After lunch, Jin got in touch with the SP following Reinhardt.
His goal was to once more draw out information from Marcello. Intelligence was indispensable.
First of all were the preliminary investigations for the matter. He wanted to know where Marcello had been imprisoned. Once he knew that he could somehow manage with the help of the SP.
But the reply he got was surprising.
“Chief, that isn’t a worthwhile question. All the Unifiler prisoners were executed in the morning.”
“What!?”
“Kidnapping a Shouro Empire diplomat was a crime that resulted in the death penalty for all of them.”
“What the heck…”
The hastiness of the executions was a little too strange.
Jin once more thought that the Unifilers probably had connections with Celuroa Kingdom’s underworld. They were probably afraid of information being leaked.
However, by now there was nothing that could be done.
He recognized the Unifilers’ strangeness anew, and resolved to do what he could for now.
Jin decided to review Reiko’s railgun.
“What kind of force did she use to bend the Adamantite barrel…”
Reiko looked apologetic when Jin was shocked.
“I am sorry. When I saw Father get sent flying I lost my self-control.”
“Does that mean you may have used 1000 percent of your power…?”
Strength to bend even Adamantite. Jin then suddenly realized it.
“Reiko, your skeleton’s also made out of Adamantite, are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”
The gun barrel which was thicker than Reiko’s bones was bent. Jin became worried.
“Yes, nothing’s wrong.”
Reiko said, but Jin who had become worried decided to do a check-up just in case.
Jin looked over Reiko’s skeleton after her Magical Energy came to a stop and she had come to a standstill.
“I knew it…”
The joints had become loose and some of the arm bones too had been bent. Jin wondered whether Reiko lied because she didn’t want to worry Jin or whether she didn’t notice it at all.
“Even Adamantite can’t bear Reiko’s 1000 percent power, huh…”
Jin thought. Of how he could increase the strength.
“After all, strength, meaning the force tying the atoms or molecules together needs to be increased, huh.”
If the bond between the atoms or molecules was broken that would mean the object would break.
“So, what to do to increase the power of these bond?”
Jin remembered that there was a method of adding particular metals together to increase the metal’s tenacity.
“Let’s give it a go I suppose…”
As Reiko was still off, he called for Soleil and Luna.
“Please get Adamanite and Mithril ready for me.”
“Yes, Father.”
The two fetched Adamantite and Mithril ingots from the underground storehouse and put them in front of Jin.
“Good work. …First, let’s try just Adamantite.”
Jin made an Adamantite testpiece using Craft Magic. It was a rod with a diameter of one millimeter and a length of about 20 centimeters.
“Next let’s mix in one percent Mithril.”
Using [Alloying] he created an alloy of Adamantite and Mithril. Then he made similarly-sized testpieces of it.
“This will do. …Soleil or Luna, can either of you bend this Adamantite rod?”
Jin asked, but very quickly,
“It’s impossible.”
He got such a reply.
“Well, I guess it would be.”
And then with no other choice, he activated Reiko.
“Father?”
After Reiko woke up, seeing the displeased look on Jin’s face made her puzzled.
“Reiko, I thought so, but your skeleton has got some problems with it. That’s why I wanted to reinforce it, but to do that I need to experiment. So I woke you up even though I didn’t repair you yet.”
“I see, I will gladly help.”
Then Jin had Reiko bend the Adamantite testpiece.
The testpiece bent and snapped broke with about 25 percent of current Reiko’s output.
“Alright, next is this one.”
It was the one to which Mithril had been mixed in. It bent with about 20 percent output.
“Father, hasn’t it become weaker instead?”
Said Luna, who was watching. However,
“Well, just wait. Next I’ll do this and then let’s try bending it.”
Jin said, then poured in his Magic Energy into another testpiece.
Fundamentally Adamantite didn’t interfere with Magic Energy, but because Mithril had been mixed in it became able to contain Magic Energy.
“I will bend it now. …?”
Something was weird and it was apparent from Reiko’s expression. But that was to be expected, as the rod didn’t bend even with power increased to 30 percent.
Reiko further increased the power. Jin felt her output rapidly increasing and quickly had her stop.
“Alright, Reiko! That’s enough. As I thought, it seems that Magic Energy increases the strength.”
“Just Magic Energy increased its strength? Not reinforcing magic?”
Jin nodded at the question.
“Ah, so you’re lacking an explanation. You know the magics [Hardening] and [Reinforce], right? It’s the same principle as with them. Supplementing the force linking the atoms or molecules together with Magic Energy.”
In the case of metals, when the microscopic crystal lattice’s bonds stretched and returned to normal it was called elasticity, and when the bonds got completely dislocated it was called plastic deformation.
[Hardening] and [Reinforce] which were used up until now strengthened these bonds by sort of wrapping them up from the outside.
To do that from the inside this time Mithril was added in the metal.
Jin’s conjecture was that the small Mithril particles were scattered amidst the Adamantite ones and by applying [Hardening] the Mithril particles would become the magic’s origin points, in other words creating a network of Magical Energy which increased the strength. Probably.
Doing the same thing to simple Mithril would of course also increase the strength, but as its base strength and hardness was low, its effectiveness wouldn’t be dramatically higher than Adamantite’s. Therefore even Jin didn’t notice to do this until now.
You could say that in the first place he didn’t even think of the idea of mixing Adamantite which cost 7000 to 10000 Torr per gram with Mithril that similarly cost 4000 to 5000 Torr per gram.
“What’s left is the mixture’s ratio, huh.”
Jin experimented on changing the Mithril’s proportion. The result was that 1.5 percent mixture produced the greatest reinforcement.
“All right, let’s call this alloy Magi Adamantite.”
He came to know that by pouring in Magic Energy to strengthen it to the maximum, it became five times stronger than simple Adamantite.
“Okay Reiko, please go to sleep once again. Because I’ll reinforce your skeleton with this Magi Adamantite.”
“Yes, Father.”
And thus Reiko’s skeleton was upgraded to Magi Adamantite.
Next Jin decided to create a new, even more powerful model of the railgun.
His plan was to, instead of spherical shots, use pointed bullets and add rifling inside the gun barrel.
By making the barrel out of Magi Adamantite, even Adamantite bullets would find it hard to wear it down.
And then he changed the method of shooting from a slingshot-type to a spring-type.
To put it simply, you could think of it as something similar to a spring-piston BB gun.
For the spring Jin would use not the leather of a Sea Dragon, but the muscles themselves. After the dragon’s dissection there were a few uncut muscles that remained intact. They were probably the sinewy muscles from the wings.
An interesting property these sinewy wing muscles had was that when Magic Energy was poured in them they extended. Depending on the amount of Magic Energy put in, the extension’s length and force differed.
Jin was wondering whether all the muscles did that or not, but the limb muscles and such contracted with Magic Energy. It was the same response as that of humans’ muscles.
“So that must mean it needs Magic Energy to spread its wings.”
Jin who didn’t know much about magical life forms made such an assumption for now. But more important than that was the way they were used.
“Without Magic Energy the muscles would be contracted, and when pouring in the Magic Energy in one go they would extend, and that would fire the bullet. Hm, that should work.”
In this situation the faster they extended the better, so Jin used one of the pieces of Elradrite he obtained to boost the Magic Energy when firing.
The gun barrel was wholly Magi Adamantite. Moreover the bore was increased to 5 centimeters.
With this it seemed like it could withstand even Reiko hitting something with it at 1000 percent output. Well, if that sort of situation was to happen often it would still be a problem though.
“Alright, Reiko, give it a try.”
“Yes, Father.”
In front of the research laboratory, Reiko aimed east with the new railgun, nay, the new Magi Cannon, and shot at full power.
Along with a bang, a hole appeared in the clouds while a trail appeared in the ionized air. The Elradrite’s boost was frightful.
“Ooh, that’s rather amazing… Did it reach all the way to space this time?”
He wasn’t able to make precise measurements, but if there was a person watching in space right now, they would probably notice a small flying object circling the planet.
Its initial velocity was Mach 80. In other words, 27 kilometers per second. Even taking into account the deceleration after firing caused by air resistance, it became the first object on the planet to reach escape velocity.
“Reiko, don’t shoot that with full power until I tell you to. Don’t shoot, got it?”
Jin gave Reiko a reminder.
＊ ＊ ＊
Meanwhile, Reinhardt had been extremely busy.
First he had explained to the garrison in Celuroa Kingdom that the two of them had been kidnapped by the Unifilers.
To prove this they ended up having to travel back all the way to Stearina’s villa in Dali.
After seeing Stearina’s destroyed golems and Automata there, in addition to the disastrous destruction caused by the golems, and lastly the state of the guards’ corpses in the morgue Celuroa Kingdom’s defense bureaucracy finally seemed to accept it.
On top of that there was great difficulty with the captured Unifiler members.
Because no one had for now witnessed Reinhardt with Jin, he kept pretending to have no idea who had saved them.
Well, being a foreign diplomat, Reinhardt wasn’t questioned thoroughly which saved him a lot of trouble.
However, the members of the Unifilers all together spoke of Jin.
Well, as Jin had been wearing the helmet they weren’t able to pinpoint that it had been him. Also because Reinhardt kept quiet, the question whether or not it had been Jin was left to be answered, and the name ‘Mysterious Golem Master’ was coined for the event.
It’s a bit of a digression, but Reinhardt and Stearina weren’t told about the execution of the Unifilers.
＊ ＊ ＊
“So, the person who saved us was surely Jin-kun, right?”
After finishing tidying up Stearina’s partially destroyed villa, she and Reinhardt were drinking tea.
“How unfortunate that I didn’t get to talk with Jin-kun this time either as I’d have liked.”
“Well, you were unconscious so that couldn’t be helped.”
Maybe because of the magic-sealing choker, Stearina had yet to wake up in the morning.
After having her drink the two portions of the medicine Jin gave to Reinhardt, she finally opened her eyes.
“Hey, Stearina, are you sure you’re not hurt anywhere?”
“Huh? Where’d that question came from?”
“No, I was just bothered because after being rescued from the Unifilers you were unconscious for a rather long time.”
First he had wanted to smoothly approach the topic but he gave that up after Stearina asked for Reinhardt’s reasoning.
“The truth is that my health’s been in a bad shape for a long time now. Always feeling my body’s heavy, and sometimes getting these spasms of pain.”
Stearina spoke openly.
“Did you go see a healer?”
“Yep. After receiving healing I became alright, but in two or three days the pain would come back.”
“Is that so…”
“However, now I seem to feel somewhat better than usual. It must be because Reinhardt-kun is keeping me company, no?”
Stearina said and smiled. Neither of them recognized that it was the effect of Jin’s medicine, and it looked like they wouldn’t notice it for the next while.