Muzzles Spitting Flames

"!!"

"Good Lord..."

Though he was a hundred kinds of unwilling and a thousand kinds of confused, when Coulson saw the other woman actually fire into the sky, he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt—just this once. At her urging, he steeled himself, raised his sidearm, and charged toward the hiding place of the Bilgewater gang members and bounty hunters.

Then,

to his amazement, he really did see pellets of all sizes raining down from the sky, causing chaos and considerable damage among the enemies hiding behind cover.

"..."

Bang! Bang! Bang!

He emptied his entire magazine, killing the few thugs who, despite their injuries, had still tried to fight back. Then he kicked a dockside gang member who had just gotten to his feet square in the throat, sending him crashing down, where he stayed. Only then did Coulson dart behind a barricade made of wooden cargo crates to take cover from the bullets coming from farther down the street.

"Hah! Hah!"

"This is unbelievable, Miss Sarah! How did you do that?!"

Coulson had studied physics, so he knew that bullets fired into the sky could still cause serious injuries if they fell at a terminal velocity exceeding sixty-one meters per second.

He had also read the relevant medical literature. Between 1985 and 1992, doctors at a hospital medical center in Los Angeles had treated more than a hundred people injured by falling bullets, and over a third of them had died. But what he couldn't understand was how Miss Sarah had managed to control roughly where her bullets would land after firing them into the sky—and how she knew the hail of bullets from those two outdated, beat-up flintlocks would still hit with lethal force once they came down.

Coulson just couldn't make sense of