This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Obsequium_Minaris on 2025-10-15 01:24:39+00:00.

First / Previous / Royal Road

XXX

That night, while the others slept, Pale took it upon herself to step out of the house that King Harald had put them up in, and head outside by herself. As she stepped out the front door, she looked around, making sure there was nobody watching nearby. She didn’t expect anybody would be; the house they were staying in was located on the outskirts of town, after all. But it paid to be cautious, she supposed.

A quick diagnostic scan of herself showed the extent of the damage to her ship once more. Pale sucked in a breath as she looked up into the night sky, watching the stars as they shined overhead. Her brow furrowed at the sight of it, but she shook her head regardless, and instead closed her eyes and began to concentrate.

It had been a while since she’d called upon her Affinity. From what she recalled, the last time she’d used it had been in her fight against Sven, back when the Luminarium had been attacked all those months ago. For an ordinary Mage, that would have been a problem, but with her perfect memory, Pale found it easy to remember how it felt to recall her own magic.

Once she felt that familiar feeling well up in her chest, Pale opened her eyes. One of her hands fell to her pocket, where she pulled out a single pistol round. The brass case glinted in the moonlight, but not for long; Pale concentrated, and as she did so, the brass began to change, turning a bright silver, as it was steadily replaced with steel. She gave a content nod as she turned the newly-turned steel cased round over in her hand, looking for any kind of imperfection. Despite her keen eye for detail, she wasn’t able to find a single one.

“Still got it…” she muttered as she placed the bullet back in her pocket. That was her warm-up done; she’d at least confirmed she still knew what she was doing when it came to using her Affinity.

Now it was time to truly put it into practice.

Over the past few hours, Pale had developed a theory in relation to her magic. She’d been aching to test it out, but her friends had insisted that she spend at least a few hours relaxing with them, and she’d given in to them, both because it put them at ease, and because if she was going to do this, then she wanted to go into it as refreshed as possible. Part of her had even wanted to wait after getting a good night’s sleep first, but after tossing and turning for about a half-hour and feeling not even the slightest shred of exhaustion, she’d eventually given in and stepped outside.

In any case, her theory was simple – her affinity was tied directly to her sjel. Nobody knew what, exactly, housed the sjel; it couldn’t have been just the brain, because Pale’s own brain was completely artificial, and she had a sjel regardless. No, it was manifested by something else entirely – some higher form of consciousness that transcended anything physical. It had to have been something innate to whatever it was that gave sapient beings on this world the ability to introspect and learn for themselves.

And if she was right, and that was truly the case, then there was absolutely no reason why her sjel, and by extension, her Affinity, had to be limited purely to the body of the avatar she was occupying now.

When the realization had crossed her mind earlier, it had all but begged for additional experimentation. Part of her yearned for the bodies of additional avatars, purely to see if her Affinity not only held between them all, but could somehow compound if she operated them all in tandem. But, alas, only this one had survived the attack from the Caatex and the subsequent trip to this solar system, so that possibility was all but dead in the water.

But, thankfully, it wasn’t the only other body she had at her disposal.

Pale closed her eyes once more, focusing on the ship itself for the first time in a long time. Her true body, as it were, was still floating in orbit high above the planet, and yet it was easily accessible to her regardless. And, moreover, while it was in tatters, it hadn’t yet disintegrated into nothing, which was good – that meant that there was still an opportunity to use it as a testing bed.

Pale started small. There was no way to truly and completely repair her ship right now, not with how limited she was with her affinity, but in due time, that would come. For now, though, there was something that caught her attention instead.

Namely, her armament.

She’d run out of 250-millimeter shells ages ago, when she’d spent them all in a panic trying to flee from Sven during her and Kayla’s first encounter with him. That had hit her hard, because the 250-millimeter cannon had been one of her key armaments early on in this new world.

But now, with her Affinity in place? Perhaps she could do something to bring it back online again.

The way the cannon worked was simple – the entire system had been designed to be automatic from the ground-up; the gun was powered by its own independent power source, which miraculously hadn’t been knocked offline when the Caatex had attacked, hence why it was still operational even when the rest of the ship was stuck in orbit. The gun itself fed fresh shells through a belt that led into the weapon, and when the shells were fired, they were ejected out into a second belt on the other end of the weapon. It had been purposely designed this way so that spent shells weren’t stuck floating around the interior of the ship as it moved. And, moreover, the spent shells were designed to feed back into an auto-loading system, where they would be refilled and repackaged with fresh payloads, then sent back into the first belt. It was simple, yet effective, until it wasn’t.

But, perhaps, she could change that.

Pale sucked in a breath, then did a deep dive into her own systems. With her position as the heart and soul of the ship, she had near-total access to even the smallest of its parts, so long as they were connected to her ‘mind’ in some way. With how automated everything was, that meant it was a simple feat to examine the interior of the gun-and-loading system, and determine exactly what was wrong.

And, sure enough, within mere moments, Pale determined the issue – part of the auto-loader had been hit by plasma slag during the Caatex’s attack. The gun itself was still perfectly operational, but she had no way of getting fresh ammo into it.

Until now, at least.

As she pored over the auto-loader’s system, Pale poked and prodded with her Affinity, trying to determine what needed to be done to fix it. The gun’s motherboard was completely fried; plasma had dripped through the external housing and onto the sensitive electronics, rendering them useless. But, perhaps, with a bit of finesse…

She started small – as small as possible, even, making the tiniest of adjustments on a mere microscopic scale, the same way she had with Professor Tomas back when he’d first started helping her explore what her Affinity was capable of. Between her naturally superhumanly-analytical mind and her Affinity, she was able to work atom by atom.

And, slowly but surely, she felt something begin to shift the more she worked.

It didn’t take long for her to begin getting used to how it felt to control things at this scale. Before long, she was transmuting entire groups of atoms, and within just a few hours, she’d gotten comfortable enough to begin working at a larger scale than even that.

And, finally, around two in the morning, Pale felt the auto-loader spring to life. She nearly jumped out of her skin when the machine came alive, and the belt of spent shells began to automatically feed into the reloader, and then a few seconds later, began to fall into place on the other side of the gun.

Finally, after all this time, she had access to heavy artillery once more.

A grin split her face. She hadn’t been lying earlier when she’d said that she was tired of war, and of fighting, and of killing… but she also couldn’t deny that the knowledge she was now better-equipped to defend her loved ones brought her no small sense of relief.

Enough that she was more than willing to allow herself to lose her composure for just a moment.

“Yes!”

Her voice echoed through the night as she pumped her fist out of a sense of sheer victory. She allowed herself a few seconds of celebration before managing to regain her faculties again, and calmed down.

At least, until she heard an all-too-familiar giggle come from behind her.

“Well,” Kayla said, “I don’t know what you’re celebrating, but I’m certainly glad to see a smile on your face.”

Pale blinked in surprise, feeling her face begin to heat up as she turned around. She cleared her throat as she locked eyes with her best friend.

“…I made a big breakthrough just now,” she explained. “To put it in simple terms – do you remember when we invaded Sven’s camp, and I blew it up?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Well… I now have the ability to do that again.”

Kayla blinked in surprise. “…I’m not even going to ask how you managed to do that, because I know it’d go right over my head. But I’m definitely happy for you, and not just because it’s good to know you’ve got another tool in your arsenal.”

"What do you …

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1o6xtry/ballistic_coefficient_book_3_chapter_61/