Fleshmarket Refugee Evacuation

The Fleshmarket Refugee Evacuation was an improvised rescue effort launched as The Gun’s qi-charged bombardment devastated the city. Yuan Guang tried to use the spirit-train to carry civilians out, but the operation could save only a fraction of Fleshmarket’s population. Its outcome was defined by that contrast: a trainload of people escaped, while the city around them became a mass grave and could no longer sustain those left behind.

The evacuation plan under bombardment

When projectiles began falling on Fleshmarket, Yuan Guang and Revolver intercepted some in midair with their own bullets. They could not stop them all: one struck the passenger wagon in a cataclysmic blast, tearing open its roof and shaking the spirit-train. Yuan Guang knew Holster was in the engine room with Orient and that the luggage wagon had escaped the impact, so he turned at once to getting civilians out.

Yuan Guang asked Revolver to escort the spirit-train inside the city while they evacuated civilians. Revolver agreed, but pointed out that his motorcycle could not fly, leaving Yuan Guang to take the more dangerous route. Yuan Guang intended to storm the walls and confront the enemy waiting there by himself. He tapped Bucket on the back and ordered him to help Orient repair the damage and bring every noncombatant they could find aboard. Bucket saluted and asked what would happen to Yuan Guang; he promised he would not be long.

That division of labor made the evacuation a rescue operation conducted alongside, rather than after, the fighting. The train had to remain useful while under attack: Revolver was assigned to escort it, Orient to manage it, and Bucket to help gather passengers. Yuan Guang went toward the walls alone, accepting that the person he expected to face could not be left for others to handle.

The bombardment and the survivors

The crisis widened when The Gun announced its arrival with a rain of bullets. Its storm of qi-charged projectiles struck Fleshmarket indiscriminately, destroying Metallist screen-towers and the Flesh Mansion Sect’s organic corruption alike. The bombardment reached the train and the people sheltering in the city; even Yuan Guang and Revolver had to protect themselves behind layered Barriers. In the chaos, Yuan Guang remembered that Holster and Orient were still in Fleshmarket, and feared another loss of the kind he had already endured.

The train did not leave intact. After the battle, Yuan Guang saw it derailed, while Holster, Bucket, and a few other survivors crawled out of the machine. He had no sense of triumph at finding them alive: the city lay in ruins, and its inhabitants were probably dead almost to the last man, woman, and child. Orient had managed to rescue around a hundred people, mostly Bullet Church armed men, their families, and civilians who had taken refuge with them. Against a city the size of Fleshmarket, that was only a small remnant.

The survival of those passengers depended on what Orient and Holster did during the attack. Yuan Guang learned that Orient had created a Barrier around herself with Holster’s help, shielding the people aboard from The Gun’s rain. Their days around Yuan Guang had apparently given them enough understanding to defend themselves against the bombardment. Their protection saved passengers, but it could not protect the city as a whole.

Triage in the ruins

After the fighting ended, survivors and rescuers faced immediate work: recovering the living, gathering what supplies remained, and dealing with the dead. Yuan Guang spent much of the day carrying corpses to a trench dug by Bucket and the others. Holster recited the Last Rites Sutra continuously, silently praying for the dead. The burial effort was not simply a gesture of respect; hungry ghosts could remain dangerous, and the rites and burials aimed to keep the dead from tormenting the living.

Other survivors salvaged what they could for the train, particularly pieces of Metallist technology, weapons, and supplies that had survived the bombardment. Getting the vehicle upright again required considerable labor even with Yuan Guang’s superhuman strength. Meanwhile, the scale of destruction made recovery uncertain. The Gun had leveled every building, including the sewers and basements that might otherwise have offered shelter. Rescuers found only a handful of people alive, and the approaching sunset threatened to end the searches before all the buried or trapped could be reached.

The disaster also left a danger that evacuation alone could not solve. The bombardment contaminated Fleshmarket’s water reservoir with lead. Even if those who remained had wanted to rebuild, the city could no longer sustain itself. The evacuation therefore did not merely move survivors away from immediate gunfire; it marked the abandonment of a place whose infrastructure and means of survival had been destroyed.

Departure and aftermath

The spirit-train departed Fleshmarket by nightfall, carrying far more people than it had been built to accommodate. Its wagons were intended for a few dozen passengers, not roughly five times that number and the belongings they could bring. Orient made space in the luggage, panoramic, and restaurant cars, turning parts of the train not meant as passenger quarters into crowded shelter. The departure secured a route away from the ruined city, but the crush of people aboard recorded how little capacity the rescuers had compared with the need.

The evacuation ended without a clean victory. Yuan Guang’s first assessment had been that Holster, Orient, and the cargo were safe; the later sight of the derailed train and the handful of people emerging from it showed how fragile that relief had been. Orient’s rescue of around a hundred passengers was a real achievement, yet hundreds of the dead remained undiscovered and were likely to become hungry ghosts. Yuan Guang saw too many bodies and too few people to bury them.

The catastrophe also sharpened Yuan Guang’s sense of responsibility. Arc confronted him over his role in arming the factions fighting for Fleshmarket: he had hoped the sects would use the ammunition against one another, casualties notwithstanding. He could not deny that plan or dismiss the possibility that his actions had helped draw The Gun to the city. The survivors’ escape thus followed not only a military defeat but a reckoning with the consequences of his own scheme. Amid that reckoning, Revolver’s struggle against the bloodlust of The Gun remained vivid to Yuan Guang; Revolver had saved him twice, and Yuan Guang resolved to find a way to free him from the curse, even if doing so delayed his revenge.