The Gun’s Death

The Gun’s death is the decisive reversal in the destruction of Fleshmarket: the immense being that had seemed to embody the cycle of gun violence is killed within Revolver’s Death’s Roulette, and the fatal wound carries back into the real world. The victory is real, but its aftermath leaves the Gunsouls confronting both the Gun’s corpse and the damage surrounding it.

Causes and Background

The Gun’s arrival over Fleshmarket is announced by a storm of qi-charged bullets. Millions of projectiles fall from gunsmoke thunderclouds, battering the city with gunshots and detonations. Yuan and Revolver respond by forming layered Barriers around themselves, each instinctively suited to withstand the attack. The bombardment makes the stakes immediate: survival depends on resisting the Gun’s overwhelming force, not merely on winning a private contest. In the ruins, Revolver’s Authority creates a different kind of confrontation, one in which the Gun can be wounded and the consequence of that wound will not remain confined to the contest.

The Saloon and the Fatal Shot

Revolver’s Authority remade the ruins of Fleshmarket as an empty saloon: a roof, walls, a skull-faced table, and one flickering lamp, with no doors or windows. Yuan Guang found himself seated between Revolver and the Gun. The Gun had shrunk from its immense form to a human-sized avatar, its cannon-hands replaced by metal fingers; Yuan Guang’s weapon and wounds, and Revolver’s wounds, were gone. Within those walls, violence could not take place, turning the confrontation into a contest governed by the Authority rather than an ordinary exchange of force.

The decisive moment came as three gunshots silenced Yuan Guang’s thoughts. He had not noticed his finger pulling the trigger and could not tell whether the Authority had compelled him or he had simply lost his nerve. The uncertainty did not change the result: somebody had died. A hole opened in the back of the Gun’s head, and oil began to bleed from it. After a moment of stunned stillness, the Gun’s arms went limp; its fingers released the golden revolver, and it collapsed headfirst onto the table as oil spread from its skull. Death’s Roulette had claimed its victim.

The Authority collapsed immediately afterward, and reality returned: the saloon crumbled away to reveal the ruins of Fleshmarket. The Gun resumed its true, immense shape, but the wound it had sustained inside the contest carried over. It fell onto its left side with a final whimper, its hide striking the ground with a low thump as its whirring and clicking stopped. In the silence, the Gunsouls stared at their dead patron, unsure whether it would rise again. Revolver, after putting his broken jaw back into place, finally voiced what had happened: “I’ve killed the Gun.”

The Gun’s death became physically undeniable as its metal parts rusted into orange dust and its flesh rotted away, centuries of decay seemingly compressed into a minute. Revolver’s subdued disbelief gave way to pride and joy. He revealed that he had created the Authority for this very occasion, though he had not expected it to succeed. The victory therefore belonged not simply to the shot, but to the constructed conditions that made the Gun’s death possible—and to the startling fact that a wound inflicted within the saloon remained lethal after the Authority vanished.

Responsibility and the Unfinished Curse

The victory did not leave Yuan Guang free of responsibility for Fleshmarket’s destruction. Arc confronted him with the consequences of his ammunition scheme: he had meant to arm the sects fighting over the city so they would slaughter one another, accepting casualties as part of the plan. Now, with Fleshmarket devastated and the Gun dead, he could not deny what he had hoped to bring about. He wondered whether his actions had helped draw the Gun there, and admitted that he had not expected the situation to become so terrible. The Gun’s death therefore followed not a clean triumph but a reckoning with the violence Yuan had helped set in motion.

The loss also sharpened Yuan’s sense of what he owed Revolver. His fellow Gunsoul had saved his life twice, first from Elder Polio and then from the Gun, and Yuan had watched Revolver struggle against the bloodlust overcoming him. The prophecy of a Perfect Shot offered no simple answer, but it made the danger plain: the right shot had to serve the right purpose, and Revolver’s survival alone would not be enough if the Gun’s curse continued to govern him. Yuan resolved to find a way to free Revolver, even if doing so delayed his own revenge. After losing his friends and witnessing the Gun’s death, he refused to let another ally die without trying to repay the debt.

That resolve matters because the Gun’s physical death does not end the violence attached to its identity. Weeks later, Revolver describes following an incomprehensible pull to its source, then killing without distinguishing between former masters and slaves, the old and the young, Scraps and cultivators. He says that killing has become as natural to him as breathing. The contrast recasts the victory at Fleshmarket: Death’s Roulette killed the Gun, but the cycle it embodied survived in Revolver. The event closes one life while exposing the curse’s capacity to continue through another.

The Violence That Remains

Weeks after the Gun’s death, Revolver explained that an unexplained pull led him to his targets: he followed it to its source, took up his revolver, and turned laughter into screams. Yuan Guang answered with an apology, but Revolver could not describe his killing simply as something he hated. He said he neither enjoyed it nor hated it; killing had become as natural as breathing, and he understood himself as a thing of aim and direction. The change was especially stark beside his former cause: he had once fought to free slaves from their masters, but now killed both, without distinction between old and young, rich and poor, Scraps and cultivators. The Gun’s corpse had decayed, yet Revolver’s account showed how its violence endured: the death at Fleshmarket destroyed the body, not the pattern of killing it had passed on.