by eden Hudson
“I ain’t any later than he was yesterday,” he said, scowling at me. He was starting to grow some bristly red-brown stubble on his chin.
I rubbed my hairless jaw. How did he already have that level of facial hair? I could go without shaving for a month and barely get a couple dorky wisps.
“That makes it all better, don’t it?” The Bailiff rocked back on his heels. “You know, Mr. IFC Champ, I’m starting to think I might’ve figured out how you almost lost to this little indenture over here the other day. Pure, unadulterated laziness. You did all right in some lily-livered tourney on some fancy Confederated planet, beating rich folk who liked to think they were fighting for real, so you thought you’d be good enough to hang with the big gents on Van Diemann, but in reality, you wouldn’t know which end of a switchblade to stick somebody with.”
Red flames started flickering along the tops of Warcry’s ears and scalp.
“It’s easy to stand around flapping your gob while the rest of us train, isn’t it?” the redhead snapped. “Beating your gums about the fighters while they’re in the cage, hanging around the saloon while the rest of us’re out killing ferals, but you never lift a hand to put your Spirit where your mouth is.”
The Bailiff grinned, showing off his yellow brush of teeth. “Well, how’s about I do it right now? You win, you sleep in every day, and I won’t say boo about it. I win, you come early to training every morning and again every night.”
I frowned. That sounded like the kind of thing that would require a training dummy twice a day instead of just once a day.
“I never lose,” Warcry said.
“Isn’t that something.” The Bailiff’s ghost arms beckoned. “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Champion.”
Fire engulfed Warcry. He shot toward the Bailiff like a missile. Then he and the Bailiff disappeared in a blur of red and gray. The thud and ping of combat rang through the air, but I couldn’t see the actual fight until I enhanced my sight.
That’s when I realized Warcry had been taking it easy on me the day before. Either that, or he’d been too hungover to fight at full speed. He was throwing everything he had at the Bailiff, faster than the un-enhanced eye could see, but the Bailiff hadn’t even taken his webbed hands out of his pockets yet. All he was doing was hopping out of the way of Warcry’s attacks. Every now and then, one of his big ghost arms would block something, but for the most part he just straight-up avoided the blows.
Something hovering next to the Bailiff’s right hip, just beside his wrist, caught my eye. A little grayish figure, floating there like it was dangling from his pocket.
Then Warcry landed a roundhouse to the thigh that buckled the Bailiff’s leg.
The grayish figure exploded into a huge ape of ghost light. The monster snagged Warcry out of the air and slammed him to the dirt. Air whoofed out of the redhead’s lungs, and he coughed up flecks of blood.
The Bailiff sauntered closer and looked down at Warcry, hands still in his pockets.
“Well, Mr. Champion, looks like I might know a thing or two after all.” One of his ghost hands wiggled a finger at the blood oozing out the side of Warcry’s mouth. “You’re gonna want to stop that internal bleeding. You got a long day ahead of you.”
The ghost ape dissolved like smoke, and the little gray figure reappeared next to the Bailiff’s pocket.
Warcry got to his feet, spitting a red wad into the dirt.
“Cheater. You couldn’t beat me without summoning that Martial Devil.”
“Winning’s winning,” the Bailiff said, shrugging.
“I’d kick your arse across the continent one-on-one,” Warcry sneered.
“Hey, genius,” I said, “how about you shut your mouth before we have to train all freaking day and night?”
He glared at me. “Mind your own, grav.”
“This is ‘my own.’ I’m the guy who has to spar with you.”
The Bailiff chuckled. “If I were you, Mr. Champion, I’d listen to my training dummy.”
Fire engulfed Warcry again, an ugly scowl twisting his face.
“Now—” The Bailiff’s ghost hand grabbed Warcry’s shoulder and turned him to face me. “—fight.”
Warcry sprinted my way at roughly the speed of sound. I threw my arms up, reinforcing my bones as a flaming fist screamed toward my face. Without the reinforcement, that probably would’ve snapped my arm in half and knocked my head off. With it, I went sliding backward through the dirt until I bumped into the side of the fight cage.
He was already coming after me when I straightened back up. I fell into a fighting stance, shifting my weight backward so I could nail his good leg with a kick, but he jumped into a Superman punch before he reached me. While he was in the air, I ducked under the blow and hooked a punch into his kidney.
It should’ve been a much harder shot, but my brain hadn’t fully committed to it. I’d just thrown it out there, not expecting to make contact. I filed that away as something to fix with my next punch, then threw up a double-arm block to stop his standard follow-up kick. The metal of Warcry’s prosthetic pinged, and the impact stung all the way down my arms and into my shoulders.
The flames covering his whole body had receded. He was settling down, taking smarter shots. He threw a jab, which I blocked, then suddenly there was a boot in my gut. I doubled over, and a spin kick caught me in the ear.
Then I was on the ground, head spinning, while Warcry sneered down at me. My OSS tattoo burned, healing whatever damage he’d just done.
“You’re bleedin’ giving away every move before you make it.” He spat another pinkish wad off to the side. “Stop twitching the leg you’re gonna kick with. A blind man could see it coming.”
“Okay.” I nodded slowly as what he’d said sank in. “Thanks.”
His mouth twisted in disgust, and he went back to where the fight had started.
I got back up, shook my head to clear some of the ringing, and followed him.
We fought a dozen more times that morning, but that weak kidney shot was the only thing I got off the whole time. Warcry never got back to that blind rage he’d been in when he fought the Bailiff, but he was a different kind of dangerous when he was calm than he was angry. Fighting angry, he probably would’ve killed me by accident. Fighting smart, he went right up to the edge of killing me and backed off just enough that I wouldn’t die.
By the time the Bailiff called it good for the day, I felt like I’d been systematically taken apart and nailed back together.
“See you back here at black sunup,” the Bailiff told Warcry and me both, before he went off to catch up with the other bruisers.
“Your kishotenketsu is trash,” Warcry said.
I shrugged. “You suck at keeping your cool. Everybody’s got room for improvement.”
“What’re you, stuck in Ki? Can’t break through that bottleneck? Or’d you never make it as far as the bottleneck?”
“I’m still keeping up with you,” I said. “Kinda makes you wonder what’ll happen when I start developing my Sho, doesn’t it?”
He slammed a forearm into my chest. “I let you get as close as I want you, grav. Unlike some cheating space trash, I’m a professional. I control my Spirit.” He shoved me. “You don’t want to see me when I go all out.”
“No Bailiff around to stop you,” I said, shoving him back. “If you want to start something, now’s the time. Unless you’re scared a guy stuck in Ki’ll kick your teeth in.”
Just then my Winchester buzzed. I glanced down at the cracked screen.
1 Unread Message, Sender Master Distiller Muta’i
“Luck must like you today,” Warcry sneered.
“Tonight,” I said, heading for the distillery. “Round two, thanks to your big fat mouth.”
“Bring your best, grav. Maybe if you’re good, I’ll let you get a taste of a real fight.”
As I rounded the corner of the saloon, I made a mental note to read up on Sho as soon as I got a chance. Ki wasn’t going to cut i
t if I wanted to fight Warcry for real.
Two-a-Days
WHAT MUTA’I WANTED me for was to break rocks. He’d sorted through the Spirit jade chunks and removed the pieces that had come out of the ground cleanly to start grinding them down into Spirit stones. The rest were still attached to the sandstone from the dig site. That was where I came in.
The minotaur showed me to the corner of the back room where he’d set up a sandbox-type square of wood and mesh to crack off the sandstone from the jade. The jade chips, powder, and dirt got sucked down by a dust collection system underneath.
“There’s a second sieve down here,” Muta’i said, pulling out a thin flat tray to show me an even finer mesh to sift out the rock chips. Then he shoved that back in and pulled out the bottom drawer, which was just a frame with cloth stretched over it. “The powder’s the only thing that makes it into the bottom. When you’re done, pick out the jade chips from the sieve and collect them, too. I’ll use divining on the last tray to separate out the jade powder for the real elixirs.”
“And put the leftovers in the counterfeit elixirs,” I said, because I still had some attitude floating around from mouthing off to Warcry.
Muta’i’s big nostrils flared. “Something about that conflicting with your moral compass, indenture?”
“If it did, I don’t think you’re the mountain I’d complain to about it.”
He snorted. “Bailiff’s right. You’re smart for a human. Get to work.”
For the rest of the day, while Muta’i ground down white jade on his workbench, I sat on the edge of the sandbox with my rock hammer, chisels, and picks—not picks like pickaxes, but these things that looked like one step above dentist tools—and broke rocks.
In about ten minutes, I and everything in the back room was covered in a fine coat of red dirt in spite of the dust collector. Probably not great for the lungs, but since I had to breathe anyway, I practiced Swallowing the Universe. If I could get decent at cultivating while I was doing other stuff, like everybody else was apparently a master at, that might help me get to the Sho level faster.
Later on, when my HUD went off with a message, I checked it just to see if I’d get yelled at. Muta’i didn’t get upset, which confirmed my theory that this was the kind of job I was expected to do until I died or it was finished, whichever came first, and if I wanted to draw it out by taking the time to read my messages, that was my problem.
The message was from Kest.
Were you able to keep your reinforcement going during training?
Yes. I’m pretty sure it saved my life a couple times, I sent back.
She didn’t get back to me right away, but when she did, she’d completely changed subjects.
We found some stuff in the storage ring you should see. Can you come over tonight?
Sure.
We messaged back and forth for a while, talking about random junk like kishotenketsu and Coffee Dranks and the cinnabar she’d mined. I made fun of her when she got too technical for a human to understand. Having something to break up the rock breaking made the day feel like it was going faster, although it did kind of cut into my cultivating. I couldn’t concentrate on Swallowing the Universe, breaking rock, and texting at the same time.
I worked straight up until Muta’i said it was time for me to get back to the fight cage. Instead of heading straight over, though, I made a quick run to the boneyard. I’d managed to cultivate a few hundred Spirit while I was working, but that wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for another training session. I got another five thousand from Hungry Ghost—filling my Spirit sea right up to the point where I felt like it might burst—then I re-hid the grinning skull and headed for the saloon.
Warcry was already out back when I got there. In spite of his attitude earlier, he didn’t start anything with the Bailiff this time. Maybe as a joke, or maybe to take Warcry down a peg, the Bailiff had us fight every other bout without Spirit. The redhead was still better than me, but the gap was a lot closer when we couldn’t use our kishotenketsu. You could tell that most of what separated us was experience, and that was encouraging. I could always get more experience.
Obviously, Warcry was not as cool with that revelation as I was, because he stepped up his game a serious amount on all the Spirit-enhanced rounds to make sure I knew I wasn’t on his level. My Ki-sight could track him, and with the speed enhancement, I could move almost as fast as he could, but I couldn’t get them both to work at the same time. My hand-eye-Spirit coordination wasn’t fast enough. By the time I saw him move and thought about what I wanted to do about it, it was too late, I was already on the receiving end of the beatdown. I needed to speed up my reaction time, not just my muscles, but I wasn’t sure how to do that with Ki enhancements.
The Transferogate beeped just as the Bailiff was giving Warcry a rundown of all the stuff he needed to improve. I tried to brace myself so I wouldn’t end up in the dirt like a wuss, but there’s no bracing for that kind of drain. When the shoulder rig finished its job, I was on my hands and knees in the dirt, and they were staring down at me.
My face got hot. I stood up and dusted the knees of my jeans off. Not that any part of me was less dirty, but I wanted something to do so it wouldn’t look like the transfer had been a huge deal.
Luckily the Bailiff’s HUD beeped with a notification before either of them could say anything.
“Well, I’ll be a bait fish’s uncle,” he said, reading his screen. “You got me my commission and paid back all them Spirit stones I lent you. You’re going places, Smart Boy. He’s gonna run right up your tailpipe, Mr. Champion, if you don’t get yourself into fighting shape.”
Warcry stuck his nose in his HUD, too. “Cultivating a little Spirit would look impressive in a backwater like this, wouldn’t it.”
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot,” the Bailiff said cheerfully. “The champ’s Big Five material. The biggest fish in the little Ghost Town puddle. Well, I can tell you, Mr. Champion, there ain’t a Big Five gang out there that would spit on you if you were on fire. Not once they seen you fight.”
“We’ll see about that,” Warcry growled.
The Bailiff spread his arms wide. “Prove me wrong. Win an affiliation. If you can.”
Warcry’s jaw clenched, and flames licked along the tops of his ears.
I squinted at his five-o’clock shadow. It was darker than it had been earlier, like it had grown since we started training. What was he, like twenty-five?
When the Bailiff dismissed us for the night, I checked Warcry’s profile on the Van Diemann Spirit rankings.
Name: Warcry Thompson
Race: Human
Height: 6'1"
Weight: 168 lbs
Age: 17 Van Diemann years (Current Location), 15.3 Universal years
Blood Type: A
Spirit Type: Burning Hatred
Spirit Reserve: 425,601
Planetary Ranking: #12,252 of 2,191,987
“Seventeen?” I muttered. A year older than me, with that kind of facial hair growth? There’s no justice in any universe.
Back at the stables, I scarfed dinner silently thanking God for Hungry Ghost. There was no way I could’ve paid the Bailiff back and gotten the quota and commission without it.
Once the food was gone, I found a beat-up old tin bucket and got in line for the water pump. Waiting in line took forever, but I wasn’t going over to hang out with Kest and Rali stinking like B.O. At least not today, when I had time to wash up.
I hauled the water back to my stall and used the T-shirt that wouldn’t go on over my Transferogate as a washrag to take a bath. Getting all the dirt and salt and nast off made me feel a hundred percent better. An hour-long hot shower would’ve made me feel a thousand percent better than that, but indentured servants on alien prison planets couldn’t be choosers.
Once I was all scrubbed and clean, I put back on my dirty jeans, dumped the water outside, and headed over to pick up Hungry Ghost.
The breeze coming in off the
Shut-Ins felt great drying my skin as I crossed town toward the boneyard. After topping off my Spirit with some of the Miasma the little turquoise skull had been gathering all day, I stuck him in my pocket and went to the twins’ shack on the outskirts.
Jade Books
I COULD SMELL WELDING before I even got close to the twins’ shack, and light flickered out of the shipping container into the night. Kest was at her workbench, hunched over what looked like her chain gauntlet, attaching thin strips of reddish metal.
“What’re you working on?” I asked.
She jumped a little, then grabbed the gauntlet and stuffed it into the pile of junk on the middle shelf of her workbench where I couldn’t see it.
“Nothing.” Black lace colored the tops of her cheeks, spreading out from under her welding goggles. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”
“Was that the cinnabar from the mine?”
She pushed her goggles up on her forehead. “No. I mean, yeah, it is. But I’d rather not talk about the build right now. Not until I’ve had some time to test its functionality. It’s still in development.”
I tried not to smile. I hadn’t seen Kest flustered like that before, and it was pretty cute, but I also didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I dropped it.
“No big deal,” I said, shrugging.
She relaxed. “Ready to see what we found in the storage ring?”
“I kind of doubt it’s better than a Spirit tank shaped like a skull and small enough to fit in your pocket, but sure,” I said.
“Come on.”
We headed into the new room, where Rali was meditating. I was about to say we should probably talk outside so we wouldn’t disturb him, but Kest nudged him before I could get the words out. Obviously, she didn’t mind disturbing her brother.
“You know, if I was at a critical moment in my advancement, being interrupted could seriously injure me,” Rali said, stretching. “Hey, Hake.”
I waved.
“Whatever, you’re years away from another breakthrough.” Kest knelt down and pulled off the storage ring while we got comfortable. “Whoever used to own this ring, they were pretty well off. No surprise there since they were in a cinnabar mine a few dozen yards from where the OSS found a chunk of jade. The real wonder is that no rival mining company moved in here when the Van Diemann Mining Company went bust.”
