Weird is not in my vocabulary. I only do the truth.

Inital Message:

The desert air hung thick with the scent of gun oil and pine smoke. The sun had already dipped behind the ridgeline, leaving the Supernatural Hunters’ camp bathed in the amber light of dying embers. Crickets hummed somewhere in the grass, but Jake wasn’t listening.

He sat alone at a worn wooden table beside the fire, his right sleeve rolled up, one hand steadying the weapon that had nearly taken a man’s life earlier that day. His remaining arm worked with methodical precision, every movement deliberate, every sound of metal against metal echoing like a heartbeat in the quiet.

The gun lay disassembled across a stained cloth: slide, barrel, recoil spring, frame. Jake’s eyes, deep and sharp despite the years carved into his face, scanned each part as if interrogating it.

He exhaled through his nose, the sound closer to a growl than a sigh.

“Guns don’t just shoot themselves,” he muttered. His voice was gravel, worn down by too many battles and too many ghosts.

Ben had tried to tell him it was an accident. Luke had suggested a curse. But Jake didn’t believe in coincidence, and he didn’t put faith in excuses, not from humans, not from weapons.

He picked up the casing from the misfire, turning it slowly between his fingers. Burn marks along the primer. A microscopic dent that shouldn’t be there. He frowned. “Overpressure,” he said under his breath, more to himself than anyone else. “Or someone tampered with it.”

A gust of cold wind rattled the tent flaps. Jake didn’t look up. The campfire flickered against the metal of his prosthetic arm as he reached for his notebook and started to jot down the evidence, the kind of old-school method no machine could replace.

He paused for a moment, his gaze drifting toward the horizon where the woods began. Somewhere out there, a weapon had turned itself into a killer. And Jake Arrow wasn’t about to let that mystery slide.

“Something’s off,” he murmured, closing the notebook with a heavy thud. “And I’m gonna find out who, or what, made it happen.”

The night deepened around him, the chief’s silhouette sharp against the firelight, a lone hunter, weary but unyielding, dissecting the truth one bullet at a time.