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 9, if the pistol has sufficient charge to fire it, often burns out the mechanism completely, rendering the pistol useless. A blast at setting 10 can only be acheived via a process known as Supercharging, which is extremely dangerous; at this level, however, one blast could vaporize a large mecha, possibly even a Seraphim (this has not been tested).

Balefire's temporal 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.