Genshin Impact: Watch me turn the tables and kill my servants at the start!

The newly arrived weapons were unloaded in the armory behind the firing range. Three rows of metal crates were stacked, each with its model and number painted on it in white.

Ajax stood at the warehouse entrance, looking at the unopened boxes, his hand hovering over the hilt of his knife before lowering it: "I've never used anything like this before."

Fanes stood to the side and used a crowbar to pry open the lid of a long, narrow box, revealing a heavy machine gun that had not yet been assembled.

The metal surface of the barrel was coated with a layer of anti-rust oil, which gleamed with a warm, dark light under the lamp. The gun was thicker than Ajax's arm, and the capacity of the ammunition box was marked with a number that he hadn't had time to count.

Fanes patted the edge of the box: "Learn how to use it first."

Ajax crouched down, reached out and gripped the middle of the gun, weighed it in his hand, and then frowned slightly: "This thing isn't light."

Fanes stood by without saying a word, simply watching him slowly assemble the various parts—joining the barrel and the receiver, aligning the feeding mechanism with the interface, and screwing the bracket into the base.

He assembled each part faster than most people handling this weapon for the first time, but Fanes noticed that he would pause after each assembly, running his fingers along the joint, then gently pressing it with his fingertips before releasing it. It wasn't until the third part that he asked, "How do you control the recoil?"

Fanes stepped back, making way for the direction the gun was pointing: "Shoulders pressed tight, body leaning forward, weight on your supporting leg. Don't try to withstand it, just move in that direction. Try firing one burst first, don't worry about accuracy."

Ajax carried the machine gun to the firing position, assumed the stance as instructed by Fanes, and pulled the trigger.

As the gunshots rang out across the firing range, Ajax's shoulder was jolted back by the recoil, but the muzzle didn't rise noticeably. Scrap cartridges ricocheted from the ejection port, circling around his feet, the warm, bronze-colored metal striking the ground with a dense, crisp sound.

Ajax held the trigger tightly until the entire magazine was empty. Most of the rust-preventive oil on the barrel had evaporated due to the high temperature, and the remaining coating formed a faint, shiny oily trail along the edge of the barrel, which was carried away by the wind after a few breaths.

Ajax lowered his gun, took a half step back, looked down at his shoulder, and then at the ring of still-warm shell casings on the ground: "This is the weapon a real man should use."

Fanes stood to the side, briefly noting down the position of his shoulder blade and the distance between the butt marks and the gun, without saying much.

The following afternoon, a new armored vehicle, recently transferred from the logistics department, arrived on the north side of the firing range. The machine gun mount on the roof had been removed, but the weapon itself remained in the warehouse, waiting for someone to come and take inventory.

I don't know which genius was organizing the warehouse, but they took it off the base, moved it to the side of the shooting range, propped it up on a simple stool with the base legs welded on, and then left it there.

As Fanes passed by the armored vehicle, he didn't pay much attention—he was looking down at the record board in his hand, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ajax squatting next to the low stool, checking if the ammunition feed port was in place.

As Fanes looked up, Ajax was attaching the ammunition belt to the rack: "I'll try this."

Fanes stopped and glanced down at the machine gun's base structure. It was an armored vehicle heavy machine gun welded to a short-legged support, a size larger than the one from yesterday, with a different ammunition feeding system and cooling sleeve thickness.

The gun was originally fixed to a base on the roof of the vehicle. The base itself was bolted to the main structure of the armored vehicle, which could distribute the recoil force to the vehicle body.

Now it was just a low stool with four thin legs welded on, without even a single reinforcing rib along the edge of the base. After clearly seeing the spacing between the thin legs and the distribution of the weld points, Fanes called out, "Wait a moment."

Ajax had already rested his shoulder on the butt of his gun: "Don't worry."

No sooner had he spoken than Ajax pulled the trigger. After the first bullet was fired, all four legs of the stool left the ground simultaneously.

In that instant, Ajax was pushed backward by an unstoppable force, his shoulder leaving the stock and his arm slipping off the grip.

The stool overturned on the ground with a metallic clanging sound, and the gun barrel, having lost its anchor, began to rotate around its base, the muzzle tracing a horizontal arc.

The bullet swept across the left half of the target wall in front of him, the marker posts at the edge of the range, and the upper side of where Fanes was located in less than a second after leaving the muzzle.

Where the ballistic trajectory swept, several parallel grayish-white scratches appeared one after another on the plaster surface of the target wall, as if it had been cut by some invisible blade, leaving a row of shallow grooves of varying depths in the air.

Fañes reacted in the split second before the arc swept over him. He crouched down, and as he looked down, he felt something brush past his head with a gust of wind, a subtle vibration traveling through his scalp and down his entire spine.

Fanes remained crouched until he heard the gunfire completely stop—the belt was empty, and the cylinder's inertia caused the muzzle to spin half a circle before coming to a complete stop. The barrel emitted a layer of fading heat in the sunlight, and the halo around its edges slowly receded.

Fanes remained crouched, not standing up immediately.

The firing range fell silent for a moment. Shell casings were scattered in a fan-shaped area centered on the low stool, some of them embedded in the loose soil on the frozen ground.

Ajax sat on the ground about two meters away from the stool, his back against a marker post he had knocked askew. His grey-blue eyes were fixed on the still slightly warm barrel of the gun, as if he had just experienced something beyond his expectations.

Fanes slowly stood up, looked down at the ground beneath his feet, and then looked up at the spot where the gun barrel was now. The gun was still on the stool, but it had been turned around, the muzzle pointing directly at the target wall that had been swept, the scratches extending from the middle of the target wall to its right edge.

Fanes turned to Ajax: "You know what? The gun barrel was only thirty centimeters away from me, just brushing past my scalp. Don't let me find out who designed this thing."

After speaking, he stood there for a while, then looked down at his legs—his knees were still trembling slightly. He raised his hand to brace himself against the edge of the ammunition box next to him to steady himself, then turned around and walked over to touch the edge of the machine gun barrel with the back of his finger. When his fingertip touched the metal surface, he was burned and pulled back, causing him to lurch backward and shake his hand twice.