Gunsoul

Calamity beckoned.

An overwhelming flood of malevolent qi engulfed Fleshmarket. A tidal wave of phantom gunpowder and searing hot air suffocated Yuan, causing what remained of his iron lungs to burn within his chest.

The same oppressive sensation of danger he experienced in Manhattan’s presence overcame him once again. This time it was wilder though, violent and bombastic. Manhattan had been a quiet death, cold and unfeeling. The Gun’s presence instead cast a shadow of savage and indiscriminate destruction; an incoming threat of mindless, maniacal violence.

Yuan Guan was no coward and not one to back down from a fight, but he was not an unreasonable man. He knew he stood no chance against a demigod capable of razing an entire city to the ground in the blink of an eye.

So he followed Revolver’s advice.

Yuan ran towards the Bullet Church’s ruins. He wanted to rejoin with Orient and Holster to confirm their survival—they had to have survived—and then escape the city. Nothing else mattered.

He hardly managed to walk two steps before collapsing among the ruins.

His legs spasmed mid-motion and caused him to trip up. Pain coursed through his feet then upward across his back, everything below the waist going numb.

“Yuan!” Revolver rushed to his side. “Yuan, stand up! You can’t stay here!”

“Can’t… move…” Yuan clenched his feet and tried to power through the pain, to no avail. His own legs refused to obey him. “Won’t… too much…”

Gayak warned him that it took a while for a body to adjust to crossing the Third Coil, and that was before he pushed himself to the limit to defeat his enemy. His limbs now suffered from his performance’s backslash.

He heard Revolver curse under his breath. The older Gunsoul grabbed his arm and pulled it over his shoulders.

“Hold on, kid,” Revolver told him before whistling. The roar of his cruiser resonated across the smoke, though it was hardly audible over the encroaching symphony of whirring cylinders and gunshot steps. “We’ll pull through this.”

He was lying.

A great tremor shook the earth near them, followed by a searing heatwave that nearly set Yuan’s remaining clothes on fire. A great shadow loomed over the Gunsouls and blanketed them in thick darkness.

Yuan looked up.

And up.

And up.

The Gun towered over the Gunsouls like a mountain made of lead and steel. The brief glimpse Yuan caught during his revival didn’t do the real thing justice. It was over three times Asa-Zakura’s height, a walking metal fortress with monstrous gun barrels for hands and a rifle for a face. Its emaciated parody of a humanoid form was a monstrous mix of charred bones and burned flesh melting together with oily metal. Mounted artillery cannons fumed on its shoulders, and an ammo belt tail whipped the ground in its wake. Its entire body breathed gunsmoke and death; its maw opened to reveal rows of lead shells for fangs.

Death by firearms glared down on them, and Revolver shot it in the face.

A bullet packing more qi than Yuan could muster in his entire core hit the Gun with enough power to blow Orient all the way to the Nowhere. It surged out of Revolver’s barrel like a blazing comet and detonated into a fireball larger than Asa-Zakura himself. So bright was its glow that Yuan had to cover his eyes not to go blind, and even then the impact blew out a wave of hot air that threw dust in his face.

The Gun didn’t even flinch.

Everything that followed was a blur. Revolver fled with Yuan on foot at bullet speed, crossing the ruins by running even faster than Orient could drive. They rushed past piles of wrecked cyborgs and the lead-riddled remains of their enemies across a wasteland of the dead.

The Gun caught up to them in a single bound.

Its mere movements sent shockwaves rippling across the air, blasting away debris and creating a vast crater on impact. Yuan and Revolver were thrown at burning wreckage with greater force than Gatling Man’s punches, the latter losing his grip on the former. Yuan bounced off piles of debris and soon ended up laying face-first on the ground.

“Away…”

The sound was so soft, so weak, that Yuan hardly recognized the word.

Yuan turned to look up at the Gun looming over him. The giant monster could have stomped the young Gunsoul to paste with a single step, but it did no such thing. Its gun-arms pressed against both sides of its barrel-face like a man struggling with a potent headache.

“Run… away…” The Gun’s screech carried the painful clicks of a thousand triggers, drowned out by the whirring of its countless cylinders. “Get… Away…”

What was that pained sound coming out of its maw? Black oil droplets dripped down the Gun’s barrel and fell near Yuan, carrying both the smell of rancid salt and the acrid tang of gunpowder.

“Are you…” Yuan blinked in utter disbelief. “Crying?

The Gun wailed.

Had Yuan been a Scrap, his eardrums would have ruptured from the sheer noise. The Gun’s scream threw him back and spread vibrations across the air. The shoulder-cannons soon fired an artillery barrage at random, sending heavy projectiles across the smoking desolation. One of them nearly hit Revolver, who counterattacked with qi-bullets of his own. His shots would have killed the likes of Gayak in a single hit, but failed to make the Gun budge nor take notice. The monster continued to unload its payload without rhyme nor reason. The sight reminded Yuan of a godlike child reveling in tearing down a human anthill.

The Gun was mindless violence and mayhem incarnate. Almighty power without purpose.

With nowhere to run and nowhere to go anyway, Yuan decided he wouldn’t perish without a fight. He barely managed to move his hands enough to coat his arm in a cylinder Barrier. “Recoil… Blas–”

A bullet coming from the west shattered Yuan’s Barrier before he could complete his technique.

Yuan had expected this, but neither the shot’s direction nor its qi signature. He immediately recognized it.

Arc.

His own mentor had sniped him from leagues away.

Why? Yuan’s confusion was only matched by the sting of betrayal. Why?!

He didn’t have much time to think. The Gun finally deigned to focus on him, light building up inside its barrel-nose for a fatal shot. Yuan glared back at the face of his incoming death, refusing to beg nor kneel.

A metal locomotive rammed into the Gun from the east in a cataclysmic collision.

Yuan could only stare in disbelief as a familiar spirit-train hit his own patron demigod at phenomenal speeds. Something so big and so long shouldn’t move faster than a bullet, yet it did. A feng shui corridor of qi propelled it forward with such force that it pushed the Gun back and caused it to misfire. A shining qi meteor erupted from its barrel-head and surged at the horizon. A devastating explosion rocked distant hills and reduced them back to rubble.

Orient! Yuan brimmed with joy once he noticed Holster’s familiar qi presence onboard. Moreover, through some miracle, the spirit-train appeared to have been untouched by the Gun’s bombardment. Thank the Wayfinders, they’re alive!

His relief lasted until the Gun pushed back against the spirit-train, its inhuman might more than a match for Orient’s bulk and speed. The monster stopped the vehicle dead in its tracks and prepared to fire at the locomotive at point-blank range.

A qi-charged bullet hit the Gun from the west.

Revolver’s projectiles failed to leave a dent in the demigod of ultraviolence, but Arc’s blasted off half its metal face and caused it to flinch. It produced no mighty fireball nor blinding flash of qi; in fact, the only hint that it was a bullet that hit the creature instead of an artillery cannon was the lack of smoke or wide explosion that followed. The hit was subtle in its appearance and devastating in its execution.

The Gun’s head snapped in the surprise attack’s direction, ignoring the spirit-train trying to drive over it.

“Arc…” the Gun rasped. “Please…”

Hearing his mentor’s name coming out of that creature only confused Yuan more. What’s going on here?

Arc’s actions didn’t make any sense. Why would she attack the Gun after preventing Yuan from doing the same? If Arc had wanted Yuan dead, she could have hit his bullet-core easily enough. Did she want him to focus on running away rather than fighting the Gun? Something wasn’t right here…

The Gun didn’t leave him time to think things through. The monster let out an agonizing wail, then kicked the spirit-train away with all of its monstrous strength. The locomotive derailed to the side with a loud boom, its wheels spinning on empty air, its chimney helplessly breathing smoke into the ruins.

Revolver jumped to rejoin Yuan. “Your friends are onboard that train,” he told his protegée with a grim, heavy tone. “Are you ready to wager your life to save them?”

Yuan grit his teeth and nodded sharply. He refused to let Orient and Holster perish, whether Arc allowed it or not. “Yes.”

Revolver chuckled. “Then brace yourself.”

He holstered his guns, then joined his hands into a series of mudras. However, no verbal mudra escaped Revolver’s mouth. He instead chose to sing a low, humming tune.

“I call upon luck, the fairest judge,” Revolver whistled to the wind. “Chambers loaded, let’s play…”

A wave of metal qi erupted around Revolver before quickly engulfing Yuan. It expanded outward until it reached the Gun and caught it like a fish in a net. The energies solidified into a ring that trapped the three of them at the exclusion of everything else.

Yuan at first thought that Revolver had used a Barrier until he sensed a veil falling upon him. Reality itself twisted within the circle’s confines, bending space and time. Revolver’s will overflowed from his body and seeped into the world. Its gravity warped the very fabric of existence.

An Authority.

He said he was pushing towards the Fifth Coil, Yuan recalled, though he hadn’t expected his fellow Gunsoul to have reached it yet. This is his trump card.

“Two pull the trigger, one walks away!” Revolver chanted as the Dao itself bent to his will. “Steel and chance no longer wait!”

A sniper’s bullet struck Revolver in the jaw and blasted half of it away in an attempt to silence him; far too late.

“Death’s Roulette, seal our fate!"

The light of Revolver’s soul swallowed Yuan and the Gun alike.