Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1209: Testing Result

Danny took the gun and felt the weight shift in his hands immediately.

Heavier than a standard rifle — noticeably so. He turned it over. Apart from a second tube running the length of the barrel, the weapon looked like an ordinary bolt rifle, though rougher in its finish than his own high-precision piece. The second tube was the change that mattered: it ran all the way to the base of the barrel and joined the bolt.

That connection was where the steady fire came from. He was certain of it before he fired a single round.

He raised the weapon, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. But instead of watching the muzzle, he fixed his eyes on the iron tube along the barrel’s side.

The gun shuddered as the bullet left. In the same instant, something moved. It was fast enough that a less attentive eye would have missed it entirely: the bolt shifted. The rod inside the iron tube punched forward, then retracted, dragging with it a small metal shard attached to its end.

Under normal circumstances, that shard was fixed to the bolt — pull it forcibly and the rod would snap. But the groove cut through the shard’s middle changed everything. It let the bolt retract and unlock in the same motion.

Then the sequence reversed. Rod back into the tube. Bolt to its original position. Shard sliding home, locking the bore.

An elegant piece of engineering. Even someone who had never touched a weapon could watch the mechanism run and understand it. The rod was doing four things at once — pushing, pulling, lifting, pressing — and completing the cycle without any hand involved. The gun restored itself.

Danny fired through all twenty rounds, the smell of burnt powder rising around him and that familiar voice arriving in his ear, the way it always did when he was at work.

“You missed one out of twenty,” Malt said. “Not used to the new weapon?”

“I haven’t got used to it yet. Watch the next round — I won’t miss any.”

“Watch what?” a voice said, confused.

Danny came back. He was in a shooting range, not a battlefield. A ring of onlookers surrounded him. He looked toward the Artillery Battalion commander — the man’s expression somewhere between baffled and hopeful — and shook his head. “Nothing. Thinking aloud.”

“Nineteen out of twenty,” Van’er said, a hand dropping onto Danny’s shoulder. “And you’re not satisfied. That really is something.” He asked, carefully casual, “So — what do you think?”

Danny knew perfectly well about the rivalry between the Artillery and Gun Battalions. But both battalions served the king. That was the simpler truth, and he honored it.

“It’s very good,” he said. “A little unstable, a little heavy. But if it’s possible — I’d like to see the sniper team get an upgraded version too.”

He meant it honestly. At fifty and a hundred meters, the gun matched a standard rifle for accuracy. The extra weight was manageable; neither the sniper team nor the artillery had to fire on the move or hold a ready stance for hours at a stretch.

The real strength was the rate of fire. Snipers currently lost precious seconds repositioning between shots after a miss — readjusting, re-acquiring the target — and in those seconds the target was often gone. This weapon compressed that interval close to nothing. Fire again immediately. In a mass engagement, that would matter enormously.

Van’er’s grin had the particular quality of a man who has built something and watched it work. “It’s only a preliminary design. If you could help us refine it further, I’d feel a lot more comfortable presenting it to Sir Iron Axe.”

He believed — Danny could see it plainly — that if the sniper team adopted a weapon born in the Artillery Battalion, that settled something between him and Brian.

Danny agreed for simpler reasons: he liked firearms that killed demons efficiently, he liked the smell of powder, and Malt’s voice was always clearest when he was working with something new. “Happy to help, Commander.”

They shook on it.

Roland heard about the weapon a few days later.

As soldiers from the Artillery Battalion increasingly occupied the Second Mechanic Plant, the plant superintendent reported the situation to the Administrative Office, which forwarded it to the Minister of Engineering. Anna brought Roland a duplicate sample.

He turned it in his hands. The design was crude — the additional tube rode exposed in open air, vulnerable to impact and fouling. Under sustained use it would break down regularly, demanding constant maintenance. But the artillery didn’t need sustained use. They fired in concentrated intervals.

“What do you think?” Anna asked, watching him with quiet amusement.

“There’s a great deal that could be done with this,” Roland said, setting it down. “But it’s a good sign. It means soldiers are starting to think independently — figuring out what they actually need and building toward it. The advantages are obvious: minimal cost, simple modification.”

A full army conversion would spike bullet consumption steeply. The frontline soldiers relying on HMGs didn’t necessarily need successive fire, which would contain the impact. But in the right hands, this mattered.

“Then let’s help them,” Anna said.

With Anna’s involvement, the design was quickly finalized. The bolt and piston gave way to a more flexible latch structure, and the joint was encased in a shell that stabilized the mechanism and largely solved the jamming problem. A section of the air duct was trimmed away, and the weapon was officially upgraded. Roland named the new rifle after Van’er.

The Ministry of Engineering’s inbox promptly filled with suggestions and feedback from soldiers across the battalions.

Roland read through the reports and felt something that had nothing to do with the rifle itself. Universal education had been a long, slow investment — years of classrooms and primers and teachers trained from scratch — and this was what it yielded: soldiers who encountered a problem and built a solution. The weapon was a fine piece of improvised engineering. The thought behind it was the thing worth celebrating.

He was still sitting with that when another report arrived.

Celine had found a breakthrough in the research of the Magic Ceremony Cube. Working through the sixth batch of cube replicates, she had found a way to significantly reduce uranium consumption.

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