Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  “I won’t absorb it.”

  The creature glanced behind me at Kest, Rali, and Warcry. “And do not let anyone else.”

  “They won’t, either,” I said. “I promise. They’re good.”

  I mean, obviously Warcry was a douche, but there was a big difference between being a douche and being evil enough to absorb a ghost begging for your help.

  The creature nodded. “Thank you, Death cultivator. When we arrive safely to our bodies, we will repay you with a technique you may use to defeat the reaper.”

  Before I could ask it anything else, the chaos creature popped into a marble and rolled to my side. I picked it up.

  The marble sank into my palm and disappeared.

  “Holy—” I stopped suddenly, realizing I could feel Spirit start to slip out of the marble and flow toward my Spirit sea. “Wait!”

  Fast as I could, I concentrated on making a tiny Death Metal shield around the marble. Kind of a little pill capsule. When it was done, the creature’s Spirit was sealed off.

  Awesome, now I just had to do that fifty more times and keep all the shields active while trying not to get killed by the angel of death or the OSS.

  Thinking about the angel made my ears prick up. The crashing outside the cave had stopped.

  “How long has it been quiet like that?”

  Kest and Warcry turned to look at the rubble like they hadn’t noticed the change, either.

  But Rali said, “Not long. She stopped while they were telling us how they got stuck in the mine shaft. I’ve been listening to see if she would start shifting the rock, but so far nothing.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “She’s super strong. Moving some boulders wouldn’t be a big deal.”

  “My guess would be a seal that keeps her from getting through,” he said. “You said they were holding her off while we ran. They must have some kind of defense against her.”

  “Maybe so. Her scythe sliced right through their bodies, but it didn’t do any damage, and she couldn’t go through them at all.”

  I picked up the next purple chaos marble from the floor. It disappeared into my hand, too, and I slapped it with an encapsulating Death Metal.

  “So, we’ve got to get from here to the mine shaft,” I said. “Alive. Anyone have any ideas?”

  “Not if she’s out there waiting,” Warcry said, scowling at the fallen rocks. “We’re proper screwed, then.”

  “Then we don’t go out that way.” Rali pointed at the back wall of the cave. “We go out that way.”

  Warcry snorted. “You blind, fatso?” He limped to the wall and smacked it. “This is solid rock.”

  “It is right now.” Rali looked at his sister. “But I just so happen to know a young Selken with a pickaxe in her storage ring.”

  Kest frowned at him for half a second, then started pulling up maps on her HUD.

  “Theoretically, we should be able to. There’s a draw on the other side of that wall. It shouldn’t be more than seventy or eighty feet thick. If we tunnel through into the draw, we can follow the shut-ins to their easternmost point, then it’s a straight shot north across the Rust Flats toward the mine shaft.”

  “What if we pop out on the other side and the angel of death is standing there waiting?” I asked, absorbing and encapsulating either my sixteenth or seventeenth marble. It was hard to keep track while talking.

  Rali tapped his chin with the top of his walking stick. “I wonder if she will be. Possible seal on the outside of these rocks notwithstanding, if she could pop up anywhere, wouldn’t she have just appeared in here with us?”

  “You’re thinking she has to move through three-dimensional space like the rest of us,” Kest said.

  “And find people like the rest of us,” I said. “If she could just sense me, she would’ve known where I was as soon as I made it to Van Diemann.”

  Warcry threw up his hands. “Sure, and she’s probably not gone to get something that can track you! There’s bound to be a Hunter affinity in one of the galaxies.”

  “Even more reason to get moving.” I tried scooping up a handful of marbles to see if I could absorb them all at once. It didn’t work, so I went back to singles. “The sooner we get these guys back to their bodies, the sooner we get that technique to stop her.”

  “We?” Warcry crossed his arms. “I didn’t accept a ghost quest. That’s your problem, grav.”

  “But the Bailiff is both of our problems. There’s no way he’s going to let us live after tonight.”

  “Think you solved that, yeah?”

  “Actually, you solved it a long time back. If we were affiliated with one of the Big Five, a jerk from a little local gang like the OSS couldn’t touch us.”

  “You heard the Dragons’ recruiter,” Warcry said. “They’re not accepting solicitations.”

  “He told you the Wilderness Territorial was the best way in,” I said. “So, we enter the tournament and get signed that way.”

  Warcry snorted. “You won’t even make the top two hundred.”

  “He might not have to,” Kest said, frowning as she thought about it. “Everybody focuses on how the winner of the one-on-one competition and any small gang he’s affiliated with always gets signed, but a lot of the time, fighters who rank high and don’t win get recruited if they impress one of the Big Five. Most people who get signed from these tournaments do it that way.”

  “There’s the small gang riot, too,” Rali said.

  Kest nodded. “That’s a good idea. Most of the hype around the tournament is for the individual combat, but they also have a riot bracket for up to five fighters. It’s not as popular with the spectators, but the first-place prize is still affiliation.”

  “The Bailiff was training Ripper and a couple other hooligans for that,” I said.

  “That’s because he’s smart enough to hedge his bets,” Kest said. “We should do the same, enter the four of us.”

  I paused halfway to picking up another marble. “No way. You guys are third-genners. You can buy your way off Van Diemann if you keep clean records. You’re not getting slapped with a criminal label because of me.”

  “Hake,” Rali said, “we just attacked the OSS, stole their script remote, kidnapped their hooligan and indentured servant, and destroyed their very costly Transferogate. We’re not getting out of this alive without an affiliation to someone much bigger and stronger.”

  “But...” I felt sick to my stomach, and I couldn’t tell whether it was partly due to the exhaustion or a hundred percent because I’d sucked my friends into something they’d been avoiding their whole lives. “Kest, what about your plan to work for a major manufacturer?”

  She shrugged. “This will give me a fallback option if I don’t get headhunted for my builds. The Big Five have connections to all the major corporations—the Technols more than anybody. If I get in with them, I’ll have access to so much more material and censored information. And not having to stay away from contraband anymore will really open up my build options.”

  I dragged my hands through my hair. There was probably a way to push back against this, but after all the fighting and running and strategizing and chaos marble storing, my brain felt like a corroded battery. I wished I had chugged that Coffee Drank back in Kest’s workshop. It was probably still sitting on her workbench, going to waste.

  “I notice you didn’t say anything about my hopes and dreams,” Rali said, elbowing me.

  “Do you have hopes and dreams?” I asked.

  “Not really.” He grinned. “I just like to be included.”

  I huffed out a laugh, then shook my head. “Fine.”

  “Fine, we’ll do it?” Kest asked.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, fine, riot bracket small gang fight. Whatever it takes. We’re probably all on the Bailiff’s hit list now, anyway.”

  “Oi,” Warcry snapped. “I didn’t say I’d do bleed all.”

  “Honestly, dude, I don’t give a crap what you do.” I picked up the last of the marbles and sta
rted absorbing them. “Go beg the Bailiff for your spot back if you don’t think you can win at the tournament. The rest of us—”

  “I could win the Territorial in my sleep, grav. I just ain’t joining no small-time riot bracket. I fight alone.”

  “Then we need to get to work.” I looked at Kest. “How many pickaxes did you say you had?”

  “Only one,” she said. “But I’ve got the components to make a sledgehammer and stake, too.”

  Blocking the Signal

  WE TOOK TURNS CHIPPING away at the rock, one person resting while the other three worked. Most of the night, Kest worked the pickaxe, and Rali, Warcry and I traded off swinging the sledgehammer and holding the long metal stake in place. That last job was the scariest, especially when the person wielding the sledge started to get tired and sloppy, so the sledge and stake person swapped out a lot. After making it a few feet into the wall, the broken rock underfoot got to be a hindrance, so Rali stopped swapping into the sledge team and started clearing it out.

  When Rali wasn’t working, he spent his time infusing food with his All-Nighter Erasing ability. All we had to eat was some dried fish and fruit Kest kept in her storage ring, the last of a batch Rali’d made for when they were scavenging down in the Shut-Ins. I wasn’t a huge fan of fish, but I was so hungry by the time Rali called us over to eat that it tasted like heaven.

  With the first bite, the burning ache in my shoulders and back eased off, and energy flowed in, waking my drained muscles back up. Even my throbbing, scraped-up fingers from Warcry’s most recent missed swing stopped hurting so much.

  “Sage Rali, you’re a genius,” I said, scarfing down a handful.

  Warcry looked reluctantly impressed as he chewed. “What’re you, then, some kind of Organic supertype with Healing affinity?”

  “Heart Spirit,” Rali said. “But I specialized my kishotenketsu to Warm Heart when I got to the Ten stage.”

  “Restrictions or covenants?” Warcry asked.

  “Restrictions. I can use it for others’ gain, but not my own.”

  “What does all that mean?” I asked. “I haven’t read anything about changing your Spirit from one thing to another.”

  “Specialization doesn’t change your affinity,” Kest said between bites. “It narrows your range of abilities, but makes each one more powerful, kind of like the stake concentrates the force of the sledgehammer in one spot. Focus it, and you can penetrate farther, faster.”

  Rali nodded. “If you decide to specialize, you either do it by restricting your Spirit or making a covenant with it. Break the promise or step outside the boundaries you set, and you lose your specialized abilities. In some extreme cases, all but your most basic levels of kishotenketsu can be destroyed.” He gestured at Warcry. “You’re specialized, too. Something from the Entropic supertype, right?”

  “Hatred Spirit,” Warcry said. “I specialized it to Burning Hatred last year.”

  “Is it possible to put restrictions on such a chaotic supertype?” Rali asked.

  Warcry shrugged. “I went with covenant.”

  No one asked Warcry what his covenant was, and he didn’t put it out there like Rali had, so I figured it was probably an unspoken rule that you didn’t pry into something like that.

  The Spirit boost from the food made the rockbreaking go a lot faster when we got back to it. No one said much, but you could feel that everybody was throwing everything they had into tunneling.

  We’d already gone about twenty feet in when Kest lowered her pickaxe and said, “We’re idiots.”

  I stopped the sledge midswing and turned to face her.

  “The second we step out of the Shut-Ins, the OSS is going to be standing there waiting for us.” Kest pointed at me, then Warcry. “They’ll be watching the trackers in your tattoos.”

  “What do we do?” I rested the sledge’s handle against my leg and shook some of the sting out of my hands, then looked down at the tattoo on my forearm. “Cut them off or something?”

  “Script sinks into the bone,” Warcry said. “You’d need a script artisan or someone with Ink Spirit to get it out. Tattoo artist maybe even.”

  “I’m guessing there aren’t any of those down in the Shut-Ins,” I said.

  Rali wiggled his eyebrows. “Not living ones...”

  “What we need is a cloaking device,” Kest said, frowning as she reasoned through it. “Something that interferes with the signals the script sends to the monitoring HUDs. I have something I’ve been working on for the bazaar. Sort of a script-strength multiplier. If I modified the build to nullify the signals instead of intensify them...”

  “Right, that stuff that we all understand,” I said.

  She blinked. “You don’t have to understand it, you just have to agree to be my test subject.”

  “I’m in,” I said. “Make me invisible.”

  Kest looked at Warcry.

  “Yeah, go at it, then,” he said.

  “It’s going to take some time,” she said.

  “Time well spent,” Rali said. He clapped his hands together, then held them open like a basketball player asking for the pass. “Toss me your pick. I’ll take your spot.”

  With Kest out in the main cavern working on the cloaking device, our progress slowed down. Rali was a big guy and obviously strong, but he wasn’t breaking off chunks as large as his sister had been with every swing.

  After about an hour, he yelled down the tunnel to her, “Were you using something besides Ki abilities to speed this up?”

  “Are you striking along the breakage planes?” she called back.

  Rali looked at me. I shrugged.

  He flicked sweaty hair out of his face. “What’s a breakage plane?”

  “The place where the rock is naturally weakest.” Her voice grew closer as she came down the tunnel toward us. “I’ll show you in a second. One of you give me your arm.”

  “I went last time,” I said to Warcry. “It’s your turn.”

  Warcry sighed, but he sat down the sledgehammer and stuck out his arm.

  Just like she’d done three times over the last hour, Kest snapped the wide metal bracer she’d been working on around his OSS tattoo and activated the artificery with a little Metal Spirit.

  This time, though, Warcry didn’t spasm uncontrollably. His eyebrows shot up, and he looked at Kest.

  “That doesn’t hurt,” he said.

  “Don’t get your hopes up yet.” She pulled up her HUD to check the tracking map. “It still might not...”

  The lace in her eyes thickened, and she bounced up and down, squeaking a little. It was pretty cute.

  “You did it?” I let the stake drop with a clang and hopped up.

  Warcry grabbed her HUD wrist and checked the map for himself.

  “My signal’s not showing up,” he said. “Just yours.”

  “Okay, so the infinite loop rebound is what we’re going for,” she said, putting the storage ring to her forehead and taking out some more scrap metal. “Good to know. Give me ten minutes and I’ll have one for you, Hake.”

  It took longer than ten minutes—closer to another hour—because she was building the second bracer completely from scratch. Warcry and I switched holding the stake a few more times, and we had to stop long enough to clear rock from under our feet again, but eventually, Kest looked up from her work.

  “Hake, give me your tattoo.”

  “One sec.” I finished cracking off the chunk of rock we’d been working on, then went over to where she was sitting.

  Attaching the bracer was close work. Kest had to wrap her arm around mine and almost lean into my side while she did it. I was sweaty and nasty, but if she was grossed out at having to touch me, she didn’t act like it. She was really zeroed in on what she was doing, though. I pretended like I didn’t notice all the contact, either.

  Finally, she activated the artificery. I braced myself. Nothing happened.

  “No jittering or sparks,” I said.

  Kest checked h
er HUD, then turned her wrist over so I could see the empty map.

  “Grady Hake, I pronounce you hidden from the OSS,” she said.

  “You rock,” I said.

  Black lace trickled down into her cheeks. She swiped some hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear.

  “You might change your mind about that when I cut you to test whether the healing script is still working or if it’s going to get stuck in the activation stage and drain all your Spirit.”

  “That’s likely?” Warcry snapped. “I’ve been getting skinned alive over here by this grav’s idea of aiming—”

  “Has your healing script activated since you put on the bracer?” Kest asked.

  “Only about a dozen times.”

  “And it shut off on its own each time?” She checked his profile on the Spirit rankings. “Your Spirit reserve doesn’t seem to be dropping at a significant rate. Are these numbers normal or were they a lot higher before?”

  He checked. “Normal.”

  “Then it’s functioning properly. Probably because it doesn’t have to send a signal to an outside location to heal; it’s all in-body. Hake, pull up your reserve.”

  She stabbed me in the hand with one of her pointy weights, and when my Spirit stayed steady, she pronounced my bracer functional, too.

  “Good deal,” she said. “Going into a fighting tournament without healing script would’ve really put you guys at a disadvantage.”

  Sudden Death

  ACCORDING TO OUR HUDS, it took a whole day and another night before we finally broke through into the next shut-in. By then, we’d run out of food Rali could fortify for us, and we were all sore, hungry, and tired, but the second we saw blue sunrise through the cracks, the four of us started working for all we were worth. In ten minutes, we had a hole big enough to crawl through, and a couple bruises and scrapes from not being careful enough.

  No angels of death rushed in to murder us with enormous scythes, so we stepped out into the dawning daylight next to a wide blue-green creek.