The Blackwyrm Chronicles #2: My Little Campaign of Carnage Gets out of Hand

Chapter 66

Chuckling to herself, Nova continued her lesson: "If no one's realized it yet, your weapon is a ticking time bomb if you don't take care of it. Now, Dante might be completely off his rocker, but he's one of the only ethridial weapon smiths I have known to create extremely stable weapons that can be used for extended periods of time without maintenance. Of course, his anti-matter launcher is the prime example of one such weapon that doesn't like to stay in one piece, but I digress."

I rose my hand.

"Yes?" Nova prompted me humorously.

"Why exactly is Dante's anti-matter launcher so unstable?"

Nova thought about my question for a few moments before she replied: "Dante has dived into a field of ethridial sciences that is bewildering and, quite frankly, dangerous as hell. You see, Dante believes that there's a rare 'anti' version of your typical piece of ethridium. You may wonder what that means. Well, that's the thing: scientists are still trying to learn about this 'anti' version of ethridium, but they haven't even been able to produce an actual sample to study and experiment on. Naturally, Dante has already produced a sample and has tested a weapon out on ...an unwilling test subject. Essentially what he did is design an ethridial chamber that can house a regular piece and an anti-piece of ethridium separately so the weapon doesn't tear itself apart. When he pulls the trigger of this weapon, the energy of the two pieces of ethridium combine, and the subsequent shot is extremely volatile."

"Volatile as in explosive, right?" Horace inquired nervously.

Nova cringed, "Um...not entirely. Some scientists in Volhime believe that Dante's anti-matter technology could potentially punch a hole through the time-space continuum."

My jaw dropped, "What? That should be impossible..."

Nova snorted, "To Dante, there's no such thing as 'impossible.' The term is completely foreign to him."

I groaned, "Great...as if Dante was crazy enough, now he has dimension-eradicating technology...fuck...."

Nova clapped her hands together: "Alright people, let's get down to business. Because your weapons are unstable, we'll need to fix them. Each of you will get a set of tools to achieve just that, so don't do anything stupid until I pass out everything."

Five minutes later, Nova huffed as she returned to the front of the table: "Now that all of you have tools to fix your weapon, I'll need you all to..."

She stared at Analise as she grabbed a pair of wire cutters and started laughing maniacally.

"Listen to instructions. "She finished. "Analise? Please set those down and listen to instructions."

"Instructions?" She echoed quizzically.

Nova groaned: "Listen. To. Me." She emphasized each word to get her point across.

Ana's shoulders slumped, and she set the wire cutters down with a sigh.

"Alright," Nova continued, "There should be a faulty wire in the ethridial chamber. The first thing you'd always do is remove your shard of ethridium before working on the chamber: you could potentially blow your weapon up if you fail to do this step. Now, take your wire cutters-yes, those are wire cutters Dorrian, and cut the green wire when I tell you to."

Everyone removed their shard of ethridium from their ethridial chambers, grabbed their wire cutters and waited for Nova to give the order.

"Cut the green wire now." She commanded.

Snips sounded from around the table as everyone cut the appropriate wire.

When nobody's shocker blew up, Nova grinned and pressed a button on the side of the worktable facing her and watched as the floorboards behind me opened to deploy a training dummy made of burlap sacks. Unfortunately, the training dummy shot out of the opening at break-neck speeds and smashed into the roof with a resounding thud. I swore and felt splinters rain down on me as the dummy fell back to the floor. Luckily, the floorboards closed just in the nick of time so the dummy didn't plummet back into the hole.