His right arm exploded, as did the Barrier around it.

  With the threat of Orient and Holster’s lives on the line, Yuan poured most of his qi into his cannon. The power he had accumulated across his short half-life of cycling burst out of him in a mighty detonation that vaporized his metal bones and annihilated his fingers. The leyline’s qi and feng shui alignment only magnified it.

  Yuan thought his thrusters would be enough to help him stay in place, but he was wrong. The blowback threw him backward while his shockwave carried on with such strength and speed that the very humidity in the air condensed into vapor. It picked up power the more it traveled along the leyline, leeching off qi from the earth to grow in size and power.

  The pain was intense, but not unbearable; not when it saved his loved ones’ lives.

  The Recoil Blast struck the Gun in the right side of its torso, close to the shoulders and joints keeping its cannon arm attached to it. Although Yuan’s attack couldn’t hope to match the Gun’s mountain-destroying might, the impact packed as much of a punch as Orient did when she crashed into Manhattan.

  The shockwave hit the Gun and tore its way through it.

  The blast ripped half the Gun’s torso to pieces and continued its course into the wasteland beyond, shattering its bones and severing the Gun’s cannon arm off from the rest of its body. The power accumulated within it suddenly broke free in a mighty fireball that incinerated the demigod and the city’s ruins.

  As it turned out, the Gun wasn’t immune to its own power.

  The cannon-arm detonated with the heat and power of an arrow of light. Blinding flames shining like the sun melted off the Gun’s skin and flesh to reveal thick steel bones, alongside gear organs pulsating within thorned ribs. The shockwave blew dust and heat into Yuan’s face, forcing him to push qi into his thrusters to fight it off. When the light and flames died out, only a smoking crater remained of the dead city’s ruins.

  Yet the Gun endured.

  “God created men, Colonel Colt made them equal!” the Gun boasted. Its body slowly began to grow bullet-flesh to restore its lost body parts, starting with the cannon-arm. “All meat for the trenches and blood on the school boards!

  Yuan sensed his qi reserves dropping at an alarming rate. Gun Demon Incarnation consumed an immense amount of qi, and his Recoil Blast had taken a lot of his strength too; it wouldn’t be long before he began to run on empty. He had to end this quickly.

  Observing the Gun gather qi to power its techniques gave Yuan a pretty good idea of its core’s location, or whatever served as that monster’s qi battery. He once again thought back to his fight with the Rad Hag that eventually became Orient. He could still use the leyline to end things once and for all.

  Yuan flew across the railroad and began to pick up speed. The leyline’s qi carried him forward like a fish swimming alongside the current. His body became a bullet coursing towards its target.

  He had no idea whether his body would survive the collision, but one thing was certain: Gun Demon Incarnation would end immediately after. Failure was not an option.

  The Gun flapped its barrel-wings and fired a volley of Recoil Blasts at Yuan, each of them striking the landscape with the power of an artillery bombardment. Yuan dodged them all. He grew so fast that the world ahead of him became a tunnel of light. He closed his eyes to better focus on the ambient qi, and the pulsating core of power that served as the Gun’s center of power.

  Yuan veered upward and rammed into the Gun with a fatal headshot.

  He punched through meters-thick layers of steel bones and a brain of qi-circuits relaying orders to an immense demonic body. The bullet in his head pulsed with a familiar memory of entering Yuan’s own skull. It was home again.

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  But Yuan didn’t stop. Channeling Elemental Infusion through his thrusters, he pushed deeper into the Gun’s brain, worming its way towards the pulsating core at its center: a humanoid body bound by circuits to serve as the host of the monster that raised him from the dead.

  Revolver.

  Yuan rammed into the body with all of his might all the way to the back of the skull.

  The two of them erupted from the demigod’s head in a shower of fleshy metal and broken pieces. The Gun’s God Incarnation body rippled the moment it lost its core, its iron breaking down into gray dust carried by the wind. A storm of qi blanketed the wasteland.

  Revolver’s eyes glowed crimson, and the Gun inside him breathed gunsmoke in Yuan’s face. A mighty Recoil Fist swiftly decked the latter in the mouth.

  The blow shattered the lower half of Yuan’s jaw and sent him falling into the desert below at full velocity. He lost control of his trajectory, his thrusters sputtering smoke from lack of qi to fuel them. He barely managed to soften his landing with a well-placed Recoil Shockwave.

  Yuan bounced off a dune of sand and dirt, the Gun Demon Incarnation technique literally beaten out of him by the crash. He returned to his human form amidst puddles of broken bullet raindrops and molten metal puddles formed by the Gun’s earlier bombardments. His entire body brimmed with pain. He had lost his jaw, his arm, and most of his qi. Even moving demanded some effort now.

  A laughing shadow fell upon him.

  With Gun Demon Incarnation's end shortcircuiting his techniques, Yuan had no choice other than to rely on feng shui. He slammed the ground with his remaining left hand and summoned a circular Barrier around himself. The Gun crashed upon it with all of its weight, its Recoil Fist straining Yuan’s defenses.

  Yuan jumped back to his feet and leaped away as the Barrier collapsed. The Gun landed in front of him, its clothes burned during their earlier encounter. Only a black metal skeleton wreathed in gunsmoke remained of Revolver. Its crimson eyes gleamed with bloodthirst while the smoking silent city loomed behind them.

  The Gun lunged at Yuan with murder on its mind.

  Yuan did the same, his last fist raised for the final clash. With most of his qi spent, he knew this would be the end. It was now or never.

  The Gun waved its right arm into a haymaker while Yuan lunged forward to strike back, the two duelists now within an inch of each other. Their fists prepared to connect for yet another clash of steel.

  Or so it seemed.

  Black Mirage.

  Arc had warned Yuan that overusing Gun Demon Incarnation would hamper his techniques after its conclusion, and her words rang true. He felt the qi circuits he had spent so long building burning as he overheated his body's internal machinery. Some of his bullet-core's roots went up in smoke, his nerves frayed and leaving his iron flesh permanently damaged, yet he pushed through with all his might.

  Yuan turned to smoke before the blow connected and let the Gun phase through him in its momentum.

  He could only maintain the transformation for a split second, and he felt the spiritual weight of the Gun as he passed by. He experienced the crushing grip of death, the bitter regrets of the deceased souls that gave it life, and the final fear and horror of its victims’ last moments. It was awful, like dying all over again a thousand more times.

  It only encouraged Yuan to endure further, to end it all here and now.

  He phased through the Gun and reformed right behind it. The monster, carried by its momentum, barely had time to peek over its shoulder before Yuan’s fist hit it squarely in the face.

  He had only one arm left, but that was more than enough.

  “Gatling… Fist!” Yuan growled through his wounded throat.

  He pummeled the Gun from behind with all of his remaining speed and strength. His arm became a blur thundering like a maddened piston. He punched the Gun again and again, cracking its jaw, knocking out its ammo-teeth, and breaking its spine. Each hit's recoil reverberated through his body and cracked his bones with wounds Yuan knew he would never heal from, but he didn't relent. The final blow threw the Gun face-first into the ground in defeat.

  The Gun growled amidst the lead and dust like a wounded animal. It wasn’t dead. The Gun would never die.

  But as it struggled to get up, Yuan found the scene oddly familiar. He recalled LaChair’s story, and all clicked into place.

  Revolver knelt in the desert, his back turned to Yuan, his head down the same way he had the day Elder Polio had him shot dead for daring to fight for his freedom.

  That was how the Gunsoul was born; and how the Gun might die.

  The circle was completed.

  Pushed by instinct and exhaustion, Yuan grabbed the gun Revolver had gifted him the first time they met. He heard a clink in the chamber holding Arc’s final bullet as it aligned with the barrel for the shot. He pointed his weapon at the back of his old comrade’s head, the same way Polio had put him in the ground once before.

  “I’m sorry,” Yuan whispered under his breath.

  He pulled the trigger, the gunshot echoing across the wasteland of the dead.

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