Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  The catfish guy was gone.

  I looked around. Had he gotten on the train? Was he hiding somewhere, getting ready to ambush me?

  A hand broke through Dead Reckoning, reaching for me. “Hake, what—”

  I spun around, throwing a big hook.

  With Ki-sight I could see Rali’s lace eyes widen just before he ducked the strikes at lightning speed.

  “Your reaction time has really improved,” he said as he came back up.

  “Wow, sorry.” I hooked my hands in my pockets and blew out a harsh breath. “I thought you were someone else.”

  He flicked his hair out of his face. “I wouldn’t want to be that guy, whoever he is.”

  “What’re you doing down here?”

  “Wandering the neighborhood talking to beggars. I was actually lost until I felt you cultivating.” He tipped back his head and studied the architecture. “It’s kind of body desecrate-y, but I bet that appeals to you.”

  “I mean, I think it’s cool.” I shrugged. “And there’s enough Miasma down here to fill a hundred Spirit seas.”

  Rali grinned. “It’s a good place for a Death cultivator. What’s the plan now?”

  I scanned the subway platform one more time for the catfish guy. He wasn’t there.

  “Head back to the hotel and get some supper?” I suggested. According to Warcry, complimentary room service was a normal thing at fancy hotels like Jade Rennaissance, which was lucky considering we’d spent almost all of our pooled resources on the room.

  “That’s the best idea I’ve heard since we got to this city,” Rali said.

  No one attacked us on the stairs or ambushed us as we emerged from the station, so maybe the catfish guy really had hopped a train.

  I hadn’t realized how long I’d been down there, but when we stepped out aboveground, the dim light that had filtered through the canopy of buildings and overpasses had been replaced by darkness lit with flickering neon signs and the light spilling out of storefronts.

  The station wasn’t far from our hotel. Rali and I made the walk in just under ten minutes. I thought it would be weird checking in since one or possibly two of our party had already gone up to the room, but once I showed the manager the booking confirmation Kest had sent me, he handed over the key code to our room without asking any questions.

  I wondered what Rali would’ve done if he’d come in by himself. Asked the guy at the desk to call one of us to confirm he wasn’t just a crazy guy pretending like he had a room here?

  Our room was on the eighth floor, and Warcry and Kest were already inside. He was at a table on the balcony, shoveling some super fancy pizza with ten kinds of meat and ten more kinds of vegetables into his face. Kest was sprawled across one of the two huge beds on her stomach, staring at her HUD.

  “He’s ranked in the low twenty-thousands,” Kest read, “and his finisher is—”

  “Finally!” Warcry said through a mouthful of pizza. “One of you listen to her coaching. I already told her I don’t want to hear a word about the other fighters.”

  Kest sat up on the bed, tucking her bare feet under her. “If you know who you’re up against, you can analyze their weaknesses ahead of time and strategize for your match.”

  “Strategies are a waste of time,” Warcry said. “You do what you do when they come at you. If you take time to think about some convoluted plan you made ahead of time, you’re dead.”

  “Life or death in the moment,” Rali said, heading out onto the balcony and grabbing a slice of pizza. “That’s an enlightened way to look at it.”

  “See?” Warcry said to Kest. “Your brother knows what I’m talking about.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Well, I want to know who I’m up against.” I flopped onto the bed opposite Kest.

  “Oi, get off me bed! You’re sleeping over there, grav, on the foldout.”

  I ignored him. “Are the individual brackets out?”

  Kest shook her head. “Registration doesn’t close for another hour, but they keep a running list of competitors updated. I’ve been checking their profiles based on the guess that they’ll set up the individual bracket similarly to last year’s, starting with the highest rank versus the lowest to speed up the early eliminations.”

  “I’m probably still the lowest rank on the planet.” I hooked my arms over the edge of the bed and started to pull up the Wilderness Territorial page on my HUD. Then I caught a sniff of myself. “Geez. I’ll look after I take a shower. They’ve got indoor plumbing in this place, don’t they?”

  Kest pointed at a door along the side wall. I grabbed a piece of pizza off the balcony table and gulped it down on my way into the bathroom.

  Instead of a stand-up shower, there was an enormous claw-foot tub with a faucet and sprayer. I wasn’t used to sit down shower-baths, but after a month of washing up with a rain barrel and water pump, any kind of hot, running water was luxury to me. The tub looked toxic after my first pass, so I let that water out, rinsed off again, and refilled the tub, then leaned back to cook like a lobster.

  I should’ve brought some more of that pizza in with me so I could’ve eaten it while I chilled in the tub.

  Then someone was hammering on the door. I lurched awake, sloshing water all over the floor.

  “You done in there, grav? I gotta use the jacks.”

  I swiped some of the now lukewarm water off my face.

  “Sometime before the tourney starts would be good for me,” he sneered.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m getting out.” It kind of sucked to get dressed in dirty clothes, but at least I didn’t feel like I was ninety percent grime, ten percent human anymore.

  Luckily, they’d ordered a few more pizzas while I was in the bathtub. I ate a couple dozen slices and looked over the competitors list with Kest out on the balcony. Rali buried himself under pillows and blankets in the twins’ bed and was snoring in no time.

  “I don’t know how he can sleep with everything tomorrow,” I said. The more competitors I read up on, the more this weird electric nervousness pulsed in the pit of my stomach.

  “You better figure it out quick like, grav,” Warcry said, coming out of the bathroom and tossing a towel over the coatrack. “You’re gonna need all the rest you can get. If you win your first fight, you’ll have as many as you can handle tomorrow.”

  “It’s not the number I’m worried about,” I said. “I’ve fought you twenty times in one day, and I was fine. Sometimes in one training session.”

  Warcry hopped onto the far bed. “First thing to go in a tourney is your stamina. The adrenaline sucks it right out of you.” He turned over to face the far wall and let out a long, loud yawn. “When that happens, you better hope you’ve got some piss and grit to fall back on, grav, or you’re proper bled.”

  I thumbed the scars on my knuckles.

  It’d been a long time since I thought about kung fu movies. Literally, a whole other life. But this was just like them. The hero had to win—to return a village treasure, to restore his family’s honor, to save the people he loved—so he did.

  I glanced sidelong at Kest, then the big lump of covers that was Rali.

  I had to win tomorrow.

  Dead Man’s Hand

  I SLEPT LIKE CRAP THAT night. The softness of the pullout couch was a million miles away from the ripped cot in the servants’ stable—I even had blankets—but I kept waking up, convinced I’d overslept and missed my first fight. In the one dream I had, I made it to the fight on time, but then everybody else knew the rules and I kept doing stuff wrong.

  In spite of the lack of sleep, as soon as my HUD’s alarm buzzed, I was ten kinds of awake and ready to go. And I wasn’t the only one. Rali and Kest were on the balcony, him meditating facing the blue sunrise and her tweaking her cinnabar gauntlet. One of them had shut the door so the crackle of Kest welding wouldn’t wake me and Warcry up.

  Warcry was just coming out of the bathroom as I folded up the pullout.

  His eyes narro
wed. “You live or die today, grav.”

  I took a long breath. It didn’t matter whether he was talking metaphorically or he meant that if I didn’t get an affiliation, the OSS would kill me and everybody I cared about. He was right either way.

  “Better hope you don’t see me in the cage, hadn’t ya,” he said, heading for the door.

  Nothing smart came to mind. No snappy comeback. I watched him stalk out, feeling like every muscle in my body was hooked up to some low-level electrical current. Live or die. It was all on the line today.

  When the door slammed behind him, I shook my arms out, then scrubbed my hands across my face. Maybe some taiji would help.

  I went through the exercises, centering my Spirit and body, trying not to run into the furniture.

  The balcony door slid open.

  “The individual brackets are out,” Kest said.

  The nerves amped up to all-out jitters. I pulled up the Wilderness Territorial page and pored over the bracket until I found my name. Surprisingly, I wasn’t the lowest-ranked seed. I was third lowest. Which meant the guy I was fighting was third highest. He had a record from the previous tournament—three wins before a loss knocked him out of the running—and he’d finished in the top six hundred, which was apparently pretty good.

  “Chlorophyll Spirit?” I read from his profile.

  Out on the balcony, Rali stood up and stretched.

  “That’s good,” Kest said, nodding. “He won’t have a lot to draw on out here in the Territories.”

  “I’m not sure he’s going to need to draw much,” I said. “He’s got almost half a million Spirit in his reserve.”

  Rali came in from the balcony, a slice of cold pizza in hand.

  “Quality, Hake, not quantity,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “Spirit doesn’t necessarily equal skill. Eat this.”

  “Thanks, man, but I’m pretty sure if I eat anything, I’ll barf.”

  “Just try one bite,” Rali said. “I infused it with Calming the Sea. It’ll center your Spirit, and that, my friend, will help keep you from barfing.”

  I forced myself to take a bite as we left the room. It actually did help settle my nerves down a lot. That weird, wired electricity was still just a serious thought away, but with Rali’s Spirit-infused pizza in my stomach, I didn’t feel as sick anymore.

  People were already flooding the kokugikon when we got there. Rali and Kest weren’t allowed on the arena floor during the individual bouts, so we had to split up at the entrance.

  “You’re going to do great,” Rali said. “Let your Spirit guide you, Death cultivator. Unless it suggests you kill someone for real. Then maybe let something else guide you for a while.”

  I laughed. It was forced, but Rali pretended not to notice.

  Kest had been reading on her HUD the whole walk over. Now she frowned up at me.

  “Chlorophyll is under the Organic supertype,” she said, gearing up for one of those big rehearsed lectures. “It affects chlorophyll-bearing plants. In his bouts last year, Shrike was known for a Vine Whip attack using vines he’d grown on the spot. If you see him throw down seeds, he’s going for the whip.”

  “Shrike is my opponent?” I asked, picturing throwing my Death Metal shields up at an Indiana Jones bullwhip made of vines.

  “Yes.” But Kest wasn’t done. “He did okay in the last tournament, but he wasn’t a powerhouse. His strength is all in his vine weapons, zero in his physical presence. If you get in close and engage him in actual combat, Hake, you can destroy him. He’s bigger, but he’s not as strong as you.”

  My face got hot. She thought I was stronger than someone? I tried to make myself focus on the fight ahead, but it wasn’t easy after that.

  So instead, I just said, “Thanks.”

  She nodded, and Rali gave me slap on the back. Then they disappeared into the crowd headed for the seating area.

  I followed the signs directing fighters down to the arena floor. The place was huge, at least the size of two football fields lined up next to each other, and it had been divided into twenty-four fight cages with dirt floors and professional-looking coated UFC-type wire instead of the crappy chain link fence the OSS had in theirs. I gave my name to a kokugikon staffer, and she directed me to cage twenty-three.

  As I went, I looked up at the rows of seats. Already the place was filling up. It was like the Superbowl in there. Big broken-winged eagles started flapping around the pit of my stomach instead of butterflies, banging into stuff.

  An official and a few other fighters had already gathered at cage twenty-three. One was the massive owl-headed guy I was supposed to be fighting, the number three seed. He sized me up when I came over, then turned back to the official.

  “Rules are simple, fellas,” the official said. “Apparatuses, scripts, weapons—whatever you’ve got on you—is allowed. Killing ain’t. Kill your opponent and you’re disqualified. Big Five can’t recruit a dead man. You win when your opponent is incapacitated and can’t continue fighting or states clearly that they quit. Got it?”

  I nodded, the nerves starting to ratchet up again.

  “Fight one is Bilo Shrike versus Grady Hake,” the official said. He opened the cage door. “If that’s you, get inside and let’s get this elimination on the road.”

  Shrike and I went into the cage and took spots across from each other.

  “Face your opponent,” the official yelled.

  I turned and met Shrike’s huge gold-colored eyes. His gray beak looked like steel under the kokugikon lights, shiny and sharp. His arm, growing feathers farther up and scaly bird skin farther down, reached into his pocket.

  Seeds, my brain said. Here comes the Vine Whip.

  Death Spirit cycled to my muscles, hitting all the major enhancements—speed, strength, sight, reinforcement...

  “Bow,” the official said. “Take your fighting stances.”

  Probably the weirdest thing I’d ever felt was the combination of familiarity and fear pumping through my veins as we went through the pre-fight routine. My body knew what it was doing from countless fights during training, but my brain was freaking out, thinking this couldn’t possibly be real. I was supposed to be in a classroom in rural Missouri smarting off to upperclassmen and taking the fast track to college, not getting ready to fight in some crazy alien kumite so I could join a gang.

  “Fight!”

  I shot toward Shrike as he flicked his scaly hand at the cage floor. My Ki-sight registered the seeds slamming into the dirt like bullets. I hopped over their little blast zones, threw out Dead Reckoning, and chopped a testing kick at Shrike’s shin.

  He jumped back and landed out of Dead Reckoning’s range. Squiggling green lines of Spirit poured out of his hands and plunged into the dirt.

  I started to go after him, but something grabbed my ankle and held me in place.

  A vine.

  I tried to stomp it off my leg, but two more braided around the first, making it stronger. Shrike dodged around me and snatched up another cord of vines. Not exactly the Indiana Jones bullwhip I’d pictured. It was only as long as his arm, but it had six lashes, and every one of them was covered in thorns.

  As Shrike reared the whip back, I sent Miasma crashing out into Death Metal, one on each arm, covering my front and back. Just in time. Shrike’s thorn whip cracked, its lashes thudding into my front shield.

  More vines snaked around my ankles. I had to get off defense, take the hand-to-hand to the owl like Kest had said, but I couldn’t see how to do that when I was tied down like this.

  The whip lashed out again, and the vines around my ankles jerked backward.

  I threw my hands out instinctively to catch myself, which put both Death Metal shields between me and the dirt, where they were completely useless. Pain seared across my shoulder and the back of my neck as thorn lashes ripped out chunks of my skin. I yelled, half in pain, half in anger at myself for letting that happen.

  This was bad. I was going to lose if I didn’t do som
ething quick.

  I let go of Death Metal and flipped onto my back. Miasma rushed out of my Spirit sea as Three Corpse Sickness sprang to life. I sent the blobs running at the owl. They still didn’t look human, but I’d worked on them enough that you could tell they were humanoid. Their arms even had fists now. If someone didn’t know better, they would think the corpses were dangerous.

  Shrike didn’t know better. I could hear his whip cracking, but I ignored it. Instead, I focused on the vines twisted around my legs.

  Hungry Ghost had said something about killing before. If Chlorophyll Spirit could grow living plants super fast, then didn’t it stand to reason that Death Spirit could kill them? I grabbed the grinning skull out of my pocket, took a huge hit of Spirit, then sent Miasma creeping into the vines. I could feel the thing that egged them on to keep growing, see it like a flickering green flame down in their roots.

  I surrounded the flame with Miasma and crushed it, easy as licking your fingers and putting out a birthday candle. It hardly took any effort. Once the flame was gone, the vines withered up and crumbled.

  I jumped back to my feet, ducking under a whip aimed at one of my Three Corpses, and sprinted top-speed at Shrike.

  His gold eyes got huge when he saw me coming. He pumped Chlorophyll Spirit into his whip, and it hulked out. The lashes got as thick as garden hoses, and the thorns grew into Jesus tree spikes with hooked barbs. Beads of clear poison welled up on the points.

  I did not want to get hit with that. I let the Three Corpses drop, and in their place, I threw out a super concentrated Dead Reckoning, pumping it full of Spirit.

  The hulk whip shot toward me faster than Ki-sight could focus on, but Dead Reckoning told me when and where to dodge. With the Miasma I should’ve been using to regulate my internal alchemy, I traced the whip to the flickering green flame hidden down in its handle in Shrike’s fist.

  For such a hulk, the life in the whip was just as young and small as the rooted vines had been. I closed my Spirit around the little green birthday candle.