by eden Hudson
“Why aren’t they attacking?” Rali mumbled, his eye lace thinning out.
The shut-in lit up with incredible white light, like a star suddenly appearing on Earth.
“Grady Hake,” the angel of death boomed, her voice echoing off the rock walls. She floated about ten feet above the ground, brilliant white fans of light spreading from either shoulder like wings. “Why weren’t you consumed like the rest?”
Fight the Reaper
IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER how beautiful angels are. Looking at one feels how I imagine getting hit by lightning does, like a crack of thunder too big and too loud for your mind to comprehend booming through your body, and no matter how hard you try, it’s not something you can accurately remember or describe later.
My mouth and throat dried up. That long white hair, perfect skin, radiant light, and pure deadly fury etched across her face. She was stunning and terrifying all at once.
“The chaos creatures were supposed to devour your unbodied soul!” the angel boomed.
I swallowed hard. “I think she’s the reason the chaos creatures haven’t attacked yet.”
“She who?” Rali asked, still searching the shadows.
Kest tossed Warcry his prosthetic. “A casing to keep the joint free of debris will have to wait, but it’s better than it was.”
Warcry grunted, “Thanks,” and strapped it on.
It was like none of them had noticed the angel of death hovering right in front of us.
I blinked from them to the angel. “Can’t you guys see her?”
“See what?” Warcry stood up, dusting his pants off. “Did you finally snap, grav?”
“You don’t belong here, Grady Hake,” the angel boomed. “You’re an aberration. You should have disappeared like the others.”
Righteous anger twisted and popped in my synapses.
I let out a mean laugh. “You’re mad at me because sweeping your screwup under the rug didn’t work?”
Lips twisting into a snarl, she thrust out her hand, palm facing me.
I flinched, expecting to explode or something, but nothing happened.
The angel frowned down at her outstretched arm for a second, then gave up on whatever that Spirit attack was and pulled a huge scythe out of nowhere. The blade was at least twice as long as she was tall, and it shined like Earth’s moon.
I stumbled back a step.
“Hake, what’s going on?” Kest asked. “Who are you yelling at?”
“Her.” I pointed, Hungry Ghost still clutched in my fist. “The angel of death is right there, and she’s got a big freaking scythe. I don’t think she wants to hurt you guys, though. I think she’s just here for me.”
Except that scythe blade was so enormous it would probably slice the twins and Warcry in half if I was anywhere near them when she struck.
I jogged away from them, yelling at the angel again and trying to keep her attention on me. “Did you finally get in trouble for killing the wrong guy? Good! I told God on you about a million times! It shouldn’t be that hard to tell the difference between a sixteen-year-old high schooler and a twenty-nine-year-old methhead, you incompetent ditz!”
The angel’s beautiful face distorted with rage, and she tore through the air at me.
Not thinking, I sucked down more Spirit from Hungry Ghost even though my Sea was already full. It felt like my insides were about to burst. In a rush, I sent it all coursing through my body like opening the floodgates.
Suddenly, I felt twenty feet tall and faster than a water moccasin’s strike. I could see everything better than I’d ever seen before, down to the pores on the angel’s skin, which wasn’t skin at all. From the looks of it, her body was made of marble or some other smooth white rock.
Even with all the speed and sight enhancements, I just barely managed to get Dead Reckoning out in time to feel her first slice with the scythe incoming. I dove out of the way, but I wasn’t fast enough. The blade cut my arm to the bone, so fast and clean that I didn’t even feel it at first.
The pain hit as I got back on my feet.
Holy crap. I could get my head chopped off and not know it until I was staring up at my headless body.
My left arm hung down my side, blood running like hot water from a garden hose. I started cycling as much freezing Miasma to the cut as I could without letting Dead Reckoning drop. The bleeding stopped as the wound iced over. Frost grew down to my elbow and up to my shoulder. I downed more Spirit from Hungry Ghost.
Nearby, Warcry and Rali had dropped into defensive stances, searching for whatever had hit me. Kest was typing furiously on her HUD.
“This isn’t your world,” the angel said.
“I didn’t want to leave my old one!” I yelled.
She flew at me again, robes and hair flapping around her like wings. This time, when the very edge of her scythe touched Dead Reckoning, I ducked under the swing. By the time I’d thrown a counter, though, she was already gone.
“Where is she?” Kest swung her HUD around, pointing it at the sky like she was going to shoot this crazy chick out of the air with nothing but her wristlight.
“Stay back!” I hit Hungry Ghost again and concentrated all my Spirit into a Death Metal shield for my right arm. We’d see how that angel felt about getting bashed in the face.
“Can either of you see her?” Kest demanded.
“Feel the air currents,” Rali said. He’d shut his eyes and gone perfectly still. “The disturbance is...up there.”
He pointed his walking stick right at the angel.
Her perfect white eyebrows jumped up in shock, then scrunched down over her nose. White lightning crackled around her.
She shot toward Rali.
“Look out!” I crashed into him, shouldering him out of her way and throwing my shield between us and her.
The angel’s scythe sheared through it like a box cutter through a T-shirt, and then I was bleeding from my right collarbone all the way to my left hip. I pumped Spirit to the gash, feeling cold take over my torso. The OSS tattoo burned like fire, but it couldn’t keep up with these wounds.
I got a flash of déjà vu. Wasn’t this how I’d died the first time? Cold and bloody?
“The bollix’re these now?” Warcry snarled.
“Chaos creatures,” Kest said. She raised her voice and yelled, “Get back! I have a Spirit Damper!”
I glanced their way.
A wall of translucent purple jello monsters were surrounding us, climbing over each other and creeping closer, sealing off our escape routes. Off to every side, shadows flickered and tried to catch my eye.
“Stay back!” Kest yelled, holding out her Spirit Damper and reaching for the lid.
“Back,” one of the jello monsters croaked, lunging at her.
Then the rest of the monsters started croaking, “back,” and hopping toward her like an army of toads.
As they closed in around us, Rali set his feet wide apart, holding his walking stick like a bo staff.
“Wait.” I’d caught sight of something just over the wall of chaos creatures.
Warcry almost bumped into me backing up, but I stepped around him.
A second, much taller wall had formed on the other side of the creatures corralling us. These were penning in the angel of death. She sliced them with her scythe, but as soon as the blade passed through, the jello monsters grew back together. It was like trying to cut soup.
“They’re holding her off,” I said.
A jello monster from our wall crawled over a few others and jumped at me, barking, “Back!”
I did what it said. New ones crawled over it, telling me to keep going “back.” All around the edges of my vision, their flickering shadow decoys tried to get me to look their way.
“They’re not trying to hurt us,” I said, focusing on the monsters right in front of me. “I think they’re trying to show us a way out of here.”
Now Kest and Warcry definitely thought I was crazy. But Rali looked from the creatures to me an
d back.
“I defer to the Death cultivator,” he said, lowering his staff.
A little bit at a time, Kest relaxed her grip on her Spirit Damper. She didn’t put it away, but it didn’t look like she was about to trigger it any second.
“You’re not bleedin’ serious,” Warcry snarled.
“Almost never,” Rali said. “But this tastes like Miasma, so it’s Hake’s domain.”
Warcry scowled at him. “You want me to listen to the grav who’s being sliced to ribbons by some invisible angel?”
“If I’m wrong, you can kill me later,” I promised.
Warcry let out a grunt halfway between frustration and anxiety, but he started backing up.
The monsters herded us toward a black hole of a cave near the end of the shut-in.
On the other side of their rolling wall, the angel of death had given up trying to slice through them. Now she was slamming full force into the creatures with booms that rocked the whole shut-in. Unlike her scythe, though, she couldn’t cut through. She tried going up and over, but the creatures at the top of the walls expanded until they were too heavy to stay up and flopped forward against the cliff, making a dome over our heads.
“In,” a purple jello monster croaked at me, and pretty soon all of them were yelling it. “In! In! In!”
“In the cave,” I said.
“This goes against everything.” Kest shook her head. “Just everything.”
I shrugged. “Your options are definitely die out here or probably die in the cave.”
Rali chuckled. “Sounds like fun.” He peeled off and headed into the black hole.
Kest took a deep breath, then followed her twin.
Warcry looked from me to the creatures yelling, “In!”
With a final snarl in their direction, he stalked inside.
I ducked in after him.
The wall of chaos creatures collapsed, and one of them flowed into the cave behind us. It was still rolling and sloshing forward even though it didn’t have any of its buddies to climb over. It turned back to face the entrance of the cave and raised one thin, weird arm sticking off its fat belly.
Then the cliffside collapsed, sealing us inside.
The Will of the Death Cultivator
A BURNING HAND GRABBED my arm, and I flinched.
“If this is Hake, you’re bleedin’ dead, grav.”
“You’re still alive, so you’re bleedin’ welcome,” I sneered, jerking my arm away from him. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. I was exhausted, and the Spirit I’d taken from Hungry Ghost was running low. I downed some more to keep my wounds sealed and get some internal alchemy regulating, but it barely touched the fatigue.
Light flickered in a thin filament, then brightened until I could see Kest holding up a squiggly strand of metal heated to a white-hot glow.
“What just happened?” She looked down at me. “I tried to get a lock on this angel of death creature’s Spirit signature with a modded version of my Fish Finder, but it wouldn’t track anything. And then those chaos creatures...”
Kest trailed off, turning to face the one that had followed us into the cave.
It wasn’t alone anymore. Dozens of the purple jello creatures were squeezing through the cracks between boulders of the cave-in like play-dough through one of those spaghetti makers. We had to keep backing farther into the cave because they were taking up all the space, even thinned out like noodles.
Outside, the angel of death battered away at the rubble.
The chaos creature with the huge belly and skinny stick arms and legs sat up.
“Why,” it croaked at me, “do you have Sheigo’s apparatus?”
“The what?”
“Hungry Ghost was his.” The creature tilted its head until its cheek was flat against its belly. “Yet it has accepted you as its master.”
I blinked. “You guys can see Hungry Ghost? I thought it was supposed to be hidden from everybody else.”
“All unliving can see one another,” the creature croaked. “From who did you obtain Hungry Ghost?”
“I found it in a mine shaft,” I said. “It was on a dead body.”
“Sheigo!” one of the other chaos creatures wailed, grabbing at stringy purple hair.
The rest of them started wailing, too.
“Brave Sheigo!”
“Dead!”
“No!”
The chaos creature with the huge belly raised its stick arms. Its buddies quieted down.
“I feared this,” the creature croaked. “We were sent to this planet by Van Diemann Mining Company to mine Spirit jade, but when we discovered rolling silver, hired swords from Blue Star Mining were sent to our town to slaughter us all and take over the mines. We fled into the shafts while Brave Sheigo held them off alone.” The creature hung its head. “The tunnels collapsed in the battle.”
“The gasses,” a tiny, flat creature moaned.
“Invisible poison!”
“We slept!”
“As our bodies fell into their last slumber,” the huge-bellied chaos creature said, “our consciousnesses were pulled away and tossed into the far gorges. It was Brave Sheigo’s last attempt to save us from being trapped in the mines forever.”
Ice water trickled down my spine as I remembered the glassy eyeshine of that baby on its mom’s shoulder.
“You guys are the mummies.” I swallowed, looking around at them.
“The first inhabitants of Ghost Town,” Rali whispered, nodding slowly, “became the chaos creatures. Of course.”
“Brave Sheigo meant well, but we have never been able to find our way back to our bodies. Each night, we try, but when the blue star rises in the east, we fade away.”
“And the hunger,” croaked one of the other chaos creatures.
“So hungry!”
“Life essence!
“Starving!”
The twins, Warcry, and I all moved back a little farther.
“We will not harm you,” the big-bellied chaos creature promised. It set one scraggly hand on its stomach. “Sheigo was sent as our protector by our company, but he soon became our friend. You cultivate Death as he did and protect your friends as he did. You are an heir to his will. Our hunger for the living is constant, but we will not harm the inheritor of Sheigo’s will.”
“Or my friends?” I said.
The creature nodded. “Or your friends.”
My Spirit ran out again, and the OSS tattoo started eating away at calories. My body didn’t have much of those for it to feed on—the little body fat I’d had when I died had disappeared not long after coming to Van Diemann—so I took another hit from Hungry Ghost to refuel the script.
“Stop wasting your Miasma,” the chaos creature said. “It is running out like water through a sieve. Our healers will mend the wounds inflicted by the reaper.”
One of the creatures crept-rolled across the ground to me and wrapped itself around my useless arm like one of those blood pressure cuffs at Gramps’s doctor appointments. Another one sloshed across the cave floor and climbed up my leg onto my chest and flattened out. It felt like being hugged by water balloons, cold and rubbery and likely to pop at any second.
They both glowed purple, then the wounds started healing. I watched as the chip in my arm bone rebuilt itself and the muscle fibers sewed back together. I couldn’t bend forward to see if my stomach was doing the same thing, but I could feel the cold there seeping away and warmth replacing it. Shiny pink scars filled in the gaps, then the chaos creature healers hopped down.
“Apologies. We cannot fix the metal,” the bigger of the two said, pointing at my shoulder.
It took me a second to figure out that they were talking about the Transferogate. Looked like the angel’s scythe had sliced right through all the wires, tubes, and the bits suctioning it to my shoulder. Without that taking a good deal of the blow, I might’ve lost my arm at the shoulder.
“That’s okay, I hate this piece of junk,” I said. “Thank you.”
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As they sloshed back into the crowd of creatures, I shrugged the Transferogate down my arm as far as it would go. Underneath, my shoulder was ultra-white against the browning I’d gotten from going shirtless under three suns, and a piece of tubing stuck into my armpit. I took a deep breath, braced myself, and jerked that out. It bumped against stuff inside my chest on its way out, which made me lightheaded because of the sheer wrongness of that feeling, but no huge wave of pain came from the OSS tattoo. Maybe breaking the Transferogate had stopped it from telling the script to hit the shock juice.
That reminded me.
I tossed down the Transferogate and looked from Rali to Kest. “The Bailiff was about to zap me with the script remote before you guys attacked, but he never did. I wonder how long it’ll take him to find it.”
“Oh, right.” Kest pulled something out of the storage ring. It was the script remote. “I grabbed it out of his hand when I threw up the Portable Shield Wall. He never knew what snatched it.”
Rali chuckled. “I’m not condoning stealing, but you have to admit, under special circumstances, it has its uses.”
“Talk about a relief,” I said, letting my shoulders slump. “I’ve been waiting for him to find that thing in the street and hold down the button.”
The huge-bellied chaos creature got us back to business.
“Death cultivator, you know of the mine shaft where our bodies reside, correct?” it croaked. “You are able to find this place again?”
I nodded. “We’ve been there a couple times.”
“Take us, please. Bear our consciousnesses to our bodies so that we will not fade when the blue star rises. We will be able to return to our souls and be released to the afterlife.”
I saw Rali’s eyes bug out, not with fear, but with some kind of manic excitement. This must be like something he’d read in one of his favorite sword legends.
“Bear you how?” I asked.
One at a time, the chaos creatures imploded, turning into shining purple crystals as round and smooth as marbles.
“Do not absorb the Spirit therein,” the huge-bellied one said when he was the last one still in his chaos creature form. “Please. Consciousness was not made to linger after death; it is a terrible hell of hunger and memory. You are our only chance to be released.”
