Chapter 219: The Problem With Studying My Gun Is That I’m Holding It

It took the leader less than ten minutes to realize Raven wasn’t going to hit him for entertainment. That seemed to worry him more.

He sat against one of the warehouse pillars with his leg immobilized and his damaged knee wrapped in one of Elise’s sacred bands. Roland had removed his weapons, Valeria was going through the captured documents, and Elise remained near the other prisoners. Raven placed the waterproof notebook on a crate.

"Who pays you?"

The man clenched his jaw. "I don’t know his name."

"I expected that. I’m asking how the payment works."

The leader watched him for a moment, perhaps waiting for a threat. Raven gave him none.

"An intermediary," the man finally said. "Changes depending on the city."

"Direct contact?"

"Never."

"How do you deliver information?"

"Notices at smaller Mercenary Houses, taverns, some workshops. If you have something worth selling, you leave a mark. Someone sends instructions afterward."

Raven nodded. A compartmentalized network. Nothing special. Just competent.

"What are they buying?"

The man glanced toward the rifle resting some distance away. "Anything connected to that."

"Too broad." Raven opened the notebook to one of the marked pages. "There are different prices for different things. Give me the list."

The man stayed silent. Valeria didn’t look up from the documents.

"If you believe silence protects your employer, you may want to remember that your employer sent you after a man they were already collecting tactical data on. I wouldn’t describe the relationship as particularly sentimental."

The leader looked at her. Raven waited. It worked.

"Intact projectiles pay the most," the man said eventually. "Even deformed ones. Fragments too. Stone or metal struck directly by a shot if it still carries residue."

Raven didn’t react. "Keep going."

"Spent firing components. Samples of the black metal from the weapon. Any organic material that comes loose. Information on how long it takes you to reload, how many times you can keep firing, what happens when the crystal starts losing charge..."

He stopped. That was more specific. Raven tapped the notebook. "Mana consumption."

"Yes."

"How are you measuring it?"

"We aren’t. We watch. Whether you look tired after firing. Whether you need to touch crystals. Whether you wait before the next shot."

Raven understood. They weren’t collecting exact measurements. They were buying approximations good enough to build hypotheses.

"What else?"

The man looked toward the Mk.I again. "They wanted to know whether the organic parts were still alive."

Elise raised her head. Valeria stopped turning a page. Raven’s expression didn’t change. "Who told you it had organic parts?"

"No one. It’s one of the questions."

That mattered. Someone had moved beyond studying external effects and started asking questions about internal construction. They didn’t know how the Mk.I worked. But they were learning which questions mattered.

---

Roland placed another sheet on the crate. "There was a payment table too."

Raven looked it over. A recovered round was worth several times more than a written report. A confirmed Black Mithril sample had its own price. Biological residue paid even more if it still retained mana activity.

There were separate rewards for details that looked almost trivial on their own: actual reload time, number of shots before maintenance, visible changes in the Reservoir, weapon response after taking damage. Raven traced one line with a finger.

"They don’t want the rifle."

The leader looked at him. "Of course they do."

"If they could get the whole thing, yes. But that isn’t the main objective." Raven closed the payment sheet. "They want to understand the principles that make something like it possible."

Valeria moved closer. "That matches the purchases we found. They aren’t searching for your exact five components. They’re looking for equivalent functions."

"Because they still don’t know what the actual components are."

Elise looked toward the Mk.I. "Could they eventually reproduce it that way?"

Raven didn’t answer immediately. FORGE remained the piece they couldn’t easily copy. That didn’t mean they were incapable of building something different.

"They don’t need an exact copy to learn something dangerous."

That was enough truth. There was no reason to offer more.

---

One of the prisoners started convulsing. The movement was so violent that Roland had an arrow ready before the man finished falling onto his side. Elise reached him first.

"Don’t move him."

The prisoner gasped and arched his back. Something shifted beneath the skin of his neck, too large to be a blood vessel. Raven approached without lowering his guard. He had watched the man fight only minutes earlier. There had been no sign of anything like this.

Elise opened part of his shirt. Valeria grimaced. The alteration spread from his chest toward his neck—dark tissue, malformed plates, and small structures that seemed to have grown around the ribs with no respect for human anatomy. Predation reacted.

[Foreign Biological Integration Detected.]

[Host Compatibility: CRITICAL FAILURE.]

[Progressive Systemic Corruption.]

[Reversal Probability: NEGLIGIBLE.]

Raven read the panel. He said nothing. Elise passed sacred perception through the man’s torso, and her expression changed. "This is too advanced."

The prisoner opened his eyes. "Help me."

Elise didn’t answer immediately. Raven watched her posture. He recognized the decision before she spoke. "What are you going to do?"

Elise looked up. "Purify him."

The injured leader went pale. "What?"

Elise remained calm in a way Raven was beginning to find more unsettling the better he knew her. "His body is collapsing. The foreign structures have already reached vital organs and they’re still spreading. Even if I stop the growth now, I can’t restore what they replaced."

The man convulsed again. "I don’t want to die."

Elise closed her eyes for a second. "I know."

Raven looked at her. "Not twenty minutes ago, you stopped me because breaking someone’s knee was too much."

Elise turned toward him. "This isn’t the same situation."

"I assumed you’d say that."

"You were about to cause additional damage to prevent a possible future action. He is suffering an irreversible biological collapse that will destroy him and may eventually make him dangerous to others."

Raven folded his arms. "So breaking a joint to secure a battlefield is unnecessary cruelty, but killing him because you’ve decided his condition can’t be allowed to continue is mercy."

Elise frowned. "I’m not saying his life isn’t worth prolonging."

"You’re saying you get to decide when prolonging it stops being mercy."

"Because I can see what is happening inside his body."

Raven held her gaze. "And then you wonder why your morality concerns me."

Elise looked genuinely frustrated by the comparison. "They are completely different situations."

"To you."

She opened her mouth, then stopped. Across the room, Roland became intensely interested in one of the warehouse walls. Valeria noticed. "No opinion?"

Roland kept staring straight ahead. "I have a survival instinct."

Raven almost smiled.

---

The prisoner screamed again, and the argument ended on its own. Elise knelt beside him.

"I can reduce the pain first. After that, I need you to decide whether you want me to keep trying to stabilize you, even though I don’t believe I can reverse this."

Raven watched her. That was different. Apparently Elise had learned something too. She wasn’t imposing purification immediately.

The man needed several minutes before he could answer. Raven moved away before hearing the final decision. He didn’t need to turn it into another doctrinal argument. He had a more immediate problem. Information.

---

He returned to the notebook. The questions had been designed to feed models: charge, pressure, materials, biology, consumption, reloading. Whoever was behind this didn’t need perfect answers. They only needed enough correct information to eliminate the wrong possibilities.

Raven knew the method. Black Hound had done the same thing when reconstructing enemy capabilities from fragments, witness accounts, and mistakes. The difference was that now Raven was the system someone else was trying to reverse-engineer.

Valeria approached him. "You’re thinking about something."

"Yes."

"Is it the kind of thought that should worry me?"

Raven looked at the payment table again. "Probably."

Valeria gave him a faint smile. "You’re improving. A few months ago, you wouldn’t have warned me first."

Raven set the notebook on the crate. "They’re buying information."

Valeria waited. "We already know that."

"Then we can sell them information."

She understood immediately. "False information."

"Not completely."

That made her smile properly. "Of course not. A complete lie breaks too easily."

Raven nodded. A good story needed real data, something observable, something capable of explaining known behavior, and one false conclusion believable enough to send resources in the wrong direction.

Roland finally walked over. "What kind of lie?"

Raven looked toward the Mk.I, then the Reservoir, then the notes about reload time. He didn’t answer yet. First he needed to decide which truth he could afford to give away in order to protect the ones that actually mattered.

And for the first time since arriving in Marden, the enemy’s curiosity was starting to look like something other than a threat.

It could become a weapon too.