A Black Market LitRPG

Word on the street was all about how the enforcers were protecting the factories quite frequently. Even the Ardent Cretins seemed to be protecting their factories for some unknown reason. Rumour was that the enforcers finally had enough of hijackings and were actually doing something serious about it.

Niko was not planning on hitting those factories, but rather the factory that he used to work at. He knew it inside out with Karl – all they made was some processed metal, minerals and maybe a few basic household appliances. Nothing special, but still worth money when sold to the fences.

As far as Niko knew, the enforcers were not protecting the shipments of this particular factory, so Niko felt that it was a clean hit. With the insider information provided by his two corrupt enforcers buddies, Niko had a high confidence in the success rate of this hijacking.

With Karl providing the delivery timing of the shipments in and out of Niko’s former factory, it was a cinch to simply set up a roadblock in the factory blocks to stop the factory wagon. The corrupt enforcers had slowly cleared out the rest of the area, while claiming that they were patrolling the area to prevent the clean enforcers from spotting the hijacking.

However, the factory wagon was nearly an hour late, slightly scaring Niko that he had been made by Karl. “Fuck, where is the wagon?! Have we been set up?!” Niko whispered angrily to his crew.

“Not possible sir, I don’t see any enforcers coming to arrest us. This whole block is empty!”

Niko got his crew to check around a bit, and found nothing else suspicious save for the late timing of the wagon. Just as Niko was about to call off the operation, the sound of an arctech wagon could be heard rumbling through the factory blocks. “Finally!” Niko exclaimed, preparing himself for a quick and fast hit.

The wagon’s driver noticed the impending roadblock in front, the wheels screeching to a halt.

Niko and his crew attacked the wagon immediately, smashing the windows and dragging the occupants out. To their surprise, there were two additional factory workers inside, who tried to fight back. “Private guards? I’m surprised the factory has enough money to hire you guys to guard shipments now!”

The crew killed the private guards and the driver without hesitation. Dumping their bodies into the back, they quickly drove to an intermediate point, splitting up the bolted wooden crates into five different wagons before driving out in unpredictable routes, before finally arriving at the Seven Snakes base through multiple transfers to shake off any enforcers.

It was a simple plan and a routine hijacking - except for the fact that now Niko and his crew were on their knees, kneeling in front of Kyle who glared at him, while Damian and Keith were speechless, staring at the interior of the crates.

One of the crates was opened to reveal a full military arsenal unlike anything they had ever seen. Repeater arctech carbines, explosives, portable cannons, reactive armour and defensive barrier deployables. The technology in the crates were obviously far beyond what the regular guy can get in Raktor, and was most definitely not from Niko’s former factory.

What made it even worse was that the private guards’ bodies were found to have marks indicating they belonged to the Ilysian Punks. Niko gulped internally as he realized what he had just done. This meant that effectively, the Seven Snakes had hijacked another gang’s truck, while said gang had stolen it from a separate source.

“Did you not even stop for a moment to realize this truck was not from the same factory! Alarm bells should have went off in your head the moment the planned truck was an HOUR late!” Damian roared as he berated Niko.

Niko couldn’t say anything, knowing he got too caught up in executing the hijacking in order to prove himself to Kyle. He glanced up at Kyle, whose face was surprisingly not as angry as Damian and Keith. Instead, Kyle’s eyes were locked on the repeater carbines in the crates.

The carbine did not work anything like the automatic energy and particle rifles he had in his former life, but he recognized that the speed at which one could shoot with this was close to ten times faster than the flintlock pistol. His head was racing with ideas on how he could create marginally better guns and enter the market.

Keith finished counting up the equipment. “Sir, the amount of equipment in this crate, you could outfit fifty men up to military grade. And based on what I found, it seems that the Ilysian Punks were planning on smuggling these out of the Yual Dominion back to their home country of Versia.”

Keith handed over a handwritten note found on the crates. “It also seems to be authorized by one of the top dogs of the Ilysian Punks.”

Not every gang was local – with Raktor being a trade hub at the border of the Yual Dominion, it had a lot of foreign immigrants or travellers who established their own gangs.

“They had an insider in the military,” Damian concluded. “There’s no other way for them to get these many guns out other than sheer luck or a long ass stakeout at the factories.”

“If so, we’re going to be caught in a crossfire of hell. The enforcers would definitely be looking for the missing shipment; the Ilysian Punks would be after us for stealing them.” Keith sighed. “We should put this equipment back where the enforcers can find it easily or hand it back to the Ilysian Punks.”

“No.” Kyle suddenly stated. “We’re keeping them.”

“WHAT?!” Damian and Keith were shocked.

“Kyle, we’ll be trapped in an all-out war! You’re talking about robbing the military here!” Damian shook his head vigorously.

“Only if they found out. Were you spotted on your way back?” Kyle asked Niko.

Niko shook his head. “No, I checked the roadblock area to make sure there were no observers around. We swapped wagons five times and spilt up, so it’s impossible they locked onto us.”

“So this means we have some time…” Kyle glanced at the repeater guns, pulling them out.

25 MP? That’s a ridiculous consumption rate. Kyle inspected the exterior of the repeater, noticing that human technology had jumped slightly faster due to the existence of arcite. It was radically different from how kinetic guns worked in his life, with the rifle’s inbuilt engraving providing explosive energy to the projectile rather than contained within a bullet casing.

Kyle’s mind raced as he thought of all the potential scenarios that could happen. The only reason why they were stuck to their district now was that they lacked the strength and firepower. If he could reverse engineer the guns and military-grade equipment, he could easily take over the entire district.

Furthermore, he had learnt various engravings from his time at the Culdao Peaks, thanks to the records of the goblin shamans who marked them on pig skin.

“Kyle, whatever you’re thinking, it’s too crazy!” Damian tried to convince Kyle. “If you so much as use those guns outright to kill anyone else, the enforcers will immediately come swarming. Even our own enforcers won’t be able to protect us anymore!”

“We won’t be killing anyone with these guns. Keith, get every associate that is good with their hands to gather here. I need about ten of them.”

Keith was slightly confused before his eyes finally lit up, understanding what Kyle was planning to do.

“Damian, go to the enforcers and check up on their activity. Drop a hint that the Ilysian Punks have insider knowledge of the military. Tell Adrian to keep an eye on the movement of the Ilysian Punks. They must be suspecting the Red Lions for now. Get Monica to shift half a crate over to the Red Lion district and place it in one of their pubs.”

Damian finally caught on, quickly issuing orders and leaving the base. There is a chance the Ilysian Punks will try to probe us first, seeing as the hijacking happened in our district.

The Ilysian Punks were known to be vicious and had never done a sit-down before. Not even Sebastian of the Ardent Cretins could get them to stop their violent streaks. Kyle finally understood it was because the Ilysian Punks were receiving the support of a rival country beyond the border – Versia. This is going to get complicated fast, but the biggest rewards always have the biggest risk.

“Niko, from now on, you’re in charge of making sure no one other than the ten associates and we get near these crates, got it? We’ll slowly shift them over to a new location, where you will permanently guard.”

Niko nodded vigorously, willing to do anything now to make up for his mistake. However, there was something about the grin on Kyle’s face that made him feel like it wasn’t a mistake.

Kyle grabbed one of the repeater guns back to his office, checking the engraving. The basis of a gun is simple: accelerate the projectile. As such, the engravings should be basic as well.

He dismantled the gun, revealing the interior of the barrel. It was layered four times, with the innermost being rifled. The three layers all had similar types of engraving aimed at accelerating the projectile through the barrel.

The magazine did not have bullets, but rather lots of tiny pellets. It seemed as though the gun was designed to fire multiple pellets at the same time when the user pulled the trigger. Interesting, a slightly similar concept to a particle gun…

All he had to do now was to copy the engraving multiple times. But first, Kyle was worried about the system message claiming that it was unstable.

Reassembling the gun, he loaded the magazine in before getting Niko to set up a dummy in an old room where they used to hold the prisoners. Kyle quickly made a makeshift firing range with crates and scrap metal, making sure the pellets didn’t ricochet all over the place onto him.

Aiming down the barrel, he squeezed the trigger, feeling the arcia energy within him drain outwards into the rifle. The engraving lit up, accelerating the group of pellets in the barrel forwards in a burst shot that blasted the dummy into pieces.

However, instead of Kyle firing another shot, he was forced to drop the gun. The barrel had become unbearably hot from the acceleration, while the MP drained from him was more than half of his MAX. The recoil from the shot was also too strong, reducing accuracy.

Did Niko pick up the defects? Kyle wondered. There was a good chance that it was simply just the technology of the era as well. He had not seen the military in action yet, so he was not privy to what was their technology level.

In some sense, the technological progression path in the world was warped by arcia. Arctech wagons moved on engravings rather than on the concept of combustion, and energy was generated directly from arcite ore without the need for boiling water either. Even wireless radio technology was done via engravings.

Kyle fired the rifles a few more times, testing out different angles and firing speeds before jotting down what he needed to modify.

The idea was simple: with the military guns now in place, he could now ‘create’ guns. There was, of course, a nationwide ban on guns. But that was not going to stop Kyle.

Kyle could have made ‘guns’ much earlier based on his former life’s knowledge, but he needed to get an idea of what the current era’s type of gun was. Making one that was far too advanced would be a disaster for his plan of laying low in the meantime.

Kyle quickly drew out the engravings he needed to implement into the new gun that he was planning to sell. He was not going to sell exactly the same type of gun, as that would be a dead giveaway. It needed to seem as though it was a natural occurrence rather than them hijacking the factory. Instead of a rifle, let’s make handguns instead.

“Sir, I have your ten members,” Keith reported, with the ten new associates in front of him. Most of them were and are still involved in the potion-making process.

“Good. Anyone experienced with arctech engravings?”

The ten members looked at each other, shaking their heads. “No matter. You will be split into two groups of five, where each member will never be located in the same place.” Kyle handed out the engravings he drew, giving a different one to each of them.

Each member of the five-man assembly line was to engrave a specific part of the new handgun without knowing how to assemble the entire thing. Kyle didn’t trust any of the associates, so he compartmentalized the process for them.

At the end of the day, each of the members would then ship their completed batch to Kyle, where he and Niko would assemble it into its final form. And, of course, I’ll add my own little touch at the end. A present for those who try to reverse-engineer my guns.

“Keith, the new locations, are they ready?”

“Not yet sir, but they have already been cleared out.”

“Start moving now. All ten of you, report to your assigned locations. I will teach you personally how to engrave. We start in two days.”