BANG!
A heavy ball of metal hit Kyle's chest.
Luckily, Kyle's body was hard enough that the heavy ball didn't cause any real damage.
A moment later, Kyle looked at the big cannon he had built on the other end of the room.
The bottom looked like an old-timey cannon one would expect on a ship in a pirate movie.
Yet, the top looked completely different.
It looked like the top of a baseball pitching machine.
There was a big storage with a bunch of metal balls inside, which fed directly into the end of the cannon.
Meanwhile, a metal wire led from Kyle's foot to the back of the cannon.
Kyle's Soul extended along the metallic wire to the space inside the cannon.
Then, he launched a Boost from the end of the metallic wire inside the cannon.
BANG!
Another ball hit Kyle's chest.
'It's not a meteorite but the closest thing I can create,' Kyle thought. 'Big metal ball that moves real fast.'
Naturally, just imagining a meteorite didn't work.
This world had different rules.
Everything worked with Ether, and if one wanted to understand something, one needed to understand what the Ether did to make that thing happen.
This cannon would completely obliterate a normal person, but it couldn't be compared to a proper meteorite.
It wasn't nearly as fast as one.
Meteorites moved much faster.
Many of them reached speeds of tens of kilometers per second.
That was the speed of a Transcendent.
Meanwhile, almost no guns on Earth shot bullets that reached speeds of even one kilometer per second.
The metallic balls Kyle launched reached speeds of about 1.5 kilometers per second.
Then, there was the aspect of size and weight.
A bunch of meteorites were tiny. Most of them didn't even survive their journey to Earth since they just burned up in Earth's atmosphere.
On the other end were humongous meteorites that left kilometer-wide craters.
Could a gun compare to the asteroid that made the dinosaurs go extinct?
Maybe a huge artillery gun that could launch a ridiculous hydrogen bomb, but in that case, the damage didn't come from the force of impact but from the explosion the bomb caused.
Ether acted very differently on different levels.
The way the Ether acted when an object traveled at speeds of a thousand meters per second was very different from how an object traveled at speeds of two meters per second.
On Earth, one could use the same formula for both since it was the same physical act, but with different numbers. This was not the case in this world.
Surprisingly, these changes also weren't gradual, which one would expect.
The Ether of an object traveling at speeds of 100 meters per second and an object traveling 200 meters per second were the same, just with different intensities.
Yet, there was suddenly a huge difference in how the Ether acted when speeds of 200 meters per second and 300 meters per second were compared.
It was weird.
It was almost like there were levels to speed.
It was like there was an interval of speed a level was responsible for, and when the speed went beyond the upper limit of the interval, the way the Ether acted suddenly changed.
As a Peak Warrior with active Enchantments and techniques, Kyle could just barely reach a speed of a thousand meters per second, but only for a short moment.
Kyle could observe the way the Ether moved on his own body when moving at top speeds.
After a lot of experiments, Kyle could sense that the Ether of his speed became unstable when he reached his top speed.
It was like it was just about to transition to the next level.
That was why Kyle was using the metallic balls.
They reached the next level, and Kyle wanted to understand how the Ether of that level acted.
After another hour of getting peppered by balls, Kyle paused his experiments with momentum.
If he just focused on momentum, he would be focusing on an aspect shared by wind, gravity, and space.
He didn't just want wind.
He wanted metal and fire as well.
He wanted a meteorite… or, for now, a bullet.
A massive, metallic object that moved very quickly.
Kyle went to the cannon and focused on the Ether inside.
He focused on the force of the explosion.
Yet, he didn't fire the cannon with his own Ether, this time.
It wasn't important what he could already do.
After all, he could already do that.
He needed to see something that he couldn't do with just his own power.
So, he changed the cannon a bit and loaded it with a red stone.
A moment later, Kyle closed his eyes and focused on the cannon.
Then, he infused the cannon with some Fire Ether.
BOOOOOM!
The entire room shook as the metallic ball hit a massive metallic wall.
This ball had moved almost three times as fast as the ones Kyle shot himself.
However, firing the cannon this way was expensive.
Kyle was using a Rank B Material beloved by Fire Sorcerers.
This material enhanced the effects of Fire Ether by adding its own Fire Ether.
Of course, this meant that the material would get weaker and weaker the more it was used.
Naturally, this material couldn't be used to increase the power of Fire Ether endlessly.
The enhancing effect was like a hyperbola.
At some point, one needed 100 times more of the material to increase the effect by just one percent.
But it was enough to push the power of Kyle's Boost to the next level.
The Ether that dictated the explosion's behavior reached a level Kyle couldn't reach himself.
For several hours, Kyle continuously fired the cannon.
Then, he took a break from that as well and focused on comprehending more Rank F Materials.
Momentum was the cannon's aspect of wind.
The explosion was the cannon's aspect of fire.
The material was the cannon's aspect of metal.
Naturally, to comprehend the aspect of metal, Kyle needed to understand materials.
Luckily, there were not many Rank F Materials remaining that Kyle hadn't comprehended yet.
Kyle was also slowly forming an overarching theory of how all Rank F Materials worked in his mind.
If he could just see a couple more of them, he could solidify his theory.
That would be when he would comprehend his first Fragment.
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