This SIG P226 was a hand-modified firearm. It had a stainless steel titanium nitride-coated recoil spring guide rod, a five-inch threaded chromium phosphate .40 S&W barrel, a single-action trigger, a short-reset trigger kit, an ergonomic polymer heat-insulated grip, a heat-treated steel magazine baseplate, and other accessories. These modifications turned the already excellent P226 X5 competition pistol into a special-operations .40-caliber handgun suited for rapid, precise shooting and the installation of tactical accessories such as suppressors. Its magazine capacity was ten rounds.
Most of this gun's components came from the City of Immortals—for industrial work such as corrosion-resistant chromium phosphate coatings and seamless alloy barrel manufacturing—and the private workshop at Oxfordshire Manor, where it was polished and assembled. As a result, the pistol looked completely ordinary, but its metallurgical standards far surpassed those of the modern human world. It was somewhat heavy for some people, and its recoil was intense enough to make one-handed use inconvenient, but that was understandable—this was a custom handgun made for a Witch. Its ammunition used an improved single-base nitrocellulose propellant from the City of Immortals, mixed with powdered bagasse as a propellant charge. It propelled heavy tungsten-core sabot armor-piercing full-power pistol rounds to an astonishing muzzle velocity of 420 meters per second, capable of piercing the defenses of any nonhuman creature at close range.
The modified pistol was beloved by veteran firearms connoisseurs Bayonetta and Jeanne. They were especially satisfied with its lethality against low-ranking angels serving as live targets—Extra-dimensional Beings. At the Oxfordshire family firearms exhibition, which little Lorna also attended, they gave this hand-modified pistol high scores of ninety and ninety-four respectively. Against ordinary enemies wearing body armor with ceramic ballistic plates, standard hollow-point rounds also performed quite well, though overpenetration was unavoidable.
Yet excessive lethality was also a form of deterrence. At