Yuan’s core pounded so hard it hurt to think.

  He had rushed to Battletown as fast as he could without overtaxing his Gun Demon Incarnation, since he would require it for the battle ahead. While Arc had insisted that he leave her to fight Manhattan on her own so his group could prepare their trap, he refused to cower and hide. Yuan knew he was nowhere near strong enough to challenge Manhattan, but he had hoped to at least distract him at a critical moment while Orient and Holster continued setting up their counter-attack.

  Then his bullet-core had sensed Slash’s presence.

  The fact that he survived Manhattan’s surprise attack hardly surprised Yuan, since his enemy was in a Dyad bond with the Yinyang Khan himself. Mel and Hardy already warned him that the student would likely survive so long as the master remained alive.

  Locating the Authority swallowing the Khan’s old pagoda didn’t take much time; the sphere of iron covered most of the area like a bubble preventing anyone from escaping it. Having witnessed both Manhattan’s Fukushima Paradise from afar and Arc’s Headshot Forge up close, it didn’t take Yuan long for him to identify its owner. The mere fact that the Khan managed to activate it meant that Arc was either dead or on the backfoot.

  So he had jumped into the fray.

  Crossing the Authority felt akin to entering the Thunderlands. Getting past the veil between reality was hardly disorienting, though he sensed the path close up behind him. Yuan soon leaped into a domed arena where four fighters eyed each other. Arc had transformed into a mechanical figure which Yuan took as her Gun Demon Incarnation. His relief at seeing her alive lasted until he noticed that Manhattan, the Khan, and Slash were still standing too. Yuan’s bullet-core pounded in his skull upon seeing the last two, his qi sight immediately noticing the ungodly similarities between them.

  They’re one and the same. A light and its shadow. Most would have been intimidated by this revelation, but not Yuan Guang. Learning that the man who put him in the ground was the same tyrant whose cruelty led to Holster’s branding as a Human Pillar only heightened his desire to slaughter them both. Their death is long overdue.

  “What’s that shovel for, trash?” Slash asked upon noticing Yuan’s tool.

  “Your ditch,” Yuan replied while unloading his revolver at his murderer.

  He knew it wasn’t particularly a good idea to bring such a tool to a battle to the death—even if it originally helped with setting up Holster’s alterations to the Khan’s artificial leyline—but it did help make a statement.

  Slash laughed hysterically, then swiftly crouched while he adopted a fighting pose with his katana. A sutra circle appeared out of nowhere around him. Yuan at first thought they formed a Barrier, but they let his bullets pass through it.

  Slash’s sword intercepted them easily enough.

  Yuan fired wood and fire projectiles at Slash, each of them capable of either blasting him to pieces or restraining his limbs. His katana sliced through them both at such blinding speeds that even Yuan’s enhanced sight struggled to keep up with it. The blade cut through more than the lead making up the bullets; it cut through the qi empowering them. The fire and roots they carried were split in two without triggering a detonation, leaving the debris to harmlessly fly past their target and drop to the floor.

  Arc and Manhattan resumed their fight with the Khan at the same time, the latter two engaging in melee while the former bombarded them with lightning bullets. All three of them moved so fast that they appeared like blurs to Yuan’s senses.

  Yuan and Slash ignored them. They instead glared at each other with murderous animosity. The rage radiating from Yuan’s bullet-core was only matched by the bloodlust oozing from his enemy’s sword.

  “You’re funny!” Slash said before waving his katana at Yuan in a vertical motion. “I’ll enjoy killing you again!”

  His sword cut through the air and more. Space itself seemed to ripple and rip as a tear formed in the very fabric of reality. A slash that sliced through everything traveled in Yuan’s direction at supersonic speed.

  But Yuan had long transcended that kind of speed. He dodged the attack by side-stepping and followed with another volley of revolver bullets, trying to gauge Slash’s defense. The space slash cut through the spot he used to stand on a second ago, carving out a line across the ground and even leaving a slight crack on the iron walls of the Khan’s own Authority.

  Slash easily cut through any projectile thrown his way. Most importantly, he did so without looking at any of them; his sword guided his hand the moment the bullets entered the range of his sutra circle.

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  An automatic defense, Yuan guessed before adjusting his strategy. Realizing long-distance wouldn’t work, he holstered his revolver and moved in closer to Slash, then followed through with a Recoil Blast aiming at the sutra ring itself. The shockwave shattered the circle without giving Slash a chance to intercept it.

  The Dyad swordsman lunged at Yuan in response at a speed that rivaled Coyote’s. Yuan immediately triggered his Gun Demon Incarnation, his body changing in the blink of an eye and his speed increasing tenfold. The shovel fell off his back and was sliced in half before it even touched the ground.

  Yuan himself easily dodged Slash’s slices then followed them up with a blast from his cannon-arm. A stream of fire erupted from it to incinerate his murderer.

  Slash’s sword shrieked with the rabid rage of a savage animal, the knife-mouths along its length snarling at Yuan. Slash whipped up a whirlwind with a set of circular motions, repelling the flames. Such was his katana’s bloodlust that it almost threatened to leap out of his hands in its hunger to kill Yuan.

  “That’s a muramasa; the Blade’s equivalent to Gunsouls,” Arc warned Yuan in between shots. “A cursed sword that relishes the taste of blood!”

  “This is the only blade that can channel my technique without breaking down,” Slash boasted. He waved his sword horizontally, a line splitting space along its edge and right towards Yuan. “The Wuji Slash!”

  Wuji. Yuan knew that this term referred to the nothingness beyond yin and yang. A sword that cuts the line between positive and negative… between good and evil.

  No wonder his murderer could counter his projectiles so easily. His technique cut through reality itself like a knife through butter.

  Yuan jumped over the horizontal slice, then responded with a volley of qi-powered minigun bullets. His counterattack proved too quick for Slash to anticipate. His projectiles blasted apart his left shoulder and half his chest.

  To Yuan’s frustration, Slash’s wounds knitted back together in an instant. The pieces blown apart by his projectiles simply flew back into place while he laughed.

  “Enough of this, my lesser half!” the Khan ordered upon pointing a finger at Manhattan. A circular Barrier suddenly enclosed the nuclear cultivator behind a shroud of smoky darkness and light beams. Its surface rippled as its prisoner attempted to break out, to no avail. “Finish off that subhuman waste of skin and let us focus on the woman!”

  Yuan guessed that the Khan’s two halves planned to take on their enemies one after another. They likely hoped that their Barrier would keep Manhattan contained long enough for them to deal with Arc.

  A difficult prospect.

  “Subhuman?” Arc scoffed upon following through with a Recoil Blast that hit the Khan in the chest and sent him back a few meters. Her shot tore off half the warlord’s chest. “Big talk for a two-faced mutant.”

  The Yinyang Khan responded with a growl, the hole in his chest closing in the blink of an eye. Yuan observed the process long enough to sense Slash’s own core flare up in response to his other self’s injuries.

  Their Authority would keep reviving them so long as at least one remained.

  “They’re the same, Yuan!” Arc warned him, having reached the same conclusion he did. “We’ve got to kill them both at once!”

  “Subhuman creatures like you Gunsouls, who cannot even cultivate without the mercy of a higher power, ought to be exterminated from this Earth!” The Yinyang Khan snarled, his hands slapping together. “You are a stain on our arts!”

  A space-ripping slice erupted from his hands straight at Arc, longer and thicker than the one Slash sent Yuan’s away. Both Gunsouls dodged the attacks and fired back with qi-powered bullets. Slash summoned another sutra ring and cut apart Yuan’s projectiles, while Arc’s own shots were frozen in space by the Khan’s mudra sequences.

  Seeing the Yinyang Khan’s attack and comparing it to Slash’s own led Yuan to a profound realization. One that emboldened him.

  “I see you now,” Yuan said as he dodged slice after slice, flying around Slash while looking for an opening. “What you are, really.”

  Slash chuckled smugly. “The man who put you in the ground and will send you back there?”

  “A slave to yourself,” Yuan countered with disdain. “The half of the Khan who needs a sword to cast the same technique his better half can do with his bare hands. The weakling that makes his master shine.” Yuan empowered a bullet with a specific qi frequency. “The sidekick.”

  Slash’s jaw tightened into a scowl, his katana surging to automatically intercept the bullets, only for them to phase through his blade as if they weren’t even there. They bounced off Slash’s skin without inflicting any damage, but the surprise still rattled him.

  Yuan suppressed a smirk. As he had suspected, Slash’s technique let him cut through anything it touched, but it was still channeled through a metal sword. Armor-ignoring bullets could phase through it.

  These projectiles unfortunately lacked the power to inflict damage on a Third Coil cultivator and above. Arc told him he could imbue his bullets with multiple effects, so he would have to learn how to on the spot.

  I am a gun, Yuan told himself. He cycled qi through his inner circuits, reciting the sutra chant engraved into his very being, basking in the instinctive knowledge that being a living firearm provided. Quick to fire.

  He fired a stream of bullets at Slash with his minigun arm, empowering them with qi frequencies aligned with different weapons. Each of his projectiles carried a different note in the Gun Path’s song. His goal was to nail a combination of an assault rifle’s armor-ignoring ability and a gun’s qi-powered explosive bullet.

  Almost all of them were failures. A few phased through Slash’s defense and flattened against his invulnerable skin as Yuan imbued them with the armor-ignoring effect but failed to pack them with explosive qi; others were sliced apart by his enemy’s hungry katana.

  However, there was an advantage to firing with a bottomless minigun: namely, probabilities worked in his favor. It didn’t matter how many bullets Yuan wasted; he only had to nail the right combination once.

  Which he eventually did.

  One of Yuan’s qi-powered bullets phased through the metal blade and blasted Slash’s skull open with immense force.

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