Night had fallen on the Seventh District, but the thuds of hammers against wood and steel didn’t cease until well into the night as crafters of all occupations continued to work. Devroux sat in the back of Sam’s shop, smithing equipment scattered around the room, leaning back in his chair with an empty anvil in front of him. Sam had long since gone to bed, no longer a part of the day and night working due to his old age, leaving his mink apprentice alone to handle business by himself.

As Dev sat alone, he pondered on his short past as a blacksmith. He had originally begun to learn through happenstance while visiting the island of Drum, but his mentor there, Bart, was influential enough to force him to continue his work. He hadn’t picked it up truthfully until he had decided to throw himself into it having come to Baltigo, where another chance encounter helped him meet the one who trained his trainer. It was, as anyone would see it, too lucky to be coincidence, but the mink couldn’t bring himself to claim divine intervention either.

While the past may have been fruitful for his current success as a blacksmith, as slim as it may be, it wasn’t as personally fruitful as it could potentially become. He worked for Sam for free, only having brief moments to sell himself as a future master blacksmith. While his pockets weren’t being lined with beli, his crafts were still being sold to that masses, none of which he’d taken up for himself either. That thought lingered. He had crafted tens of dozens of daggers to appease Bart’s rigorous training process. He had crafted just as many weapons and other items for people of all walks of life since coming to work for Sam. Yet the one person he hadn’t crafted a weapon for was himself.

The mink reached down to his side, placing a hand on the two kiridashi hanging from his waist. He had purchased them prior to leaving Zou. They had been more used as whittling tools than as weapons, though that’s what they were intended for. His hand moved to the opposite side of his body, placing itself upon the axe given to him by Bart. It hung in its own clip from his waist. While it was a keepsake of Bart and his family heirloom to boot, Devroux had only used it one time before to behead two of the most disrespectful people he had met before leaving Drum. Strapped to the mink’s back was his most used weapon, Yoru.

Yoru was a special case, however. It was a weapon he had picked up through a chance encounter with Tell-Tale Tom, but it was also a weapon of immeasurable crafting expertise. An obscenely sharp blade combined with an ornate design of incomparable delicacy. It was bladed on both sides of the steel and encased his hand in a hilt of thorns when held. The lightweight design made it easy to wield and Devroux’s go-to weapon. It was the one that had taken the most lives while in his care.

In spite of how much or how little they were used, each weapon had a place at the mink’s side. Yet, he wanted more. Weapons that not only sliced, but cleaved, smashed, and grated. He wanted a weapon for any use case, which wasn’t possible with just one. While there were plenty of weapons on his list to get, there was an entire class of weapons that had yet to be made part of his collection. A heavy hitting axe, a carving tool, and a sword, but they all lacked one thing – range.

With all of the work the Dev had put into working in Sam's shop, many designs were flying through his head. There were many things that could fill the niche that he wanted to fill. A whip granted more range than any of his other weapons – or a whip-sword if he wanted to get a little creative with it, but usually the people who used those weren't threats in their own right. Shuriken would work if he wanted to emulate the ninja of Wano, but he'd have to put in some special training time in order to master the use of those. A simple chakram would work, but he was no monk.

Out of the numerous options that made their way through his thoughts, only one caliber of weapon made sense to craft. Devroux was a swordsman and his skill set, although not incredibly linear, wasn't equipped to handle the weapons of a marksman. However, those weapons made the most sense to fill his desired niche and, even more than that, who was anyone to tell him he couldn't use a gun? The ladder reasoning is what sold the mink on forging himself a weapon of that class, but questions were still left to be answered.

A marksman's weapons chest wasn't as narrow as some would believe; this he knew. With the many pirates, mercenaries, and huntsmen that came through Sam's shop he had had plenty of opportunities to craft a variety of guns – plenty more to investigate on new designs for the future. Handguns, rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles were all options, but that's simply because they're classes of guns, not specifics. A handgun could be narrowed into several different sub-categories – flintlocks, revolvers, clip-loaded, and the like. Some of those designs being more complicated than the next.

As confident as Devroux was in his craftsmanship, he knew that his experience was still lacking in certain areas. He needed to pick something that he could not only wield convincingly, but also craft well enough to meet his personal standards. He wasn't some run-of-the-mill customer and thus wouldn't be sated by any weapon coming off the grinding wheel.

Clip-magazines were tedious to make - the locking and loading mechanisms were something he had yet to master. Flintlocks were too simple – they were the most frequently used by young, inexperienced or poorly equipped crews of pirates. Revolvers, however, still had plenty of options to play with within their own sub-category. The mink placed his clawed fingers against his chin as he contemplated, lightly scratching his furred face. If he chose a revolver, would it be five-shot? Six-shot? Would he want to lower it further to fit bigger rounds? How long did he want the barrel? There were so many questions to answer, but that customizability is what solidified his decision to craft one.

After deciding on his chosen sub-category, Devroux was forced to self-reflect in order to figure out the answers to the next line of questioning. What kind of person was he? How skilled was he with a weapon? What was this gun going to be used for? However, after all he'd thought about so far, these were the easiest questions for him to answer. To him, picking a weapon was the same as picking out dresswear for some people; that thought leading him into a mental image of the Bandit King, Jackal, and the various calico scarves he'd already seen him wearing. When it came to answering questions about himself, he was sure. He knew what kind of person he was and that's all he needed to know how the weapon would be used.

His skill with a gun was nowhere near the level of his skill with bladed or blunt weapons, thus his speed in reloading would be inefficient to say the least. Dev's best bet in remedying this, he thought, was by crafting the maximum capacity he could without making his weapon obscene. For this, he chose a six-shot as the solution. The gun would then be primarily used to start fights, taking people out from a distance before they had the chance to close in on him, or he had the chance to close in on them. But again, Dev's skill with a gun had yet to be determined. Lengthening the barrel would help make his shots a tad more accurate, giving him a length to look down rather than guessing. A long-barrel six-shot revolver was the end result of that line of personal questioning. As simple as the answer seemed, there were nearly infinite variations that he could have come up with instead.

Devroux had no intentions of returning to his inn room that evening. With no further questions coming to mind and Sam having long-since gone to bed, the mink was free to begin his work. His intentions were to work through the night in order to quickly complete a weapon that would finally be for himself. The only thing standing in the way of that goal being the accuracy of his own hammer strikes against the iron and how accurately he could temper the steel.

The mink stood up from his stool before the anvil, giving himself a quick stretch before continuing. The first step, as usual, was heating the iron to be melted and folded. Dev walked over to the large stack of iron bars against the wall to choose one at random and take it to the forge. With his tongs, he stuck the bar into the heart of the furnace and began to watch the cold metal heat up. As his eyes locked onto the metal, his mind wandered momentarily back to his time on Drum.

Bart's barn, his workshop, had a furnace much larger than the one he was currently using. At the same time, the barn didn't have any real ventilation aside from leaving the door open to let the winter island air seep in. Dev's days with Bart, while meaningful, were filled with sweat in spite of the copious amounts of frigid air. By comparison, working with Sam was much easier. He could enjoy watching the metal slowly heat from gray to a glowing red as the flames danced around it without having to suffer at the hands of its heat.

"I wonder how Bart is doing these days," he thought. "I should pay him a visit sometime soon. Maybe he has stories about Sam too."

The color of the metal slowly shifted away from its cold gray, eventually turning red and glowing just as it was supposed to. When the time came and the metal was ready to be worked, Dev quickly pulled it from the furnace and brought it to the anvil. With his hammer in one hand and the glowing steel in the other, the mink began beating the weapon into shape. Compared to swords, spears, and weapons of that type, a revolver was an entirely different beast, but it didn't mean the initial process was all that different. All weapons were birthed from embers and beaten between steel.

For the most part the revolver would all be one, solid piece. The barrel and frame were all connected by the same steel. The cylinder and the trigger were the only visible portions of the gun that would be moving and thus would be forged from different steel. The shapes of each part were made to be generalized at first, then would be narrowed down with precision instruments after the fact. Dev had become comfortable with the hammer since beginning working with Sam and the process to hammer out the shape of his weapon went by relatively quickly. It was the following portion that would be an extensive, time consuming process and the process that made smithing guns far more intensive than smithing other weapons.

With the shape of the weapon hammered out, what Devroux had in front of him were merely lumps of steel that were roughly shaped like the frame of a gun and its cylindrical cartridge. What made a gun a gun, however, was the fact that it had several openings throughout the metal – these being the barrel, each hole to load bullets, and the vacant area to include the mechanics that made the gun fire. Due to the nature of these they weren't able to be hammered out and merely rolling a sheet of steel wasn't a viable concept. In order to get the proper shape, these openings would have to be drilled out, requiring a lot of time, a lot of patience, and a lot of precision.

Sam's shop and its equipment were, for the most part, outdated. Most of the popular shops in the area were wealthy enough to afford machining tools to help them hammer out larger pieces of steel or, as would be usable in this case, equipment to help bore a hole through steel for guns. What Dev had to work with in Sam's shop was little more than a hand-cranked drill and a prayer that he could keep the line straight for the entire length of the barrel. It had been measured to be eight inches in length, but it had to be kept impossibly straight for the weapon to be usable. Without outsourcing or using higher grade equipment, there was nothing left for Dev to do but dive into the process.

With a piece of fabric tightly wrapped around the frame of his project, the mink tightly – but carefully – screwed it into a vise so that he could drill without worrying too heavily that it would move. Cranking carefully, he began to bore out the length of the barrel, stopping roughly every tenth of an inch to again measure the thickness of the barrel sides and keep it straight. The smaller the distance between checking again, the lower his chance of messing it up and being forced to scrap it altogether. The barrel was the longest portion of the drilling process, but it wasn't the only one.

Eight inches of steel had to be carved out with absolute precision, the same being said about the ammo cylinder that came afterwards. Seven holes had to be carved out of the cylinder – six for the ammo, one for the pin that would hold it in place and allow it to rotate. The only part of the cylinder that was forgiving was the fact that it was a smaller piece that could be reforged much easier than recreating another full revolver frame. Dev worked in this order, moving from the barrel to the cylinder and then back to the frame to carve out the void for the mechanical pieces.

Dev had been able to bore out the pieces without being forced to forge anything a second time. This wasn't due to skill so much as it was him doing his due diligence and checking the width and spacing so frequently. The time he had been able to save by tacking on extra time to check his spacing meant that by the time morning had come, he had been able to make all of the pieces necessary to assemble the revolver.

There's always an order of operations in anything, even in smithing. Devroux had been through trial and error enough times to know the order of operations for making this type of weapon, though it was still the first of its kind for him. The first order of business was to always hammer out the shape of what you were crafting to as close as you could get it, with the second being the process that had the highest chance of failure. This put boring the holes immediately second in Dev's order of smithing operations. If he hadn't drilled them straight, he would have had to scrap, meaning if he had put any further work into it prior to that, all of it would have been in vain. However, now that the hard part was out of the way, he was free to finish up the craft.

The hammering could only shape the weapon so accurately, meaning that each piece needed to be taken to the grinding stone to get them closer to perfect. A hand file would come after the grind stone if there were portions that needed special attention. When everything was smooth and even, the mink could take polish to each of the pieces and give it a nice, glossy shine before beginning to assemble it all.

When it came time to assemble the pieces to make the full weapon, it was a simple task. As this gun wasn't mass-produced, each piece was made to special order, deliberately sized to only fit smoothly with each other. The most complicated part of assembling the revolver was putting together the mechanics within the handle that let it fire; even those were relatively simple though. Before long, the weapon was assembled and ready for use.

Dev sat on a stool at the workbench in the shop, carefully polishing his newly completed project when Sam came out of his room upstairs. Well rested, Sam silently watched his apprentice work for a moment before speaking up.

"You made this? Overnight?"

"Yessir. It was... tedious, to say the least."

"I didn't know we even had the tools to make guns anymore." Sam chuckled. He knew full well that they didn't have the machinery to properly bore out the holes necessary. He had long-since left the gun game when he became too old to properly work with that equipment and time necessary.

"Barely," Dev shot back. The mink reached across the workbench and picked up the hand-crank drill he had to use. "This is what you've got. But I did it. Hopefully."

"Ah. You haven't shot it yet. Mind if I take a look though?" The old man held out his hand expectantly, but Dev knew if he refused there wouldn't be a fight. Sam's experience, however, was necessary for the time being. His wealth of crafting knowledge wasn't to be scoffed at, so he handed the polished revolver over to the old man.

Sam rotated the gun around in his hand, pulling the hammer back, pulling the trigger, popping out the cylinder, and looking down each bored hole. "It looks really solid," he said. Again, popping the cylinder out, he closely inspected the size of the holes. "I can teach you how to make the bullets for this, if you want." Sam held out the weapon to give it back to his apprentice.

"That would be much appreciated." Dev had been excited to craft himself his own weapon and hadn't been worried about what it would take to fire his creation. While he could figure out how to craft a gun, he had no idea how to craft the bullets that would go into it.

Sam, however, was prepared. His shop may have been poorly equipped, but as a person, he was not. He didn't keep most of the equipment necessary to smith what he had stopped doing a long time ago, but the basic, hand-worked equipment would be more than enough to teach an apprentice the basics. The old man slowly made his way around the shop gathering pieces from different parts to bring back to the work bench. He brought back simple, small pieces of metal, lead, and some gun powder.

Making sure Dev was watching, he slowly began to roll and punch out the necessary pieces that would fit together to make the bullet casing, which he then filled with some of the gun powder. The lead had to be melted down and molded into correct sizes, but those were then VERY CAREFULLY tapped into the head of the casing. When the hammer collided to make the spark, this lead was what would be shot out.

Contrary to his initial understanding of the process, Dev actually thought it was pretty simple. An easy, repeatable project if he ever needed to make more ammunition, which he definitely would. It made him appreciate Sam a little more once again, as he never seemed to not be useful when it came to smithing knowledge.

Sam took up the weapon once more and slowly loaded the complete bullets into the cylinder, clicking it back into place when it was full. "Well, there you go. I'm sure there's plenty of firing ranges in the Fourth District if you want to test it out. Mercenaries love their guns." Sam chuckled, finding his truth comical.

Devroux took the weapon from Sam and walked over to one of the windows. The morning sun had begun to rise and it gave the perfect lighting to give a last inspection to the now fully completed weapon. He grabbed a rag and polished it once again, the bullet creation having dirtied his and Sam's hands. Walking back towards Sam, Dev held out his hand to give him a handshake.

"Thank you, Sam. You're really amazing at what you do."

"Well, of course! I have to teach my apprentice properly aftera-"

BANG!

Sam's body collapsed to the floor, a through-and-through hole in the center of his forehead. Mid-sentence Dev had lifted the gun and pulled the trigger, much faster than Sam could have ever reacted.