Gunsoul

Like last time, Yuan found Arc crafting bullets in Headshot Forge’s heart. He couldn’t help but wonder if she did anything else in her spare time.

“You should have accepted her offer,” she told him without turning to face him. “You’ll come to regret your decision.”

Yuan crossed his arms. “How much did you see?”

“Everything.” Arc studied her latest bullet. “The Moonlight Sect visited me too once, when I first survived the moonburns. I regret denying them today.”

“But you still did,” Yuan replied. “Why?”

“Same reason as you, I suppose. I was a naive fool who wanted to stand on my own two feet.” She shook her head in bitterness and tossed the bullet aside. “For all the good it did.”

“You made your choice, and so did I. I’ll see this through to the end.”

“Stubborn one, aren’t you?” She turned to face him, a wry smile on her face. “You performed well for a newbie, I’ll give you that.”

At least she seemed pleased with his progress. Yuan took it as a good sign, though he had some issues with her training methods. “You deceived me. No Barrier could repel the moonburns.”

“I asked you to cultivate under the moon for a full night and you did,” Arc replied. “I’m no helicopter mentor.”

Helicopter? Was that some kind of spirit-beast? “I don’t know that expression.”

“It means I’m not going to coddle you. You wanted to learn my techniques, so I’ll teach them my way.” She raised her index finger at Yuan. “You’ve shown good instincts by combining Item Materialization and the Recoil Fist, but you’ve also missed a key application of Barriers.”

Yuan watched with attention as his mentor crafted a tiny, cylindrical Barrier extending from her nail and beyond: one crafted to repel air itself. It surrounded Arc’s finger and extended to three times its length. It reminded him of a rifle’s barrel, with his mentor’s hand serving as the handle.

In short, it looked like a finger gun.

“Barriers always require some form of physical anchor, a support on which to stand,” Arc explained. “Your body is as good as any. You’ve seen that when you began crafting bullets of your own. A cylinder is a stable shape with many applications.”

“You’re creating an artificial barrel to increase range and velocity while reducing friction,” Yuan guessed.

Arc confirmed his assumption with a nod. “I call it Sniper’s Bore. You create a tube extending from your finger that focuses the Recoil Fist’s energy and stabilizes the bullet’s trajectory. This drastically sharpens your precision, if your eyes can keep up with the target.”

To illustrate her point, Arc grabbed a bullet and jammed it inside her finger gun’s Barrier. The projectile floated in front of her nail; not only was the cylinder designed to repel air from the sides, but also kept the bullet contained within itself.

Arc then pointed at the sun and activated her Recoil Fist. Unlike Yuan, she had enough precise control over her technique to avoid using her entire hand. A burst of energy surged from her finger alone, igniting the bullet’s primer.

The charged shot flew faster than Yuan’s eyes could follow with a supersonic boom. He managed to trace a flash of its qi trail as it crossed the entire length of Headshot Forge and beyond.

“What was your longest shot?” Yuan asked as his mentor’s Barrier dissipated.

“Around five hundred kilometers,” Arc replied flatly.

“You’re kidding.” Yuan stared at her in disbelief. It took him a while for his mind to grasp the sheer distance. “That’s the length of the Fanged Coast. There’s no way you could see a target at that range.”

“Believe what you want,” Arc replied with a shrug. “It wasn’t a good shot anyway. The bullet’s impact loses its punch and velocity at such a distance. Three to ten kilometers is your optimal range for Sniper’s Bore. You’ll get diminishing returns beyond that, not to mention that you won’t keep up with your current eyes. You’ll need more Coils under your belt to punch above your range weight.”

Yuan pondered her words in contemplative silence. His longest shot ever was at a kilometer and a half with an iron sight and little obstruction. So many parameters determine a shooter’s success at a distance, from the wind to air friction and the target’s movements. He could see himself doing better with an actual sniper’s scope, but not with naked eyes.

I’m still thinking like a Scrap. If Yuan could reinforce his body with qi, he should be able to sharpen his vision. Mudras will help me too.

Yuan began to practice Sniper’s Bore under Arc’s watch. Creating the Barrier came easily to him, since it was designed to keep bullets and the Recoil Fist’s shockwave penned in; both of which he understood on an instinctual level. It only took him a few tries to create a stable cylinder around his nail and lengthen it until it matched a rifle’s barrel.

“Now comes the hard part,” Arc warned. “The Recoil Fist usually expands from your entire hand. You have to keep it limited to your finger.”

“Do I focus its power?” Yuan asked.

“No, you must divide it. The Recoil Fist’s energy travels from your bullet-core along its roots all the way to your palm. Tune the output to a minimum. Too much power will destroy your own projectile otherwise.”

Yuan never tried this, since he never needed to. He pointed his loaded finger gun at the sun and looked into himself. Passing the moonburn trial enhanced his qi awareness enough that he could see the exact pathway connecting his bullet-core to his phalanges. He focused on one alone, then mentally the qi allocated to the technique before firing it.

A faint pulse of power erupted from his core, traveled the length of his arm, then reached his index finger. The Recoil Fist’s energies ignited the bullet’s primer while remaining contained within the cylinder Barrier; it flowed forward like a wave pushing the projectile ahead at immense speed.

His bullet flew across the length of his mentor’s Authority in the blink of an eye.

Yuan had succeeded on his first try.

“Good so far,” Arc said. “You’ve got a natural affinity for these techniques.”

“I’ve used guns for so long, they feel like an extension of myself.”

“It shows,” his mentor replied, albeit without any fondness. “Can you think of another use for that Barrier?”

Yuan thought it over before finding one. He formed another Barrier cylinder, albeit one that encircled his entire hand instead of his finger alone. The increased radius would prevent him from firing bullets, but he had no intention of using one. Instead, he crafted the Barrier to fully contain his Recoil Fist’s shockwave so it wouldn’t disperse.

Let’s see if I can blow them out. Yuan pointed his enclosed palm at the gunsmoke clouds hanging over the Headshot Forge. One, two, three…

Unlike with Sniper’s Bore, Yuan didn’t reduce his output and used the same amount of power he usually afforded to a normal Recoil Fist. His qi poured out of his core along the length of his arm and finally exploded into a shockwave when it reached the palm.

Yuan flew.

A powerful blast of air erupted from Yuan’s palm in a mighty supersonic boom. The cylinder Barrier canalized the pulse into a focused shockwave of compressed air. It blew a hole into the gunsmoke cloud in an instant.

But it worked a bit too well.

While the Barrier held the blast as it was designed to, the backlash proved terrible. The recoil traveled back along the length of Yuan’s arm and threw him backward. It was like firing a cannon with his bare hands without ground support. He ended up crashing against Arc’s workbench at full speed, the shock sending discarded bullets falling to the ground.

“It always happens to us the first time, clever boy,” Arc teased him. She seemed more amused by his fall than anything. “That’s the Recoil Blast. It covers a smaller area than the Recoil Fist and it has a much smaller range than Sniper’s Bore, but as you can see, it packs a mean punch.”

“Yeah, the recoil part lived up to its name.” Yuan grit his teeth. His entire arm felt sore from the wrist down even after his cylinder Barrier disappeared. He might have shattered his bones had he overdone that shot. “I’m still beholden to momentum’s laws. No dispersion means I take the full blowback.”

“You’ll need set-up before you can use that technique,” Arc warned him as she offered him her hand. “You have all the tools you need already to fine-tune it.”

“By forming a Barrier at my back to avoid falling?” Yuan asked as his mentor helped lift him up. “Or by optimizing the cylinder?”

She shrugged. “You’re smart, figure it out.”

Yuan was starting to see a pattern there. “I’ve noticed something,” he said. “So far, you’ve encouraged me to figure out techniques on my own rather than simply tell me how to practice them.”

Arc sneered. “Cultivators who don’t experiment and push their limits are doomed to perish. Few of them learn how to learn.”

Learn how to learn? Yuan never considered that approach. What little he had seen of Sect training involved endless drills, spars, and lessons. Follow orders, climb the ranks, never question, always obey.

Arc’s approach appealed to him more than the Stoneskin Sect’s lessons ever did.

“You’ve proven you can handle yourself, so I’ll return your weapons to you.” Arc tossed him back both the Saint Heckler and Kalash Angel. “You’ll have to figure out what they can do in the field.”

“I may have to test them soon,” Yuan replied. “I’ve got some cargo to deliver back to Fleshmarket.”

“I’ve seen that.” Arc didn’t bother to hide her distaste. “You understand these bullets you’ve crafted will kill innocent people too, right?”

“I do,” Yuan conceded, though he felt neither shame nor guilt. “If you could observe my moon trial from so far away, then you’ve seen the people I’m traveling with. One of them is a Human Pillar, a Hitobashira.”

Arc’s expression darkened slightly. “I’ve seen.”

“The Flesh Mansion Sect robbed her of her freedom, and would have taken her life had I not intervened. The Metallists are barely any better. I’m sick of these people getting away with everything. If they want to kill each other so badly, I’ll oblige.”

“So that’s your plan? Sell ammo to both sides and hope they wipe out each other?” Arc scowled. “You would have been better served infiltrating one of the sides and destroying it from within, or strategically taking out a few important figures like dominos. That would minimize casualties.”

“Too late for that,” Yuan replied. “The situation in Fleshmarket is a powderkeg. The sect war can start anytime, and everyone with sense has likely evacuated already. This ammo run is the best I can do right in the current circumstances.”

“So you’ll just plant seeds and hope they bloom the right way?”

“Yeah.” Yuan spat at the ground. “I know many bystanders will die, but the more the sects kill each other, the more it’ll weaken their grip on the region. Maybe some good will come out of it one day.”

“Spoken like a true son of the Gun.” Arc snorted. “And that’s not a compliment.”

“What would you have me do then?”

“Nothing,” Arc replied with fatalism. “Even if your half-assed plan works, another Sect will just fill the void and the cycle will begin all over again. You can try to purge them off the Unmade World all you want. They’ll come crawling back like cockroaches, as they always do.”

Yuan knew it was a possibility. Fleshmarket’s choice location and vital infrastructure would make it a tempting target for warlords and power-hungry cultivators seeking to control the Fanged Coast’s trade. He couldn’t guarantee that he would succeed in eliminating the sects in power there, let alone that someone worse wouldn’t take over.

But Yuan never rolled a die expecting to know the result. Hope for the best, expect the worst.

“Maybe this is gonna sound stupid,” Yuan said. “But if you don’t try to change things… then they never will, no?”

Arc responded with a long, heavy moment of silence, and then a word of warning. “There are no winners when powerful cultivators fight; only survivors.”

Yuan could live with that. He wanted both sides to lose.

“I’ll be back soon,” Yuan promised.

“Return to me with a qi pill or not at all,” Arc warned him sternly. “Those lessons were just to pick you up to speed. You’ll need to cross the Third Coil before I teach you the real stuff.”

She knew how to motivate him at least. “I’ve seen the shape of my soul,” he said. “Bullet Hell. The Moonlight cultivator said it was the Path my soul wished to take.”

“There are Paths within Paths,” Arc replied. “I’ve told you that the Gun branches out into many roads. The one you’ve seen is but one of many.”

“What’s yours then?"

“Can’t you tell?” Arc returned to her bullet forging. “Sniper.”