Well, that would have been darn unfortunate. Some darn tootin’ outlaw done taken the storekeeper hostage. Shame Jonah had been around too long, gone past caring for the everyday man. Je wasn’t no hero of this story. He was just another bastard in the West. Not above shooting the hell outta both hostage and man if that was the way it played, and not a damn thing would be said about it. The Tired Gun, for his part, had emptied Mistress into his hand, the rounds sequestered away in his palm, keeping her nice and empty for what he had in mind.

He’d emptied those rounds lickety split, the second that crazed bastard outside started talkin’ in fact. It’d only taken him a sec, and the next moment he was levelling it directly through the damn wall right at the voice outside. The words came from the head after all (so to speak), so long as he aimed straight (and he always did) they’d carry on their merry way right into the pretty little bastard he wanted dead. Course, one might question how he, the Tired Gun, planned to fire said bullet through a wood wall reliably with no rounds in his damn gun. The answer was simple, and no, he wasn’t planning to use Spouse instead. It was Mistress, seemingly blurry to the eye, which filled with a black smoke. Shadow, if you will.

He fired, many a time, the shadowy rounds carrying right through the wood wall with nary a moment’s pause and right on through to the thorough-fare, where Shin was just concluding his little speech. Only a couple of the six shots were actually on target, two were wide, two were actually going to slam home in the hostage and spill his guts on the ground, potentially going through. But those two on target were deadly indeed, heading right for the mask, a mask which would find itself offering little protection against the shadowy bullets heading for it. The only saving grace was that they lacked the stopping power of an ordinary bullet, even if they hit the head dead centre death was not an inevitability. It’d still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch though.