Gayak swung his whip-arms at lightning speeds.

Having witnessed Yuan killing Gatling Man by removing his bullet-core, he immediately aimed for his own with lethal precision. Yuan quickly shot them both before they could reach him.

Fire bullets are incendiary projectiles, Yuan recalled. Earth created shrapnel, Metal bullets are tougher than usual but nothing special…

The bullets he fired carried water and wood-aligned qi respectively. The first turned Gayak’s right whip-arm to ice after impact; the other burst into a seedling bud that quickly infected his enemy’s flesh with roots and petals.

Neither brought him much respite. The boiling blood dripping from Gayak’s arms suddenly burst into flames, melting the ice and burning away the flower bud in an instant. They moved to close on Yuan from both sides in an attempt to catch him.

He activated a Recoil Shockwave in response, though he didn’t retreat. Banking everything on offense since his body wouldn’t withstand a prolonged duel, and ignoring the pain in his exhaust ports, Yuan threw himself straight at Gayak’s body with his foot first. Gayak’s loss of eyes prevented him from reacting quickly enough to dodge.

Yuan kicked Gayak’s torso at supersonic speed, shattering bones on impact. His foot quickly encountered resistance. Muscles tightened and reassembled themselves near the area where he hit, forming a layer of meat that softened the blow and prevented Yuan from reaching Gayak’s core.

With his hands too sore to follow up with a punch and Gayak’s whip-tentacles closing in on him, Yuan decided to retreat. He quickly released a Black Haze to shroud his movements and then attempted to leap over Gayak and strike him from behind.

Burning tentacles grabbed him by the left ankle in midair, piercing through his steely skin and the iron muscles beneath. Another lunged for his bullet-core, but Yuan managed to catch it with his free hand first. He had to bite his tongue not to scream from the pain of his fingers’ flesh melting off his bones.

“I wanted to pace myself to kill the Metallists later, but you’ve done it,” Gayak confessed with giddiness. A layer of translucent matter covered his eyes like a pair of organic glasses and shielded them from the gunsmoke. “I’ll fight you with all I have.”

Yuan answered by aiming for his enemy’s torso with his revolver. Gayak stomped the ground with his foot and summoned a Barrier to protect himself. It stopped the first, non-elemental qi shot. The second, however, carried a spark of fire. The bullet flattened against Gayak’s defense, but the explosive burst of flames went through.

Although the blast burned the outer layers of Gayak’s torso and caused him to stumble, he didn’t release his hold on Yuan either. His tentacles coiled around his leg and hand, tightening their grip.

Yuan had no choice but to use another Recoil Shockwave to retreat. The sudden burst of speed let him wrench himself free from Gayak’s grasp, but his tentacles sliced off parts of him on the way out. Yuan could see his finger bones in some places, and his left foot hurt so much it wouldn’t move again.

The pain did help Yuan achieve a certain kind of clarity. Taking a page from Gayak’s book, he quickly created a Barrier meant to repel only himself to give himself an anchor in midair and control his trajectory. He managed to land on his uninjured right foot a few meters away from Gayak.

What’s this? Yuan noticed a strange change in Gayak. His torso had grown a layer of thick black bark that endured the flames threatening to consume him. Yuan had seen trees with that kind of bark survive wildfires better than most. How odd.

First the arms, then the eyes, and now this… Yuan finally guessed the nature of Gayak’s technique.

Adaptation. His body quickly adapts to environmental pressures and attacks.

It had to be an innate technique of some kind; and considering Gayak kept it as a trump card up his sleeve, it likely carried certain weaknesses that made abusing it unwise. Yuan needed to probe it further.

Following Arc’s teaching, Yuan used Sniper’s Bore to lengthen his revolver’s barrel until it reached the length of a rifle, then fired a water-aligned bullet at Gayak’s left eye. The cultivator’s tentacles failed to catch the precise projectile in time and ice swiftly consumed both his target and the barkskin surrounding it. Both caught fire from a sudden surge of boiling blood.

Five seconds, tops. It took seconds for Gayak’s body to mutate when threatened with an attack. It’s both limited and automatic too, or he wouldn’t have surrendered his first heatproof adaptation. It doesn’t heal him either.

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“There it is, that look of understanding,” Gayak said before running at Yuan at full speed. “The way you pick up abilities with a mere glance… it’s instinctive to you. Is that a quirk of your brain’s biochemistry or experience, I wonder?”

Yuan indeed felt that his brain worked faster since he crossed the Third Coil, but it could have been adrenaline or insight from the moonburns. He would explore the subject after surviving the fight.

Unable to run with his injured foot, Yuan answered by spinning his revolver’s cylinders until it landed on the wood-element bullet chamber, then fired at Gayak’s leg. The bullet surprisingly flattened against a Barrier, though the bud erupted from it and caught him nonetheless. The time it took for Gayak’s flames to consume it gave Yuan a brief second to analyze his defense.

Barriers were stationary by design, but Gayak found a workaround: he created short-lived ones from his feet whenever either of them hit the ground. He thus alternated between two overlapping defenses with each step. Fiendishly clever.

An innate technique draws from the user’s qi, Yuan thought as he quickly reloaded his weapon. If I designed a technique that automatically reacts to attacks, I would design it to use as little qi as necessary to avoid exhausting the user.

Which meant that this Dance of Endless Mutation always took the path of least effort when it came to adaptation. It optimized the body to react to the current threat alone, without anticipation or foresight.

And change without foresight led to extinction.

One of Gayak’s tentacles lunged at Yuan’s bullet-core. Yuan cloaked himself in a short Black Haze long enough to dodge by rolling to the side, then counterattacked with a water and wood bullet in quick succession. Gayak shrugged off the former, but then hastily dodged the second by leaping to the side.

He has guessed my plan, but it’s too late. Gayak’s body now naturally produced steam and flames in high quantities. The very air bent around him from the heat. It’s hit or die now.

“I’m gonna harvest your head,” Gayak decided. “Your brain, the eyes, the whole package.”

“Try, if you dare,” Yuan replied.

Channeling the Recoil Kick through his only remaining functioning foot, Yuan propelled himself forward at Gayak, revolver first. A shroud of Black Haze obscured his weapon and its line of fire.

There came the moment of truth.

Gayak had shown great caution across the entire battle. When confronted with a new move, he always focused on defense rather than pressing his luck. Yuan avoided using his earth bullet during this final clash, so even if Gayak kept count of the chambers, he knew there was one projectile whose properties he didn’t fully understand.

However, their current positioning gave him a clear shot at Yuan’s bullet-core if he chose to go on the offense. One blow with his tentacle could either kill or cripple his foe.

Would he risk a potentially lethal surprise for a shot at victory? Would he assume that Yuan wouldn’t dare use such a dangerous move if he didn’t have a trick up his sleeve, or would he call the bluff? Yuan held his breath as he prayed he hadn’t misjudged Gayak.

He hadn’t.

Gayak retracted his tentacles, planted them in the ground, then threw himself above Yuan.

It was the smartest move in his situation, since his enemy wouldn’t have been able to pivot correctly to hit him with his revolver even with Black Haze obscuring his line of fire, and his other hand was too mangled to sustain a powerful Recoil Fist.

Or so it seemed.

Quickly spinning in midair, Yuan coated his free hand in a cylinder Barrier and pointed up. A few centimeters separated his back from the earth and his arm from Gayak’s body. His eyes widened in surprise as his lethal mistake finally dawned on him.

Recoil Blast, Yuan thought.

The detonation threw him to the ground and tore Gayak apart.

Yuan’s fingers’ bones cracked as compressed air erupted from his makeshift cannon and hit the living kindling. Yuan had guided Gayak’s technique down a predictable path that would maximize his technique’s damage, which it did. The cultivator’s heated-up body exploded into a thousand pieces of scorched meat spread all across the courtyard. Bones, guts, viscera… Everything went down in flames.

Nothing remained of Gayak other than scraps and boiling blood. He didn’t reassemble himself again.

Everyone was only one slip-up away from death on the battlefield.

It’s over. Yuan lowered his revolver and coughed black oil rising from his lungs. I’ve won.

Victory well and truly exhausted him, but he had prevailed nonetheless. He had defeated two powerful cultivators in a row and crossed the Third Coil. Yuan sat on his knees and allowed himself to catch his breath, then took a good look at the sky above his head. Grey and black clouds accrued over Fleshmarket, melding with the smoke from the fires consuming it. Webs of flesh had consumed many buildings and crushed emerging screen-towers. Yuan could tell which way this war was going.

His bullet-core suddenly pounded in his skull at an accelerated rate. A sense of overwhelming dread filled his bones, alongside the acrid smell of burning artillery shells.

What’s that shiver down my spine? Yuan’s survival instinct flared up, telling him to run, to flee, to get the hell out of Fleshmarket.

A malevolent aura filled the air. Yuan recognized it as Gayak’s, but… stronger, more overwhelming. He glanced at the pieces around him, suddenly fearing he hadn’t done a good enough job at finishing off the man.

Gayak’s remains failed to move, but a tentacle of flesh suddenly burst out of the ground next to him.

An enormous flower of blood and pulsing muscles bloomed from the debris, unveiling a lanky, hooded figure within its heart. The man—Yuan assumed it was one from his long white beard filled with festering maggots—leaned over on a gnarled staff of bones, his face shrouded and impenetrable. Yuan saw a glimpse of true horror lurking beneath his tattered rags: a torso of amalgamated flesh and twisted organs, alongside the outlines of tormented faces stitched together in a gruesome parody of a body.

“A Metallist survivor?” Dozens of eyes peered at Yuan from under the hood, gleaming with malevolence. The man’s oppressive aura matched that of Revolver’s in terms of power. “No, a Gunsoul. Pitiful.”

An elder.

Polio, Yuan guessed, to his utter despair. The Flesh Mansion Sect’s elder had come to check on his apprentice. Fuck…

A gunsmoke cloud hung over Fleshmarket, obscuring even the sun.