"After we finish that step," William continued as he threw back the casings he had into the pot, "The big beauty that's behind us finally joins the stage."

  "Why did we have the pot this far away," Dan heard William murmur as the man bent, lifted and carried it to the machine before any of them could try and help him.

  "Now as I was saying," William said with fast breaths, "The next few steps need you to use this machine here. It all starts with this box and this scooper."

  Saying that he reached beyond the metal box pulling something Dan hadn't noticed before, a quite big metal scooper. He then also patted the 50 cm high box that was on the roller conveyor belt.

  Being close now, Dan saw clearly what it was, it was made of metal and wasn't really a closed-off box. It had row after row of holes at the top, big enough for the casings to drop down with just a shake or two.

  "You might think that these are on ordinary box and scooper, but you would be wrong."

  William bent down, using the big scooper to scoop the casings from the pot, then dropped them at the top of the box. With the sound of metal hitting metal, the casings went down those holes. William dropped another 2 scoops before he stopped and stood up.

  Moving to the box, he removed the latches keeping the top and walls linked to the base before taking them off, leaving the base alone on the conveyor belt. Once it was removed, Dan raised his eyebrows once he noticed how the casings were standing there in an orderly 15 by 15 grid.

  "This here," William said as he showed them the part he removed, "Is what made that possible. It has an Alignment rune that makes sure that every casing drops standing upright. Linking that with a detection and activation rune combination we made sure that only 1 casing would drop on each slot. The scooper isn't normal either, I've put a Counting and a weak barely functioning Barrier rune combination into it, once the first one reaches the needed number, the second activates and you wouldn't be able to scoop any more casings into it. It makes sure that every scoop has 75 casings exactly, 3 scoops and we are done."

  "I must have been underestimating Runes too much," Dan said as he looked at the scooper and the neatly arranged casings left on the base.

  "That's why I was so excited once I got Schema," William said as he turned the scooper back and showed them some weird inscriptions on it, "As long as we have the materials we can make so much more than this! These were just some rune combinations given to me by my tier 1 Skill. I didn't even have the time to look deeply into the rune books you bought.

  "All that aside, let's continue." He waved his hand. "The platform that the casings are on isn't normal, it has a Secure rune that makes sure the casings won't move no matter what. You first activate that rune before pushing it to the next step in the line."

  William put his hand on the platform and activated the rune. After that, he pushed it on the belt to the next step of the process, where a space perfectly cut to match the platform was. It dropped into the slot and he latched it before continuing with his explanation,

  "This step here is where we deprime the casing. You need to activate this rune here, which would target the casings with a precise Telekinesis pull; it's only strong enough to deprime them without affecting the casing itself. The calibration took a bit of testing and repeating but we managed to get it working eventually. The books you got on runes were pretty helpful with that."

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  William activated the rune he mentioned and soon after, the sound of small pieces of metal falling was heard as the casings were deprimed. He then removed the latches and put the platform on the belt again as he pushed it to the next step. Unlike the previous one that had a bulky metal mess at the bottom, the bulky part was above the conveyor belt in that exact location.

  "The next step is pretty straightforward, we need to trim, chamfer and deburr the casings." William pulled down a contraption that had three rows of drill heads, each of the rows had 15 identical heads. "Changing the sizes and shapes of these drill heads to be useful for us was quite hard on Luke, it seems that the harder the metal is, the harder it would be for him to control them. That aside, each of those drill heads is powered by magic and has a Measuring rune on it, once a casing reaches the length or angle we already specified, it would stop working. The first row is for trimming, the second for chamfering and the third for deburring. The handler only needs to move them from one row of casings to the other. Activating the rune combination and moving the contraption to the next row after all the drills are done."

  Doing just that, William soon finished the trimming, chamfering and deburring. He then unlatched the platform and put it on the roller belt again and led it to the next step. He didn't latch it, instead, he dropped it to the specified space before continuing with his explanation,

  "We then hit them with another Cleanse, removing all the remaining shavings from the trimming, chamfering and deburring stage." A flash of light happened after William activated another Cleanse rune. "The next step is putting the powder in. Getting the powder was easy, we just had Linda take a look at the powder from a bullet we opened and then she used her skill to make it from other materials, same for the primers. She can make in a day what would last us a long time.

  "The powder is stored here." William pushed the platform to the next stop and pointed to the glass container above it. "We first made accurate cuts in the glass, putting under them gates that were inscribed with a rune combination that allowed a specified amount of powder to drop down.

  "Finding that combination was quite a pain, I was about to give up and have it be done manually till I understood runes enough to make my own. Eventually, I found a perfect match. Can you believe it? It was actually used for automatically refilling livestock feed. I had to scale the specified weight many magnitudes down, but it worked."

  As before, William activated the rune combination. This time though, there was nothing to see, no flash and no other actions from the machine.

  "And it's done." William again moved the platform to what seemed to be the last step. "All that's left now is attaching the projectiles. Unfortunately, making the projectiles was mainly done by Luke, but we are already preparing to have our young guest work on them too, after we get a forge running of course. Not just that, we can even see about making more weapons. He seems to be sure of himself.

  "Look at me losing track again." He chuckled. "As I was saying, this is the last step. For putting the projectiles on the casings, we just reused the same mechanism for organising the casings, with the measurements changed. The projectiles would find their way atop the casings without any more input from the handler. With the projectiles in their place, you remove the walls again and then bring the press. Fortunately, we are only working on the AKM's 7.62x39 mm ammo, so after calibrating it once, you just need to bring the hand down and it will push the projectiles in perfectly."

  Showcasing what he had just said, William went through the motions before raising the press and taking the platform off the belt and carrying it to them.

  "And that's it!" he said proudly, "Each run leaves us with 225 perfect and ready-to-use bullets. Here, take them and have a look!"

  Dan smiled as he did just that, he took one of the bullets and looked at it deeply. He didn't know much about the subject though, so he just gave them a look, noted how it didn't seem any different from any other bullet he had seen before, then looked at Marcus, Old Raily and George. If anyone was going to find fault with them, it would be one of those three.

  "It looks good," Marcus said after studying three of the bullets for a while, "We will try them later on, just to make sure if they are as accurate and usable as the ones we have."

  Old Raily and George nodded in agreement. Dan saw William relax a bit, it seemed that the old engineer was still worried about what might come out of the inspection. There was still that one final test, but at least the first inspection seemed positive.

  "What plans do you have for this?" Dan asked in interest.

  "This is barely a functioning prototype," William said seriously, "We will work on streamlining it and making it even more automatic. Even using my tier one Branching Upgrades on it shows how many improvements could be made. That's without even mentioning making a full production line for both ammunition and AKMs or some other weapons. We can even improve the ammo itself, I'm sure that using special metal from this world or special powder can have some fascinating and astonishing effects. We need to put all that to the test."

  PATREON!!