Yuan Guang’s final duel with The Gun turns a long pursuit of revenge into a rescue attempt: Yuan fights not only to destroy the demigod, but to reach Revolver, whose body and soul have become bound to it. The confrontation brings Yuan’s accumulated guilt and his commitment to protect others into the same battle as his most powerful techniques.

The Burden Behind the Duel

The duel’s stakes were shaped by events well before Yuan confronted The Gun in its divine form. At Fleshmarket, Yuan had hoped that arming the warring sects would make them destroy one another. When the fighting drew The Gun to the city and it unleashed a rain of qi-charged bullets, the devastation forced Yuan to face the consequences of his plan. He could not deny that he had accepted casualties as part of the scheme, and he wondered whether his actions had helped lure The Gun there. His admission that he had not expected matters to become so bad marks the conflict as an ethical reckoning as well as a fight for survival.

Divine Form and Reversal

The Gun’s transformation made the scale of the encounter unmistakable. It tore its own body apart, releasing Hell before manifesting in a grotesque parody of divine glory. A Recoil Shockwave burst from it with the sound of a heavenly gunshot, vaporizing the building beneath its feet and sweeping away an entire city block in dust and flying concrete. Against that spectacle, Yuan’s smaller form was not a competing display of power; it was a deliberate refusal to be intimidated by the difference in scale.

Yuan entered Gun Demon Incarnation, his revolver absorbed into his metal body and his limbs reshaped as weapons. He attacked with qi-powered bullets from a minigun arm, each round designed to pierce armor and explode. The shots passed through the Gun’s chest before detonating inside, opening smoking holes and exposing the technorganic flesh beneath. The Gun answered with laughter and hurricane-force wingbeats, firing Recoil Blasts from the barrels that formed its wings. Yuan escaped them at hypersonic speed, but the exchange established that the Gun could withstand a frontal assault even when Yuan’s ammunition bypassed its armor.

The fight’s immediate stakes widened when the Gun sighted the Spirit-train fleeing hundreds of miles away. Yuan’s friend had traveled far in less than an hour, yet remained within the demigod’s range. Rather than press his attack on the Gun, Yuan concentrated his will into his cannon arm and unleashed Recoil Blast. The strike hit the Gun near the shoulder joints that held its cannon arm in place, then tore through half its torso, shattered its bones, and severed the arm. The released power became a fireball that consumed the Gun and the city’s ruins. The reversal exposed a weakness in its own destructive force: the Gun was not immune to its power.

The Headshot and the Rescue

The duel had become more than a contest of strength because Yuan could no longer treat Revolver as merely part of the enemy. The Perfect Shot prophecy remained cryptic, but Revolver’s struggle against the bloodlust of the Gun haunted Yuan: Revolver had saved his life twice, and Yuan would not leave one of the few people who had shown him unconditional kindness to suffer forever. Freeing Revolver from the Gun’s curse became a purpose that could delay Yuan’s revenge, but not be set aside.

When the Gun attacked the Spirit-train, Yuan poured his strength into a Recoil Blast that tore through half its torso and severed its cannon arm. He then pursued the opening at lethal speed, dodging further blasts and focusing on the Gun’s center of power. Yuan veered upward and rammed into the demigod with a headshot, punching through its steel bones and qi-circuit brain. Deeper inside, he found the core: Revolver’s humanoid body, bound by circuits to host the monster that had raised Yuan from the dead. Yuan drove through to the back of the skull and forced both himself and Revolver out through the Gun’s head.

The extraction destroyed the Gun’s divine body. With its core removed, the iron structure crumbled into gray dust, and a storm of qi spread across the wasteland. But the rescue did not end the danger: Revolver’s eyes still shone crimson, and the Gun continued to breathe gunsmoke from within him. Revolver struck Yuan with a Recoil Fist, shattering the lower half of his jaw and sending him falling toward the desert. Yuan managed to soften the landing with a Recoil Shockwave, but the violent blow made the outcome unmistakable: the Gun’s body had been destroyed, while Revolver remained bound to the force inside him.

An Incomplete Victory

The extraction ended The Gun’s divine body, not its hold over Revolver. Even after the iron collapsed into gray dust, the Gun remained inside its former host: Revolver’s eyes glowed crimson, and gunsmoke escaped him before his Recoil Fist broke Yuan’s jaw. The duel therefore closed on a reversal rather than a clean rescue. Yuan had reached Revolver, but the friend he pulled from the monster was still carrying its violence.

That unresolved ending sharpens the duel’s ethical stakes. Weeks after becoming The Gun, Revolver had followed compulsions he could not understand until he reached their source, then killed the people he found. He had once fought to free slaves; now, at the barrel’s end, enslavers and the enslaved, the old and the young, Scraps and cultivators all looked alike. Yuan’s rescue attempt answered the debt he felt toward a friend who had saved his life, but destroying The Gun’s enormous body did not erase the cycle’s human cost or release Revolver from it. The victory was real, and incomplete.