Improving The Equipment

Two days had passed since Ryo and the girls drank the liquid virus. Things at the Estate had been a bit hectic, since they were working on expanding the perimeter and cleaning up the houses around it, with Rika joining in on the activity since the second day she was at the Estate. They now covered a circular area of 6 kilometers and had access to many markets and shops in the area, something Ryo found convenient.

The market they had gone to a few days prior had been emptied, and their total resources were estimated to last for a year even if the size of the group doubled. Having babies was still banned, so Ryo took it upon himself to gather contraceptives. He was sure that even if every couple in the entire settlement had sex on weekly basis, they would last for at least the rest of the year.

"*phew*... These last two days have been tiresome as fuck!" Ryo complained while he drank a glass of whisky. It was 5 PM and the girls were all doing their own thing, so Ryo was left alone for a moment. He heard footsteps approaching and soon, someone hugged him from behind and covered his eyes. "Who is it?"

"*sigh*... Rika, as much as I find this funny, I don't appreciate your teasing" he said while removing her hands from his face and moving his head forwards, freeing it from D-Cup. She clicked her tongue. "*tch* Spoilsport"

"By the way... I saw what you did to that bus" Rika said as she sat on the bar's counter. "You literally took apart my dear Humvee and turned that bus into a machine that would last for a century if taken care of properly"

Ryo felt grateful that she wasn't mad about what had been done to her Humvee. After all, the last thing he wanted was a mutated angry sniper on his ass.

"Just tweaked it a bit here and there... I still have more ideas on what to do to it" he said offhandedly, thinking of things he could improve. That was when a sudden idea came to his mind and he shouted in excitement, before running away. "That's it! Come with me, I need you!"

"Hey! What's "it"!?" Rika yelped as he pulled her away. Her thoughts though, where somewhere else. 'And what is it with that "I need you?!'

Ryo, who was totally oblivious to the effect his poor word choice had, simply pulled her to the place he had set apart to work on his mechanic stuff.

*

The mansion's garage used to be occupied with two cars, one was a Mercedes GLA and the other was a classic Lincoln Continental. Ryo, as much as he hated Soichiro, had to admit the man had good taste. Unluckily, one car was modern and full of electric parts, while the older one was modified to feel modern on the inside... so it also had a lot of electric parts. Ryo had them moved out and repurposed the entire area with one big desk in the center so he could work on things he wanted to experiment.

Rika looked all around the place and was utterly amazed. All the tools that had been in her garage were there, organized from top to bottom according to their utility, what they did and what kind of tool they were. There were even small boxes organized by size which held screws, nuts and other smaller parts.

"You... This looks like the crazy inventor's lab in movies..." she said as she looked at him in a new light. There was more to Ryo than just a strong, slightly stupid but capable man. He had a craft of his own. She for one, still didn't know his story.

"Well, I worked as a mechanic for a year or two, but I never stopped studying on the topic. I absolutely love anything that works mechanically, from cars to engines to planes. I never dabbled in guns, but I understand how they work to a T"

Rika registered his last words and furrowed her brows. She got the part where he explained his interest in mechanical engineering, but what did guns have to do with it?

"What part do guns play exactly in this?" she asked inquisitively, as if trying to understand what was going through his mind. He just smiled brightly while taking out his Fauchard. "See this bad boy? Now imagine it has a gun strapped to the bottom. The gun won't hinder the blade, neither will the blade hinder the bullets path"

"Poof! Now you got a Gunspear!"

Rika's eyes opened wide when she heard what he said. If he was able to properly merge a firearm with a cold weapon, he would increase the total potential of it by a ton! He would definitely turn it into an even more effective murder machine than what she had already seen it do!

"You! Are you secretely a genius?!" she yelled out in disbelief. Then she realized only someone with the knowledge on how to do it would bother thinking about it. "So, why am I here?"

"You know a lot about guns and Kouta said that the guns in your appartment were heavily modified" Ryo explained while grabbing screws, metal tubes of the same diameter as the Fauchard's shaft, clamps and even the soldering kit. "I need you to help me modify most weapons so they'll be better for everyone"

Rika immediately liked the idea. She was a big gun nerd like Kouta, the only different being that she was a tanned bimbo. The idea of making the first weapon of a kind excited her, and Ryo was asking for her help in crafting a literal gunspear. How could she decline the offer?

*

"So you're telling me that guns are basically a trigger, a firing pin and tubes?" Ryo asked in disbelief after Rika finished her explanation on the basic mechanism behind guns. She answered with a matter-of-factly tone. "Well, yeah. There are some other things to it, but the basics are those"

Rika then looked at the assortment of guns they had in the place. Most of the weapons weren't usable, since they had some rusted and even broken parts. These were the weapons taken from the police estation's illegal possessions.

"I was thinking something like a semi-automatic..." Ryo said as he studied the weapons and took them apart under Rika's instructions. She looked at each weapon and spotted what she was looking for. "Well, you can repurporse this AR-15. It isn't even that big once you take away the stock, which you probably don't and won't need"

Ryo began studying the firearm and realized it was pretty much the same width as the shaft of his weapon, with only a few parts that would stick out -mainly the magazine and the trigger- he thought that it wouldn't be too hard to use it.

The hardest part of the process, in Ryo's eyes, was actually taking the AR-15 apart without damaging the important parts. Sawing off the unnecessary parts and removing the stock were surprisingly easy and it didn't cause any damage to the rifle. Then, Ryo had to actually merge both weapons.

"Rika, can you please hold the rear end of the Fauchard?" Ryo asked while grabbing the hand grinder.

She just nodded and looked attentively at what he did, since she was learning so many things she didn't know. Ryo cut the Fauchard in two different places, getting three parts. One was the back of the shaft, the other part was what would be replaced by the AR-15 and then he had the handle right below the blade.

Under what little light of the day they had left, Ryo rounded the handle of the blade and turned it into and actual khopesh. He saved it for later and moved on to work on the read end of the shaft. He worked on it until it looked exactly like the end of the stock that was supposed to be attached to the barrel and fire mechanism.

Rika was surprised by the finesse Ryo treated each part with. In her eyes, he wasn't a mechanic nor an inventor, but an artist. One crazy artist that was good at making weapons and vehicles to survive... or kill. And she liked what she saw. It was something else to add to the list of things Ryo could do. She thought that, since he had to learn how to aim properly, she could make good on the time she would spend teaching him.

"It worked perfectly" Ryo said as he looked at the weapon that now looked like a shaft with a firearm on the end. Rika looked in amazement at how easily he was able to replicate the parts of a firearm that took at least centuries of using and studying them to make. "Yeah... yeah it did"

Ryo then took out the shaft from the weapon and began cutting it in shorter parts of the same length, around 10 cm (3.5") each. In total he got four parts, but Rika didn't know why he did it.

"Rika, would you be so kind to turn on the light, I can see pretty clearly but it would be more comfortable" he asked her while using the grinder with milimetrical precision, to shave the end of each part from metal chips. As she turned on the light in the garage, she asked him why he was doing that. His answer was quite stunning. "Well, using such a large weapon can be hard at times. So I plan on making the shaft retractable"

After messing aroun with springs, a magnet and a button, he managed to make a retractable shaft. Now he could carry the weapon as if it was a sword and use it as a regular khopesh for the most part, while still being able to make use of its reach in wider spaces. The last touch, was adding the Khopesh blade as a bayonette, lining it up to the side of the barrel so it would work as a sight. Though with his own eyes he didn't really need one anymore.

"Man... what time is it?" Ryo asked as he admired his new baby. It was a beautiful piece of state-of-the-art mechanical engineering turned into killing machine. Rika answered his question offhandedly while shooting one of her own. "No idea... what are you going to call it?"

Ryo stared at his weapon for a while, trying to come up with a good name for it, but in the end decided to go for something more realistic.

"How about... RH-15, Bladed Series?"

-----------------------------

So, yeah... this chapter took a lot of research and time, mostly because I wrote the descriptions of things once and again and again. I think I spent at least two hours reading about guns, two hours rewriting descriptions and one more hour fleshing it out as best as I could.

And the name, RH-15, Bladed Series, should be obvious, right? RH=Ryo Hashimoto / 15 in honor of the AR-15 / Bladed Series because it is supposed to be more of a cold weapond than a firearm.