Chapter 1701 - Science And Magic (Part 1)
The soldiers obeyed the order, using a mix of fire and darkness magic to make all but the load-bearing walls crumble.
The nobles could finally get out of the reinforcement's way while the Doppelgangers had to choose between holding their ground and being killed or escaping by blending in with the crowd.
Unfortunately for them, the choice was quickly taken out of their hands.
Phloria had arrived for a while, but all she could do was to keep watch from the outside with Life Vision while filling Reaver to the brim with spells.
Rushing in meant revealing a power capable of ignoring the city arrays. She had been forced to wait and hope that nothing bad would happen until a reasonable time to justify her arrival had passed.
As for Friya, she had spent the time before the destruction of the walls trying to figure out Lith's weapon.
'I wish that cheapskate had allowed me to practice with the Fixed Tracks Metal Barrel, but he said that if I did, it would consume charges that he wasn't willing to pay for.' She thought.
'On top of that, Salaark forbid me to use it in the Desert and when I asked Faluel to test it in her cave she freaked out. Let's hope that I understood enough from Lith's explanation to make it work.'
The weapon looked like a stringless crossbow ending in a giant tuning fork longer than her arms. Friya inserted a cylinder with a blue crystal at the base of the weapon and heard a humming sound as electric arcs built up between the fork's extremities.
'Unlike artifacts, alchemical tools don't suffer from the sealing arrays since the spells they use have already been cast and their elemental energy stored inside by their crafter.
'They would be great, if not for being limited to tier three spells and the impossibility to imbue them with willpower since user and caster don't match. That's why only magicless people want alchemical tools while mages only want artifacts.' She inwardly sighed.
After a few seconds, the blue gemstone blinked and Friya inserted an odd rectangular-shaped metal box right below the tuning fork, like Lith had instructed her to.
'I wonder why he put two handles yet he nagged at me not to grab the removable one while firing the Fixed Tracks Metal Barrel. It would make aiming easier.' Almost in reply to her question, a click followed.
A small piece of metal moved from the box and into the middle of the fork where it floated in mid-air, completing the circuit.
Now the current traveled from the power source up one of the forks, through the metal which acted as a connecting wire, and back down the other fork. The electric arcs disappeared as the electricity coming from the power source could flow freely and create a powerful magnetic field.
'Okay, I'm done with this nonsense. Let's see how it wor-' Friya aimed at one of the giants that were walking through the collapsed walls and pressed the trigger.
The electricity in the fork surged, but instead of producing a bolt of lightning like she expected, it pushed the enchanted metal forward and out of the fork.
The projectile moved at supersonic speed, enveloped in a golden light caused by the air magic that reduced the air resistance and kept the friction from pulverizing the bullet.
The recoil from the shot, however, dislocated Friya's shoulder and sent her tumbling down the roof.
'That moron! Not everyone weighs a few tons. He should have warned me.' Lith actually had, recommending her to always have a solid footing and a strong grip, but Friya had thought that he was being anal retentive as usual.
She was a blue cored Awakened, not a weak human after all.
Friya stopped the fall with a flight spell and recovered the weapon with spirit magic as a roar of thunder followed the projectile hitting something.
'Oh, shit!' She thought while looking at the crater that had replaced one of the rooms on the first floor of the mansion.
In spite of the protective arrays of the house, the stone floor was collapsing onto the ballroom, making the fight even more chaotic. The air resistance was reduced but it was still there, and the recoil had thrown her aim off even further.
Friya shifted to a kneeled stance, using full elemental fusion to stabilize her arms before pulling the trigger again. Yet aside from the electric arcs building up again nothing happened.
'Okay. The good news is that now I have the time to think about how to properly aim the next shot. The even better news is that once I get back to the Desert, I'm going to kick Lith's ass big time.' Friya took a series of deep breaths and as soon as the blue gem blinked again, she made her move.
She had created the Scope spell to spy at her enemies and to hit them with her rapier, Dreadnought, from a distance, but it worked perfectly for the situation at hand as well.
It was the reason why Lith had entrusted her the first model of the magical version of a railgun that he had devised. Tyris' universal language had no word to describe it and Fixed Tracks Metal Barrel didn't have a nice ring to it but Lith didn't care for the name until he was sure that it worked.
The second shot still hurt Friya's arms but her aim stayed true. The projectile entered Scope and came out almost at point-blank range from the Doppelganger. The upper body of the giant exploded like a water balloon, making Friya and all those that were watching the fight freeze in amazement.
'How can something so small do so much damage?' Friya thought while waiting for the arcs to charge up.
Lith knew the principles behind a railgun, but he had always lacked the engineering knowledge and the materials necessary to make one. At least until Aalejah the elf had explained to him what the Thunderstone Flower in his possession was and how to use it.
The Thunderstone Flower had the ability to harmonize the earth and the air element, allowing anything that was imbued with its essence to retain the hardness of earth while also still being capable of tapping into the air element's full potential.
Without it, Lith would have never had the means to create a magnetic field strong enough to charge the bullets. On top of that, the Thunderstone Flower was also involved in the making of the projectiles.
Projectiles without a magical aura, no matter how fast they moved, would have been rendered useless by the gravity sheathe of any enchanted armor. Also, unless Lith wasted magical metals to make the bullets, the friction and the high temperature would have destroyed any kind of material before it reached the target.
The railgun was the product of a mix of Alchemy and Forgemastery. The weapon itself was an artifact with a complex series of pseudo cores that would just keep the magnetic field stable and cool down the rails in-between shots.
The projectiles, instead, were an alchemical tool. Lith had enchanted them with the air and earth element not only to be superconductors, but also to compensate for his ignorance about aerodynamics.
It made them very expensive, but the pros surpassed the cons.