Arc and Czar Zoa’s Battle was a confrontation remembered through its lethal outcome and the danger it averted: Arc stopped Czar Zoa near the irradiated ruins of an old city, helping preserve the nearby settlement of Gatesville. The surviving accounts offer little detail about the fight itself, but make its stakes plain—the devastation of one place threatened the lives and future of another.

Setting and Background

The battle took place in the ruins of an old-world city, later encountered by Yuan Guang and Revolver along the road. Its toppled skyscrapers stood inside a large crater, their metal weathered by time and dust storms. The surrounding air carried poisonous dust that Yuan Guang’s bullet-core struggled to assimilate, and the place struck him as diseased.

Revolver remarked that the city had been inhabited four years earlier and recalled that one of the Gunsouls and Czar Zoa had killed each other there. Yuan Guang later connected the site specifically to Arc, telling her it was where she had fought Czar Zoa years before. The accounts thus preserve the encounter as both a personal clash and a place marked by lethal violence, without recounting its tactics or exact sequence.

The Battle and Its Stakes

The clearest account of the battle’s consequence comes in Yuan Guang’s exchange with Arc. When Arc dismissed the possibility of building anything lasting in the barren landscape, Yuan Guang pointed to Gatesville, a small settlement about an hour’s ride from the irradiated city. Its residents included homeless people, drunks, and couriers down on their luck; they had raised their village over the ruins of a highway.

Yuan Guang argued that if Arc had not stopped Czar Zoa, Gatesville would have become a radioactive crater and none of its inhabitants would have survived. The battle therefore mattered beyond its two combatants: Arc’s resistance had kept destruction from spreading to a vulnerable community. The surviving evidence does not specify how the fight produced the city’s irradiated condition or describe the battle’s moment-by-moment course.

Aftermath and Significance

The ruined city and the surviving settlement form a stark contrast. One bears the physical damage associated with the confrontation; the other remains standing because Arc prevented Czar Zoa from extending the devastation. Yuan Guang used that survival to challenge Arc’s bleak judgment that preserving a place only lets its people suffer for a few more years. Even a precarious settlement, he insisted, could sustain the hope that tomorrow might be better.

The battle’s remembered significance consequently rests less on a recorded victory than on what Arc’s resistance made possible. Gatesville was neither flourishing nor secure, but its continued existence meant its inhabitants were not erased with the city nearby. In Yuan Guang’s argument, that limited protection was still consequential.