Chapter 72: Lights Out
Slash’s head exploded atop his shoulders.
Yuan’s bullet-core pounded with satisfaction inside his skull at the irony of his murderer perishing from the very same way he once put the Gunsoul into the ground. Payback at last.
However, his joy only lasted until his foe’s corpse hit the ground. Slash’s blood and brain matter had already started pulling itself back together by the will of his surviving other half. The Yinyang Khan himself remained on the defensive, his hands forming a mudra sequence that stopped all of Arc’s projectiles mid-flight.
Realizing this, Arc charged at him with her free hands forming mudras signs of her own.
“The last thing you never see!” she said, her voice strained with pain. “Headshot Forge!”
A bubble of lead and gunsmoke emerged from her body, pressing back against the Khan’s own inner reality in an attempt to kill him before his other self recovered.
Yuan had never seen an Authority clash in the past, and witnessing it first-hand sent shivers down his spine. Two different visions of the world materialized within a few meters’ range and fought over ownership of reality. The Yinyang Khan’s maddened vision of endless fighting and splintered minds pressed against the ammunition bog of Headshot Forge, the same way water sought to extinguish any pocket of air within itself.
Arc pushed back with all of her qi and strength, but the experience wore her down spiritually and physically. Her rifle-arm cracked along its barrel and her steel-skin rusted along the edges. All of her willpower hardly allowed her to expand her Authority around two meters from herself.
But it was enough to briefly engulf the Yinyang Khan.