Arc–Jim relationship

Arc–Jim relationship is a bond tested by a curse that turned Jim into The Gun and by Arc’s years-long attempt to release him. The relationship becomes unmistakable when The Gun falls at Fleshmarket: among the rust and ashes, Arc recognizes Jim’s remains and grieves not for a weapon defeated, but for a friend she had been trying to save.

A Friend Lost to The Gun’s Curse

The available account gives little of Arc and Jim’s life together before the curse, but it establishes the essential fact plainly: Jim was Arc’s friend. Their history is therefore revealed less through shared memories than through the work Arc undertook to recover him. She later explains that she had spent years trying to free Jim, who had endured as The Gun for far longer than she had expected. The length of that effort gives the relationship its shape: Jim’s transformation did not make Arc accept him as irretrievably lost, even as the means of reaching him repeatedly failed.

The curse made Jim’s continued existence inseparable from violence. Arc understood that freeing him required more than destroying The Gun’s outward form. According to what she had learned from a Long Dragon Sage, the curse could be broken only through The Perfect Shot: the right shot, bullet, gun, place, time, and reason brought together. Arc spent years trying to craft the necessary bullet. Her project was not an abstract pursuit of a legendary technique; it was an attempt to reach a particular friend trapped within the Gun’s cycle.

The Search for a Perfect Shot

Arc’s effort remained uncertain and costly. She had tried to save Yuan and Revolver with her own attempts, but those shots barely affected The Gun. The failure exposed the distance between knowing the conditions of release and being able to fulfill them. Arc could identify what the solution demanded, yet her crafted bullets had not been enough to free Jim—or to stop The Gun when it came for others.

Her waiting in Ammobog is presented as bound up with this search. Yuan wonders whether Arc had stayed there hoping to finish the right bullet before The Gun reached her, and hoping no other Gunsoul would take up its title in the meantime. That possibility makes her vigil both practical and desperate: she was preparing for the return of the force that had consumed Jim, while holding on to the chance that preparation might finally set him free. The narrative does not confirm every part of Yuan’s conjecture, but Arc’s years of work and her later grief establish the emotional truth behind it: she had not stopped trying.

Jim’s Remains at Fleshmarket

When The Gun’s attack fell upon Fleshmarket, its arrival was announced by millions of qi-charged bullets. After the confrontation, the world briefly took the form of an empty saloon, and the struggle ended with The Gun’s destruction. Arc reached the ruins soon afterward, despite the instability of her cracked bullet-core. Her strained Barrier held Headshot Forge within a five-meter radius, and containing the warped reality around her demanded a tremendous expenditure of qi. Her condition makes her arrival part of the scene’s meaning: even with her power difficult to control, she came to examine what remained of The Gun.

Arc ignored Yuan and Revolver and went directly to the rust. She addressed the fallen figure as Jim, pleading with him not to be gone again. The remains then disclosed a human body amid the ashes: a young teenager, younger than Yuan, with blond hair stained by blood and clothes riddled with bullet holes. The fatal wound was the same one that had killed The Gun. Arc cradled the corpse’s hand; Jim’s pale eyes were turned toward the sky, his expression relieved. The contrast is stark: The Gun had appeared as a destructive power, but what Arc found was a dead young person, and her response was the intimacy of someone confronting the loss of a friend.

Grief Without Release

Arc’s words and gestures distinguish Jim from the violent identity imposed upon him. She mourns him by name, kneels beside what remains, and holds his hand. Yet the discovery does not give her the reunion she had sought. She says she had spent years trying to free him and that he is now gone forever. The destruction of The Gun ends its immediate threat, but it does not fulfill Arc’s aim of rescuing Jim; the body’s appearance confirms his presence while the finality of her reaction marks the failure of that hope.

The relationship also gives the search for The Perfect Shot a personal measure. For Arc, the prophecy’s exacting conditions were not merely a puzzle about technique: they represented a possible way to end Jim’s captivity without reducing him to the weapon he had become. The narrative leaves the origin of their friendship and the moment of Jim’s transformation unexplained. What it does show is the duration and persistence of Arc’s attempt, the inadequate results of her bullets, and the grief with which she receives his remains. Their bond survives in that record of care, even though Arc cannot bring Jim back.