No Step On Slime

Chapter 18: Tell Us What?

A bit of time had passed.

Rimuru had done a bunch of other things while the snow still lasted. It wasn't hard to notice, especially when he introduced the concept of Christmas and New Years' celebrations to the citizens of the monster nation.

I respectfully stayed out of the celebrations. Not because I had anything against this time of the year specifically, but December 25th to January 1st were particularly painful days for most anyone in the US.

The 2023 New Years' Times Square Attack and the 2026 Christmas Day Truck Bombings did well in turning what was supposed to be the most joyous time of the year into somber memoriam.

The snow began to melt as the days got warmer. The ground got muddy and the familiar smell of end-winter was in the air. And that is when I finally finished my bolt-action rifle.

It took awhile because I had also been building up Tempest's industry in the background, too.

One of the Dwarven brothers, Garm, made me a pair of goggles to protect my eyes from damage. If any of my guns had a catastrophic failure it's highly unlikely that it'd actually kill me, but my eyes probably wouldn't survive unscathed.

So right off the bat I immediately began testing my rifle. Rimuru wanted to witness the test himself because he wanted to see how far my breakthroughs were getting.

I lowered my eyes to the scope, which was a modified eyeglass that the Dwarven brothers had given me on request.

"Firing!"

I pulled the trigger, and I immediately felt the familiar kick from the recoil on my shoulder. A cloud of smoke obscured my vision for a few moments.

Looking through my rifle's optics, I could see that it was barely on the mark. I adjusted the crosshairs, before pulling the bolt back to slap another cartridge in the chamber.

"Firing!" I exclaimed, after chambering another round.

The second shot was closer to the target's center, but not quite.

This pattern of re-adjusting the scope and firing again to check the accuracy continued until I had expended all fifty rounds of ammunition on hand. By then, I had a good idea as to the performance of my rifle.

"What do you think, Rimuru?" I asked. "Impressive, or what?"

"There's a lot of smoke, and breathing it in makes me feel tingly," Rimuru said, using his hand to wave away the black powder smoke. "Probably would sting for people who actually felt pain. But I can't really say I could've made something like that by myself. Good job."

Huh.

"Smoke issue..." I said, rubbing my chin. "Yeah, might be a problem. Can't really remove it, 'cuz that's how black powder works. Gas masks? You think I'll need to make those too?"

"No, no, you don't need to trouble yourself," Rimuru replied. "I'm impressed you've managed to get this far. What's your next goal?"

"I wanna get started on smokeless powder. Problem is, we need chemical factories for that. And we don't have any chemical factories."

Nothing could beat smokeless powder, so of course, it was going to be inferior to what I worked with on Earth. But my rifle worked a lot better than I expected, for a black powder weapon.

"That sounds too ambitious," Rimuru said. "Do you have a simpler goal?"

"A revolver. True semi-automatic would be hard to do with black powder, so I'm probably gonna make revolvers."

"Revolver pistols?"

"That, and revolver rifles."

I picked my rifle off the testing table, feeling the balance in my hands. It wasn't balanced all that well, being made almost entirely out of metal.