No Step On Slime

Chapter 8: I Only Incite Defense

This chapter was a bit of a late update, but it's twice as long as most of the other chapters.

. . . . .

I didn't stop to take any breaks at all. Why would I? My first actual firearm was an arm's length away. The double-barreled shotgun design was simple, yet it certainly did have its uses.

I used the drill press as a somewhat-shitty milling machine. It wasn't the most ideal thing to use, but I would attest that it definitely worked. Using that, I cut out smoother corners on my shotgun and made some of the smaller internal parts that would comprise the trigger mechanism.

It was a really unorthodox design, I have to admit. Most gunsmiths would make the barrel like a tube, but I decided to just drill two long holes through a block of metal and call that a barrel.

The ammunition was a somewhat different story.

I had the gunpowder and the ammunition. Instead of stuffing it in like an 18th-century militiaman, I decided to skip a few years of progression and made brass cartridges to store the gunpowder and bullet in.

I wasn't going to touch any of that complicated birdshot or buckshot stuff yet. I specialized more in rifles, and I didn't really have any tools to accurately measure bullet grains.

For the primer, the part that would actually ignite the gunpowder, I had to improvise.

Modern firearm primers required industrial-grade chemical plants to produce. I didn't even have a chemistry set on me, much less anything industrial.

The only ones I could actually make with what I had on me were 19th-century fulminate explosives: mercury fulminate, or silver fulminate. I sure as hell wasn't going to use mercury, which means I'll need to use silver.

As for the other two ingredients I needed, ethanol and nitric acid, I pretty much had to ask Rimuru for both of them. Turns out that Rimuru was able to separate the alcohol he drank into its base components, which meant I had access to a very pure form of ethanol.

For the nitric acid, I pretty much had to explain to him how it was made for his body to process it. In reality, I was mostly rehearsing the lines from Dissenter's Archive, as I got the exact recipe through there.

I was snapped out of my thinking as Kaijin tapped me on the shoulder.

"Eh? What is it?" I asked.

"There's going to be a feast tonight, in celebration of Rimuru's new human form," he said. "We weren't able to do it yesterday, as we had to rebuild parts of the village. You want to come?"

I shook my head. "Automaton. Don't need to eat, probably can't even taste the food. You guys go enjoy yourselves at the party, though."

I picked up my shotgun and the eight rounds of test ammunition I made for it. "Anyways, I'm done with this. Wanna come out and see me test it?"

"Certainly!" was Kaijin's enthusiastic answer.

We stepped outside to one of the open areas. I wanted to test my weapon at a good range... maybe two or three hundred meters from my target.

I walked a bit away from where they were doing the village construction work, but still in the section of forest that was cleared out for the town.

A tree stump several hundred meters away caught my eye.

"I'll be aiming at that," I said, pointing out the tree stump. "Watch carefully and cover yer ears, it's gonna be loud."

I aimed down the sights of the shotgun. There was a tree all the way down there that I wanted to hit...