No Step On Slime

Chapter 17: A Page Out Of Henry Ford's Playbook

Milim was an utter nuisance, to say the least.

Not only was she an insanely powerful Demon Lord, but she was also careless as hell. What was that quote, about being so strong it's like living in a world of cardboard and that all it takes to kill someone is to let loose once? I think that one's a Superman quote.

Except Milim here isn't doing much to restrain her powers. If it weren't for Rimuru's full potions, we'd probably have a body count on our hands.

The worst part was that none of us could really say anything unless we wanted a really strong punch in the face. I wouldn't be surprised if Rimuru was losing sleep over trying to handle her.

Aside from that and the various amounts of property damage she would cause, I was making a ton of progress. My machine shop had been finished by the Orcs, which meant that the larger machining tools could be moved in to free up space that Kurobe and the Dwarves needed in their smithery.

My first course of action was to make a bolt-action rifle. A simple one that wasn't magazine-loaded, of course. I had to start somewhere.

But I soon realized this: before I could begin on the rifle itself, I had to figure out what kind of ammo I was going to use. My shotgun rounds weren't going to cut it; they were made on the fly and were far from measured or anything. A gun was only as good as its ammo, after all.

And, since I was the only one who actually made ammunition in probably a hundred-mile radius, I also had to also be the one to decide what kind of ammunition measuring system I was going to use for all my guns. And that was surprisingly stressful.

I didn't want to use a caliber-based system, mostly because Rimuru didn't give me any measurement tools with inches on them and because labeling with both calibers and millimeters can quickly get confusing.

For example, the .223 Remington and 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge. The .223 was one of the most popular sporting rifle rounds in the United States, while the 5.56x45mm was what the US and Western Europe used for the latter half of the cold war.

Both rounds were identical in size and shape, and at first glance, you'd think that a .223 could fit into a 5.56mm chamber, and vice versa. But that was where the similarities ended.

Firing 5.56mm rounds in a gun made for .223 would utterly fuck up the insides of the gun; the NATO round has much higher chamber pressure than the Remington one. The opposite, a .223 in a 5.56mm gun, wouldn't damage the gun but at the same time, it wouldn't cycle properly due to the lower chamber pressure.

I was currently working with black powder, but I planned on moving to smokeless powder at some point. Which meant that I also had to distinguish black powder from smokeless powder loads when classifying ammunition.

I've heard a horror story or two of utter idiots who tried firing smokeless powder in black powder firearms. It was a very messy way to amputate your hand, to say the least.

But enough of that, let me think...

I wanted to keep it an easy number. 7.62mm or 12.7mm were examples of numbers that didn't qualify. So probably something in base 5 or base 10.

But a 5mm bullet would be laughable, and a 10mm rifle round is excessive. Something in between should suffice.

7.5mm bullets don't sound so bad, don't they? They ran a little smaller than .30-06 Springfield or 7.62x39mm, which gave me a good mental gauge of how large they would be.

Until I get the specifics hammered out, I was going to work on the trigger housing and stock of the weapon. It was going to be made out of hollowed metal, similar to my shotgun.