Mopping up the remaining plastic men hardly warranted any effort on Yuan’s part. By the time he returned to the spirit-train, Bucket and the others had destroyed most of the vehicles and melted down the few enemies that managed to board. They only suffered two dead passengers and three wounded; a vanishingly small number of casualties considering the scale of the raid they’d just faced.
Such was the strength of a large, well-armed group in the Wasteland. A lethal encounter for a small team turned into a road bump for them.
Yuan received a hero’s welcome on his return too, with passengers firing their guns into the air and wasting their bullets on a welcoming committee. Yuan was about as incensed by their lack of respect for good ammo as he was pleased by their appreciation.
Returning to Arc’s side was almost a relief. His mentor hadn’t moved an inch from her meditation spot, though Yuan could tell she had observed the battle closely. He guessed he had passed her test with flying colors.
“It went well,” Yuan said.
Arc shrugged. “You did well, yes, but not perfectly.”
This took Yuan aback. He thought he had done an excellent job taking down a spirit-beast without any issue. “What did I do wrong?”
“There was an easy way for you to destroy the trashemoth’s core which you missed out on,” Arc replied. “Not saying your method wasn’t effective. You just missed a quicker alternative.”
Yuan pondered her words. Arc insisted on taking his revolver away before he confronted the creature, which led him to rely on his unarmed techniques, Sniper’s Bore, and homemade bullets.
“An armor-ignoring bullet,” he guessed almost immediately. “You think I could have hit the core with an armor-ignoring bullet.”
“I don’t think, I know.”
“It wouldn’t have worked,” Yuan argued. “Armor-ignoring bullets pack the same punch as normal ones. I would need to charge them with qi to destroy the core.”
Arc scoffed. “Who said you can imbue a bullet with only one kind of effect at once?”
Yuan remained silent for a few seconds as he digested her question, during which he felt like a colossal idiot. “Can we stack them?”
“Yeah, we can. The number is only limited by your skill. You could have created a qi-powered, armor-ignoring bullet and shot that monster dead in a single strike instead of starting a fireworks display.” Arc shrugged. “I guess I shouldn’t fault you for it though. You’re not Sniper Path material.”
Now that she put it that way, thinking things through and using her tactic would have let Yuan slay the trashemoth with minimal qi expenditure long before it reached the spirit-train. Rampaging through the plastic men and unleashing Dragon’s Breath felt good, but cost him much more energy than he truly required to get the job done.
Yuan didn’t entirely regret his choices, since they had led him to develop a new technique. Nonetheless, Arc’s method would have likely spared two lives today. Yuan could have assisted the defenders after taking out the trashemoth early and thus limited casualties.
Yuan and his mentor approached combat in very different ways. Arc was cold, precise, and focused on winning the battle with a single devastating strike. Yuan preferred to adjust to the flow of battle, innovate, and learn through experience. He supposed which tactic worked better depended on the circumstances.
“You said you would teach me how to learn,” Yuan said upon sitting in front of her. “But I guess we learn in very different ways.”
“We do, and that is good,” Arc replied. “All Paths can teach you something worthwhile. I assume you picked up that fire-breath technique from somewhere else.”
“I call it Dragon’s Breath.” Yuan ignored Arc’s snickering. “Been thinking about adapting another technique.”
“That mist-transformation you told me about when we first met?” Arc didn’t wait for him to confirm it. She could read his mind like an open scroll. “You’ve already partially adapted it with that Black Haze of yours.”
“Yeah.” Yuan examined his left palm and cycled qi through his fingers. Black Haze exhaled dark fumes from his skin. “I’ve been able to alter the chemical elements in my lungs to recreate gun-like effects, so I’m wondering if I can do the same with my bones and flesh. Transform the metal into gunsmoke for a second.”
Arc nodded sharply. “You’ll have an easier time doing that once you finish engraving your soul’s sutras into your body. It being aligned closer to the concept of gunsmoke would make the shift more natural.”
“So you think it’s possible?”
“Yeah. I’ve encountered that kind of ability in the past though, so I’ll issue a few warnings.” Arc raised two fingers. “First, an intangible body makes your core extremely vulnerable to qi-based attacks, ‘cause there’s no physical shell to protect it anymore. Second, long-term intangibility is also unsustainable. You’ll spend a lot of focus and resources just keeping your body in one piece for more than a few seconds."
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Which was probably why Toshiro only used it for split seconds at a time, besides the inability to counterattack.
Yuan would have preferred to focus on mastering an innate technique first and foremost anyway, but gunsmoke intangibility would definitively offer him an edge against Slash. The man’s name and choice of weapon—a katana—implied he preferred melee over ranged combat, where Yuan usually had the edge. Improving his defenses might mean the difference between life and death once Yuan finally crosses paths with his murderer.
I should take the opportunity to gather more information on Slash while in Battletown, Yuan thought as he continued his engraving. There must be rumors about which techniques he favors. Anything that can give me the edge.
Come to think of it, the Yinyang Khan had to hold Slash in high esteem to trust him with the Cube of NATO’s recovery. Yuan had originally thought Slash would have been a mere henchman, but a warlord wouldn’t send a low-ranked minion to fetch a potentially world-ending artifact. Slash had to be part of his master’s inner circle, maybe even his direct apprentice.
A fatal confrontation approached, and Yuan still knew too little about his sworn foe. He would correct that as soon as possible.
Arc and Yuan cycled for most of the afternoon, during which the latter mostly grunted and sweat oil. His qi circuits began to form a single, unified sutra script of nightmarish complexity glorifying the Bullet Hell, where firearms never jammed and the screams of the damned were drowned in eternal gunfire. Yuan nearly collapsed in exhaustion once he completed the process. All of his nerves burned beneath his skin.
“Good,” Arc congratulated him on his success. “Now we’ll do the hard part.”
Yuan grit his ammo teeth. His mentor had a very strange way of reassuring him.
Thankfully, the sight of Orient walking into the fire wagon eased Yuan’s pain.
“Honored Conductor Yuan, Lady Arc, if I may interrupt your meditation?” Orient asked kindly. “I hope it has been fruitful for you both.”
“It has,” Yuan confirmed. “What’s the issue?”
“Although we are still a day and a half away from Battletown, we will soon reach an elevated point giving us a good view of the region,” Orient said. “Might I propose that we stop there for the night for the purpose of reconnaissance?”
“Sounds reasonable,” Yuan replied. “How are the others holding up?”
“Miss Holster has given the Last Rites sutras to our deceased passengers,” Orient explained. “I have repurposed a spot in the greenhouse to serve as a burial site. Their families kindly agreed that we can use their remains as fertilizer to aid in growing produce.”
“Good,” Yuan replied. Planting seeds into corpses was standard practice in the Unmade World, with burials being usually the hasty result of an attempt to quickly move on without rousing a hungry ghost’s wrath. “Maybe they’ll reincarnate into spirit-trees.”
“One of them did,” Orient replied with a chuckle. “I sensed a soul passing into the seed I planted in his heart.”
Yuan wasn’t certain if reincarnating as a tree was truly a ‘good’ second life, but who knew? Maybe that poor sap would learn how to walk with his newfound roots a few years down the line.
“We’ll need to decide on how to approach Battletown,” Arc said after whipping up a cloud of smoke from nothing. “A spirit-train entering through the front door is bound to attract attention.”
“The Moonlight Sect said they would arrange our entry into the History Road competition,” Yuan replied with a shrug. “I say we should pretend to be another racing crew. I don’t think we’ll stand out too much from other competitors.”
“True,” Arc conceded. “The sects will send a whole freakshow in case the Khan can back up his threat.”
Taking a glimpse of the region only strengthened Yuan’s opinion. They definitely wouldn’t stand out among the Khan’s grandiose madness.
True to her word, Orient soon stopped the spirit-train atop a rocky hill offering a wide view of the region, where she, Yuan, Holster, and Arc could observe the landscape. The desert stopped a few kilometers ahead, its sands drowned in the gasoline waters of the Oil Sea. Refinery outposts pumped the sweet fuel along the shore, all under the dominion of a colossal settlement of glitzy neon lights and machine towers.
Although many leagues separated the sprawling cityscape from the spirit-train, the city put Fleshmarket to shame in every way. Yuan saw the edges of cranes and steel structures prospering in the shadow of a massive metal pagoda the size of a small mountain.
Battletown left Yuan without breath. He had never seen such a large settlement short of a Screen City. No wonder most of the region paid the Yinyang Khan tribute.
However, his allies paid more attention to a set of six strange landmarks spread across the region. Each of them stood in isolation along the length of an immense highway starting and ending at Battletown, like points of interest. None of them even vaguely resembled the other: one was a large spire of rusted metal on four legs, another a pyramid of stone, and the third a palace with a bulbous roof… the rest were too far away for Yuan to distinguish them.
There was something wrong with the highway too. Yuan detected a large amount of qi radiating from it, like a leyline, but it felt… unnatural, for lack of a better term. Like the circuit was forced on the land in a way that inherently damaged it.
Arc snickered. “Is that the Taj Mahal?”
“The Tajwhat?” Yuan asked.
“Taj Mahal,” his mentor replied while pointing at the third structure. “It’s a Lost Age palace. The Spiral Dancer practiced her Thunderdance in front of it.”
“Really?” Yuan frowned in confusion. “That place feels weak for such an important landmark.”
“Don’t be stupid. The real one is at the center of the world’s biggest patch of Thunderlands.” She waved a hand at the palace with disdain. “That one’s just a cheap replica.”
“I believe I recognize the spire structure,” Orient said. “I think its name is the Eiffel Tower? It used to be the landmark of a city long destroyed that I used to visit on my itineraries.”
“All these landmarks are copies of Lost Age monuments,” Arc replied with a deep scowl of absolute disgust. “That’s the Khan’s History Road. A murderous mockery of the past.”
Yuan’s unease grew stronger the longer he observed the qi circuit, while Holster paled and fearfully grabbed his sleeve. She shook like a spirit-leaf, her heart overtaken with the same abject dread she used to live in during her time as a slave.
Yuan’s fists clenched on their own. He had quickly figured out how the Yinyang Khan managed to redirect enough qi to produce an artificial leyline around his city.
“How many?” Yuan asked Orient, his hands protectively resting on Holster’s shoulders, his voice laced with cold anger. “How many?”
Orient looked away, her face twisted in deep sorrow. “At least… at least thirteen Pillars per landmark, with a seventh set for the city.”
While Yuan heard a lot about the Yinyang Khan, he had wondered if the man himself differed from the gruesome rumors spread about him. The horrific nature of the History Road taught him better.
The Yinyang Khan had sacrificed nearly a hundred children just to pave his driveway.