A nuclear punch hit her in the chest at lightning speed.

  Arc would have been more than fast enough to dodge in her heyday, but she had grown rusty and was too close to Zoa to dodge properly. A fist imbued with radiation melted the outer surface of her iron belly and threw her back. She landed on a field of lead summoned by her own Authority and followed through with a Recoil Blast.

  Czar Zoa was already healing from his wounds, with his jaw reforming itself from raw nuclear radiation surging from the rest of his body. Arc studied the way his qi traveled through his body in an attempt to find his core. Zoa was too good to give its location away, but at least she prevented him from casting his Authority.

  “I am fighting for the sake of your immortal soul too, Arc,” his half-formed mouth spoke while his legs avoided the blast with graceful dancing moves. “Rudra Tandava.”

  Zoa’s steps carried the strength of thunder as he danced forward, his hands and feet following a complex mudra sequence as nuclear light imbued his limbs with power. By the time he closed the gap between Arc and him in a bright flash of light, his face had already put itself back together… only for his regeneration to abruptly stop afterward.

  Arc found herself taken aback when her enemy charged at her with the back of his skull missing. Zoa knew that her Headshot Forge would automatically target anyone with a brain… so the clever bastard interrupted his regeneration before he could regrow one.

  Arc wished she could say she could heal so easily. Her flesh regrew ammo-muscles to fill the wound Zoa left in her stomach, but the radiation imbuing it slowed down the process. A vile force caused her very atoms to decay into nothingness.

  So long as the tumor that grants him his half-life remains untouched, he’ll eventually recover from anything. Arc thought their Authority clash had cracked and destroyed Czar Zoa’s core during their last battle, but apparently not. He must have used a qi Barrier to hide it after nearly perishing at her hands. I’ll thoroughly clean up the shitstain this time. Leave not a speck of dust behind.

  Czar Zoa wasn’t the nuclear cultivator who put her in the ground—that honor belonged to another she had slain decades ago and forced her to shoot herself rather than suffer a cruel death by radiation cancer—but he was by far the most dangerous. She couldn’t allow him to escape again.

  “When the Gautama Buddha achieved Nirvana, he concluded that desire and pain were fetters trapping the mind in a universe of physical illusions,” Zoa said as he swirled on himself, his hands and feet leaving trails of nuclear fire in their wake. “This flawed world is a prison for the souls of mankind; a trap ensnaring the immortal spirits of men in a cycle of reincarnation that keeps them from joining with the Dao.”

  “I don’t care,” Arc replied after using a Recoil Shockwave to get away from her adversary.

  “I know you do,” Zoa replied as he relentlessly hounded her across the battleground, the two of them passing by the agonizing Khan and the Barrier keeping the cube contained. The nuclear cultivator refused to give her any space. “You have seen the vices festering among men. Greed, ambition, violence, ignorance… sins on which this rotten city and its overlord build the foundations of their wicked power.”

  He clapped his hands to unleash a searing burst of crimson microwaves. Arc formed a Barrier to protect herself, the sheer heat from the attack turning dust to glass around her.

  “Do you think a world where thugs like this so-called Khan rule is worth preserving?” Zoa asked as he maintained the pressure. “There are thousands like him, cultivators who blind themselves to the spiritual heights of our arts and spread more suffering. The Spiral Dancer tried to open their ignorant eyes to the Dao’s truths, and she failed.”

  With Zoa fast enough to dodge heavy attacks and experienced enough at making Barriers to repel her weaker ones, she settled on a different solution: charging her bullets with different elemental affinities the same way Yuan’s revolver channeled them.

  Countering her enemy’s radiations would demand using an opposing wavelength to cancel them out, so Arc combined wood and fire qi inside her rifle arm to produce lightning. She used her Truesight to analyze Zoa’s energies and align the electrical current to them.

  “Birth, aging, sickness, and death… such are the four pains that keep us chained in the cycle of dharma, forever afar from the Dao,” Zoa ranted as he punched through her Barrier and forced her to stay on the move once again. He had always liked the position of lecturer. “The Buddhas of old believed in helping individual souls reach enlightenment… but why help prisoners escape when you can simply destroy the jail itself?”

  “I like living,” Arc replied as she finished charging her bullets.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  She blasted a volley of lightning-speed projectiles at Zoa, each of them cackling like thunderbolts. Her nemesis attempted to stop one bare-handed on reflex, expecting his intense radioactivity to melt the bullet to nothing. The bullet instead pulverized half his palm. He struggled to dodge a shot to the chest next, with Arc’s newest projectile grazing him.

  “Do you?” Zoa asked sharply. He sounded more curious than anything, his hand already healing itself. “What is there left for you to live for in this ruined shell of a world?”

  Arc knew talking in battle was a waste of time, but she found herself unable to ignore these questions. Once she would have said that she fought for revenge, then to live long enough until she could extirpate Jim’s soul from the Gun’s grasp. But Jim was dead now, as was the nuclear cultivator who first put her in the ground. The hatred she felt for Zoa and the sense of duty she held for the world’s safety paled before these goals.

  What was she living for?

  “Where there is light, there is shadow!”

  Arc’s head snapped in the Khan’s direction. She had been too focused on Czar Zoa to notice a small change with the warlord. The strange fang-shaped muscles on his chest had transformed into actual teeth through which a forked tongue slithered out. The belly-maw began to form deep, bellowing words even as the Khan’s head struggled with the bullet stuck inside his skull.

  “The forever war rages on within myself!” He chanted, his four hands forming a hand-sign sequence. “Between good and evil, order and chaos, truth and illusion!”

  Realizing what the Khan was trying to do, Arc immediately switched targets and attempted to switch places with the bullet lodged in the Khan’s head. She sensed an invisible, ever-expanding gulf forming between them and canceling out the attempt.

  Zoa understood the danger and joined in on the attack by lunging at the Khan with radioactive fists too, only for their common enemy’s defense to slow him down to a crawl.

  “I gazed beyond the yin and yang into infinity, for I alone am fit to bear it!” the Khan chanted as he completed his incantation. “The Maddening Burden of Duality!”

  His Authority erupted from him in a wave of chaos, and Arc screamed from the depths of her soul.

  Headshot Forge was more than a technique and a place; it was a physical manifestation of her core, of her inner self. To have another Authority clash with it was akin to suffering the worst kind of violation.

  The Khan’s Maddening Burden of Duality formed a bubble around him that expanded within Headshot Forge, like a puddle of ink trying to wash away another artist’s drawing. Arc fought back to the best of her ability, but she retained the wounds of a similar clash already. Her Authority was swept away and forced back into her body for the first time in half a decade.

  The Khan’s Authority swallowed everyone, banishing the lead and gunsmoke landscape to replace it with an iron dome covered in black spikes. The vast cage encircled the duelists with a droning noise and the scent of brimstone. The ground turned into a circular tatami shaped after the yin and yang symbol.

  The Yinyang Khan split in two.

  In a blink, he was gone, and then two stood in his place. The first was a perfect copy of the Yinyang Khan himself, albeit missing his lower set of arms and with his entire body now a pale shade of bone-white. The latter was a figure with a black obsidian body and a grinning oni mask for a face.

  Slash.

  “Now this, this is a fight worth our while!” he shouted with a maniacal laugh, a katana materializing out of nowhere in his hand. He immediately pointed it at Arc. “Why won’t you become our woman once this fight is over? Just imagine what the three of us could do together!”

  Arc would have sneered if she still had lips. “Two different personalities, and you’re both creeps.”

  “Stop wasting time, lesser me,” the Yinyang Khan said as he stretched his arms, his eyes glaring at Czar Zoa. The bullet wound in his head and chest had closed on their own. “Both of them are worthy of our full powers. We can’t afford to toy with these two.”

  “Yes, yes, boss,” Slash replied with a sigh. “Got it, boss.”

  Arc immediately guessed what happened: their Authority allowed the two personalities to physically manifest in a single imaginary space.

  This is bad, Arc thought. On one hand, the Khan had lost his lower hands, which prevented him from both attacking and using his defensive mudra techniques at the same time. On the other hand, there were two Khans now; and while Slash was clearly the weaker of the two, the original’s qi reserves hadn’t diminished in the slightest. He’s not a big enough fool to sacrifice his impenetrable defense unless his Authority provided some form of trade-off.

  She learned what said advantage was the moment Slash’s sword began to smell of death.

  A vile, oppressive aura swirled around the weapon in crimson waves of rolling bloodlust. Arc sensed her bullet-core pounding wildly within the depths of her iron flesh. The sniper rifle within her recognized the presence, the same way a predator identified another of its kind.

  She fired a lightning bullet and Czar Zoa followed it up with a gamma ray burst. The Yinyang Khan stopped them both in time and space with his technique, shielding his other self until he completed a sutra chant.

  “By our covenant, I call upon you, oh demigod of ultraviolence!” Slash laughed maniacally. “Slicer, slasher, stabber! Oh Blade, lend me thy beheading edge!”

  His sword screamed.

  Its edge gained the color of blood, and its handle twisted until it gained spikes. Maddened yellow eyes and mouths with knife-fangs opened along the length of the blade, snarling and screeching. A malevolent will now dwelled within its steel; it was nowhere near as powerful as the Gun, in whose shadow it lingered, but it exuded twice the bloodlust and taste for impending carnage.

  The Authority shook as a bullet crashed through the dome.

  An Authority’s frontier varied from one to another. Most prevented anyone from entering or exiting, but some would forgo one or the other in order to allocate more qi to its offensive capabilities. As a Dyad Path follower, the Yinyang Khan’s very soul wouldn’t turn down a challenger.

  A man of steel leaped into the dome, phasing through its steel spikes as if they didn’t exist. He carried a shovel on his back, and a revolver in his hand. He immediately fired a bullet at Slash’s head before he even landed.

  The Yinyang Khan’s lesser self easily sliced the projectile with his empowered blade, though he looked slightly rattled by the intrusion.

  Yuan Guang had entered the fray.

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