by eden Hudson
Some nights, Kest and Rali stayed out and cultivated with me. There was plenty of Metal Spirit in the boneyard for Kest to gather from the markers and run-down fence and rebar in the shrine ruins, and Rali said Warm Heart Spirit collected wherever he was content, which was everywhere, all the time. They helped me learn the taiji movements, even though Rali preferred to meditate in stillness.
With Hungry Ghost and all the extra cultivating and conditioning, I didn’t miss the quota once over the next few weeks, even on days the Bailiff was feeding me Spirit stones like candy. Personally, I thought that was great. Rali, though, was starting to side with Kest on the Hungry Ghost issue.
“The more your cultivation relies on an apparatus or elixir, the less sustainable your progress is,” he said. “At the higher levels, you’ll plateau and get stuck there.”
I’d never actually thought about getting my kishotenketsu to the higher levels, just surviving training was taking all my concentration, but to placate the twins, I cut down to only using Hungry Ghost to meet the quota. The rest of the time I poured on the sweat hours and elbow grease.
A little at a time, Dead Reckoning sharpened and my Ki-level abilities got stronger, which rocked when I was fighting Warcry. By the third week, I was definitely pushing him in every fight.
The Bailiff thought that was hilarious. “If you can’t do better than that, Mr. Champion, I’m gonna have to kick you off my hooligan squad and let the smart boy take your place.”
Obviously, he was never going to do that, but just hearing it was usually enough to tick Warcry off and get him to double up on the effort. Even better for me. The harder he worked, the harder I worked, and the better my fighting got. I threw everything I had at him every time. I wanted to beat him, but even more than that, I wanted him to get better so he’d win at the tournament and my indenture would end early.
While all that was going on, my servant jobs stayed about the same level of difficulty. After what seemed like a million years, I finished breaking rocks. Then Muta’i’s scouts found an oasis out in the hills with some kind of special grass, which apparently mimicked some other kind of grass people used in real elixirs, so while Warcry and the hooligans cleared out the ferals that lived there and then fought off a rival distillery crew, a couple other indentures and I harvested sacks full of the crimson plant, then packed it back to the distillery. I looted the dead ferals again. Pretty much any time there were corpses to loot for the OSS, I got called in. I don’t know why it was never any of the other indentures. Somewhere along the way, I just started being known as the guy who looted nasty corpses.
I just reminded myself to breathe through my mouth and gather up the Death Spirit while I looted. Corpses gave off Miasma by the truckload when they were fresh.
That made me wonder why Mortal cultivators didn’t just kill a bunch of people and absorb the Spirit that came off of their corpses, but then I read on the hyperweb that some of them did. A lot, actually. That would be why the affinity had such a bad reputation.
Near the end of the month, the OSS had another cage tournament to celebrate the Shogun’s immenant Spirit breakthrough. I wasn’t allowed to fight; all the indentures were busy hauling healing supplies from Muta’i to the locker room.
Warcry won the whole thing, knocking Ripper off the Stand with a kick combo he used against me all the time in training. With Dead Reckoning, I’d gotten to where I could counter it about half the time. The other half the time, it was devastating—a roundhouse that would either take your head off or make you jump back, a spinning hook looking to do the same, and depending on positioning, either a mule kick to the chin or a straight back kick that would go right through your gut. Ripper jumped back to what he thought was a safe distance just in time for Warcry to nail him with that long back kick.
While the fights were going on and I packed supplies, I saw Kest in the crowd talking to her space moth smuggler, Naph. I couldn’t hang around to see what changed hands, but that night, when the twins and I met up at the boneyard, Kest told me to check my bank account on the Winchester.
“Holy cow.” I had twelve hundred and twenty-six credits. That was like a whole summer of working on a roof on Earth. Suspicion crept into me as I looked at the figure. “You didn’t sneak me any of the money from your cinnabar, did you?”
“No, most of that is just the sword from the storage ring,” Kest said. “Like I thought, it was a Colonization Era antique, so it was worth a lot. But I did sell one of the flutes last week, too, when a traveler came through looking for Spirit apparatuses. It had a major Heart Spirit array worked into it.”
While she was talking about the intricacies of the flute’s build, I did some quick research, then figured out how to transfer credits to someone’s account.
Her HUD beeped. She stared down at the notification that she’d just received a hundred and sixteen credits, confusion etching a line between her eyebrows.
“That’s for the Winchester and the Coffee Drank that first day,” I said.
She frowned. “I didn’t want payback for any of that.”
“Well, I didn’t want your charity, so neither of us gets what we wanted,” I said before I thought far enough ahead to realize that saying it out loud was the ultimate dick move.
Her eyes went almost completely black with only little pinpricks of white left over. The blood in my veins suddenly went cold, the way it did when I forgot to keep up my internal alchemy.
“Kest,” Rali said, bumping his sister’s arm, “you’re going Cold Metal on us.”
She glared at him, then without saying a word, turned around and walked out of the boneyard.
A little at a time, my blood warmed back up.
“All I did was pay her back,” I said, looking at Rali for some kind of agreement. “I don’t like owing people. I hate it.”
“Friends can’t owe each other, Hake, and they can’t give each other charity.” Rali laid his walking stick across his shoulders and hooked his arms over it. “Although you and Kest probably can now.”
The whole next day, the stupid crap I’d said to Kest kept hammering on my brain. My sparring was trash, and I ended up getting into a fight with Warcry right after training. All he did was spit too close to me.
So I shoved him. “Keep your loogies to yourself, dickbrain.”
“Or wot, grav?” He knocked me back.
I threw a punch at his teeth. Before it could connect, he slammed me into the side of the fight cage, forearm jammed into my throat.
“You want to street brawl with me, grav, you better bring a shiv.”
“Next time,” I gritted out.
I saw a flare of red flame, but before Warcry could kill me, the Bailiff had my whole torso squeezed in one giant ghost fist and Warcry in the other.
“If you boys have that much get-up-and-go left in you, then we’re quitting training way too early. Let’s see if we can’t work some of that off.”
So we trained through lunch until after dark. I didn’t get a chance to use Hungry Ghost, so I failed the quota, which meant I wasn’t eating, and I still had work I was supposed to do for Muta’i before I got off for the day.
I sorted grass while the minotaur made elixirs until the early hours of the morning. At first, I was just fuming, slapping useable grass down into the Keep pile and throwing the unusuable stuff into the fire, but after a while I calmed down and started thinking with a little clarity.
This whole thing was stupid. Stupid fights between friends could usually be fixed with stupid solutions. Not like crazy elaborate schemes, but the stuff you didn’t even bother to think up because there was no way it could be that simple. When Muta’i said I could quit for the night, I crossed the street to the saloon. Lucky for me, they never closed.
Gang War
I MADE IT TO THE TWINS’ little shack with only a couple hours left until the blue sun came up. In spite of the hour, the place smelled like welding, and blue-white light strobed in the shipping container. Kest was finishing
a weld on a rectangular metal box, so she didn’t notice me right away.
When she let the blue-white arc die out and pushed her goggles up, she saw me and jumped.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to interrupt while you were working.”
She shrugged. You could tell she wanted to shove the box under the workbench and hide it, but maybe because she wanted to act cold and indifferent toward me, she pretended like she didn’t care and put it in her bench vise instead.
“Shouldn’t you be at the boneyard?” she asked, cranking the jaws tight.
I set the six pack of sweating cans I’d brought on the workbench. “Can’t get Coffee Drank at the boneyard.”
She glanced over at them, then picked a file off its hook and started filing down the welds on the box’s hinges.
“I don’t want your charity,” she said.
“Your brother said it’s not possible to give friends charity.”
She ignored me. That metallic rasping was crazy loud. I couldn’t believe Rali could sleep through it.
I stared at the filings she was scraping off while I tried to decide what I should say next.
“Sometimes when I’m not thinking, I can be a jerk,” I said.
The rasping stopped.
“I shouldn’t be, though, at least not to you and Rali. You guys are the only people who’ve been nice to me without expecting anything in return since I got here.” I looked down at my elbow, then scratched it like I’d found something there so I didn’t have to look at her. “Where I’m from, everybody but my Gramps thought I was basically the worst, so I’m not used to having friends. But I like hanging out with you guys and stuff.”
When I peeked over at Kest, she was frowning at me. I thought she was going to tell me to get lost.
Then she said, “Apek’s been closed for hours. Where did you get Coffee Drank?”
“The saloon sells them.”
She pulled a can out of the pack and held it out to me. “You won’t be able to sleep tonight if you drink it, though.”
I grinned. I was beat to crap, exhausted, and half-starved, but there was no way I’d be able to sleep tonight anyway. Not now.
“I’ll sleep next time I’m dead,” I said, taking the Coffee Drank.
Kest popped her can and took a sip.
She sighed. “You just can’t beat a Coffee Drank in a can.”
“So, you’re not looking to sleep tonight, either?” I asked as I opened mine.
“I want this done in time for the Wilderness Territorial,” she said, gesturing with her Coffee Drank at the box in the bench vise. “What are there, five days left?”
My eyebrows jumped up. “You’re going to the tournament? Is that, like, a weapon or something?”
“No, that’s a Spirit-dampening apparatus, but I do have a couple combat builds.” She pressed the storage ring to her forehead and started calling out items. “Portable Shield Wall, Rolling Silver Gauntlet, Shield Arm.”
A log chain of heavy metal balls dropped onto the bench, followed by a reddish chain gauntlet made of cinnabar, then a metal bracer.
“Big Five tournaments are a big deal, and not just for the combatants,” she said. “There are huge bazaars outside the tournament. Artificers from all over Van Diemann come to sell stuff and show off their builds. Some major manufacturing corporations actually have contacts there headhunting for their companies.”
I drank some coffee-flavored energy. “Does being a third-genner without a criminal record count as bonus points? Because it should.”
Instead of smiling, Kest took a deep breath and blew it out.
“I hope—”
A boom shook the shipping container, and I inhaled some Coffee Drank. Stuff rattled on the shelves and a couple tools shook off their hooks.
“What the crap was that?” I spluttered.
The lace in Kest’s eyes thinned out. “Stunner bomb.”
Being from a small town in rural Missouri, I’d heard plenty of people shooting guns before, but what I heard next sounded like everyone in Ghost Town had opened up at the same time, popping off rounds like they’d all gone psycho at once.
Kest jerked me down to the floor. She yelled something, but over the noise, all I caught was “rival gang.”
One of those old-fashioned air raid sirens started cranking somewhere.
Rali came crawling into the shipping container on his hands and knees.
“Kest, are you—Hake, when did you get here?”
Another strafe of gunshots popped off. Kest duck-walked over to the generator and killed it. Her work light sputtered out, leaving us blind. My ears rang without the constant noise of the generator.
“Sounds like it’s down at the saloon,” Rali said.
Kest’s shadow crept back over to us. “Gonna have to scavenge down in the Shut-In closest to town tomorrow.”
When what they were saying sank in, I took off from my crouch like an Olympic sprinter. I heard the twins yelling behind me, but I didn’t slow down. I didn’t like Warcry or the Bailiff or Muta’i or any of those guys, but I didn’t want any of them to get killed, either.
Everything was nuts when I got to the main street. The front of the saloon had been blown off. Embers in the debris smoked and glowed bright red. People were everywhere, fighting like this was the Royal Rumble, except with swords and Spirit.
Luckily, there weren’t that many actual guns. From the sound of the shooting, I’d expected an army. One guy was flashing a pair of sawed-off pistol grip shotguns, and another guy had a rifle built into his arm, but that was it. Every round they shot glowed with blue-white Metal Spirit like Kest’s. For about half a second, I wondered whether she had an ability that could disrupt the shots. Then another stunner bomb rattled my brains, and I snapped back to reality. Hopefully, she and Rali stayed hunkered down where they were.
Muta’i charged past me and gored the guy with the shotguns. He bawled like an enraged bull and shook his massive head, slinging the shotgun dude into the crowd.
Across the street, I saw the Bailiff’s ghost ape, a Martial Devil, rampaging on some dudes who were packing katanas and throwing fireballs and lightning. The Bailiff grinned when he spotted me. His yellow brush teeth looked bone white in the light from his ghost ape.
“Right nice of you to join the gang war, Smart Boy! Kill whatever doesn’t look familiar!”
Then a bright green ghost bear charged bellowing through the melee and slammed into the Bailiff’s Martial Devil, and he didn’t have time for talking to me anymore.
I grabbed Hungry Ghost out of my pocket and filled my empty Spirit tank, looking around.
Nearby, Proboscis was shooting massive ice shards at a wizard lobbing sparkling yellow spheres the size of softballs. Wherever the spheres hit, they detonated in a smaller version of that stunner bomb’s thunder. Proboscis dodged one blast, then a dude with a sword sliced him across the back of the legs from behind. The wizard gathered Spirit between his hands to throw another one of those exploding softballs.
I ran at the wizard’s back, jumping and cracking him in the back of the neck with a reinforced elbow. He turned his head all the way around on his shoulders and screamed at me like a screech owl. I threw a punch, but suddenly the air was full of spinning yellow fireworks everywhere, blinding me.
Going on instinct, I sent out a wall of Dead Reckoning. According to it, the spinning lights were harmless, just a distraction for something else.
Behind me, someone broke Dead Reckoning, sounding the alarm in my Spirit. I turned into my punch, crunching the nose of a wispy figure with a dagger. The wisp staggered back a step and turned solid. Before it could recover, I hacked a kick into its shin. As the now-solid wisp fell, I slammed an elbow down on the top of its head. It dropped into the dirt, and I kicked the dagger into the forest of legs surrounding us.
Dead Reckoning freaked out. I ducked as a burning two-by-four whiffed over my head, then shot a back kick into my attacker’s knee. The joint wasn’t forward
like a human’s, though, so all it did was fold his leg up. I spun and caught him in the jaw with my heel. His head whipped around, but he didn’t drop that two-by-four.
“Down the street!” Ripper yelled. “They’re getting away with him!”
Without Ki-sight active, I wouldn’t have been able to see that far in the almost-darkness of the night sun. Even with it, the figures jogging away looked shadowy and hunched. All except for a tall, limping one.
Warcry?
Dead Reckoning warned me that another swing from the backward-jointed guy’s two-by-four was rocketing toward my head. I jumped out of the way, but instead of counterattacking, I sprinted off to help Warcry.
He saw me coming. “Piss off, grav! This ain’t your fight!”
I frowned and skidded to a stop. That idiot had given away my position.
The shadowy figures spun and dropped into fighting stances like a bunch of kung fu heroes posing for a movie poster. I couldn’t take all of them by myself, but together Warcry and I might be able to knock enough of them out of the fight to make a run for it.
I circled around, trying to draw one of his kidnappers out.
A guy in leg wrappings stepped toward me. He had a sword, and I had nothing, but the split second of distraction should’ve been enough for Warcry to make a move.
Warcry missed the opportunity. He was busy yelling at the shadowy figures.
“Forget him! He’s just an indenture! He ain’t part of this!”
One of the figures slammed a backfist into Warcry’s face, making blood explode from his mouth and sending him stumbling backward a step.
I feinted at the sword guy, then leapt out of the way as Dead Reckoning lit up to my right. Sword guy was so fast that I hadn’t seen him move around to come at me from the side. The sword missed, but I felt the air from the slice.
Then a second later, I felt hot wetness running down my bicep.
Somehow, the sword guy had hidden his Spirit attack, sending it flying at me like an extension of his blade. My OSS tattoo immediately started burning, eating through the last of the Spirit I’d borrowed from Hungry Ghost as it scrambled to heal me.
