Yuan’s body surged with strength, and then with pain.

  His muscles rippled with newfound power, doubling in size and constraining his bones. His bullet-core’s metal roots pulsed with boiling qi that burned away his body fat and reshaped his human organs. The sheer amount of energy coursing through him erupted out from his flesh in the form of searing gunsmoke and forced him to collapse to one knee.

  “Quite the bold gamble, absorbing a qi core in the middle of battle,” Gayak taunted Yuan before kicking him in the face with such strength that he soon crashed against Asa-Zakura’s leg. Yuan’s nose cracked, along with a few teeth. The blow would have likely decapitated him had his body not reached the Third Coil. “Don’t you know it takes a while for the body to adapt to your core’s new output?”

  Yuan understood it, intellectually. Living through it was a completely different experience. All of Gatling Man’s qi flowed into his bullet-core and then through his unprepared body. It was like compressing two liters of water into a bottle meant to house one.

  Yuan did his best to cycle the excessive qi through his body as fast as he could. His metal roots grew tenfold, eating his muscles and replacing them with a dense network of interwoven steel. His veins turned into silicon transistors carrying qi to nodes spread across his body's entire circulatory system, while four pits of steel grew out of his back near his scapula.

  Circuits and exhaust ports, Yuan realized. He had scavenged enough electronics to recognize them. Gatling Man’s inheritance.

  Gayak cautiously took a step back and stopped his assault upon noticing Yuan’s transformation. Flexible plates of armored steel grew to replace his destroyed skin from his shoulders to his nails. When he coated them with Elemental Infusion, they appeared well and truly indestructible.

  His bullet-core was an overheating engine whose shell mutated to compensate for the increase in power. The only solution Yuan found to deal with the pain was to expel excessive qi before it could tear him apart from within, which he did by using both Elemental Infusion and Black Haze. His entire body became metal, down to his brain. Smoke erupted from his exhaust ports and burned the salt in the air.

  After appraising Yuan for a moment and deciding to test the waters, Gayak propelled his gut tentacles at his bullet-core at lightning speed. Yuan managed to deflect them with a Recoil Fist and blasted them away.

  Have to… Yuan grit his teeth and forced himself back to his feet. He refused to die on his knees. Expel more…

  “You’re already getting used to it? Very impressive.” Gayak whistled with what could pass for genuine respect. “How long have you been a cultivator, Yuan?”

  Yuan couldn’t count clearly at the moment, but he could wager a guess. “Two weeks?”

  “And you’re already this good?” Gayak chuckled and adopted a defensive fighting stance, hands raised to shield his head and his knees slightly bent. “I think I’ve finally met a late-blooming prodigy.”

  Yuan couldn’t tell if that was true, since he didn’t know what was counted as exceptional among cultivators, nor did he care. He was only concerned with his own development and the battle ahead.

  Gotta blitz him. Yuan had no idea how long it would take for his body to complete its Third Coil transformation, but he couldn’t afford to wait that long. Gayak would finish him long before he reached that stage. Worse, Yuan felt the salt in the air slowly corroding his metal skin. Hit him hard and fast.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to join us?” Gayak asked, his tentacles wriggling in his stomach. “It would be such a shame to pluck a promising flower before it can fully bloom.”

  “I’ll pass,” Yuan replied with a grimace, swiftly calculating the distance between them and preparing to strike. “We’re evenly matched now that I’ve crossed the Third Coil.”

  “Evenly matched?” Gayak’s head tilted to the side like a curious bird, his smirk widening. “I doubt that.”

  He then opened his mouth and blasted Yuan with a sea of fire.

  The infernal blast burst out of Gayak’s gullet in the blink of an eye, but it seemed unbearably slow to Yuan. His legs carried him out of the way in a single bound.

  The sudden influx of qi strengthened his organs, including the circuits that now replaced his entire nervous system. Information flowed in nanoseconds, sharpening his reflexes until they slowed his very perception of time.

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  Absorbing his enemy’s bullet-core did more than just allow Yuan to steal his qi. His body moved on its own, guided by muscle memory he never had. His fallen foe’s moves were now ingrained into his body… including one particular technique.

  “Ah, you’re good now,” Gayak said as he joined his hands in a mudra sequence. “Would have been a shame to harvest your organs before they could achieve perf–”

  Yuan closed the gap between them in a single Recoil Shockwave.

  A mighty sonic boom echoed in the wake of his jump, followed by a cloud of fumes heating up the air. Yuan’s exhaust ports channeled the technique far better than his body could back when he was still a Second Coil and allowed him to more easily adjust his movements. His hands clicked like triggers the moment they hit Gayak’s palms. He had anticipated the punch and countered it, as Yuan expected him to.

  So Yuan followed-up with a thousand more.

  Gatling Man’s ‘muscle’ memory—if Yuan could call it that—guided his arms as they began a lightning-fast combo. Recoil-powered bursts pulsed from his fists and elbows, turning his arms into pistons that pummeled Gayak.

  This was the technique Gatling Man used on the Flesh Mansion Sect cultivator earlier, but lacked the skill to properly execute: combining the Recoil Fist and immense speed to keep hammering his target with an endless onslaught of blows, without room for reprieve nor escape.

  The Gatling Fist.

  The sheer velocity and stress the technique put on the user’s arms forced Gatling Man to rely on extensive qi-powered machinery, since he hadn’t crossed the Third Coil yet. Yuan’s newly enhanced body could execute it by himself.

  Gayak’s defense unfortunately proved impenetrable. Each blow broke the sound barrier, yet the Flesh Mansion Sect cultivator’s palms and gut-tentacles managed to parry and deflect them all.

  The problem was twofold. First Gayak created short-lived Barriers from his palms that repelled the Gatling Fist’s shockwaves, weakening the punches enough that his hands could parry them. Second, the four eyes on his chest watched each of his enemy’s movements and let him anticipate them. Eventually, Yuan would slip up enough for Gayak to catch his breath and break the deadlock, like he did with Gatling Man beforehand.

  So he blinded him.

  Yuan breathed out a cloud of gunsmoke at Gayak’s chest with Black Haze, obscuring his extra four eyes. Gayak’s palms immediately failed to catch a punch. Yuan’s fist slipped past his guard and hit his chest with such strength that one of the eyes exploded in a shower of blood.

  It went downhill from there.

  Combining Black Haze with the Gatling Fist, Yuan shrouded his movements behind a veil of thick gunsmoke the same way Toshiro did during their duel back in the Thunderlands. Gayak proved unable to recover from it. Yuan’s punches hit him in the face, the chest, the shoulders, everywhere. When he raised his palms to guard, Yuan broke his forearms. When he opened his mouth to breathe fire, Yuan retaliated with an uppercut that shattered his jaw and crushed his windpipe. When he tried to sidestep out of range, a counterpunch forced him back into Yuan’s killing zone.

  Now that the combo had slipped past Gayak’s defenses, he could no longer break out of it. He soon found himself bleeding and battered, with his back pressed against Asa-Zakura’s Barrier. He was a man trapped between a rock and a barrage of steel-hard fists. His skull broke, his eyes exploded in a shower of blood, and his gut-tentacles were blasted apart by repeated shockwaves.

  Even then, Yuan didn’t relent. He ignored the rising pain in his arms, his metal skin peeling back on his knuckles from the speed, and the cracks showing on Asa-Zaruka’s Barrier. He knew he would collapse the moment he stopped his attack. His exhaust ports and metal skin struggled to expel all the extra qi coursing through him. Any pause might cause a terrible backslash.

  His fist shattered Gayak’s skull and the demon sumo’s Barrier along with it.

  The sudden, uninterrupted momentum carried Yuan forward until he tripped amidst the Bullet Church’s wreckage. Gayak’s brain stained his fist alongside churning blood and shattered bones. The rest of his foe’s mangled body bounced off piles of stones, the landing blowing dust in all directions.

  The salt on the floor and in the air disappeared in a cloud of swirling colored mists, alongside the demon sumo that summoned the arena. Yuan assumed that his contract only bound Asa-Zakura to serve until his master died. He sighed in relief as he fell to his knees, his limbs spasming and aching. He wouldn’t have been able to take on the fiend in his current state.

  Most cultivators would have called it a day… but not Yuan. Having come back from the dead himself, he refused to take any chances. He observed Gayak’s remains, searching for any hint of qi.

  The corpse stirred.

  Swiftly grabbing his revolver, Yuan unloaded a metal qi-charged bullet at Gayak. The cultivator’s exposed sinews coiled into tentacles that pushed the body out of the way and behind a pile of debris.

  Shoot! Yuan forced himself back to his feet, a cramp in his leg nearly causing him to fall. He immediately used Item Materialization to refill his revolver’s chambers. How many more bullets will it take?

  He heard Gayak’s voice coming from behind the debris. “Damn, you actually managed to kill me…”

  Yuan didn’t have to wait long before his enemy emerged from behind his hiding spot.

  Gayak’s mangled corpse had rearranged itself into a nightmarish shape. Teeth grew around the hole in his guts, transforming it into a talking maw. Two new yellow eyes appeared on his chest to replace the old ones, and his broken arms lengthened into whips of bones and muscles.

  “I expected to bait you into overextending yourself before your body could adapt, but you nearly had me there… If my backup core hadn’t reanimated me…” Gayak’s chest-mouth let out a sinister laugh filled with grim joy. “You’re the first foe I’m using the Dance of Endless Mutation on, you know?”

  Yuan quickly assessed the situation with his qi sight. On one hand, he only detected one surviving core left inside Gayak out of the seven from earlier, so he was running on fumes; on the other hand, so was Yuan. The Gatling Fist had ripped the metal skin off of his knuckles and left his arms so sore he doubted they would support another use of the technique. At least putting Gayak through a near-death experience had banished his summoned demon.

  This would be their final bout, one way or another.

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