Soldier's Steam Speargun

The Soldier's Steam Speargun sits on the workbench, its brass barrel catching the lamplight and throwing a warm halo across a panel of riveted steel. A glass sight bulges near the breech, filled with a slow green bloom of steam that fogs and clears with every breath the gun seems to take. The stock is dark wood lacquered to a faint gloss, carved with the teeth of a dragonfly and the initials of a long-dead sergeant who once kept time with the pump and the pulse of a battlefield still remembered in field maps. Along the length, copper coils hiss softly, and a pressure gauge wobbles like a nervous eye as if the weapon itself is listening for a story to begin. When you lift it, the weight settles into your hands, the grip rough with oil and wear, the trigger guarded by a hinge that sighs when you test it—like a door that has learned to respect a soldier’s thresholds. The outer shell wears a patina of ash and oil, but the engravings—branching sigils, a tiny anchor, and the stamp of a guild that once bartered in steam and steel—still catch the light and feign that the past is not quite done speaking. In the field, its purpose feels almost mythic, a bridge between craft and combat. The Speargun fires a steam-propelled harpoon with enough bite to pierce light armor and enough reach to keep a skirmishing line honest. You pull the hammer back, hear a hidden breath escape the reservoir, and the shot streaks forward in a clean arc, like a promise kept by a stubborn engineer. If the quarry is clustered, the weapon’s trickle of steam lets you snare several at once or pin a lone target to a barricade with a thunderous impact that rattles shields and nerves alike. Reloading is a patient ritual—pump the reservoir, watch the gauge rise, feel the gun settle back into your palms—every motion a quiet reminder that this weapon runs on more than mere metal: it runs on discipline, on the colonel’s memory of a field order, on the old world’s faith that steam can be coaxed into precision. Its significance isn’t only in the kills or the knockback; it’s in the stories it tells as you move through the world. You hear rumors at riverfront ferries of units that relied on its brutal efficiency during early skirmishes, and you recall the nights when a convoy found shelter behind a broken quay while the Harbor Guild burned off the night’s fog to keep a path open for the wounded. The gun becomes a character in those tales, a stubborn grandparent who remembers the smell of coal and rain and the way a team kept pace with a machine that never forgot a fault line in its armor. Pricing threads its way into the tale too, not as dry numbers but as a rumor you hear at the Saddlebag Exchange, where traders cluster like gulls above a pier. A seasoned dealer, polishing the brass until it shines like a coin just minted, quotes the speargun at 3 gold and 12 silver, a figure that carries the weight of supply and longing in the same breath. He leans in and adds that while the tool is rare, it’s not impossible to find, especially for the right crew and the right night’s bargain. And so the Speargun remains—not just a weapon, but a waypoint in the journey of those who fight with steam and story alike.