The world became a roof, a set of walls, and a skull-faced table.
The ruins of Fleshmarket transformed into an empty saloon smelling of cigarettes and cheap alcohol. There were no doors or windows, with only a single flickering lamp above the central table for a light source.
Yuan found himself sitting in a chair, with Revolver and the Gun on his left and right respectively. The latter had shrunk from a giant to a human-sized avatar of itself, its cannon-hands replaced with metal fingers. Yuan’s weapon and wounds were gone, as were Revolver’s own. No violence could take place within these walls.
None of the players could harm each other, except through the game.
Three golden revolvers lay on the table, one for every participant. Three deaths slumbered within three of their chambers each. One killshot for each player.
By pressing the gun against their head and firing, a player had one chance out of six to kill another player or themselves. They had no way of opening the chamber and checking before pulling the trigger, and nobody could leave or enter the pocket dimension until it claimed a life.
Yuan knew this instantly. Information poured into his mind by the power of the Authority in a complex sutra script, teaching him the rules of the final game one of the three competitors would ever play.
This was, without a doubt, the world’s purest contest of luck and guts. The law of the Authority would allow no cheating nor foul play to taint it. The promised death would strike the loser no matter their rank or power. Slaves and slavers, scraps or cultivators, gods or men… none would survive Death’s Roulette. No defense or intervention would protect the loser from their fatal fate. Not even the Authority’s creator would be spared.
Within this imaginary space, even reality followed the rules. Death would switch from an outcome into a certainty.
This place was Revolver’s wish embodied; a place where all were equal before Death’s uncaring barrel.
The Gun was the first of them to grab their weapon, doing so with eagerness. Revolver quickly imitated it with a fearless laugh that inspired Yuan to follow his lead.
“I warned you, my trump card doesn’t discriminate.” Revolver pressed his gun against his head. “Ready, Yuan?”
“No,” Yuan replied before grabbing his weapon. He had already known death once, and he wasn’t in a hurry to experience it again. “But this is the only chance we have.”
The Gun was too strong for them to defeat in a standard gunfight, even if Yuan himself had been in top shape. Having more participants slightly increased their mathematical odds of slaying the Gun through this Authority if Yuan counted correctly. It was the most rational course of action for them to take if any of them hoped to survive.
It was the only way to keep Holster and Orient safe.
So Yuan hardened his resolve and pressed his weapon to his temple. “Let’s go.”
The Gun shot first. It pressed its revolver into its maw and pulled the trigger with what could pass for desperation. The first shot was a blank but it kept trying to shoot itself before the chambers could align properly.
Revolver fired a blank into his head, the blast’s damage canceled by Death’s Roulette no-violence rule. His aim was steady, but the way his hand wavered betrayed the tension in his fingers.
Yuan held his breath and pulled the trigger. A shiver ran down his spine as he heard the gunpowder ignite inside this weapon. The shadow of death passed over him, ready to take him back to the Nowhere.
A blank hit his skull.
The impact was soft, almost gentle. Yuan’s relief only lasted until the cylinder turned and switched to a new chamber holding an unknown projectile. His finger wavered on the trigger.
Am I afraid? Yuan had fought many battles without hesitation, yet his hand now trembled. There was something deeply unnerving about turning one’s own weapon against themselves. Like he was flirting with death instead of challenging it.
Something about the Gun’s behavior knotted Yuan’s stomach too. Its enthusiasm for playing Death’s Roulette contrasted with its earlier cries and pleas.
It’s not trying to kill us, Yuan realized. It’s trying to kill itself.
If the Gun wanted to die so badly, why didn’t it simply blow itself up? It had more than enough firepower to do so. Did it attack Fleshmarket hoping to find a Gunsoul that could do the job? But why would Arc try to prevent Yuan and Revolver from fulfilling its wish then?
His mentor’s name echoed in his head like a dire warning.
Even if you kill the Gun, you will never kill the Gun.
A terrible shiver ran down Yuan’s spine as a trio of gunshots silenced his thoughts. He hadn’t even noticed his finger pulling his revolver’s trigger. Had the Authority compelled him, or did he simply lose his nerve?
Whatever the case, it didn’t matter. Somebody else died.
Yuan couldn’t tell whether which shot settled the matter, but he immediately identified the loser all the same.
A hole appeared on the back of the Gun’s head, bleeding oil.
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A tense, agonizing silence settled between the shocked contestants. The monster sat still for a second, its arms going limp and its fingers letting go of the golden revolver. It collapsed head-first onto the table, a puddle of oil spreading from its skull.
Death’s Roulette had claimed its victim.
The Authority collapsed onto itself immediately afterward, with reality snapping back to its normal state. The saloon crumbled to reveal the ruins of Fleshmarket. The revolver in Yuan’s hand was gone, replaced with Holster’s custom gift.
The Gun returned to its true, immense shape, but the lethal wound it suffered within Death’s Roulette carried over. The colossus pitifully collapsed on its left side with a final whimper. Its immense hide landed with a surprisingly low ‘thump’ that silenced its whirring and clicking.
Time seemed to grind to an abrupt halt for a moment. The only noise in the air came from the spirit-train’s wheels turning in the air and the crackling embers of Fleshmarket’s ashes. The Gunsouls stared at their dead patron, half-expecting it to rise back up and finish them off.
“Fuck…” Revolver muttered to himself after putting his broken jaw back into place. Like Yuan, it took him a while for his mind to accept the impossible truth. “I’ve killed the Gun.”
As incredible as it sounded, he was right. The Gun’s corpse began to rust away before their very eyes. Its metal parts became orange dust and its flesh swiftly rotted to nothingness. It was like witnessing the ravages of centuries compressed in a minute’s time.
Revolver’s subdued surprise soon turned to pride and joy.
“I killed the Gun!” he shouted with a laugh. “Look, Yuan! I created this Authority for just this occasion, but I never thought it would actually work!”
Yuan was too tense to share his enthusiasm.
His feeling of unease hadn’t diminished in the slightest, and his bullet-core continued to pound hard inside his skull. The Gun had perished ignominiously, its body quickly degrading back to rust, but the omnipresent threat of incoming calamity remained strong.
That was too easy. Even with an Authority, it shouldn’t have been that easy. Every fiber of Yuan’s body told him that he had missed a key detail.
A crimson blur landed near the Gun’s carcass, the ground turning to a bullet carpet at its contact.
Yuan immediately recognized Arc’s qi long before the dust settled around her. It didn’t surprise him that a cultivator of her caliber could cross the distance between Fleshmarket and her lair within minutes on foot; she had managed to snipe him from that far away earlier after all.
What shocked him was that she showed up at all.
Arc had warned him that her cracked bullet-core prevented her from controlling her Authority, and he could see the result now. A hastily conjured Barrier struggled to contain Headshot Forge within a five-meter radius of Arc, warping reality around her until it transformed the ground into a fertile ammo field; from her strained facial expression and the sheer amount of qi leaking from her, containing her own technique without a leyline demanded a tremendous effort from her part.
“No,” she muttered to herself, ignoring Yuan and Revolver alike to examine the Gun’s remains. Her voice brimmed with sorrow. “No, Jim, please no… not again…”
“Who the hell are you?” Revolver asked, one of his guns swiftly finding its way to his hand. “Are you the gal who shot me earlier?”
Arc didn’t answer. She knelt next to the pile of rust the Gun had become, which a gust of wind swiftly blew away.
A man’s corpse lay amidst the ashes, his sweater and pants were riddled with gunshot holes.
T’was a young teenager many years younger than Yuan himself, with lustrous blond hair stained red by blood pouring out of his head’s wound; the same that killed the Gun. His pale white eyes stared at the sky with an expression of relief. Arc tightly cradled his hand with her own, a deep scowl of defeat all over her face.
“What’s going on here?” Revolver asked, his joy replaced with confusion. “I don’t unders–”
His words turned into a scream of agony.
Yuan’s head snapped in his ally’s direction as he collapsed to his knees, his hands holding onto his skull as if he were suffering from a monstrous headache. A malevolent aura of crimson bloodthirst enveloped Revolver, followed by a suffocating pressure of demonic qi. Gunsmoke fumes swirled around the Gunsoul, taking on the shape of skulls riddled with small explosions.
A gun’s barrel burst out of Revolver’s forehead.
Yuan froze in horror as his fellow Gunsoul’s wail turned into a symphony of whirring cylinders and clicking triggers. His helmet face opened to reveal rows of growing gunshell-fangs.
“Children screaming at school… soldiers rattling in the trench… snipers bleeding in the jungle!” Revolver screamed, his words ringing with gunfire and artillery booms, his voice growing more metallic. “Food for the firing squad! Meat for the lead grinder and the gunpowder pit!”
It was then, when Yuan took a good look at Revolver’s qi, that everything fell into place.
Why the Gun craved death, yet encouraged others to flee rather than fight; why Arc tried so hard to prevent either Gunsoul from killing the creature without inflicting lethal damage; and why Gatling Man called it a curse he had to free himself from.
The Gun wasn’t an individual.
It was a title.
A curse to be passed on.
No way Yuan could accept this. “Revolver–”
He hardly crawled half a meter closer to his ally before a bullet hit the ground in front of him, pushing him back.
“Back off,” Arc said, her rifle-arm pointed at Revolver. “He’s already doomed.”
And worst of all, she was right.
Yuan could tell from the way Revolver glared at him with hardly contained bloodlust. The malicious aura of unfettered violence surrounding him only grew more menacing. The very essence of death by firearms overwhelmed his fellow Gunsoul’s body and mind, quickly reshaping him from a man into an incarnation of murder.
“Riddle them all with holes!” Revolver’s mouth foamed oil at the seams. “Have to shoot… something… someone!”
Revolver raised his namesake weapon, and for a very brief second Yuan thought he would turn it in his direction. However, it seemed a sliver of his ally’s humanity struggled against the demon he was quickly turning into.
Revolver turned his gun on himself and pulled the trigger.
It jammed.
He tried again and again to shoot himself, to no avail. The Gun’s curse had taken hold of him, denying him any escape that wouldn’t further its cycle of destruction.
Revolver’s cruiser drove to his side. Unlike the spirit-train, it suffered damage from the previous Gun’s rainfall, its steel hide riddled with so many holes that Yuan wondered how it could still drive. Yet it answered its master’s call anyway, thrumming and waiting at his side even as he transformed into a monster.
“Can’t… can’t resist… bloodlust… too strong! Too strong!” Revolver threw away his namesake’s weapon and moved towards his ride. “Get away, Yuan… must get away…”
“Then run,” Arc said with a voice full of pity. “Run into the wasteland to seek your demise.”
Yuan powerlessly watched Revolver climb onto his cruiser. The very man who had helped him bounce back from his first death underwent a monstrous fate worse than death, and he couldn’t do jack shit.
“Forgive me…” Revolver grabbed his crusier’s handle the best he could, even as his fingers turned into barrels. “Forgive me!”
His cruiser’s wheels burned brightly and carried the spirit-machine across the ruins. Yuan watched Revolver disappear into the distance and the endless wasteland sprawling across the horizon; searching for victims or for the sweet release of death.
Yuan looked around himself. Arc–who knew and said nothing–cradled the previous Gun’s corpse with sorrow and regret; the city lay in ruins, its inhabitants were probably slain to the last man, woman, and child; and the spirit-train had derailed. Even the sight of Holster, Bucket, and a few survivors crawling out of the machine gave Yuan no sense of fulfillment.
The battle for Fleshmarket had finally concluded.
And nobody won.