One advantage of this brutal world was that people did not take it quite so personally when you shot them in the head. As I unloaded my first round into Lao Gen’s face, he looked more confused than affronted. The Old Man’s body fell backwards as his cranium exploded into a mess of skull fragments and blood.

Twig shouted something incoherent, but I quickly changed his scream of alarm into one of pain. Moving swiftly, I snapped the boy’s leg in two with a sideways kick aimed at his knee. With any luck, I would not have to kill him. There was a chance that as the youngest he had not been allowed to sample any of the ‘spoils’.

The camp was now on full alert. The loud bang of my gunshot had put an end to any confusion there might have been about who was fighting. My cultivation flowed easily through my meridians, once again an extension of my will. It had been ages since the Qi had flowed so easily through my channels.

I was a fully-fledged cultivator at the peak of the energy-focusing stage. My reverie was interrupted as Leader Wen called out, “Kill the bastard!”

I might be the strongest cultivator in the camp but there was still a whole gang to contend with. I picked off a few of the bandits rushing at me with well-placed bullets. My pistol only held six shots though and there were dozens of men rushing me. Some even had movement techniques that allowed them to reach me in seconds.

Rather than standing still and waiting to be swarmed, I moved forward to confront the mob. I risked a large portion of Qi in an area attack. I whipped my left hand forward in an arc in rhythm with a step of my left foot. Qi splashed out from my fingertips producing a metal aspected qi blade. The move only managed to catch out a few of the weaker qi-gathering gangsters but it did at least thin the numbers of the hoard a little.

One scarred man did not even slow down. He simply ducked under the qi and came up on the other side attempting to strike me with the index finger of his right hand.

He must have been trained in one of those silly martial styles that only used a single finger.

The man was only at the foundation establishment stage, so I had no problem grabbing his extended finger and snapping it before pulling him behind me. As he passed me, I put a bullet in his chest. The man’s mangled body must have fallen next to Twig because I heard a high-pitched scream just after the corpse thudded to the ground.

I pushed Qi into my gun to reload as I fended off the attacks of the next two men to reach me. They each slashed at me with a dagger, and I brought my right leg up coated in metal qi to push the blades aside.

Their arms broke at the impact, and they stumbled back blocking the advance of their comrades. Suddenly Leader Wen appeared at my back jabbing at me with a Spear of Earth Qi. I had taken the man to be the upfront type, but it seemed that he was more cunning than I had thought. He had let his underlings absorb my attention and waited to strike.

It must have been apparent that I was far more powerful than his men, but that Leader Wen had not sacrificed his men in vain. Balanced on one foot as I was, I could not avoid the spear. The best I could do was reinforce my body with qi before the blow fell.

The spear did not pierce me through and through as Leader Wen had no doubt wanted to, but it did crunch against my back painfully.

The impact threw me up into the air and away from the spear wielder. I fired off all the remaining rounds in my pistol to thin out the crowd a bit more. The gang members were starting to realise just what they were up against and stopped attacking me so enthusiastically.

Leader Wen on the other hand charged me with his spear pointed at my chest. I recognised this martial style as a variant of a military style called the unrelenting bull. It was handed out to recruits who were unable to learn anything more subtle. Essentially the style focused on the straightforward use of force. I could let Leader Wen tire himself out and just avoid direct hits. The blow that had landed had bruised my ribs though and I could no longer move fluidly.

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I dodged to the side painfully contorting my body to avoid Leader Wen. I cocked my gun and fired a hastily channelled bullet into the man's chest as he passed but the shot only left a dent. Leader Wen must have had armour under his clothes.

The other gang members had scattered into a rough circle now. Not daring to approach the two of us.

Leader Wen spun and snarled, “Why are you doing this? Are you an errand boy for the Sun Gate Sect?”

My cultivation stuttered a bit as the purity of my cause took a blow. Of course. Fan was hoping I would kill this bunch. They were not a threat only an annoyance not worth expending the resources of the Sect to snuff out himself.

Like an idiot, here I was taking care of the Sun Gate Sect’s enemies. I was not an avatar of justice I was just a twice-tricked gullible fool. Still, I glance over to the group of captive women. Their husbands, fathers and sons were dead. Most likely any older women they had with them too. Besides abandoning them to their fate would not have made me any less of a moron.

I shrugged and replied, “I was just going to leave you lot to rot out here in the wasteland, but you chose the wrong time to bring home your loot.”

The pause gave me time to shunt more Qi into my gun. Aiming to win more time I took out my Marshal’s badge and waived it around. Leader Wen charged at me again as if the badge was a red cape and I was a matador. This time I put two rounds into his chest as he came at me. The bullets tore off his shirt and revealed a dented breastplate underneath. Changing tack Leader Wen swept his spear outwards in an arc instead of being content with a failed charge. Caught off guard by the manoeuvre I did not move fully out of the way in time. Leader Wen’s traced a bloody line across my cheek.

Still no match for my speed Leader Wen growled and took out a red pill from his pocket. He said, “You give me no choice then. This pill brings out the true potential of…”

I shot the thing out of his hand and followed that up with a bullet to the head. I should have just shot him in the head in the first place. The man did not have any defensive arts.

There was silence in the camp as Leader Wen slumped to his knees before dying. I used the hot barrel of my pistol to light a cigarette. I thought the message was pretty clear but none of the gang moved so I clarified, “That’s your cue to run away you morons.”

The remaining men started to scramble into horse saddles. One man tried to mount Swift but she kicked him in the balls before he could. The man crumpled and I put him out of his misery with a shard of metal qi through the brain.

As the rest of the gang fled, I took a few half-hearted potshots at their fleeing figures. A few went down but my heart was not in it. I did not feel the same sense of righteous anger I had when they first brought the captives into camp. Instead, I just felt like a tool. A bruised tool.

Once everybody had left except the captives and a still groaning Twig, I walked back over to the late Lao Gen’s bottle of Agave. For a few minutes, I sat there brooding and puffing out gouts of green smoke.

Eventually, one of the women cleared her throat and asked, “Can you untie us, young hero?”

The title grated against me. I was a butcher more than a hero. Still, I begrudgingly went over to sever the ropes that restrained them. The woman that had spoken before said, “Thank you, stranger.”

I grunted a response. The woman seemed a little out of sorts as I went around the camp absorbing random bits of metal to recharge. My cultivation was back to moving glacially my brief glimpse into my Dao was over.

“Is there anything we can do to repay you?” asked the woman.

I gave a dismissive wave and replied, “It’s all in a day’s work for a Marshal in service to the gracious Imperial mission. Oh unless on the off chance you happen to know anything about mysterious foreign cultivators from the North or Chalk-bone.”

It was a more flippant response than she deserved. The bitter comment probably just confused her.

Surprisingly I heard a gasp and then a shaky, “We have seen a cultivator dressed in furs poking around in the sands, but we have never heard of this Chalk-bone before.”

I turned slowly around and gave the woman an intense stare that frightened her into taking a step backwards.

“Show me where you saw this man in furs,” I commanded. It was always better to be a lucky investigator rather than a smart one. It looked like Fan might have put me on to the right trail after all.