Elder Polio gazed upon his apprentice’s remains without sparing Yuan a glance.
Why should he? There was no way Yuan could have taken him in a fight at his best, let alone in his current state; and they both knew it. Still, he wondered why the man hadn’t killed him yet.
It would have been so easy.
“You’ve damaged my apprentice quite a bit,” the elder mused while stomping the ground with his staff. Disembodied hands of rotting flesh emerged from the ground to grab Gayak’s mangled parts and gather them. “A shame. I was very proud of this design.”
While Elder Polio planted his staff in the earth and began a series of mudras, Yuan subtly used Item Materialization to create new bullets and reload his revolver. The elder underestimated him, the same way any high-level cultivator looked down on everyone else. It might give him an opportunity to escape with judicious use of Black Haze and projectiles.
But Yuan could hardly focus with his bullet-core pounding harder than a maddened piston in his skull. Was it going to burst out in his head if he failed to cycle through the Third Coil properly?
“Varada, Pushpaputa, Vajrapradama.” Elder Polio completed a mudra sequence and then traced a circle around his apprentice’s remains. “Mend the Splintered Flesh.”
Virulent qi erupted from the elder and filled the circle. A tense silence fell upon the ruins for a few seconds.
Then the pile of flesh pieced itself back together.
This is a nightmare, Yuan thought, praying to the Wayfinders that his eyes deceived him. Gayak’s remains reassembled into a mass of quivering meat. It can’t be.
“Do not look so surprised, child,” Elder Polio taunted him. “If you were in my place, would you bother looking for a naturally-occurring prodigy when you could just create one?”
“Twice in a row…” A tumorous parody of Gayak’s face emerged from the blob of flesh and organs his body had become. His half-formed, mangled limbs struggled to carry him, but he was alive again. “You’re too much!”
He was never human in the first place, Yuan realized. His master pieced him together from various unwilling subjects. And though Gayak was still missing pieces… they had a choice Third Coil donor freshly available.
He had to run now.
Yuan attempted to trigger his Recoil Shockwave and flee, but a spasm of pain instead coursed through his back. His exhaust ports coughed smoke rather than qi. His own technique failed him.
“You think I will let you run away?” Elder Polio chuckled under his beard. “What of Asa-Zakura, apprentice? I smell him in the air.”
“Gone, Master,” Gayak replied nonchalantly. “My first death banished it.”
“The contract was broken?” Elder Polio grunted in annoyance. “Foolhardy apprentice, securing that fiend’s allegiance cost us half a dozen Hitobashira. It will take us weeks to renew it.”
His cold, dismissive tone—the kind a warehouse owner would use to describe useless equipment—boiled Yuan’s blood. “Do the lives of others…” Yuan coughed gunsmoke. “Mean nothing to your kind?”
“As fuel for our arts, they most certainly matter.” Elder Polio stomped the ground with his staff. “Which part of him should I preserve, my apprentice?”
“The head,” Gayak replied, his eyes staring at Yuan’s skull with what could pass for lurid desire. “I want his head and his heart.”
“As you wi–”
Elder Polio suddenly stomped the ground with his staff so fast Yuan’s eyes couldn’t follow his movements. A thick wall of hands, bones, and human muscles formed around him and Gayak right as gunshots echoed behind Yuan.
A projectile blasted it with smoke and fire.
To Yuan, it seemed like a shooting star of golden qi hit the elder’s shell of flesh from above, followed by a shower’s worth of them. They vaporized its outer layers, forcing Polio to summon more organic mass from nothing to repel them. One shot went through his protective shell and vaporized Gayak until nothing but steaming guts and viscera remained. Elder Polio took a shot to the shoulder, but managed to regenerate his defense before it collapsed entirely.
When the bombardment was completed, Elder Polio’s bunker of flesh resembled a charred fruit’s shell breaking at the seams. Yuan looked up at the Bullet Church’s wreckage. A man stood atop the ruins, a revolver in each hand.
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“Stand up, Yuan.” Revolver cocked his guns. He looked quite pleased with himself. “A Gunsoul does not kneel before a pile of trash.”
He spoke with such easy moxie and confidence that Yuan couldn’t help but feel inspired. He grit his teeth, used Item Materialization to create a makeshift metal brace to help his wounded foot and powered through the pain enough to force himself back up. He continued to cycle his qi as fast as he could; though the pain remained sharp, his body began to feel less sluggish.
“How long were you there?” Yuan rasped under his breath.
“Since that mutant summoned the sumo,” Revolver replied as he leaped to Yuan’s side. His guns were squarely aimed at Elder Polio’s flesh cocoon, waiting for him to come out. “Could have broken through the Barrier and lent a hand, but I figured you would have resented me for it.”
“Yeah.” Yuan would probably have refused help. Killing Gayak was something Yuan had to do by himself, if only to prove that he could win on his own. “Thanks for the assist.”
“No, thank you for luring this piece of shit out.” Revolver slightly cracked his neck. “Been waiting forever for this one.”
Elder Polio’s wall of muscles ruptured open at last. Revolver immediately fired a qi-charged shot at it only to blast an empty shell. A flower of flesh surged from the ground a few meters away, unveiling the old man hiding within.
“You have broken my apprentice again?” Elder Polio seethed with anger and malevolence as he revealed himself once more. “Wasn’t your first death enough of a lesson, Revolver?”
Revolver scoffed. “You’ve got no thrall to shoot me in the back this time.”
“You’re still the same weakling slave unfit to be a graft.” Polio stomped the ground with his staff. “A bad investment from start to finish.”
“You should have kept the receipt.” Revolver tightened his grip on his weapons. “You best get out of dodge, Yuan. My trump card doesn’t discriminate–”
Revolver grunted in pain, his hands reaching for the back of his skull.
A wave of agony surged from Yuan’s bullet-core at the same time, sharp and visceral. A terrible sensation of metal piercing through his brain burned his iron nerves and coursed through his circuits. A phantom pain that was so familiar, so unforgettable, because it was the last he experienced before his death and rebirth.
Yuan Guang lived through his murder all over again.
His scream echoed with the low sound of distant gunshots and the sharp clinks of bullet casings falling on the ground. A tension coursed through the air, followed by the thick burnt aroma of discharged weapons and the acrid scent of burning oil. A savage aura of qi blanketed all of Fleshmarket.
Elder Polio sensed it too. His hooded face stared up at the gunsmoke-filled sky, where gray rain clouds blanketed the city in thick shadows. The storm’s thunder sounded like an artillery bombardment and fire explosions set it alight instead of lightning.
“What have you done?” he whispered under his beard. “What have you done?!”
Yuan couldn’t tell why, but he knew what. Every fiber of his qi-roots quivered in anticipation, like children calling their daddy home. His bullet-core trembled with excitement. Detonations erupted above his head as a prelude for incoming calamity.
“There are too many of you in one place…” Elder Polio muttered to himself, his words laced with an emotion Yuan never thought he would hear from an elder: fear. “You’ve doomed us all, accursed fools!”
Elder Polio summoned another shell of flesh to protect himself, but it was likely too little too late. Revolver powered through the pain to look at the sky with what could pass for quiet acceptance.
“It finally came for me, eh?” he said calmly.
The Gun announced its coming with a rain of bullets.
The gunsmoke thunderclouds unloaded a downpour of lead rather than water. Millions upon millions of projectiles fell upon Fleshmarket in a devastating cacophony of gunshots and detonations, each and every single one of them charged with qi.
Yuan immediately formed a Barrier around Revolver and himself, with his mentor doing the same. Two layered domes surrounded them in an instant, both specifically designed to stop an attack which they instinctively understood and mastered early in their journey. They bunkered down as the rains of destruction fell upon Fleshmarket.
The heavens’ judgment leveled the city to the ground.
A bombardment mightier than what any sect could have possibly organized hit the entire city from above in a deluge of gunfire. Weaker buildings were instantly vaporized, their entire structures reduced to dust in the blink of an eye. The stronger ones swiftly shattered into piles of stone and steel. The city’s outer walls held for a time under the onslaught, but the continued impacts and repeated shockwaves caused them to crack and collapse one after another. Explosions rocked the city and leveled it to the ground in a deafening symphony of death.
None were spared. From the Metallists’ screen-towers to the Flesh Mansion Sect’s organic corruption, they all took the brunt of the indiscriminate bombardment. Polio materialized a Barrier around himself the moment the rain shredded his flesh shell apart, but he hadn’t spent enough time around Gunsouls to properly tune it. Qi-charged bullet droplets vaporized his head and chest at lightning speed, incinerating his clothes and flesh. The downpour riddled him with holes and then annihilated what little scraps tied them together.
For a long moment that seemed to stretch on forever, Yuan could only stare blankly at this vision of utter annihilation unfolding around him. Only when the smoke and dust became too thick for him to see did a fearful thought finally manage to worm its way into his consciousness.
Holster and Orient were still in the city.
Horror seized Yuan to such a degree that his own Barrier wavered for a moment, with Revolver barely holding it up. He prayed to the Wayfinders that his allies had sensed the disaster and evacuated early, because if they hadn’t… if they hadn’t…
Not again. Yuan had already lost a team once, he refused to outlive another one. The wound was still too fresh in his mind. He couldn’t let Holster and Orient perish when their lives had only just begun.
The downpour ended as suddenly as it began. The wild chaos of the battle and the great gunfire cacophony that followed left the city in a heavy, terrifying silence. So thorough was the cataclysm that Yuan couldn’t see farther than his own feet. Dust covered everything else.
“Yuan,” Revolver said as their Barriers finally collapsed, his voice calm but firm. “Yuan? Yuan?!”
“Yes?” Yuan muttered under his breath, his mind still struggling to process the devastation around them.
“You run.” The ground trembled beneath their feet, followed by the noise of whirring cylinders coming from the smoke. “You run and you don’t look back.”