Future

The transmutation succeeded, and Ichiro smiled happily as he picked up the gun and turned it over in his hands.

"What is that?" Urahara asked curiously from beside him.

"A gun. A weapon from the future, and the weapon I was best with when I was alive." As he spoke, Ichiro deftly spun the gun around his finger, then aimed at a piece of wood sticking up nearby.

"A gun? This is a gun too? How do you use it?"

"Like this..."

Bang!

Urahara and Yoruichi's pupils contracted as they saw the hole in the block of wood in the distance. It was so fast!

The bullet was far too fast for the naked eye to follow!

"So this is... a weapon from the future? That attack was fast!"

"Mm..." Yoruichi nodded, then braced her hands against her chest and rubbed her chin. "But it's easy enough to dodge. As long as you react faster than the user, it's easy to avoid with Shunpo."

"Yeah... it doesn't give you much of an advantage. But there's no rush; it can still be improved." Ichiro smiled, put away the Revolver, and laid out the materials again.

He'd finally gotten a chance to come to the World of the Living, so of course he wasn't going to settle for just a Revolver. Besides, it was simply the gun he knew best, not the most powerful one.

After being reincarnated in the world of Fullmetal Alchemist, Ichiro had constantly thought about the path ahead. That world wasn't safe, and although Alchemy was a bit like science fiction, at its core it was still a kind of science and technology.

So Ichiro had no confidence that he could master Alchemy to an exceptionally high level. He needed something that didn't require much skill in Alchemy but was still extremely powerful in combat.

Naturally, guns had been the first thing to catch his eye. He'd come from modern society, after all. Guns were fairly common in the world of Fullmetal Alchemist, but many Alchemists chose not to use them. He didn't know why, but for Ichiro, they were the perfect fit.

He couldn't guarantee that he had the talent to master Alchemy, so he had chosen the more cautious path.

As it turned out, he was much stronger after getting a second life than he'd been in his previous one. His skill in Alchemy wasn't quite the best in the world, but it was good enough to qualify as a State Alchemist. In combat, he excelled at using all kinds of guns and their associated fighting techniques, bringing firearms back into the sights of the Alchemists!

The Revolver was the first gun Ichiro had transmuted. In his first life, he'd been an ordinary person, not even a gun enthusiast. He couldn't identify all the different models, let alone understand how they were constructed.

The Revolver was the gun he knew best. After learning Alchemy, he'd conducted countless experiments and successfully put one together. He'd continued to improve it ever since, and it was one of the handguns he was most skilled with.

The next gun he was going to transmute was a highly recognizable handgun: the Desert Eagle!

Although it wasn't very practical, its tremendous power and striking appearance had made it famous. As a Gun Alchemist, there was no way he'd pass it up.

The gun had plenty of drawbacks, but Alchemy could overcome many of them. Take its weight, for example. He only needed to carry a few essential parts and transmute the rest when needed. There was no need to carry the whole thing around.

As for the recoil, Body Transmutation could improve his ability to withstand it and recover from it. Unless the recoil was strong enough to blast half his body away in an instant, he could more or less ignore it.

Its high accuracy and difficult upkeep? Transmuting it on the spot would solve that perfectly!

And it looked so cool!

The only problem for now was that he couldn't make the bullets. The gunpowder he'd mixed together on the spot wasn't powerful enough to meet the Desert Eagle's bullet specifications.

Even so, Ichiro happily put away both guns. This haul had far exceeded his expectations. Now all he had to do was convince his teacher to help him convert the two guns into Reishi and take them back to the Soul Society. Then this Konso lesson would be perfect!

Compared to how smoothly things had gone for Ichiro, the Konso lesson on the other side wasn't going so well. With Ichiro's help using Kido, they'd managed to earn the little boy's trust, but now they were stuck on the matter of fulfilling his wish.

The one thing the boy couldn't let go of was a wooden sculpture he'd broken. He wanted to fix it. That was his only attachment. The sculpture was nothing special; he'd simply picked it up on the side of the road. He just wanted to repair it.

That was why Ichiro hated bratty kids. You never knew why they got so hung up on things like this.

But now they were in a bind. None of the other students could help, and among the first thirty Kido spells Ichiro had learned, there wasn't a single one meant for repairs. Maybe there was one among the higher-numbered spells, but Ichiro didn't think those were intended for something like this.

It wasn't an absolute rule, but as a Kido spell's number increased, its difficulty and power generally rose exponentially!

Powerful Bakudo spells could also inflict tremendous damage!

For example, the famous forbidden technique that stopped time belonged to Bakudo. But if you could control it precisely, stopping time for just one organ, for instance, it would be extremely effective!

And Kido spells in the nineties could even attack directly. Of course, powerful effects came with extremely difficult training. Most Soul Reapers in the Soul Society only knew Kido spells numbered around thirty to forty. Anything higher was generally something only Seated Officers could master.

That meant repairing the little boy's sculpture could more or less be ruled out as a solution. Ichiro's Alchemy could handle it easily, but that would greatly undermine the purpose of the lesson. So when the three of them returned, they simply stood quietly to one side and watched.

A Soul Reaper's job was to send the dead on to the afterlife, not to fulfill their wishes. It was important to keep the priorities straight.

Whether the others could figure that out was up to them...

Ichiro figured it would be hard for them to break out of their usual way of thinking. It was difficult to see clearly when you were caught up in the situation. And even if they did, they'd still have to handle it in a relatively humane way. They couldn't just use an illusion to trick him, like they had with the little girl before.

The two situations weren't quite the same. Every time they used an illusion to trick a Plus, they planted a hidden problem in the Soul Society, and one day it might suddenly come back to haunt them.

After watching them discuss the matter for ages while going around in circles over how to repair the sculpture, Ichiro sighed, walked off to one side, and took out the Desert Eagle. He disassembled it piece by piece, quickly assembled it again, took it apart once more, and put it back together just as quickly.

This simple exercise could help him transmute guns faster. And now that he'd learned Kido, each time he took the gun apart, he came up with new ideas for improving it.

Ichiro didn't believe guns had no future in the Soul Reaper world. Traditional firearms might not even be able to scratch someone's skin later on, but what if they were combined with Kido?

For instance, the Primera Espada's Resurrección took the form of two guns. One could rapidly fire weak Ceros, while the other fired powerful Ceros at a slower rate.

That was one possibility. Another was Soi Fon's Bankai: simply increase the amount of explosive material and boost the firepower. That was another path forward.

There were plenty of other possibilities, too. Ichiro had no intention of giving up. After all, he'd spent decades studying this.