Yuan and the Gun cultists stood atop the spirit-train as it closed in on Fleshmarket.

  Distant booms and the echoes of gunfire grew stronger the more they approached the city, as did the smell of blood and death. The corroded metal wall protecting eastern Fleshmarket trembled under the searing crimson sky. Its strategically placed gun turrets had mostly turned inwards, its technicians firing at foes within the city rather than at the wasteland’s many dangers. Scrap gunmen fought back against humans with cybernetic enhancements and robots with screens for heads trying to storm their defenses from inside Fleshmarket.

  The Metallists had made their move. They had sent forces to seize the Bullet Church’s weaponry for themselves, as Yuan suspected.

  Yuan came prepared. Boiled centidead plates covered his chest, arms, and legs. The Kalash Angel was strapped to his back, the revolver holstered to his belt, while the Saint Heckler waited in his hands.

  He expected an assault soon. The spirit-train would make too tempting a target for the attackers to ignore.

  “Here goes nothing, sir!” Bucket pointed his flare gun at the sky and pulled the trigger. A bright pyrotechnic projectile erupted from the barrel, flew upward in the sky, and exploded in a bright red cloud. “The faithful shall recognize their own!”

  “As will our enemies,” Yuan replied. A set of metal gates at the bottom of the fortified walls slowly began to open to allow the spirit-train through. “Load your irons, boys. They’re coming.”

  It hardly took a minute for a welcoming committee to intercept them.

  A group of Metallists storming the walls leaped into the void and flew towards the spirit-train. Yuan counted half a dozen cyborgs wearing softly glowing helmets and talon-shaped thrusters for shoes. Their most striking feature were the rotary blades attached to their right hands. They spun at blinding speed with a low hum fast enough to allow them to fly. The soldiers’ left hands, meanwhile, instead carried weapons from shotguns to submachine guns. Their equipment varied from well-maintained to shoddy scavenged parts strapped together.

  They didn’t fly alone either. A set of compact, head-sized mechanical drones followed them closely. Their rugged shape sported a central green screen, plenty of rotors to keep them afloat, and a small nail gun between sets of tiny metal legs.

  Yuan loved moving targets.

  “Fire at will!” he shouted to his allies.

  Yuan charged his Saint Heckler’s bullets with qi and opened fire at the cyborgs first. His projectiles shattered a soldier’s rotary blade, bounced off it, and then hit the user through their visor. The poor bastard went crashing down onto the ground below.

  Bucket shouted some nonsensical Gun sermon as he and his fellow cultists followed Yuan’s example. The cyborgs fired back with their long-range rifles and shotguns while the drones moved closer to the ground in an attempt to avoid the hailfire. The two groups exchanged fire from across a wide distance, the gulf between them quickly shrinking the closer the spirit-train approached the walls.

  While the cultists weren’t bad shots by any means, Yuan did most of the heavy lifting. His range was greater, his gunplay better, and his bullets more effective. He shot two drones, his projectiles bounced off them, hitting the nearest flying cyborg squarely in the chest, and then veering off again in the distance.

  It seemed that qi-charged submachine gun bullets ricocheted after hitting their targets. Situationally useful, but quite disappointing at the moment. Yuan would trade that ability for greater firepower anytime.

  The group had downed half the drones, but the survivors managed to reach their wagon. A five-machine strong squadron flew across the spirit-train’s length and fired nails at them wantonly. Yuan activated his Elemental Infusion to coat his skin in steel and easily stopped the projectiles, but his allies proved less fortunate.

  One of the cultists took nails to the face and Bucket a nail volley in his helmet. The former collapsed on the ground bleeding and screaming, his face skewered with steel, while the latter’s armor spared him an early grave once again.

  “Stay behind me!” Yuan ordered his allies. Using his body as a shield to protect them, he raised a hand at the incoming drones and activated his Recoil Fist. The shockwave blew the drones to pieces, their scrapped remains falling off the spirit-train.

  Only two cyborgs remained. They closed onto the train while Yuan’s allies surrounded their wounded comrade. Yuan raised his Saint Heckler to down them both when he heard a distant shot.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  A shining bullet pulverized the two cyborgs in an instant.

  Yuan’s enhanced cultivator senses picked up a bullet piercing them one after the other, but no normal bullet would blast off two men’s torsos in a row. Their aimless rotary blades caused their remains to crash onto the spirit-train windows and facade, their oily blood and cybernetic limbs falling off.

  “Sir, look!” Bucket shouted in happy zeal. “A metal angel!”

  Yuan glanced at the source of the bullet. A cloud of dust arose over the horizon as a familiar vehicle caught up to the spirit-train at phenomenal speed. A cruiser with blazing wheels rode across the wastes, its skull-headed rider firing in the air to announce his arrival.

  Yuan’s bullet-core pounded in his skull when he recognized his savior.

  Revolver.

  “Yuan?!” Revolver cackled to himself and drove his cruiser alongside the spirit-train, right beneath Yuan’s wagon. His vehicle roared like a rampaging demon, its wheels blazing bright. “It’s been a while! Is this spirit-train yours?!”

  “Yep!” Yuan replied while Bucket fell to his knees in prayer. The presence of two Gunsouls in close vicinity was too much for his heart to bear. “What are you doing here?!”

  “Came to wreck slavers and raise some hell, but I found the party started early!” Revolver replied. Of course he would hunt near Fleshmarket. Yuan recalled he wanted to storm the city when they first met. “You?!”

  “Same!” Yuan reloaded his Saint Heckler. “Wanna team up?!”

  “Attaboy!” Revolver’s chuckle rang louder than gunfire. “I’m here to cross Elder Polio’s name off my kill list, but I don’t mind filling a few more graves!”

  A mighty blast erupted over the eastern wall. Yuan looked at it to see a pillar of smoke rise over it and one of its mounted cannons falling off it. His enhanced senses detected a powerful source of qi hiding within the fumes; the signs of a powerful cultivator, with an aura of fire and steel.

  Yuan had a good idea of who it belonged to, and the projectiles surging from the smoke only confirmed his hypothesis.

  A volley of qi-charged rockets aimed for the spirit-train.

  Revolver, quicker on the draw, opened fire at them first. Yuan followed his example, their bullets flying to intercept the projectiles. They managed to hit a few and detonated them in midair in blinding flashes of fire and light, but missed two of them. One landed in the wasteland and left a small crater in its wake; the other hit the passenger wagon in a cataclysmic blast. The roof exploded, shrapnel and glass shards flying everywhere, while the entire spirit-train shook along its length.

  Yuan suppressed a sigh of relief. Holster was hidden in the engine room with Orient, and the projectile had missed the luggage wagon. Both his allies and cargo were safe, for now.

  “Can I ask you to escort the spirit-train inside Fleshmarket?!” Yuan asked Revolver. “We’re going to evacuate civilians if we can!”

  “Sure!” Revolver replied. “How about you storm the walls while I stay on the ground?! My motorcycle can’t exactly fly!”

  “That’s the plan,” Yuan replied. He knew exactly who awaited him atop the wall, and that he had to face that foe on his own. He thanked Revolver before giving Bucket a tap on the back. “Help Orient repair the damage and take all the non-combatants you can find onboard the spirit-train.”

  “Yes, sir!” Bucket gave him a salute. “What about you, sir?”

  “I won’t be long.”

  Yuan stretched his legs and then leaped off the train.

  The Recoil Fist’s energy coursed through elementally infused steel flesh and burst from his feet. His shoes shattered into pieces while the blast propelled him upward. Having crossed the Second Coil and overcome the moonburns eliminated the terrible backslash that wounded him whenever he used this technique in the past, allowing him to use it multiple times in a row.

  And thus, Yuan flew.

  He jumped across the air, riding the recoil shockwaves of his own ability again and again. His first bound sent him ten meters into the air with a supersonic boom; the second lifted him around two-thirds the wall’s height; and the third let him leap over it. He landed atop the meters-thick fortifications with such force that the steel beneath him cracked under his weight.

  It felt so good to be strong.

  Yuan observed his surroundings. He had landed right above the opened gates, which the spirit-train had started crossing already. A long platform of steel sprawled out from both sides of him, although thick smoke rising from a destroyed mounted cannon partly obscured his vision on his right. The smell of spent ammunition hung in the air while shattered concrete debris, dismembered Scrap corpses, and destroyed borgs lay all around him. The Bullet Church defended the spot to the last man and failed anyway.

  Their killer awaited Yuan, a lone mech surrounded by dead men.

  The steel behemoth in front of Yuan was about twice his size, a cyborg colossus encased in beige metal plates. He would have mistaken the man for a machine, if not for his partially exposed organic head. Only the upper part of his skull was still at least made of bone, the jaw replaced with tubes and cables likely connecting the brain to the body’s mainframe. His pale gray, silicon eyes peered at Yuan with a predator’s focus.

  The borg packed quite the arsenal too. His broad, reinforced shoulders boasted a set of mounted rocket launchers and other cannon weapons that Yuan didn’t recognize. His enormous hands firmly gripped a massive gatling gun longer than an adult man. His armor bore inch-deep scars and scorched burn marks that did little to reduce his aura of overwhelming strength.

  This guy was a tough one.

  “Gatling Man, I presume?” Yuan asked.

  “It’s good you showed up on your own, Gunsoul,” the cyborg answered, his voice twisted by a vocal modulator. He raised his trademark gatling at Yuan with a single hand. “I was gonna hunt you down anyway.”

  “Same,” Yuan replied coldly. He raised his submachine gun at the cyborg and prepared to fire, only for both duelists to freeze in place.

  They’d both sensed it.

  That oppressive, malevolent aura approaching them.

  “Fancy meeting you here, boys.”

  A man in tattered clothes stepped out of the plume of smoke, his hand dragging a bisected cyborg’s torso across the wall. He let go of his prize, stretched his neck, and then adopted a fighting stance.

  “Room for one more?” Gayak asked, a sadistic smile stretching on his cruel face.

  audiobook bundle of my Apocalypse Tamer series has recently been published on Audible (with nearly 80 hours of content). Posting a link there in case anybody is interested ;)

  https://www.audible.com/pd/Apocalypse-Tamer-The-Complete-Series-Audiobook/B0D9WKPJHQ

  (access to advance chapters, arts and other bonuses)

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