Gunsoul: A Xianxia Apocalypse - Chapter 74: Nuclear Winter

For a while, Yuan thought he had returned to the Nowhere again. That his half-life had come to an end in a flood of nuclear light and returned to nothingness.

But he had already tasted death once from the barrel of his own gun. He did not recall a core pounding in his head when the darkness beckoned him to reincarnate, nor the sore numbness of a body too heavy for his soul to escape.

Yuan Guang had survived against all odds.

His telescopic eyes slowly opened to face the familiar ceiling of the Metal Wagon, and the tearful face of Holster looking down on him with relief. He sensed her arms crush his windpipe into a hug a second later, warm water falling on his face.

“H… Holster?” Yuan growled, gunsmoke flowing out of his throat. He could sense his jaw again, though his ammo teeth had yet to regrow. “I’m… alive?”

“Sir!” Yuan heard Bucket’s voice, though his eyes hadn’t yet acclimated enough to see him. “We feared ourselves bereft of your guidance!”

Yuan was too groggy to think straight. He tried to rise up until a sharp surge of pain stopped him. He sensed kind hands move under the back of his head and help lift him. Yuan recognized Orient’s touch long before his eyes saw her smiling at him.

“Do not stress yourself, Honored Conductor Yuan,” Orient advised. “You haven’t managed to fully regenerate yet.”

She helped Yuan look around him. His allies surrounded him, except for Mel, Hardy… and Arc. They had put him atop a clinical bed to support his body, since he was missing his arms and everything below the lungs. He must have regenerated the rest over the course of… the Wayfinders knew how long.

He was afraid to ask what happened, until he saw that Bucket carried the Cube of Natho in his hands. Its baleful eyes looked back at Yuan with a hint of gleaming malice.

“What…” Yuan’s eyes widened as he finally recalled what preceded the flash. “Manhattan…”

“Gone,” Orient reassured him. “Lady Arc’s plan worked. I destroyed him.”

Yuan gasped in immense relief, and terrible doubt. “Are you… are you sure?”

“Yes. I felt his core shatter against my locomotive.” Orient’s smile turned into a grim scowl. “The blast would have snuffed me out too if I didn’t have a leyline’s worth of qi infusing my steel. Our alterations to the History Road circuit barely managed to purify the resulting radiation before it could pollute the entire region. The cube remained intact.”

Of course it did. It would make sense for its creators to specifically design it to withstand nuclear explosions.

“Mel? Hardy?” Yuan coughed oil and gunsmoke. “Did… did they survive?”

“They are… alive. For now.” Orient scowled. “They suffered extensive injuries from the blast. A surgeon is operating on them as we speak, but he could not guarantee their survival.”

“I… I see,” Yuan said softly. Of course they had been wounded. They had been at ground zero and unlike him, they couldn’t regenerate from a single bullet’s worth of qi. “I hope they pull through.”

“I’m sorry,” Orient apologized. “If I had been slower, mayhaps I could have–”

“If you had been slower, milady, then we’d all be dead,” Bucket replied with confidence. “The foul servant of the Nuke would have murdered our honored conductor and sent us off to the Afterlife Station.”

Bucket was right. Yuan was unbearably lucky to have survived where the likes of Arc perished. It almost felt unjust. Arc had been so much stronger than he was, yet a single mistake cost her life. If she had been a second faster in unleashing her Authority, then she would still be there with them.

Yuan knew he could say the same for Manhattan, but it still seemed absurd. Even the strongest cultivators danced on the knife’s edge when fighting each other.

As for Mel and Hardy, Yuan knew that Manhattan would have escaped with the cube had they not helped stall him. They hadn’t hesitated to fight the Fanged Coast’s strongest cultivator if it meant saving their hometown from destruction. Yuan prayed to the Wayfinders that they would survive through their surgery.

But although costly, today had nonetheless been a great victory.

Czar “Manhattan” Zoa, terror of the Wasteland, was dead. Hopefully for good this time.

It took Yuan some time to accept this news, and longer to fathom its full implications. The Yinyang Khan was gone, alongside Slash, Battletown, and their whole rotten empire. Manhattan had been destroyed. Arc, Mingxia, and Jaw-Long had all been avenged.

Yuan glanced at the cube with some apprehension. On one hand, he was happy that the Nuke hadn’t escape its binding; on the other hand, it spoke volumes about its power if it required such an unbreakable prison.

Manhattan’s words rang true. Ambitious fools and madmen would never stop hunting for it.

And they would have to step over Yuan’s corpse to reach it.

——–

Yuan had been knocked out for an entire day’s time according to Orient, and it took him another day under constant exposure to metal-aligned qi to regrow his limbs. Holster and her cat Gotama stayed at his side until he could walk again. Yuan guessed that nearly seeing him die had only made his charge more worried for his safety.

It warmed Yuan’s heart and saddened him a bit. Holster should be leaning on him to protect her, not the other way around.

He visited his crew afterward. Bucket and the other passengers mostly survived the race unscathed besides a few wounded during the race’s various gunfights. Knowing they were safe warmed Yuan’s heart for a reason he couldn’t quite explain. He didn’t know any of the people onboard personally, but he felt personally responsible for their safety and pleased by their survival.

My crew. The very thought caused Yuan no end of strange amusement. I have a new band now.

Orient and Holster would always come first, but Bucket and the others fought with him in the most lethal race he had ever had the displeasure of participating in. That counted for something.

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They spent the day helping survivors from Battletown’s destruction and burying those they could find to reduce the spread of hungry ghosts. Orient temporarily transformed three of the wagons into improvised hospital houses to treat the wounded and purge them of leftover radiation poisoning.

Thankfully, a few doctors like Jared LaChair had lived through the cataclysmic battle and agreed to cooperate; setting up his clinic as far as possible from the Khan’s seat of power had likely saved his life. Knowing that he had been the one operating the Dyad brothers also reassured Yuan somewhat.

Holster guided Yuan through the hospital wagons to visit them, when he noticed a familiar birdface among the wounded.

“I can’t believe it,” Yuan said in disbelief. “How are you still alive?”

Duckman looked back at him defiantly, both halves of his bisected body lying on a surgical couch. Jared LaChair was operating on him and trying to sew his severed flesh together with threads. Mel and Hardy occupied the next beds, both of them covered in so many bandages Yuan wouldn’t have recognized them without analyzing their qi signatures first.

“You thought you could rid yourself of Duckman so easily?!” Duckman tightened his hand into a fist and raised it as if to challenge the heavens. “Duckman will never die!”

“Against all odds,” Jared LaChair commented as he sewed back on Duckman’s legs to the rest of his body. “Be thankful that your bed neighbors insisted on treating you. The train lady wanted you thrown back into the desert.”

Yuan looked at Mel and Hardy in disapproval. “Why save this waste of skin? He tried to kill us.”

“The way I see it, a History Road feud starts and ends with the competition,” Mel replied with a cough. His brother remained asleep, his nose wheezing with each inspiration. “Plus he dragged himself all the way to Battletown. Can’t help but respect his resilience.”

“What is a duck, but a water phoenix?!” Duckman boasted.

“Or maybe he’s too stupid to die,” Mel said, ignoring his fellow patient’s glare. “Can’t believe you already look good as new, Yuan. Your Path is busted.”

“Yours isn’t too bad either,” Yuan replied. The Yinyang Khan had been living proof of its power. “I’m… I’m glad you and Hardy both survived.”

Mel smiled the best he could through the bandages. “We’ve got the doc to thank for that.”

“It’s always the same with you Dyads,” Jared LaChair replied gruffly. “You save one, you save the other. Your own Wayfinders refused to die until one killed the other.”

“The Duck Path is better!” Duckman insisted proudly. “Duckman will prove it anytime!”

“I hope you’re not going to pick a fight,” Yuan coldly warned him. “I can still finish what we started during the History Road.”

Duckman looked at him with an emotion Yuan had rarely seen sent his way: fear.

“Duckman…” He took a deep breath. “Duckman is going back to his pond. Duckman’s done with this shithole.”

Holster stuck her tongue at him. Yuan would have scolded her under normal circumstances, but Duckman had earned it.

It annoyed Yuan that the likes of Duckman lived while Arc perished, but he at least seemed to have learned his lesson and let bygones be bygones. Mel was right, their enmity had begun and stopped with the History Road competition.

The way Duckman looked at him did bother Yuan a bit. He glanced around himself to see other patients look at him with a mix of awe and apprehension, the same way disciples would tread warily around a Sect Elder. Even Jared LaChair seemed strangely on guard around him.

“Why are you all looking at me like that?” Yuan asked.

“It’s called respect,” Mel said with a chuckle. “You’re the man who killed the Yinyang Khan. Get used to it.”

“I didn’t kill the Khan,” Yuan protested. “Just half of him. The lesser one.”

“You were the last man standing at the end of the day,” Jared replied with a shrug. “That makes you the winner.”

It was then, at this very instant, that Yuan realized he would never be able to settle down peacefully.

LaChair was right: few had seen the fight in its entirety and only the results mattered. As far as everyone was concerned, powerful cultivators with city-destroying Authorities waged a legendary fight over Battletown’s ruins; and Yuan Guang was the only one standing when the dust settled.

He would soon become a wasteland legend. The man who picked a fight with the Yinyang Khan and lived to tell the tale.

Every ambitious cultivator across the Fanged Coast would try to either recruit or kill him to make a name for themselves. No sect could afford to ignore him anymore. He was either a force they wanted on their side, or a potential threat. The Yinyang Khan’s death had left a void that many would try to fill.

We’ve got to leave the coast before we get swept up in other people’s wars, Yuan thought as he and Holster returned to the locomotive. And before someone comes to claim the Khan’s legacy.

They found Orient keeping watch over the Cube of Natho in the driver’s car. She had sealed the artifact inside the engine, amidst a prison of pistons and sutras keeping it safely imprisoned. Her worried expression turned into a smile once her friends entered the room. “Have we settled on a new destination, Honored Conductor Yuan?”

“We need to take the cube somewhere nobody will find it,” Yuan replied. After the Khan’s nuclear stunt, he knew it was only a matter of time before rumors spread and would-be warlords started investigating the source of this vicious power. “Kaguya’s bound to contact us about it soon.”

“Will we give it to her?” Orient asked with a frown.

“No.” Yuan shook his head. “No sect should have this kind of power.”

“Personally, I agree that no one should wield it, Honored Conductor Yuan.” Orient glared at the cube’s prison with apprehension. “I can feel its prisoner’s malice leaking out like magma. No good will ever come out of using the creature.”

Yuan studied the seal. “You’re sure it won’t escape?”

“Not unless we intentionally release it ourselves,” Orient replied. “I have detected mechanisms woven into the cube that would partially allow such a thing, which I assume the Khan used to fire his arrow of light. I haven’t dared to delve any further.”

“Wise,” Yuan commented. They shouldn’t mess with something they did not understand. “Did you find a gun near me among the ruins?”

“I did.” Orient presented him with a familiar, sutra-laced revolver. “It was blasted to pieces, but Miss Holster and I managed to piece it back together.”

Yuan took the gun and studied it without a word. His silence bothered Holster and Orient.

“Is something wrong?” the latter asked him.

“No, nothing,” Yuan reassured her. “Thank you. I’d just expected another weapon.”

He had hoped against all odds that his old handgun had survived Slash’s death and Manhattan’s Authority. In all likelihood, it had been vaporized in the battle.

Yuan found it fitting, in a sad way. His old handgun represented the beginning and the end of his human existence. It perished for good alongside Slash. Although he mourned the weapon like an old friend, its destruction gave him a sense of closure.

At least his revolver had survived the battle. Hoster had put a lot of effort into upgrading it, and it was a gift from Revolver himself. Yuan would have been loath to lose it too.

Yuan had expected to reach a state of contentment after taking his revenge. Putting a bullet in Slash’s head had been the driving force of his existence since he rose from the grave. Killing him did provide a brief flash of satisfaction and the pride of ridding the wasteland of the Yinyang Khan, but little else.

Thankfully, it didn’t take Yuan long to figure out what he should do next.

I’ve got a new purpose now, Yuan told him as he glanced at Holster. He hadn’t given up on curing her, nor would he ever. And the weapon to protect her.

He also recalled Arc’s final request, to end it all. The Gun, the Nuke, the Blade, and the other Demigods of Ultraviolence. He wasn’t certain how he would fulfill that wish of hers, but he owed it to her to at least try. She did give her life for the cause.

“Did Arc leave us anything?” Yuan asked. “She said she would give us the location of a Dragon Sage who could help us.”

“She indeed entrusted me with that information, and an inheritance.” Orient snapped her fingers, and an engine compartment opened up to reveal a small letter and a silver bullet. “I haven’t checked its content, Honored Conductor Yuan. I assume it was meant for you alone.”

Yuan examined the gifts with curiosity. The letter was indeed written in the common language and addressed to him. As for the silver bullet, every inch of it was wrapped up in carved sutras. He could feel Arc’s qi inside it.

He knew for whom that projectile was meant; or rather, what.

“When did she give you this?” Yuan asked.

“Before the History Road race,” Orient replied. “I suspect she anticipated her demise.”

It would make sense for someone so far-sighted to prepare for their death.

Yuan carefully opened the letter and read its contents in respectful silence.