The Strongest Gun Magus: I Cast Bullet!-Chapter 68: Golden Gun, Start

Reynard whistled.

"Wow. So..."

Marien turned from Frozen Balance to Reynard and scowled.

"This is such scoundrel behavior from you! Thinking about marriage with an heiress for the sake of her riches..." Marien’s scowl turned into a pout. "Is this why you seduced me, too? Just for my money?"

Reynard grabbed Marien’s hand and stared pleadingly into her eyes.

"No! No, never! I fell in love with your charming pout and your eyes that shine like sapphires and the way you blush when I give you these compliments!" When Reynard saw that Marien was sufficiently embarrassed and placated, he added, "But your help was incredibly valuable to my advancement in life."

Marien huffed, but smiled reluctantly.

"You are such... Oh, I don’t even have a word! Let’s just return to Darland. Chili surely misses you, and I miss him!"

Reynard grinned.

"Right. Mister Frozen Balance, will you come with us? Or... How are we going to transport you back to Amelia?"

"I will wait for her here," Frozen Balance said.

The bird fluffed its ice feathers, becoming even more similar to an ordinary bullfinch. Even its magical aura became more subdued and hard to notice.

Satisfied that the bird won’t fly away, Reynard took out his Repeating Bird pendant and called out for Amelia. She responded quickly this time.

"Oh, you have finished your training? I see. Congratulations! Although I expected nothing less from people of your talents. Please, tell me where the Frozen Balance is."

When Reynard explained their location as well as he could, Amelia added,

"Thank you. Don’t wait for me to appear—remember that we shouldn’t be seen together. Return to the city. Everything else is for me to worry about."

***

Chili really had missed Reynard. In the past weeks, the Forge-Boar seemingly grew another palm in height, although this surely couldn’t have been. In a few months, he was going to grow as tall as Reynard’s chest.

Whenever Reynard released him to play in the outside yard, the boar stomped all over the young grass there, exhaling huge puffs of flame and smoke.

It took a couple of days to deal with the matters that accumulated in Reynard’s absence, but then he was yet again ready to try smithing the magical gold lump.

The refined and balanced mana in his Inner Athanor gave Reynard twice as much mana circulation as he had before.

For two weeks, he practiced his spells, adapting them to his changed aura and making sure he could still cast them with assurance.

Then, Reynard pulled out the lump of gold and put it into a furnace.

First, he cast Spirit Armor on himself.

Second, he created a Bound Flame in the furnace, quickly making it white-hot.

Each of these spells took almost half of Reynard’s current mana reserve, but now that they were active, he only needed a small amount of focus to keep them up.

Grinning in anticipation, Reynard took a new smithing hammer from a work table.

He bought this hammer five days ago in preparation for this moment. Unlike his regular, steel hammer, this one was smaller, but much heavier. Its head was made from a block of granite, carefully cut and polished into the shape of a smithing hammer.

For an ordinary smith, it was too heavy to swing all day long, but for Reynard, it was perfect. It also made his strikes more powerful, which was good for dealing with a metal as tough as this magical gold.

His other instruments were smithing tongs made from a temperature-resistant steel alloy. Reynard knew that it would still heat terribly in the Bound Flame, but it was the best he could find on the local market.

He set to work.

DING! DING! DING!

Reynard had to squint to see the magical gold through Bound Flame. Despite the Spirit Armor’s protection, he still felt hot, and sweat began to gather on his forehead.

But the work was going faster than ever before. Each blow left a deep dent in the metal lump, and this dent wasn’t recovering.

Reynard kept working, making only breaks to drink water from time to time. He did his best to finish the smithing as quickly as possible, while not reducing the quality.

He started in the morning. When he deemed this stage of his work complete, it was past noon.

Reynard’s clothing was drenched in sweat, and he was thirsty and ravenously hungry despite some life-strengthening potions he drank. His hands ached from swinging the hammer, and his eyes ached from staring at the blinding Bound Flame his entire time.

But at last, Reynard used his tongs—also yellow-hot—to pull out a golden tube from the furnace and put it into an oil bath prepared for tempering.

The oil sizzled from the heat. In the same instant, Reynard dispelled the Bound Flame and let go of the tongs.

With a magical pass, he released a bolt of frost at the oil bath. Then another, and another, until the entire thing was frozen and covered in a layer of rime!

Then, Reynard smashed the frozen oil with a warm smithing hammer. From inside, he pulled it—a gleaming barrel for his golden gun.

Just as Reynard expected, when cooled rapidly, the magical gold didn’t revert to its old shape, but "remembered" the new one. But Reynard knew that a gun he would make with this barrel would be incredibly hard to fully destroy, and the barrel itself would not deform from repeated firing.

Now all he needed was to produce other parts of this gun, put them together, and smelt some bullets.

’Just a few days of work, and I will have you,’ Reynard thought, lovingly polishing the golden barrel with a soft rug. ’Then I might be able to go back to Blue Bismuth School and shoot a load into the Magister’s face! Although... Better not, Marien won’t like it. But I definitely won’t have anything to fear, even from Final Cycle Albedo magi! It’s almost a pity that I don’t have fitting enemies to test it on.’

And as Reynard had these thoughts, Marien was making enemies.