Gun In Another World

The letter arrived with a wax seal bearing the symbol of a two-headed serpent swallowing its own tail, Kaito didn't need to open it to know where it came from, the Black Ink Network used different crests depending on the urgency of the job, and the ouroboros was reserved for contracts that involved Church infrastructure, dangerous politics, or people who were considered "untouchable," the kind of jobs that came with quiet gold and loud consequences, the kind that didn't get written into history—but buried underneath it.

Lilyeth slid the knife out of the letter's edge, pulled the sheet free, and scanned the first few lines, her brows furrowed before she looked up and said nothing, just handed it over, Kaito read slowly, his expression unmoving.

"Target: High Priest Morvane.

Location: Outer cathedral of Redveil.

Charges: Slave trafficking, heretic smuggling, divine fund laundering.

Payment: Triple standard. Dead, not captured."

There was no hesitation in him as he folded the letter and set it aflame with a match pulled from under his collar, he didn't need a debate, didn't ask questions, didn't care if the charges were real or not—because in his world, once a bounty was accepted, the bullet was already halfway fired.

Lilyeth leaned back against the wall of the stone loft they were squatting in, the wind outside rattled the shutters, and downstairs, Rook and the others were gathering more gossip from the drunk priests stumbling out of the east district's lesser temples, the streets had been tense lately, not from open fighting, but from the kind of fear that turned eyes inward and doors shut faster than a guilty man's conscience, the Church had started moving in silence again.

"They want him dead fast," Lilyeth said, crossing her arms, "No mess, no riot. Which means this priest knows something."

"Or someone," Kaito replied, opening a new scroll and sketching the layout of Redveil's outer cathedral from memory, "And I want to find out before I pull the trigger."

Redveil wasn't just any town—it was a fortress-mirage hybrid built into the cliffside bordering the Bleeding Forest, once used as a military outpost, now converted into a series of sanctified halls and underground prisons designed to purify the souls of "sinners," the public tours showed marble prayer halls and golden mosaics, but Kaito wasn't interested in the public parts—he was going underground.

The only way in without triggering the magical seals or alerting the cleric guards was through the old aqueduct system, sealed off decades ago after a flooding incident that had claimed half the clergy, Kaito found the entrance two nights later under the cover of fog, climbing down the vines behind a crumbling statue of Saint Telros the Quiet, ironically, the same statue that now hid the screams of trafficked prisoners.

Lilyeth stayed above, her role was to handle the exit—trigger the Frostbite charm near the west bell to simulate a mana malfunction and draw guards away from the lower levels, Kaito moved silently through the tunnels, every step careful, every breath measured, his presence dulled by a cloak laced with mana-disrupting threads, handmade using scraps of altar cloth and gun oil.

Inside the lower catacombs, he didn't find silence.

He found cages.

Row after row of metal bars, some still occupied by starved, bruised bodies barely awake enough to shiver, others empty but stained with dried blood and broken sigil chalk, the air was thick with fear and incense meant to hide the stench of pain, Kaito didn't stop walking until he reached the central chamber, where two men in white robes stood discussing a shipment manifest.

One was a clerk.

The other was High Priest Morvane.

Kaito didn't fire.

Not yet.

He watched.

Listened.

Waited.

Morvane was speaking too casually, not like a man worried about discovery, but like someone protected, someone who'd bribed enough nobles to feel invincible, his words confirmed it.

"They'll come for the Gun Saint soon enough," Morvane said, chuckling, "And when they do, we'll sell his corpse to the outer kingdoms. Imagine the profit on a dead legend."

Kaito didn't react.

He just whispered under his breath as he slid a modified capsule into his palm.

"Time to invoice."

The capsule in Kaito's hand was silent, polished, and black, etched with a rune so faint it could've been mistaken for a crack in the casing, it wasn't designed to explode—not yet—this was a custom Echo Round with a memory bleed core, it didn't kill with shrapnel, it killed with truth, laced with aether distortion and mana inversion powder, the moment it shattered, anyone within a ten-foot radius would relive their worst decisions in real time, without mercy, without filter, the kind of mental collapse that didn't leave bruises, just broken beliefs.

He waited until Morvane turned his back to the clerk, laughing about how "even rebels were cheaper when drugged," and then, with a flick of his fingers, Kaito rolled the capsule forward, it made no sound on the stone floor, just a soft pulse of blue light as it passed beneath the incense burner and stopped at Morvane's feet.

The moment it triggered, silence shattered.

The light blinked, then flared, swallowing the chamber in a flash of inverted color—reds became teal, shadows became light, and the air turned into liquid memory, Kaito stepped back as both men fell to their knees, clutching their heads, eyes wide, mouths open in silent screams, the clerk curled into a ball, whimpering something about "missing children," while Morvane began sobbing in hysterical laughter, reciting names of people he'd ordered vanished, as if reliving every atrocity he'd committed in chronological order.

Kaito didn't need to stay longer.

He stepped forward, placed a single hollow curse round on the altar beside the cage keys, then turned toward the side wall, tapped a hidden rune with his knuckle, and kicked open the concealed tunnel they'd scouted three nights earlier during a fake relic blessing tour.

He vanished into the darkness just as the guards burst into the chamber, too late to see him, too early to make sense of what had happened, the round on the altar pulsed once, released a final wave of psychic venom, and then cracked like a glass heart breaking.

Back outside, the moon had already risen.

Lilyeth was pacing near the decoy wine cart they'd parked on the upper hill, one hand on her knife, the other gripping a red smoke charm that hadn't yet been triggered.

"You're late," she said as he emerged from the stone trench, cloak coated in dust and mana burns.

"Target down," he replied, dusting off his coat, "Mental collapse. No witnesses. Unless screaming hallucinations count."

She handed him a scroll sealed in plain wax.

"While you were in there, Rook sent word—Church enforcers entered the guild quarter, arrested two fence operators and a relic smuggler you paid last week. They're asking about bullet-shaped blessings."

Kaito's expression didn't change.

"Did they talk?"

"Not yet."

He looked up at the city lights, far too calm for what was coming.

"They will."

Lilyeth exhaled.

"So what now?"

Kaito pulled a coin from his pocket, flicked it into the air, and caught it without looking.

"Now," he said, "we stop pretending I'm not on their list."

Back in the inner cathedral, Morvane had been dragged to the surface by priests, raving like a drunk prophet, spitting out numbers, dates, and sins as if he were trying to confess the weight of every coin he ever pocketed.

The Church locked him in a sanctified isolation chamber.

But the next morning, he was found dead.

No blood.

No poison.

Just an expression of horror so complete it cracked the glass in his confession chamber.

The priests whispered that the Gun Saint had cursed him.

But they were wrong.

The Gun Saint didn't curse.

He calculated.

By the time morning bell rang across the city, the news of High Priest Morvane's death had already spread across three districts, every version of the story was different, some said he'd been cursed by a relic that rejected him, others whispered he'd been struck down by divine judgment during midnight prayer, and a few, the more honest ones, claimed the Gun Saint had walked through Redveil Cathedral like a ghost, unarmed, unseen, and unstoppable, none of them knew the truth—but all of them believed it, which meant Kaito had officially crossed the line from rumor to myth, and once you became a myth, the Church stopped trying to capture you and started trying to erase you.

Kaito stood behind the half-collapsed curtain of a ruined herbalist shop, one hand adjusting the brass fittings on a disguised ammo crate, the other gripping the corner of a burner scroll that had just arrived from a contact within the courier ring, the scroll was short, no more than three lines.

"Church has issued a Red Flame bounty.

Gun Saint marked as 'soul-threatening heretic.'

Execution by judgment allowed."

He crumpled it once, then dropped it into a nearby fire pit without a word, the flames ate the parchment silently, and Lilyeth watched from across the room as she loaded a new batch of Frostbite rounds into glass vials disguised as holy water capsules, her expression unreadable, her movements sharp, like she'd been expecting this moment and had no intention of letting it slow them down.

"So," she said eventually, "What now? We move cities? Disappear? Take the long route out of Silverglen and burn the bridges behind us?"

Kaito shook his head slowly.

"No. We go deeper."

Lilyeth raised an eyebrow.

"Deeper into what? The dungeon?"

"Exactly."

She scoffed, tossing a charm into a crate and sealing it shut.

"You can't be serious. Redveil's cathedral sits right above the Bleeding Dungeon. No one's touched that place in years. It's not just abandoned—it's cursed."

"Which makes it the perfect place to vanish," Kaito replied, walking over to the wall map, where dozens of marks had been scratched and replaced, updated in charcoal and dried blood ink, "If the Church wants to erase me, I'll show them how hard it is to erase something when it's hiding inside their own rot."

He tapped the map, a sealed corridor just beneath the chapel prison.

"There's a door," he said, "Locked since the old war. Marked by bloodstain script. But behind it is a sub-dungeon, unmapped and unblessed, which means the Church avoids it."

Lilyeth stepped beside him, following the line with her eyes.

"You're planning to make that our new base?"

"No," he said, "I'm planning to make it our new marketplace."

She paused.

"You're going to run your bullet business from a cursed dungeon?"

He turned to her with that same deadpan look she'd come to both respect and dread.

"If I sell fear, it helps to be somewhere even the brave won't go."

That evening, they gathered their things—every charm, every disguised round, every crate that could pass as religious inventory, and they loaded it into a disguised funeral cart borrowed from an ally in the gravewax guild, three street kids from the Black Ink ring came along, one acting as a priest's assistant, one as a mourner, and the third as a deaf mute tasked with guarding the relics, it was all a lie, of course, but in a city full of clergy and guilt, a funeral procession didn't raise any eyebrows.

By the time they reached the gates of Redveil again, the guards didn't even look in the back.

They entered the city with a fake death and exited with the blueprint for revolution.

The descent into the Bleeding Dungeon wasn't dramatic, there were no skeletal guardians or sudden traps—just cold air, dark stone, and silence so deep it made your heartbeat sound like a threat, Kaito led the way, lantern in one hand, gun holstered but ready, while Lilyeth marked the walls with tracking dust and the kids carried crates like silent ghosts.

When they reached the sealed door, it didn't resist.

Kaito placed a Hollow Curse round into the center of the ancient lock, triggered the echo rune with a whisper, and stepped back as the entire arch pulsed red and cracked like brittle bone, the door groaned once and then opened inward into pitch blackness.

Inside was not just a dungeon.

It was a ruin of forgotten faith.

Altar statues with cracked faces, scrolls burned into the stone, relics twisted into unholy shapes, and a scent in the air that didn't belong to any one thing—just old suffering, Kaito walked forward calmly, as if it didn't bother him, as if this place wasn't made of the ghosts of failed gods.

He stopped in the center of the room, turned around, and looked at the others.

"This is where we disappear," he said, "This is where we build."

Lilyeth crossed her arms.

"And what do we call this new den of sin?"

Kaito looked up, smirked.

"The Silent Resolve."

The kids didn't get it.

But Lilyeth did.

Because for all the bullets, lies, and traps they had used to survive, it was only now—beneath the Church, inside its rotted heart—that the real war was about to begin.