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A vacuum wasn't necessarily useful for his purposes here, but the mere idea that he could so trivially manipulate air pressure had been enough to get the gears turning in his head even more. Because for instance, what if he did the opposite? Instead of creating an airless chamber, what if he purposely captured air and began compressing it?

It seemed relatively simple to do. Just materialize an open box, then seal it off. From there, he could shrink the hollow space inside, causing the air molecules trapped within to be pressed closer and closer together.

Theoretically, he could do this as much as he wanted. The only problem, he thought, would be in how much air pressure the iron itself could withstand. At some point, the air pressure would likely grow too powerful for the chamber to contain, and his iron would tear itself apart with explosive force in order to release said air.

And therein lay the foundation of his idea. A compressed air explosion. If it worked, then he was pretty sure that he would be able to find all sorts of uses for such a technique in combat.

He wasn't entirely sure it would work that way, though. Thus far, he hadn't found the occasion to actually test it.

And now that he did, he was abruptly more concerned with Voreese's safety than with the experiment itself. He supposed she'd be fine as long as he didn't soul-empower anything, but that would also lessen the value of the experiment. In a real fight, he would almost certainly want to employ soul power.

Ah well. Maybe it was better to take things easier the first time, anyway.

He was already materializing an open iron chamber by the time his spare thought processes were finishing that internal debate. He needed it to be large enough to shoot an Amir-9 out of it, and since there was no soul power to threaten Voreese, he figured that he could go a bit overboard with the physical specifications.