75. Enhanced Weapons

Enhanced Weapons

An eight-meter serrated sword swept through the space where my head had been a moment earlier. As it broke the sound barrier, it cracked the air like a whip.

I gave a strained grunt, twisted away from the next follow-up slash, and teleported aside.

Just as with every previous attempt at the same move, the bald, gray-skinned, grotesquely muscular humanoid followed me through space.

I tried to fly away next, but the instant I cleared its attack range, the demon appeared in front of me and swung its sword.

The blade struck my ribs heavily, cut through my Super Suit, and sliced into my skin.

Which basically meant I got a paper cut.

My recent upgrade to Nearby Object Manipulation had successfully canceled most of the energy that made it through, but as anyone who has ever had a paper cut knows, paper cuts still hurt.

Below me, a squad of soldier-looking people was attacking a building used to summon sword-guards.

Rank after rank of sword-wielding undead in plate armor stood between them and the building, blocking every approach, while the enemy pulled skeletal archers or imps from elsewhere to deal with the more mobile humans.

The demon tried to give me another paper cut.

Its face met my fist instead.

It staggered back, spraying black blood and broken tusks, but otherwise endured the blow and shifted its sword between my follow-up kick and its target.

I used Nearby Object Manipulation and Force Adjustment to stop myself almost instantly, just fast enough to avoid being impaled on its weapon.

And regardless of my defenses, I had very nearly been impaled.

Unlike the lower enemy warriors, this sword demon’s weapon was clearly saturated with magic. Its power was at least six times greater than an executioner’s halberd or a sword-guard’s armor. Destroying it would take me a full minute, and its wielder was not about to give me that time.

A tall, broad-shouldered soldier with dark skin rushed to the front of the line, holding a rifle in each hand.

He was the man with the very strong aura, almost as impressive as Zhao Linshou. While we had been dealing with earlier matters and preparing, I had learned that his name was Zhao Mancheng.

A strange name, but who was Ye Lin to criticize?

Although he and his targets were both moving around the battlefield and crossing obstacles, and despite the fact that he held an automatic rifle in each hand, his shots were precise.

Even while firing on full auto, he not only aimed each weapon at a different target, but made every bullet land exactly where he wanted.

Every round struck a sword-guard directly between the brows.

The bullets hit the magically reinforced helmets at tremendous speed, pierced through, and then ricocheted inside, the fragments churning undead flesh into pulp.

In a few seconds, sixteen sword-guards fell dead.

As the others in the squad opened fire, more sword-guards followed. Their marksmanship was not as stunning as Zhao Mancheng’s, but it was still deadly.

Another demon appeared beside me, forcing me to block with my forearm and suffer yet another paper cut.

Even so, I showed the two attackers a tooth-only smile that had nothing to do with joy, then attacked both of them with kinetic lances.

The kinetic lances were weaker than my punches, but they were thinner, invisible, and almost instantaneous. They carved shallow wounds across the sword demons’ bodies.

If they wanted a battle of attrition, I was happy to oblige. The surge of energy produced as the line of sword-guards below collapsed more than made up for the fatigue I felt.

Sweat kept gathering. My muscles protested beneath my Super Suit as I used Forced Acceleration to increase my speed, fighting two enemies at once and gradually gaining the upper hand.

After enhancing more than forty weapons, managing even that was not easy.

But this war was turning toward a decisive confrontation. If we did not go all out now, then when exactly were we saving ourselves for? The afterlife has terrible scheduling.

Seeing the much smaller living force inflict such disproportionate damage on the enemy line, the sword-guards charged.

Hundreds upon hundreds of undead in heavy plate armor poured out of their defensive positions, trying to overwhelm the living in one rush.

That was exactly what Zhao Mancheng’s squad had been waiting for.

Every one of them held guns in both hands and began firing.

The others did not have Zhao Mancheng’s awe-inspiring superhuman precision, but the enemy infantry occupied almost their entire field of vision, so they did not need much precision.

Hundreds of bullets struck the charging undead army, snapping legs, blasting off arms, punching watermelon-sized holes through torsos, and even occasionally decapitating them.

Before, small-arms fire had either bounced off low-level enemy armor or, at best, punched holes too small to reliably stop undead enemies.

Now, when the bullets hit, they released several times the kinetic energy.

This was not because everyone’s abilities had suddenly made a huge leap, though the soldiers’ growth had certainly accelerated through mass kills, even if relying more on weapons than their own powers reduced the gains from each kill.

No. This was the effect of weapon enhancement.

As far as our side knew, traditional magical enhancement either made an item better at what it already did or gave a weapon some harmful effect to damage enemies.

The swords used by these newly appearing demons belonged to the first type. They were more “sword-like” than normal swords, and all functions a sword could perform were amplified.

But our improvements to guns were something else entirely.

We did not improve the “concept of a gun” through range, firepower, caliber, or anything similar. Nor did we give them special magical ammunition.

Instead, Zhao Linshou, Zhao Mancheng, and I had worked out several methods using my ability to selectively adjust and apply force, altering the physical traits that let the weapons function in our favor.

The tiny Force Adjustment fields on each gun did several things at once.

First, they reduced recoil, allowing rifles to remain far more accurate even during full-auto fire.

Second, they strengthened the cohesion of the guns themselves while reducing external forces applied to them, giving each weapon a weaker version of my own toughness.

Third, they amplified the driving force applied by gases other than nitrogen and oxygen, such as the gases produced when propellant ignited.

Of course, that would make an ordinary barrel explode, but we had reinforced the barrels.

Fourth, they reduced all external forces applied to the bullet while it was still inside the gun, while also strengthening the bullet’s cohesion.

That meant less barrel wear, less speed lost to friction, less slowing of the propellant gases from the reaction force produced by launching the bullet so violently, less bullet deformation, and a reduced chance that bullets would burst into fragments under the increased forces.

In total, every bullet’s kinetic energy was multiplied several times without interfering with the soldiers’ various enhancement abilities, because technically the bullets themselves had not been magically enhanced. The force fields were attached to the guns.

That also neatly avoided the downside of enhancing ammunition, which was that you had to repeat the magic on every single bullet fired.

The combined effect of the force adjustments and the more standard enhancement abilities each soldier had developed spoke for itself.

A dozen people had attacked a thousand previously difficult enemies head-on and routed them in under a minute.

Seeing that, a steady stream of energy flowed into me, and I redoubled my efforts against the two demons.

The downside of enhancing items in any long-term way was that if we wanted them ready within any useful time frame, combining Sustained Force and Force-Field Creation required enormous effort.

Even though each rifle was twenty times smaller than a person and thousands of times smaller than the temporary force fields I used in combat, making the enhancement permanent within minutes meant each weapon demanded effort equivalent to an hour-long sprint.

To equip every survivor skilled and strong enough to matter, we needed either weeks of enhancement work or to push my body to its limits.

I chose the latter.

Given how quickly the situation was deteriorating, the enemy would have enough strength stored up to crush us in a few days at most.

Now, I was paying for that choice.