“Every Yuwen ingot carries a certificate of origin. The certificate is your guarantee of purity and composition. Stock without certificates cannot offer that guarantee. We recommend purchasing accordingly.”— Yuwen Corp, Customer Advisory
The train slid away from the platform and left me standing in air I could taste.
Scavantis MegaBuilding 11 was five stations down, but I could see the tower from here without a problem. Buildings around were even more industrial, and here the East Corporate District had its own atmosphere. Well, not in the sense that the tourist guides used, but in that the air. Something chemical and something that almost certainly had a regulatory exposure limit that was actively ignored.
I checked my holoband. Tanaka Metalworks & Reclamation, also listed as Crucible, was four blocks east and one south. Eddy recommended I visit her, and if I didn’t do that before I visited Eddy, he would not only laugh, but I would get diagnosed as ADHD for forgetting about it.
I started walking.
The streets out here did not pretend to want me. The sidewalks were wide enough for cargo loaders, and the few people I saw wore branded coveralls, not much different from what I got earlier for the ball and dropped off at home. A delivery drone the size of Erika’s car descended onto a loading pad two blocks away, and the downwash kicked grit across the street.
I pulled the collar of the coat higher and walked faster.
The street narrowed into a service alley between two structures so large I had to tilt my head back to find their upper floors.
Both buildings were corporate logistics; the alley between them was a strip of cracked permacrete maybe four meters wide, with a drainage channel running down the center that I would not be touching anytime soon.
The alley dead-ended in a cargo door.
The door was dented in three or four places and painted in layers of graffiti that had been painted over and then re-graffitied. To the left of the door was a keypad, and above the keypad was a holo-sign that flickered through three states: fully lit, half lit, off. Randomly. I wanted to take it apart, fix the connection, but I held myself back.
The sign said CRUCIBLE. There was no other sign that this was a place of business. I pressed the button on the keypad.
A speaker crackled. “What.”
“Hi? I’m Dash. Eddy sent me.”
The cargo door began to roll up slowly, with a grinding sound. I ducked under it before it had finished its travel.
The first thing I noticed inside was the smell of wet metal and cutting fluid.
The second thing I noticed was the sound; a soft, constant hum from the magnetic systems holding the inventory in place, layered over the distant clamps of a sorting mechanism somewhere out of sight, engaging and disengaging in a rhythm.
The third thing was the inventory.
The bay was the size of three Scavantis floors stacked on top of each other, and every wall, was a vertical canyon of scrap metal organized by what could only be alloy composition. Power conduits in one stack. Engine blocks in another. Something that might once have been a corporate transport’s chassis, partially disassembled, in a third. The stacks were held in position by magnetic clamps the size of dinner plates, set at intervals up the walls, and the inventory rose meters above my head and kept going until the stacks faded into the upper shadows of the ceiling.
The aisles between the stacks were just wide enough for an automatic forklift.
I took two steps in and stopped, because I had no idea where I was supposed to go. “Uh, hello?”
“UP HERE.”
I followed the voice up.
She was twenty meters above the floor, strapped into the harness of a gantry crane that ran on a rail along the ceiling. The crane held a pair of magnetic claws, and the claws were extracting a power conduit halfway up one of the stacks, while leaving the conduits above and below it undisturbed.
I watched the conduit free itself from the stack with about half a centimeter of clearance on either side, swing outward into the aisle, and descend in a controlled arc to a sorting platform on the floor.
The claws released. The gantry retracted. The woman in the harness swung herself out into open air, snapped a grav-lift to her belt, and dropped twenty meters in a slow vertical descent that ended with her boots touching the floor about three meters from where I was standing.
She unhooked the grav-lift, wiped her hands on a rag from a coverall pocket, and looked at me.
The mask covered the lower half of her face. Black, industrial, twin filtration cartridges at the cheeks. The eyes above it were dark, narrow. “COME HERE.” She turned and headed for the center of the bay without checking that I was following.
The platform in the middle of the bay was a salvaged cockpit.
Whatever vehicle it had originally been part of, the cockpit was now perched on a steel column rising five meters out of the floor, accessed by a narrow staircase that wound around the column. The cockpit itself had been gutted and rebuilt. The original pilot’s chair was gone, replaced with a workstation chair that had seen better decades. The main viewport was intact, looking out across the bay. The secondary viewports had been replaced with monitor banks.
I followed her up the staircase.
The monitors showed real-time market prices for tungsten, palladium, ferro-titanium, and a dozen alloys I did not recognize, scrolling in red and green columns. Spectrographic analysis readouts were on a second screen, currently showing a composition breakdown of something labeled SAMPLE 14-C.
Inventory tracking on what looked like the magnetic clamp system, with each stack rendered as a vertical bar with status indicators.
A security feed of the alley outside, including, I noticed, a wide-angle of the door I had just come through, and a tighter angle on the keypad, and a third angle that covered the approach from the cross-street.
She had watched me walk in. She had probably watched me before that.
She dropped into the workstation chair, swung it to face me, pulled the mask down to her chin, revealing a face that was younger than her voice, maybe early forties, but like with Mom, it was hard to tell. She had a healed burn scar running along the jawline from earlobe to chin and gestured at a small folding stool that someone had bolted to the platform.
I sat.
The stool was lower than her chair, which was probably the point. My eyeline arrived at roughly the level of the workstation’s lower monitor bank, and I tilted my head up and tried to look natural about it.
“Materials,” she said.
“To make slugs,” I said. “Coilgun rounds. Tungsten cores, ferro-titanium jackets. Eddy said you’d have stock.”
She watched me. “En masse, or only you?”
“Only me.”
“Battle rating?”
I had the answer halfway out before I caught what she’d asked. “I, uh. Don’t know?”
“Kid.” Her voice was level. “If you’re buying slug stock and you don’t know what BR is, learn it first. Buy books about system, read it, come back.”
“Right.” I could already feel the heat in my ears. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Tell me a level instead. Level’s a fine proxy.”
“Twenty,” I said. “Better thirty if it’s the same stock.”
She nodded, swung the chair to her monitor bank, and started cross-referencing. Her left hand moved through screens I could not parse at this angle: an inventory grid in cool blue, the market ticker still bleeding red and green from the morning’s price action, a third panel she scrolled for less than half a second and closed. She muttered something, glanced at the tungsten ticker, and the inventory grid resolved into a smaller subset of highlighted line items.
“Yeah,” she swung back. “I can be your supplier. Tungsten core or equivalent, ferro-titanium jackets, cobalt-chrome if you ever want ablative tips. Where do I deliver? I don’t open net accounts with people I haven’t seen. You walked through my door, I get to look at you. That’s the cost of working remote after this.” Small shrug. “Plus, delivery rates vary. So, where?”
“Central District.”
She laughed. A single bark only though. “Central District. You came all the way to East Corporate to scrape margin off raw stock, and you live in Central.”
I let out an unintentional groan and shook my head. “It’s complicated.”
“It always is.” She wasn’t pushing, just enjoying it by her tone. “Doesn’t matter. Central’s the cheapest delivery zone because of the security density. The cargo route runs through three private patrol grids. Nobody jacks the trucks. Out in the brackets I price in five to ten percent for theft variance. Central, the variance is zero. Pure transit cost.” She tilted her head. “Timing?”
“Not urgent. I have inventory from Eddy that’ll carry the next batch. But I could buy more raw stock on top of it. Stockpile.”
She gave me a small nod. “Documentation?”
“What about it?” I was confused. Does metal have a spec sheet?
“Do you need paper. Chain of custody. Document that says where the metal came from before it came to me.”
I shook my head.
She nodded. Then she looked at me longer than she had so far. Assessing in a different register. After three seconds of it, she said: “Eddy says you’re reliable, kid. Want a five percent discount?”
I knew the moment she said it that the discount was not free. Eddy’s discounts were not free either, although Eddy at least pretended. “What do I have to do for it?”
She grinned. The burn scar moved along the jawline. “Take a backpack to Eddy. Now.”
I let out a long breath.
The exhale gave me time to think. Eddy had recommended her, which meant Eddy worked with her and… was probably safe. This could be a test if this stupid central kid is reliable. I touched the holster at my hip.
“Will there be a problem with them?” I tilted my head down toward the holster.
She glanced. Then her eyebrows climbed as the brushed silver Sentinel emblem on the grip registered.
She laughed. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, kid.”
“What.”
“You’re carrying Sentinel.”
“I know.”
“You’re walking around in a coat over a yellow hoodie with a Sentinel commemorative on your hip, and you’re asking me if there’ll be trouble carrying a bag from my shop to Eddy’s.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s a no.” She wiped the corner of her eye with a knuckle. “Nobody’s going to stop you. But if someone does—tell them the truth. Where you got it. Where it’s going. That’s how trust gets built, kid. Both ways.”
I thought about it. Eddy had sent me to her. Eddy did not send people to people he did not trust. “Fine.”
She pressed something on the workstation.
A platform set into the floor of the bay, a meter and a half across, lit up at its edges in soft amber and moved along a recessed track I had not noticed coming in. It threaded between two of the alloy stacks and arrived at the base of the cockpit column carrying a black backpack of sturdy industrial weave with no logo and no markings.
I stood, descended the staircase, and lifted the bag.
The bag was heavier than I thought.
She watched me from the cockpit and laughed in my face. She came halfway down the staircase, flicked a small card off her thumb the way someone flicked a coin, and I caught it. Black plastic, single gold contact on the back with no text.
“Call me when you want the alloys, kid. I’ll quote you then. Prices are different every day.”
I left through the cargo door I had come through.
The sign above the keypad kept flickering through its three states of broken. I walked back down the alley with the bag slung over my left shoulder, balanced against the holster on my right hip, and tried to look like someone who carried weighted bags through East Corporate logistics alleys for a living.
The walk to the station was longer with the bag.
After the ride to Ashford Terminal, the walk was longer still. By the time I pushed open the door of Eddy’s Affordable Parts and the doorbell made its tired beep, my left shoulder was sore.
Eddy looked up.
His eyes went to my face, then to the bag, then back to my face. “Lad,” he said. “Got a message from Tanaka you’ll be arriving. But backpack?”
“Yes.”
A slow grin. “She gave you the discount, didn’t she?”
I set the bag on the counter, it made the counter creak. He looked into the bag for a long second, and whatever was in there matched whatever he had been expecting, because he nodded once and zipped it closed again.
“Lad. Want to see?”
I weighed it. The polite answer was probably to look. The smart answer was probably not to, because looking would make me a witness to something. “Better not. General contents?”
He laughed. “Components. Specifically,” he thought for a second. “Components that fell off the back of a corpo delivery.”
“Fell off…” I let out another sigh. “Recently?”
“Recently enough.” A fonder grin, the same grin he had used on the Syntavelli customer. He pulled the bag gently off the counter onto the floor behind him, where it disappeared from my line of sight. “I won’t bore you with the details, lad. The discount’s earned. Tanaka and I do this dance perhaps once a fortnight.”
He rested his elbows on the counter. “Anything else I can do for you, lad?”
There were two things. There was the revolver and the emitters. The twelve emitters I now needed to buy a second time, because my brain had failed.
The emitters were the worse conversation.
The emitters could wait. I set the revolver on the counter. “You were right,” I said. “Identify it. Please.”
To his credit, Eddy did not laugh. “Three-fifty for the scan,” he said. “Plus reagents. Plus time.”
“Fine.” Eddy bent over the revolver and his monocle cycled. I watched the lens shift through the unfamiliar modes I had seen the previous afternoon, and a few that were new. Eddy’s eyebrows climbed, slow.
The first reagent went onto an applicator. The applicator went onto a glyph along the barrel.
The amber along the glyph dimmed.
Then it brightened.
“Lad, you’ve got a good weapon!”
Note: Okay, let's build the revolver together!
With your comments, talking with people on discord and some good 'ol imagination, I gathered possible enchantments, it's a multiple choice. I will pick top three for the weapon. :)
If you think a cool enchantment is missing let me know in comment, maybe we can teach Dash to do it? ^^
PS: Looks like there's an issue with Patreon app, it refuses to work properly :( If you have duplicate choices, vote for the latter, that should work. Web version works fine. Let me know in comments and I'll count it.
Dash needs to re-power the enchantments after he spends all rounds (TBD how it works)
[1. Inertial Amplifier Matrix]+25% Base Kinetic Damage. Mana is drawn passively from the environment to accelerate the projectile after it clears the muzzle, flattening the trajectory and drastically increasing terminal kinetic impact.
[2. Sequential Escalation Protocol]+10% Damage per consecutive hit. Requires consecutive impacts on the same biological or structural target. Bonus compounds (+10%, +20%, +30%, up to cylinder capacity). Sequence resets upon a missed shot, target switch, or manual reload.
[3. Gyroscopic Stabilization]Recoil absorption and barrel-flip negation (85% reduction). Kinetic kickback is vented harmlessly as heat along the frame’s internal channels, ensuring pinpoint re-targeting.
[4. Structural Integrity Lock]Anti-tampering matrix. Locks the physical mass, resonance, and geometry of the weapon. Any unauthorized alteration to the grip, barrel, or housing disrupts the flow of mana, permanently breaking the internal circuitry and bricking the firearm.
[5. Phase-Shift]Partial barrier bypass. The projectile briefly matches the frequency of shielding upon leaving the barrel, ignoring up to 50% of any mana-based defensive field upon impact.
[6. Synaptic Quick-Draw Assist]Weight mitigation. Reduces the weapon's physical resistance to zero during the first 0.5 seconds after clearing the holster. Grants a +40% bonus to initial target acquisition and draw speed.
[7. Thermal Dissipation Lattice]Zero-friction chambering. Heat generated by consecutive firing is instantly converted into ambient magic (the pulsing amber glow) rather than warming the barrel, ensuring a 0% chance of mechanical jamming or barrel warping.
[8. Kinetic Reclaimer]Captures a fraction of the residual kinetic energy from the internal firing mechanism and feeds it back into the weapon's own enchantment matrix, ensuring the ambient enchantments never require an external mana battery to remain powered.Note: If we pick this, Dash doesn't need to re-power enchantments ever.
[9. Concussive Muzzle Venting]Alters the acoustics of the muzzle report. Instead of a standard gunshot sound, the weapon vents excess mana as a directed acoustic shockwave in a 15-degree frontal cone, causing minor physical disorientation to targets within 3 meters of the muzzle.
[10. Acoustic Void Projection]Total audio-visual signature reduction. Projects a micro-vacuum envelope around the cylinder and muzzle for 0.02 seconds precisely upon discharge. The mechanical cycling of the chamber and the explosive report of the round are completely absorbed and negated, rendering the firearm quiet. The suppressed sonic energy is consumed to perfectly eliminate muzzle flash.