A silver bullet. One shot. Theatre.

Silver-tin or silver-copper pellets, three to nine millimetres, thirty to fifty in a muzzle-loading charge. Habsburg armoury, Bavarian and Bohemian regimental stores, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Slavic folk issue. A single ball must hit a vital and may skip a tessellated plate. A pattern cannot miss the circulation. The gunpowder-era answer to the same problem the silver-headed arrow solved at a walk: get ion-releasing metal into a fast target that may be clothed, plated, or in cover.

Walpurgisnacht firing is not noisemaking. It is the calendrical remnant of area-coverage at the post-thaw window when overwintering hosts leave cryptobiosis. Ceremonial ostentation does not explain pellet alloy or pellet count. The folklore kept one ball and lost the pattern.