The Fleshmarket Sect War is a conflict between the Metallist Sect and the Flesh Mansion Sect that turns Fleshmarket into the staging ground for a broader struggle over weapons, resources, and power. What begins as a sect assault on the Bullet Church's armory ends in the Gun's indiscriminate bombardment of the entire city. The war therefore marks a decisive collapse of the distinction between organized battle and total annihilation: the factions seek military advantage, but the final violence destroys the battlefield, its institutions, and nearly everyone trapped within it.

Causes and Background

Fleshmarket was already a compromised stronghold when Yuan Guang and the spirit-train approached it. Orient reported smoke rising above the city, and Yuan smelled charred meat before seeing the ancient buildings themselves. The walls had been altered by two competing forms of expansion: roots of festering flesh spread across the stone, suggesting a Flesh Mansion Sect bioweapon, while green screens mounted on metal frames extended the Metallist Sect's Wayfinder's Broadcast through the city. The physical structure of Fleshmarket thus displayed the war's central contest, with organic corruption and technological occupation growing over the same defensive foundations.

The party had started before Yuan's arrival, but the walls remained mostly intact and the number of fires was still limited. The immediate strategic objective was clear. The Metallists had sent forces into Fleshmarket to seize the Bullet Church's weaponry, just as Yuan had anticipated. Its gun turrets had turned inward, firing at enemies inside the city rather than defending against dangers from the wasteland, while Scrap gunmen fought humans equipped with cybernetic enhancements and robots whose heads were flickering television screens. The conflict was not a simple attack from outside: Fleshmarket had become a city fighting itself.

Yuan's presence was shaped by both obligation and calculation. He had promised Bucket that he would return the cultists to Fleshmarket, and although he felt no loyalty toward the city, he wanted the opportunity to remove Scrap families from the cultivators' battle. He also recognized the chance to obtain a pill or bullet-core amid the disorder. When Orient asked whether she should turn back or drive onward, Yuan chose to circle the city from the east and approach the Bullet Church from that side. His decision joined rescue, personal advancement, and participation in the war, making his later guilt inseparable from the motives that brought him into the conflict.

The Battle for the Bullet Church

As the spirit-train closed in, the eastern wall trembled beneath a crimson sky. The stronger sounds of gunfire and explosions were accompanied by the smell of blood and death. Yuan prepared for the assault in practical terms, covering his chest, arms, and legs with boiled centidead plates, carrying the Kalash Angel on his back, keeping his revolver holstered at his belt, and taking the Saint Heckler in his hands. The train itself was too valuable a target for the attackers to ignore, and the approaching battle promised no protected route through the city.

The fighting reached the Bullet Church's courtyard when Gatling Man pursued Gayak and used Yuan's attack as a means of baiting his mutual enemy. Knowing that the Kalash Angel's bullets would pass through Gatling Man's metal body, he ignored Yuan and tackled Gayak from behind. Their collision carried them into the courtyard amid Scraps and barricades, while Yuan landed on the church roof beside the corpses of two defenders. One had been shot in the head by nails; the other had been torn apart by an explosion. Even before the war's ultimate catastrophe, the church's sacred and defensive space had become a field of improvised death.

The Metallist assault then became an assault on the church's identity as well as its armory. Metallist forces smashed statues, trampled altars, burned empty weapon stands, and set fire to the entrance banner alongside the defenders. The surviving Bullet Church cultists were hunted by towering humanoid robots with television screens for heads. Captured humans were forced through the robots' screen-faces, treated as though they were food being thrown into a gullet; their minds would be absorbed into the Magnum Opus' Broadcast, while their faces became only a brief image on a channel. The scene makes the war's violence both material and ideological: the church's weapons are contested, its symbols are destroyed, and its people are converted into components of the Metallists' broadcast system.

The battle also drew together fighters whose aims were not identical. Gayak faced surrounding Metallist borgs while Gatling Man opened hidden compartments in his belt and produced a handgun in each hand. Yuan, the cultists, the Scrap defenders, and the rival combatants were all caught within a conflict whose local objectives could no longer contain its consequences. The Bullet Church was not merely a military position to be captured; it became the point at which sect warfare, technological assimilation, and the Gun's larger cycle of violence converged.

The Gun's Intervention

The sect battle did not conclude through the victory of either faction. Instead, the Gun announced its arrival with a rain of bullets that transformed the war into an assault from above. Gunsmoke thunderclouds released millions upon millions of qi-charged projectiles over Fleshmarket, producing a continuous barrage of gunshots and detonations rather than a conventional exchange of fire. Yuan and Revolver responded instinctively, each forming a Barrier around himself; Yuan's dome and Revolver's layered defense reflected the protection they had learned through their shared experience as Gunsouls. Their preparation could preserve a small pocket of life, but it could not shield the city around them.

The bombardment leveled Fleshmarket with a force beyond anything the competing sects could have organized. Weaker buildings vanished into dust almost instantly, while stronger structures shattered into heaps of stone and steel under repeated impacts and shockwaves. The outer walls endured briefly before cracking and collapsing in succession. The Metallist screen-towers and the Flesh Mansion Sect's organic corruption were destroyed without distinction, demonstrating that the Gun recognized no legitimate side within the war. It did not resolve the struggle over the Bullet Church's armory; it erased the city that had made that struggle possible.

The same indiscrimination governed the deaths of the combatants. Elder Polio materialized a flesh shell and then a Barrier when the rain tore through his protection, but he had not spent enough time around Gunsouls to tune the defense properly. Qi-charged bullets vaporized his head and chest, burned away his clothing and flesh, and finally annihilated the fragments holding his remains together. His destruction sits beside the devastation of buildings and institutions as part of the same process: the war's combatants were reduced to matter under a violence too large to distinguish between armies, civilians, sanctuaries, and enemies.

The Gun's behavior also introduced a disturbing contradiction into the event. Yuan noticed that its eagerness to play Death's Roulette contrasted with its earlier cries and pleas, and he concluded that it was not trying to kill the survivors so much as trying to kill itself. Its immense firepower would have allowed it to destroy itself directly, yet it had instead attacked Fleshmarket, raising the possibility that it was searching for a Gunsoul capable of granting the death it desired. This uncertainty made the bombardment more than an act of conquest: it was also a self-destructive impulse that used an entire city as the setting and victim of its unresolved wish.

Destruction, Survivors, and Moral Consequences

The war’s aftermath revealed that Fleshmarket had not merely been defeated but erased as a place where organized life could continue. Every building was destroyed, the ground was driven down until sewers and basements became tombs, and only a handful of survivors had been found before sunset ended the search. Orient’s Barrier, created with Holster’s help, saved the passengers aboard the spirit-train, but she could rescue only around a hundred people: mostly Bullet Church armed men, their families, and civilians who had taken refuge with the cult. The scale of the rescue exposed the limits of even successful protection. Fleshmarket had once been large enough to sustain rival sects and defensive infrastructure; afterward, there were too many corpses and too few gravediggers, and Yuan helped carry the dead to a trench while Holster continuously performed the Last Rites sutra to keep them from returning as hungry ghosts.

The surviving community left the ruins by nightfall aboard an overcrowded spirit-train. Its wagons, designed for a few dozen passengers, held five times that number along with whatever belongings people had salvaged, forcing Orient to use the luggage, panoramic, and restaurant cars as living quarters. The departure transformed the train from a vehicle into an emergency refuge, carrying Bullet Church survivors, families, civilians, and displaced Scraps away from a city whose institutions had vanished. Some of those who had lost everything later offered themselves to Mordiggian’s Sin-Eater order, including traumatized survivors of the war, former cultists, and people seeking escape from ruined lives or karmic punishment. The movement of these people shows the conflict’s continuing social effect: the war displaced not only bodies but identities, loyalties, and futures.

Yuan could not treat the devastation as an impersonal disaster. Arc confronted him with the fact that he had tried to solve Fleshmarket’s ammunition shortage by arming the sects and hoping they would destroy one another, casualties notwithstanding. He admitted that he had never expected the consequences to become so severe, while the destruction left open the possibility that his actions had helped draw the Gun to the city. His original motives had combined a promise to Bucket, the prospect of rescuing Scrap families, and the chance to obtain valuable cultivation resources; after the bombardment, those calculations became evidence of responsibility rather than clever strategy. The Fleshmarket Sect War therefore changes Yuan’s relationship to violence: the question is no longer whether he can survive a battle, but whether an intended tactical advantage can justify the human catastrophe it unleashes.

The war also deepens the tragedy of Revolver. He had once been executed by Polio and returned as a gunslinger strong enough to harass Polio’s men, eventually helping bring about Fleshmarket’s destruction in an indirect act of revenge. Yet the victory cost Revolver his soul and freedom, because the Gun’s curse was consuming him and forcing him toward indiscriminate killing. Yuan saw that Revolver had saved his life from both Elder Polio and the Gun itself, and the sight of his mentor struggling against bloodlust became impossible to dismiss. Rather than allow another ally to die, Yuan resolved to find a way to free Revolver from the curse, even if doing so delayed his revenge. Fleshmarket thus leaves behind a moral obligation as enduring as its ruins: survival demands not only burying the dead, but attempting to rescue the living from the violence that remains inside them.

Historical and Thematic Significance

The Fleshmarket Sect War occupies a crucial place in the book’s larger history of escalating gun violence because it shows how a limited struggle for weapons can become inseparable from forces operating on a far greater scale. Yuan’s earlier life had already been shaped by execution, burial, and the possibility of returning as a hungry ghost; within Fleshmarket, those ritual concerns become the practical work of mass death. The Last Rites sutra is no longer a private gesture offered to a few murdered companions but a repeated necessity among hundreds of bodies, while Yuan’s practice of Archer’s Glory and the formation of Barriers reveal the complementary side of the same world: discipline and ritual can improve accuracy or preserve a small group, but they cannot make large-scale violence humane. The war therefore links cultivation technique, religious practice, military technology, and social survival rather than treating them as separate systems.

The event also establishes a contrast between different forms of organized violence. The Metallist Sect attacks the Bullet Church for its armory and uses screen-headed robots to absorb captives into the Magnum Opus’ Broadcast; the Flesh Mansion Sect contributes organic corruption and bioweapons; Yuan enters with a mixture of promises, rescue intentions, and hopes of acquiring power; and the Gun arrives without recognizing any factional distinction at all. The sects pursue political and material objectives, whereas the Gun converts their conflict into indiscriminate destruction and perhaps uses the city as an indirect attempt at suicide. That progression strips away the comforting idea that violence remains controllable when it begins with a rational objective. Each participant can name a reason for acting, but the final bombardment renders those reasons irrelevant beneath millions of qi-charged bullets.

The war’s legacy continues through displacement and altered relationships. Fleshmarket’s survivors crowd into the spirit-train, some later seek new identities under Mordiggian’s Sin-Eater order, and the train becomes a moving refuge assembled from damaged resources rather than a normal home. Yuan’s interpretation of Revolver’s fate gives the catastrophe its most intimate consequence: Revolver’s revenge helped destroy the city, yet the same curse that made him an instrument of vengeance threatened to turn him into a killer of everyone, including the oppressed people he once fought to liberate. Yuan’s decision to seek a cure instead of abandoning him marks a change in the meaning of survival. The war does not end when the firing stops; it persists in the dead who require burial, the refugees who need shelter, the guilt of those who helped create the conditions for disaster, and the living weapon whose freedom has become Yuan’s next obligation.