Gunsoul: A Xianxia Apocalypse

Yuan hastily formed a Barrier to protect himself from both the blast and debris. He sensed oily blood drip through the armored parts protecting his bullet-core and down his forehead. The heart of his being pounded in blessed agony and filled his brain with a pain as intense as it was ecstatic. Every fiber of his sutra circuits brimmed with both awe and anticipation at the coming of its Path incarnate.

The clouded sky had turned bloody crimson, its rain of bullets carrying the stench of industrialized death and gunpowder. Gunshot thunder announced the coming of a demigod of ultraviolence.

The Gun descended from the heavens as a colossal nightmare forged in steel and malice.

It had grown to titanic size—at least twenty meters—and transformed into a monstrous mechanical abomination. Armored legs dangled from a trigger-shaped chest equipped with a gnashing, hungry maw of serrated artillery shell teeth. Its left arm ended in a metallic gauntlet with claws, and its right boasted a massive cannon the length of Orient. Dozens of smoking rifle barrels sprouted out of its back in the form of twisted wings.

But it was the head that intimidated Yuan the most. The Gun’s faceless helm, adorned with razor-sharp golden spikes, gave the impression of a crown of thorns worn by a king of death. The contraption thrummed with malevolent energy, and nothing remained of Revolver’s visage.

A ghostly halo of black smoke floated above the helmet. Countless visages and ghoulish skulls reflected on its surface, screaming and crying. Yuan would have hardly paid it any attention, until he caught a glimpse of the Khan’s face among them. He saw flashes of Gayak, Slash, and countless other souls. They were echoes of the past; the last screaming faces of everyone who had ever died from a firearm.

And should Yuan falter today, his own visage would join that legion of the dead.

Yuan would have lied if he said he didn’t find the prospect of fighting this titan daunting. The beginning and the end of his half-life, his very creator, now faced him in its purest form; and he had barely managed to wound it while it still merely stuck to wearing Revolver’s body like a suit. What hope did he have of actually killing that thing?

He wondered if Arc had ever felt the same when she chose to defy her fate.

However, a single desire occupied Yuan’s mind beyond the dread and the anticipation; a simple purpose that anchored him into the present moment and renewed his fighting spirit.

He would drag Revolver’s soul out of that thing.

“I’ll send you back to Hell!” Yuan shouted while activating his sutra-circuit. “Gun Demon Incarnation!”

Yuan’s body transformed into its purest form, his revolver absorbed into his metal flesh, his limbs transforming into weapons and his face into a gun. His thrusters burned with the power of flight. He was hardly any bigger than a toy when compared to the Gun, but he didn’t let that intimidate him.

The Gunsoul demon shot its god.

Yuan fired a stream of qi-powered bullets from his minigun arm at the Gun’s chest. The projectiles, imbued with both armor-ignoring and explosive properties, phased inside the demigod’s chest and detonated a few inches beneath it. Smoking holes erupted across its torso and exposed tendrils of technorganic flesh beneath.

The Gun answered his assault with a laugh. Its central mouth cackled maniacally as it flapped its wings with the strength of a hurricane, the barrels making it up firing a series of immensely powerful Recoil Blasts. Yuan retreated at hypersonic speed to dodge them all.

The Gun proved equally quick.

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The giant monster flew after Yuan with speed that belied its immense size. It moved across the air with the grace of a bullet, smashing through the city’s ruins and whipping up a hurricane in its wake. Yuan avoided its hand trying to grab him in midair.

“La Operación Cóndor acaba de comenzar,” the skulls and ghostly faces forming the Gun’s halo chanting in a thousand radio static voices. Yuan did not understand the language, but it sounded like a threat to him. “¡Continuará hasta que el enemigo sea completamente eliminado!”

Yuan responded by channeling Dragon’s Breath through his cannon-arm. A blinding stream of qi-powered fire burst at the Gun’s faceless helmet and began to melt off its surface. The Gun waved its cannon-arm like a club, clocking Yuan in the face and flinging him towards the city’s outskirts.

“Les tontons macoutes sont de sortie!” The Gun chanted, its prayer an echo of past atrocities. Molten parts of its helmet fell off to reveal the iron skull of death itself underneath. “Une balle par tête, c’est la règle!”

It pointed its cannon arm at Yuan and gathered immense quantities of qi inside. The very fabric of space bent around the titanic barrel, the bullet raindrops deviated in its direction as if called by the irresistible pull of gravity.

The specter of death loomed over Yuan.

The Gunsoul put all his power into his thrusters and activated his Recoil Shockwave. He flew around the city in a wide circle faster than a warhead, faster than lightning, perhaps faster than Coyote himself. He moved at such an incredible speed that the friction burned the metal skin off his flesh.

The Gun pulled its trigger.

Its cannon glowed like the heart of the sun and vomited fire. Yuan’s enhanced eyes caught a glimpse of a bullet the size of a house flying out of the barrel. It surged across the landscape like a lightning bolt, the air rippling from its passage.

Then the world screamed

.

The bullet’s mere blowback unleashed a shockwave of such cataclysmic power that it ruptured the earth open. The projectile carved a path across the land, blowing dust, debris, and concrete in a straight line. Yuan had managed to fly far away from its path, but he still sensed the ripples spreading across the air

The bullet flew into the wasteland and hit the distant mountains. A massive fireball set the horizon ablaze. The impact shattered the ancient mountains in a flash brighter than the Khan’s arrow of light, vaporizing everything caught within its radius. Yuan couldn’t help but look at the deadly glow with awe.

Such was the power of a demigod of ultraviolence.

Worst of all, the Gun quickly reloaded. It charged its cannon again while its trigger mouth laughed and its halo of the dead sang its praise. “Qiānggǎn zi lǐ chū zhèngquán!” They said as the Gun vomited more fire and death. “Smert\' reshayet vse problemy — net cheloveka, net problem!”

The Gun’s second shot proved as equally devastating as the first, and so was the third. The projectiles surged with blinding speed and set the Unmade World ablaze. City-sized craters and colossal plumes of smoke formed where they hit, the sheer temperatures of their impact transforming sand to glass.

Yuan fired a gun volley here and there, though he mostly focused on circling the Gun across the sky. He couldn’t afford to slow down for a second. The Gun had already begun to charge its fourth shot, regardless of whether or not its attack was in any way efficient at slaying a small and mobile enemy. The monster reveled in the mindless destruction it caused. Every shot allowed Yuan to gain a better awareness of how its qi moved, the same way observing Gatling Man’s techniques eventually allowed him to locate his core.

It’s nightmarishly fast and strong, but inflexible. While Yuan was confident he could dodge the Gun’s attacks easily enough, damaging it proved a lot more difficult. Using his Gunsong technique to imbue his bullets with armor-ignoring, qi-powered explosive shrapnel properties hardly let him inflict more than superficial wounds. I need more power to put it into the ground.

Yuan racked his brain for a solution until he remembered one of his past battles. He had already faced one opponent who required an extra punch to hurt.

The Rad Hag.

Yuan activated his qi sight and analyzed the leylines crossing the city’s ruins. Only a field of rubble remained of the destroyed settlement, but the earth’s flow of qi didn’t care for human constructions. It continued to flow like it always did.

Yuan positioned himself above the buried railroad. Recalling his feng shui lessons, he weaved a Barrier around his cannon arm and pointed it in the way the qi flowed. The Gun turned to face him in a gunslinger duel, only for an object advancing into the fading sunset to catch its attention. So many miles separated that target from the city that it hardly looked longer than a point to Yuan.

His enhanced eyes sharpened their vision like scopes with qi until the object grew into focus: a caterpillar of steel riding on phantom tracks at full speed.

Orient.

Yuan’s core pulsed in alarm. His friend had crossed an amazing distance in such a short amount of time—covering hundreds of miles in less than an hour—but not enough to escape the Gun’s sight.

“Die Einsatzgruppen sind auf der Jagd!” The Gun pointed its cannon-arm at the distant spirit-train, its mouth laughing with malicious glee. “No one escapes the firing squad! None alive!”

“In your dreams!” Clenching his teeth in rage, Yuan poured all of himself into his cannon arm. The power of his will, refined through so many ordeals, coursed through his flesh in a shockwave. “Recoil Blast!”

Light erupted from his arm, and the leyline trembled.