired out to allow the moisture to fall a little bit in strength.

“Didn’t think I would have to wear one of these myself ever again,” Lugh commented, handing Jack the ear protection that he hadn’t been told about when clutching at his ears two hours ago. “You sure it’s gonna be loud enough for this to be worth it?”

“Hopefully,” Jack replied, putting on some safety goggles used while cleaning the inside of the forge before accepting the burning straw. “You ready?”

“You’ve used eight silver’s worth of metal for this, kid,” the smith replied. “I’m ready to see you blow your hand off.”

What a great vote of confidence from the two men standing five meters back to avoid any possible shrapnel. Smart of them, honestly, since there was the chance of something shooting back at them, and Jack was the only one with goggles on.

As for the target? Old bags of sand that the smith had hoped to make Jack transfer the contents over to newer bags that didn’t threaten to break open at any point in time. The perfect targets that were relatively risk-free, if you ignored the fact that the bullet might be lost if it went a little deep into one of the bags.

If it flew the two meters needed to get over there even.

“Firing!” Jack warned, gloves on as he lit the fuse and did his best to not shake. Trying to fire it the first time while holding the damn thing was possibly not the smartest thing in the world, but he liked to show confidence in his own work.

I am not confident at all.

It was way too late for that thought, as the fuse reached the cylinder and inside, the world briefly turned much brighter before an incredibly loud bang was heard through the room. Not as much recoil as Jack had expected, though there was a chance his arms had just locked into place so hard that he didn’t feel it.

Wait, shit, this is hot!

“Fair enough with the ear protection, kid,” Lugh said, as Jack fought to get the burning-hot prototype onto the table instead of dropping it to the floor. The back where the gunpowder had detonated beautifully had heated up quite a bit before transferring it down to the handle. Even with the improvised gloves on, a few seconds of pressing his fingers against it had shown consequences. “No fingers lost?”

“Not a single one,” Jack replied, shaking the pain away as he followed the smith over to the sandbags. From the front, he could already see that the bullet had entered right through the middle of the pile, the center bag steadily spilling sand onto the floor. “Precise shot from my end, I need to say.”

“Aye, you shot straight,” the smith agreed, taking the sandbag up to fish out the metal bullet before pausing. “Oh, by the Great Crafter himself, your little finger remover has some kick to it!”

The bag behind the first one had been shot through as well, the former’s removal allowing sand to flow from it as well.

And the one behind the second had a similar story to tell…

Though the bags weren’t industrial-sized, Jack still had to chuckle at the sight. It didn’t get through the third and final one completely, the sand finally getting ground and stopping the bullet from reaching the stone wall. His dream had been to have it reach through one of the damn things, and here he was with proof of potential. Maybe with properly portioned gunpowder next try, but this was a good first test regardless.

Jack had just made a working gun, handheld cannon or not, and he was damned proud of it.