Story
For most of our history, fighting a Horror meant getting close to it. Close enough to smell it. Close enough that you found out, in the last second of a lot of Hunters' lives, exactly how fast it was. Then somebody loaded powder behind a lead ball, and the distance changed. The gun did not make Horrors easy. It made them reachable, by anyone steady enough to aim. Out of that shift came a new kind of Hunter. We call them Gunslingers. Some of the old hands call them the Powderborn.
Most are a pragmatist down to the bone. While everyone else is debating which ritual to use and what the prophecy meant, the Gunslinger is already lining up their shot. That doesn't mean they're above a bit of superstition. Plenty of them have a relationship with their weapon that borders on devotional, and more than a few etch sigils into the steel so the rounds bite a little deeper into things that should not bleed. They simply believe, with great conviction, that most problems get smaller when you put a hole in them.
What truly defines them is not the shooting. It is the stillness. A Gunslinger is the one person still standing flat-footed and calm while the world comes apart, squeezing the trigger at the same even rhythm whether the thing charging them has two legs or nine. I rode a few jobs with a Gunslinger named Wyatt who was all of that and barely a word more. He spoke rarely and shot constantly, twin revolvers that moved like they had grown out of his hands. He had no patience for omens or ancient lore. A Horror, to Wyatt, was a problem with a center of mass, and he was very, very good at finding the center of mass. I once watched him drop a Barghest out of mid-leap, reload, and holster before the body finished sliding to a stop. He didn't even watch it land.
Anyone with the grit can walk this path. Old soldiers and lawmen who already know what their hands do under pressure. Survivors who picked up a pistol because the alternative was dying, and never set it down. The backgrounds scatter wide; the spine is the same. An unbending will to stand against the dark, and a frankly unreasonable level of skill with the tool of their choice.
In a world this crowded with nightmares, that is what a Gunslinger offers. Not magic. Not a chosen destiny. Just the oldest, most stubborn human idea there is: that the monster can be stopped, and that someone willing to stand still and aim is going to be the one who makes it.
Here is a thing about Gunslingers that will never stop entertaining me: evry one I've met named their guns, and the names are never good.
I knew one who called his sawed-off shotgun "The Negotiator." His negotiating style was to fire first and decline to take questions. Another carried a matched pair of revolvers, "The Law" and "The Order," and announced "you just met the Law!" over the corpse of every Horror she dropped. I am not convinced the Horrors found it intimidating. I am not convinced anyone did. She didn't care, which honestly made it worse.