Yuan hated fog.

Every gunslinger heavily relied on their sharp eyes, and their hearing to a lesser degree. A dense mist reduced both. Thick gunsmoke prevented Yuan from seeing further than his submachine gun’s tip and muffled all noise around him. It was a miracle he could breathe at all. A Scrap would have asphyxiated thrice over by now, but the acrid fumes didn’t bother Yuan’s lungs in the slightest. His Gunsoul nature likely spared him from it.

Trying to see the path ahead with his qi sense yielded no result either. The Ammobog’s energies clouded his sight. Someone could have stood behind him with a gun barrel pressed against his skull and he wouldn’t have been able to tell.

Other people had died in this mist too. He had encountered four corpses on his way across the bog, their bones buried in liquid gunpowder cesspools and under cartridge hills. All their skulls bore signs of headshots.

Fog made Yuan feel powerless. Vulnerable.

Nonetheless, he had no issues finding his way through it. A clear trail paved with iron plating crossed the Ammobog. The gunsmoke grew thinner around it too. The further he advanced, the more Yuan grew convinced that the Ammobog’s mistress was guiding him to her dominion.

To his relief, the fog slowly began to clear. Yuan found himself ascending a hill covered in a thin brass sheen and thorny bushes growing shrapnel shrubs instead of flowers. The floor made a crunching sound when Yuan’s feet stepped on it. Clusters of cartridges formed parodies of rock formations.

A monstrous gun’s muzzle rose at the hill’s peak and vomited liquid gunpowder onto its steel slope. Any spark should have blown the place up to kingdom come, but a makeshift forge and its roaring fire stood in its shadow nonetheless.

The Ammobog’s mistress worked there, pouring a small pot of molten lead into a bullet mold.

Yuan wasn’t sure what he had expected to see. A living gun? A demon queen who had cast away her humanity in search of greater strength? A beauty that defied description? When compared to Manhattan and Revolver, the woman in front of him appeared strangely human in comparison.

She did look fearsome, however. Her long, fiery hair bore the crimson shade of blood. A dark blindfold covered her eyes and left only her scowling mouth visible. A wide-brimmed black hat adorned with raven feathers cast her face in obscurity, and a tattered burgundy cloak billowed over a practical attire of iron plates, reinforced leather, and sturdy boots. She wore a belt laden with ammunition strapped to her waist alongside a small, archaic rifle that belonged in an old world shrine rather than on the battlefield. Her right arm hid under her cloak, while her left hand held on to a scorchingly hot pot filled with molten lead. The terrible heat didn’t seem to bother her, nor did she use tongs to manipulate her tools.

That woman didn’t carry the same aura of overwhelming menace as Manhattan before her, but Yuan’s bullet-core began to pulse the moment he laid eyes on her. She radiated a strange kind of serene grace and poise, and the air distorted around her person. Space itself seemed to twist in small and nearly imperceptible ways when she moved her head.

She kept her back turned to Yuan, though he sensed her attention on him. She didn’t need eyes to see him. When she moved from one side of her workbench to the other to inspect her cooling molds, her feet left traces of gunpowder and carried the sharp clink of bullets hitting a concrete floor.

“If you have come for my core, Gunsoul, then heed my words,” the woman spoke with a voice that reminded Yuan of a bullet’s whistle, soft yet deadly. “I am Arc, the Rifle Woman.”

She pried a mold open with her left hand and picked up a bullet. Glowing sutras were carved on its surface and shone with power.

“And I’ve never been defeated.”

It was a tall claim to make but… The arrogant cultivators who pretended as much always betrayed a hint of insecurity in their voice, but Yuan didn’t detect any from this woman’s words. That was a statement, not a boast.

This woman had slain and crushed all challengers she ever faced.

Yuan pondered his answer. Between the warning shots, the lack of hostility coming from her, and the fact that she hadn’t blown his head off yet, he assumed that she wouldn’t attack unless he struck first. The gulf in power between them was unfathomable, but she lacked Manhattan’s obvious malevolence.

“I thought you were a ghost,” Yuan confessed.

“Is that what those Bullet Church fools told you?” Arc began to trim the excess lead from the bullet with her nails. They cut through the metal as easily as knives through flesh. “They know nothing of the curse they cravenly revere. They would be wise to find a better god.”

“Is that why you let me come here?” Yuan asked. He noted that she called the Gun and Gunsouls a curse. Quite the strange statement to make for someone so far ahead in their shared Path. “So I would tell them to fuck off?”

“Yes,” she replied bluntly.

Yuan didn’t mind carrying that message, but he considered himself enough of a professional not to leave empty-handed.

“We came to pick ammo,” he said. “There’s going to be a Sect war in Fleshmarket. We want to supply both sides so they wipe out each other.”

“I don’t give a fuck.” Arc examined the finished bullet. Did she have eyes underneath her blindfold, or was she simply going through the motions? “Tell those idiots to leave by sunset, then never return. Anyone who stays any longer will die. I’m sick of foragers.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

This isn’t going well. Yuan wished Mingxia was with him. She would know how to smooth things over. “Won’t you at least tell me why?”

“Because I don’t like any of you.”

“Not the ammo thing.” Yuan crossed his arms and tried to pick the best words possible. “Why are you here? Why languish in this place for years?”

Arc didn’t answer him immediately. Yuan wasn’t an expert at reading body language, but she seemed surprised by the question. Few must have asked it.

“I’m waiting,” she finally said.

“For what?”

“For the Gun.”

“Is that what that bullet is for?” Yuan guessed. “To kill the Gun once he comes for you?”

“Even if you kill the Gun, you will never kill the Gun.” Arc tossed her forged bullet aside. It looked like a waste of lead to Yuan, but he supposed it wasn’t the perfect projectile she hoped for. “If you’re ever in a position to kill it, stay your hand. It’ll spare you a special kind of hell.”

Yuan flinched. “What kind?”

“You don’t want to find out.”

Why were all high-level cultivators so goddamn cryptic and evasive? “I want to find out.”

“You don’t,” Arc replied firmly. “Bury your gun and spend the rest of your half-life in peace. Open a shop, plant crops, find a wife or a boytoy, whatever suits you.”

Yuan pointed at her rifle. “You haven’t buried your gun.”

“I guess that means I’ll die a fool. Again.” Arc waved her hand at the workbench. The gunsmoke cloud around them condensed into a pot and magically turned into lead. “Ask me what’s on your mind or fuck off.”

Instead of answering immediately, Yuan first picked up the bullet she discarded. The projectile had cooled off considerably, but still remained warm. Sanskrit scripts covered every inch of its shell and burned with qi. This simple bullet packed nearly as much power as a lower cultivator’s core. A rifle firing it would likely inflict more damage than a rocket launcher.

This person was a master of the Path of the Gun.

“Teach me,” Yuan asked, politely, but firmly.

She didn’t even consider it. “No.”

“What do you have to lose?” Yuan insisted. “If you’re waiting to die either way…”

“You’ll use the techniques I teach you to kill,” Arc stated. “We all rise to avenge a wrong done to us.”

Yuan scoffed. “The world would be better with less marauders and slavers in it.”

Arc finally deigned to face him. Now that he took a good look at her face, Yuan noticed black burn marks under the blindfold. “You don’t get it, do you?”

Yuan scowled. “Get what?”

“That cycle of bloodshed, that’s how the Gun feeds. It plays both sides to keep the war going.” Arc sat on her workbench, a scowl forming on her face. “Kill the men who killed you, and you’ll find that one of them rises up from the dead with a bullet for a heart, or it’ll be one of their loved ones seeking payback. Then they’ll go after the people you care about, and the death spiral will repeat again and again. It happened to me, and it’ll happen to you.”

So what, Yuan should let Slash and his cronies off the hook for murdering his friends? The mere thought of Jaw-Long and Mingxia being tossed into a ditch, their unjust death forgotten, filled him with anger.

“I’ll take that bet,” he said.

“Your loss.” Arc shrugged. “Another came before you for the same reason, a cyborg. He tried to kill me for my bullet-core when I denied him, and bitterly regretted it. I told him to abandon the Path of the Gun if he could and sent him packing.”

Yuan picked up on the veiled threat, but he didn’t give up. He had a chance in a lifetime to learn from a true master of the Gun and couldn’t let it pass. Even scraps of information would teach him much.

What would Mingxia do in his place? She had a motto whenever negotiations stalled: don’t ask what they can do for you, but what you can do for them. Easy words to say, and difficult ones to apply in this case. What could Yuan offer to a high-level cultivator? He had no priceless artifact to trade away, nor the kind of talent that would interest a teacher eager to pass on their legacy.

All he had was information.

“I’ve heard your core is broken,” Yuan said. “Is it true?”

Arc studied him for a moment before answering. “I do not control my Authority anymore. What you see isn’t Headshot Forge’s natural state.”

“Headshot Forge?” Yuan couldn’t help but chuckle in amusement, even after encountering gruesome sights like dead bodies buried in gunpowder. “People call it the Ammobog.”

“Good for them, they’re wrong,” Arc replied with a snort. “Years ago, I fought a death-worshiping cultivator with way too much power. I defeated him, but he destroyed my body and damaged my soul on his way to the Nowhere.”

“Damaged your soul?” The very concept frightened Yuan. Everyone knew that a spirit survived the body’s death and moved on to reincarnate. The dying took comfort in the fact that their immortal essence would survive for a new round at life. “How?”

“He had an Authority of his own.” Arc waved her hand at the gunsmoke fog and muzzle mountain. “Authorities are physical manifestations of a cultivator’s core and will in the physical world. What do you think happens when two of them manifest in the same spot?”

Yuan’s jaw clenched on its own. “They clash and take damage.”

“They do,” Arc confirmed. “My squire, who knew nothing of our immortality, planted my bullet-core in this land. My flesh grew back and healed; my bullet-core did not. Authorities have restrained, closed boundaries to maximize their potency. Mine has open borders. I can’t stop my qi from leaking out.”

That’s why the veil was so weak, Yuan thought. He suspected entering a normal Authority would have been akin to crossing a patch of Thunderlands. Arc’s own spread widely until it thinned out, like a puddle of water. She still packs enough qi to taint everything in a five-kilometer radius of herself.

“You use feng shui to tap upon the local leyline and stabilize your Authority,” Yuan guessed.

Arc nodded slowly. “If I don’t, I leak qi until I lose consciousness and reactivate my Authority as soon as I wake up. Headshot Forge automatically attacks anyone caught in the premises unless I focus on sparing them, so I’m a miles-wide unnatural disaster. It’s even worse with Scraps like those Bullet Church fools. Since they don’t have a strong qi signature to latch on, I can’t react to their presence before my Authority kills them.”

A chill traveled down Yuan’s spine as he put two and two together. The corpses he found on his way to Arc died far too close to her location, while her power killed a cultist the moment he crossed into her territory. In all likelihood, they simply had the misfortune of being within range of her malfunctioning Authority when it first activated.

“My options were to kill myself, become a mobile disaster, or stay put. I chose the last one.” Arc lost interest, grabbed her molten lead cup, and began to pour it into the mold she used earlier. “T’was nice speaking to another Gunsoul, but I’m tired of it.”

“I could help,” Yuan suggested. Orient and Holster might have ideas on how to proceed. “If a core can be cracked, then it should be repairable.”

“I’ve tried everything,” Arc replied with fatalism.

“What do you have to lose from letting us try then?”

“Time,” Arc shot back. “You’re wasting mine right now.”

She won’t believe in me. Though it annoyed Yuan, he could understand why she would react with skepticism. He was a newborn Gunsoul who barely crossed the Second Coil. If a master cultivator failed to find a cure after years of meditation, what hope did he have? I’ve only one last card to play...

“I think I’ve encountered a nuclear cultivator in Fleshmarket,” Yuan said.

Arc crushed the cup within her palm.

Molten lead splashed over her fingers and shrapnel flew without damaging her skin. The metal dripped to the brass ground with a metallic clink. Arc looked at him for a moment, digesting Yuan’s words, before answering.

“I’m listening,” she said.