Hellfire pistol

The Hellfire pistol is a modification of the OmniSent's Balefire pistol. Balefire pistols are extraordinarily difficult to make, as the process requires a mage able to cast Balefire which is rare even in Aryth. No such pistols are known to have been made since the close of the OmniSent Conflict. However, many OmniSent agents went unprosecuted after that conflict, and to avoid hostility in nations such as Guardia and the Esper Union, many took refuge in Ticondera and its intelligence agency, The Collective. Thus, most of the supply of Balefire pistols that were not destroyed by the Grand Army ended up in Ticondera.

Balefire pistols are inherently unstable due to the powerful magic they unleash. Furthermore, the output of such a pistol varies widely depending on how much mana was consumed to produce it and how many times it was used. The Hellfire modification process, designed by the Collective at TiRaD Labs, added stabilizers and a variable power setting, as well as a recharge capability that doesn't require additional Balefire casting.

At the very lowest setting, the Hellfire beam exhausts mana rather than destroying it, creating a stun effect on living creatures and a disabling effect on magic and magitek weapons. At lower levels, the beam will permanently vaporize matter within a certain radius up to a certain mass - setting 2 creates wounds like that of a needle gun, while setting 5 creates gouges the size of a fist. At high levels, entire objects can be vaporized, and Balefire's temporal effects come into play. A blast at setting 8 will erase a person and four seconds of their past, and will take fifteen to thirty seconds to recharge. Setting 10, if the pistol has sufficient charge to fire it, often burns out the mechanism completely, rendering the pistol useless. There is a secret overload setting that can only be activated by special key that supercharges the pistol. This is extremely dangerous; at this level, however, one blast could probably vaporize a Seraphim or a Dracoform (this has not been tested). The temporal backlash would also probably kill the bearer of the pistol and anything in his vicinity.

Balefire's temporal and mana-warping effects are poorly understood; some theorize that temporal destruction of any amount could result in unpredictable localized temporal instability and/or warping. Animal testing of low-level blasts produced rare instances of local acceleration, which greatly resembles cancer.

...they carried specially modified Omnisent-issue balefire pistols, which were ridiculously hard to come by and virtually impossible to reproduce without a leashed Tane, since the manufacturing process was often fatal. The Collective had added a small improvement to the cache of balefire pistols they’d gotten their hands on before the GA had the remainder destroyed (the GA deemed balefire too unsafe for small arms usage, since a backfire could wipe out an entire squad or even a large building). The Collective’s balefire pistols were fitted with a dial so that the pistols could be used at a lower (and safer) setting, including a stun setting. The dial contained ten settings, but using a special key would unlock a final overload setting that could take out a seraphim, and probably damage the local mana field so severely as to… Well, it wasn’t pretty, and no one in a 50 foot radius of the pistol (including the bearer) was likely to survive or even produce a recognizable corpse. They were dubbed, “hellfire pistols”.