Yuan Guang's enmity with the Radiant Witch

Yuan Guang’s enmity with the Rad-Hag begins as a demand that he hand over Holster, but it becomes a defining test of whether he will treat her as expendable. The Rad-Hag wants Holster for the qi she can draw from a Hitobashira; Yuan Guang, though initially focused on revenge against Slash rather than protecting strangers, chooses to resist her.

Origins of the Conflict

As Yuan Guang meditated aboard the spirit-train, a sandstorm streaked with multicolored lightning gathered behind it. He sensed an immense qi imbalance within the storm, marked by greed and hunger, and saw the headlights of a large pursuing force emerge through the dust. The Rad-Hag was coming for the train.

A communication device then activated by itself. Through its speakers, the Rad-Hag demanded the child and threatened to take both Holster and Yuan Guang if he refused. She wanted Holster’s blood to nourish her land. Holster turned pale with fear, while Yuan Guang recognized who was speaking and answered the threat rather than bargaining over her surrender.

The Rad-Hag’s arrival made the danger concrete. Her mobile stronghold resembled a spirit-train assembled from steel, iron, and black, rubbery flesh, with Centideads crawling inside it. A three-lobed red eye lit its fanged locomotive, and a tiered fortress of stone, brass pipes, and smoking furnaces rose over its back. Oni armed with bows, spears, and rifles stood among its roofs and windows. The Rad-Hag’s qi carried death, radioactive corruption, and fatal lightning; Yuan Guang could tell that she was considerably stronger than he was.

Yuan Guang understood that the pursuers wanted Holster specifically because she was a Hitobashira whose qi could feed the Rad-Hag. If he threw her from the train, they might stop pursuing it. Rescuing Holster had originally been a fortunate consequence of his effort to tame the spirit-train, and protecting her offered him no advantage in his stated pursuit of Slash. Yet he could not accept sacrificing her to secure his own escape. He instructed Holster to hide near the locomotive and gave her the explosive collar and detonator so she could help separate the wagons if the attackers boarded. His refusal turned the Rad-Hag’s demand into open conflict.

The Fight and Its Turning Point

The Rad-Hag eventually pulled Yuan Guang onto the roof of the spirit-train with one of the Centidead larvae that grew from her back. Its mandibles clamped around his neck, but Elemental Infusion turned his skin to metal and prevented it from decapitating him. The creature hauled him up and out of the train, leaving him dangling above the steel roof in the Rad-Hag’s grasp. At close range, her former beauty was almost unimaginable: she was now a towering, hunched figure with greasy blue skin, tumors, bulging black veins, rusted-steel hands, and a hooded face from which her teeth flashed. Four larvae extended from her diseased back; Yuan Guang had already reduced three to bloody stumps, but the fourth held him fast.

The Rad-Hag considered resistance futile. She told Yuan Guang that surrendering Holster would have been the wiser choice, because consuming the Hitobashira would let her heal the Thunderlands. She treated Holster’s sacrifice as destiny, while Yuan Guang’s answer was to attack rather than continue the exchange. He had only two shells remaining from his original twelve, after spending four against a Centidead in the cabin wagon, three to sever the Rad-Hag’s tentacles, and three in the next exchange. Every shot now had to matter.

Yuan Guang tried to strengthen a charged shell with the ambient Qi flowing from the train’s locomotive. The attempt failed: as he fired, the Rad-Hag made the surrounding Qi vanish, leaving only the energy produced by their own bodies. She explained that she was the land itself and that its Qi flow answered to her, then struck him in the chest with lightning. The shock burned his skin and boiled his blood; he had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming.

Instead of letting the current kill him, Yuan Guang redirected it. His iron hand served as a lightning rod, and he reinforced the steel pathways in his body with Qi so the electricity would travel through them rather than spread into his flesh. He forced the current toward the shell already charged in his shotgun. The barrel shuddered under the strain, but Yuan Guang fired the Rad-Hag’s own power back at her. The golden blast broke the shotgun barrel in half and hurled her across the wagon, scorching her chest. She caught herself before she could fall from the spirit-train, so the hit wounded her without ending the fight.

For his last attack, Yuan Guang gathered Qi into his legs and used Recoil. The energy ruptured his muscles on its way to his heels, and the resulting shockwave tore skin from his feet as it launched him into the air. The spirit-train’s Feng Shui carried him forward; with his bullet-core pounding in his skull, he struck the Rad-Hag at full speed. His metal skull punched through her chest. She collapsed only afterward, still reaching for him with failing lightning, while Yuan Guang crawled away on his knees and elbows, badly hurt but alive.

Purification and the Conflict’s Aftermath

Even after the Rad-Hag fell, Yuan Guang treated her defeat as the beginning of another urgent task. Holster emerged from hiding with a first-aid kit taken from Maurice and helped Yuan sit in a dining chair, but he put his own injuries aside. He asked whether Holster knew how to purify the dying caretaker spirit. Though she looked at the Rad-Hag with fear and revulsion, she agreed to try. The exchange matters: Yuan had refused to surrender Holster to save himself, and once the battle was won he still relied on her choice and skill rather than treating the fallen enemy as merely a body to dispose of.

The Rad-Hag’s claim that she was the land proved more than a threat. A caretaker spirit embodied its territory, acting as a mask through which the region met the outside world and as a vessel of its Qi. Holster began to unravel that vessel, guiding the Rad-Hag’s untainted energies into the spirit-train’s circulatory system while isolating the rot in her heart. Yuan concentrated on the flow of Qi until he understood the method. His role in the encounter thus shifted from surviving the land’s power to witnessing how its corrupted guardian could be separated, at least in part, from the forces that had poisoned her.

As the purification took hold, the Rad-Hag’s enormous body shrank to human size, and her distorted face briefly regained the beautiful appearance she had possessed before radiation poisoned the Thunderlands. The Centidead maggots fell away and writhed without their host. Tumors and corroded spirit-flesh tried in vain to close the hole in her chest. Her resistance failed; her body turned to dust, and her Qi returned to the Dao. What remained was a table-sized mass of pallid flesh, tumors, and corrupted Qi, with half-formed faces moving beneath its surface.

Her death ended the immediate pursuit of Holster, but it did not heal the Thunderlands at once. A new spirit would not instantly undo the region’s radiation and Centidead infection; it could only provide a beginning. That limit complicates the meaning of Yuan Guang’s victory. He had killed the being who embodied the damaged territory, yet the violence alone could not repair it. The decisive contrast is between the Rad-Hag’s proposed remedy—feeding on Holster, whose sacrifice she called destiny—and the fragile work of purification that followed her defeat. Yuan Guang’s refusal to make Holster expendable preserved the possibility of that different beginning.

The Damaged Territory

Before the Rad-Hag confronted him, Yuan Guang had already sensed the sickness in the landscape beyond Gatesville. A ruined city lay in a crater beside the road, its toppled skyscrapers weathered by time and dust storms; the air carried poisonous dust that Yuan Guang’s bullet-core struggled to assimilate. Revolver noted that the city had still been inhabited four years earlier, when one of the Gunsouls and Czar Zoa killed each other there. This earlier glimpse of a diseased, violence-marked region gives the Rad-Hag’s claim to embody the land a concrete setting: her conflict with Yuan Guang unfolds amid damage that precedes their fight and survives her death.