Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  It was almost cool out there. I could see the night sun going down through the forest of skyscrapers, but blue hadn’t started to filter into the eastern sky yet, and the traffic down on the street was still quiet. I’d never been in a city of any size in the morning. It was kind of nice.

  Kest came out after her shower and leaned on the railing, looking out at the city with me, not talking. That was okay, though. It was the good kind of not talking. I could’ve hung out there being quiet with her all day, but I figured the spell would break once the rest of the world started waking up.

  Just before the blue sun rose, Rali joined us.

  “You’re up early,” he said to me.

  I shrugged. “I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’m ready to get today done with.”

  “Care to meditate with me?” He sank into the lotus position on the concrete, facing east. “It’s good for centering your Spirit sea.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’m going to stop off at one of the subway stations and top up. Want to go?”

  He closed his eyes. “It’s a little early for me to start rushing around like I have places to be.”

  I laughed. “You do have somewhere to be.”

  “Not yet, though.”

  Kest crossed her arms over her stomach. “Be careful, Hake. Watch out for OSS.”

  “I will.” I headed for the door. “Message me when you guys get to the kokugikon.”

  What I hadn’t told Kest and Rali was that part of me kind of hoped the Bailiff would turn up with his hooligans and try something while my friends were safe somewhere else. It was stupid and unlikely, but it was also a little bit why I’d gone out at all.

  Hardly anyone was out on the sidewalks that early except for some homeless people and a jogger. The subway ossuary was similarly empty. A few people in janitorial-looking uniforms milled around the platform, waiting for the train to work.

  I hadn’t been there ten minutes when that catfish guy showed up.

  He nodded and came over. I started cycling Spirit to my muscles and eyes, making sure I was ready for anything he might try.

  It was definitely the same guy who’d been sitting in front of us at the fights; he had the same scarred-up flathead’s face, but today he was back in a suit, a fancy black one with a thin silver tie.

  “Grady Hake, right?” he said. Standing right in front of me, he was a good foot taller and at least two of me wide. “I caught a few of your fights yesterday. Your kishotenketsu’s mighty defensive for a Death cultivator, shields and counterstrikes and all that.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Not necessarily a bad thing.” His whiskers twitched. “It’s just interesting that you lean so hard on physical combat. That’s not very common for a Mortal supertype. You know you’re the only Mortal affinity in the Wilderness Territorial this year?”

  “Does that have anything to do with why you keep turning up wherever I am?”

  He hooked back his jacket and stuck his hands in his pockets. “There’s always somebody keeping an eye on your sort. You don’t know how to cloak your Spirit?”

  “I have a book on it.” But with everything else going on, I’d never gotten around to practicing the techniques.

  “Might be smart to read it sometime,” he said. “Especially with that little murder trick up your sleeve.”

  My blood turned to ice. He knew about Dead Man’s Hand.

  His wide catfish mouth curved into a grin. “Let’s put it this way: your hotheaded IFC fighter buddy isn’t the only guy getting talked about. The conversation about you is just going around different circles. Keep your head on straight and don’t kill anybody during your riots today. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  Before I could reply, he turned around and headed for the stairs. As he went, his gills opened, showing dark red rakes, and his mouth did that fast-open thing predatory fish do. A huge breath of Miasma rushed in and immediately disappeared.

  RALI AND KEST WERE waiting for me cage-side when I got to the kokugikon. The place had changed vastly overnight: the individual fight cages had been removed and replaced with one big cage. Staffers were still smoothing out the dirt inside the wire. They must’ve been up all night putting it together. Cameras were mounted on the wire to catch the action from every angle, and down the way, an Ylef who looked like he was more than eighty percent metal and wires was busy turning on a table full of those dragonfly spies.

  Spectators already filled the stands. Fighting broke out over a seat near the bottom row, and a couple big dudes in Kokugikon Security sashes ran in and broke it up. Somebody else got the good seats while the people fighting were being dragged away.

  “I thought the small gang riot wasn’t that popular,” I said, scanning the rows for the Bailiff. No sign yet.

  “It’s not,” Kest said. Her hair was back up in its usual messy buns, and she was wearing her chain gauntlet on one hand and the cinnabar gauntlet on the other. “They fight the championship match of the individual competition this afternoon. People were lining up last night to get a seat.”

  Other fighters were starting to trickle into the arena, too. I checked the riot bracket on my HUD. There were six small gangs signed up besides us, and by some miracle, we’d gotten the first bye.

  The rules scrolled by on the right third of my screen. One had changed from the individual competition. “Don’t kill your opponent” was now “don’t kill more than half of your rival gang.”

  My stomach lurched. They could kill one of us without being disqualified. Two, if the officials rounded up.

  “Hake?” Rali asked, catching my eye. “How’re you doing? You look a little pale.”

  “Dude, I need you to tell me the truth. If someone tries to kill you, are you going to defend yourself?”

  He shook his hair out of his face and laughed. “What are you talking about? During the match?”

  “Any time, but yeah, obviously during the match, too.”

  “I’m only here to help you and Kest. That’s it.”

  “But what if they’re trying to kill you and we can’t get to you in time?”

  “The first match is starting,” Kest said, pulling us closer to the cage. “Keep an eye on both sides. We fight the winner.”

  I stared at the cage, not really paying attention to the fight. I wanted Rali to say he’d at least defend himself, that it was okay with him to be violent if his life was on the line. But he just watched the fight. Kest tried to give us pointers about our opponents, but I was too busy trying to will Rali into answering me to listen, and Rali was purposely looking everywhere but me.

  When the official announced the beginning of round two and called our match, I grabbed his arm.

  “Rali. Seriously.”

  The black lace in his eyes rippled. I was pretty sure I’d seen him and Kest have that reaction before, but I couldn’t remember what it meant they were feeling.

  “Hake,” he said, and he wasn’t just joking around for once. “Do you remember my kishotenketsu restriction? I can help anyone who isn’t me.”

  “So help me by not getting murdered to death.”

  “Hungry Ghosts,” the official called through the cage wire. “If you’re here, report or be disqualified.”

  “We’re here,” Kest yelled, gesturing at the three of us. She shot us a dark-laced glare. “Guys!”

  Rali grinned. “C’mon, Shogun Hake of the Hungry Ghosts. The official and the Metal head are getting impatient.”

  Riot Bracket

  FOR OUR FIRST FIGHT, we were up against a four-guy outfit made up of three big bruisers and a scrappy-looking techie.

  As soon as the match started, Rali hit me with a dose of his Spirit boost. Right away, I sent Death Metal to both arms and barreled straight into the middle of the bruisers, figuring I could take out the physical threats while Kest got the techie. If we got this over with fast enough, Rali wouldn’t be in danger.

  Two of the bruisers went for me, one attacki
ng from in front and the other from behind. The only tag-team experience I’d had was with ferals, and they usually all piled on the closest person they could and started chewing. The third dude didn’t come at me, though. I completely lost track of him, which freaked me out, because he looked like a roid-rager and was probably our biggest threat.

  I tried to keep one shield behind me and one in front so I could fight both the guys attacking me at the same time. I managed to stagger the guy in front with a bash from Death Metal, but the one behind me hit me with a barrage of punches. I spun around and went at him.

  These guys weren’t going down anywhere near as fast as the ferals. After a minute, the speed boost from Rali wore off.

  A fist nailed me in the side of the neck. Sparks flashed and my vision went dark.

  Rali appeared from basically nowhere, ducking under a volley of punches from the bruiser who’d stunned me, but not countering them. He slapped me on the shoulder, hitting me with another boost just in time. My vision sharpened and our opponents seemed to slow down to slow-motion again.

  In front of me, the bruiser I had staggered was pulling back what looked like the slowest haymaker in history. I shot inside his reach and jumped into a huge kick-elbow combo armed with Death Metal. The guy was still falling when I hit the dirt and shot toward the puncher chasing after Rali.

  A beam of green light sizzled through the air at Rali’s back. The techie guy had managed to get a shot past Kest.

  I darted in behind Rali, bracing both shields one behind the other and pumping tons of Spirit into them. The beam tore through the first shield like a can opener. That took some of the sting off the attack, but even at half-force, it penetrated the second shield. It felt like a hole saw drilled through my collarbone, and I stumbled back a step, bumping into someone.

  I assumed I’d bumped into Rali’s back until huge roided-out arms grabbed me around the throat and chest and squeezed like a python. Spots danced in front of my eyes, and I could actually feel my heart struggling to beat. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Duck your head, Hake!” Kest yelled.

  I tried to turtle down into the roid-rager’s arm as far as I could.

  Chain links jangled, then the arms jerked me backward. The rager slammed into the wall of the fight cage, gagging. His grip loosened just enough that I could breathe. I jacked a reinforced elbow back into the rager’s solar plexus. He dropped me.

  Across the cage, Kest jerked the chain free of her gauntlet, leaving the rager shackled by the throat to the cage wire. Behind her, the techie guy was tangled in ropes of rolling silver.

  I jumped up and KO’d the rager. Kest threw out her hand, shooting a weighted chain at the bruiser trying desperately to attack her brother. This chain came loose on its own, flying like a bolas, and tripped the gangster up.

  Nearby, the guy I’d knocked down first was taking another run at me. I threw out a blast of concentrated Dead Reckoning. The second his fist touched the edge of the Miasma, my muscles reacted, nailing him with a reinforced elbow-backfist-elbow set. He stuck both hands up, but they were a weaksauce last-ditch effort. The backfist crashed right through it into his temple, knocking his head to the side and leaving him open for that big second elbow. When it landed, his eyes rolled up, and he dropped like his bones had drained out his feet.

  “Match!” the official yelled, running into the cage. “Hungry Ghosts!”

  I relaxed my high guard and looked around. Rali was leaning on his walking stick, grinning, while Kest stood over the guy she’d covered from ankle to shoulder in that rolling silver rope.

  There was some clapping and whistling from the crowd as the official had us bow to the Shoguns. It wasn’t the championship match they’d come to see, but as long as they were there, they might as well cheer.

  Beside me, Kest unwound her chains and pulled her rolling silver ropes back into her cinnabar gauntlet.

  “So, I’m guessing you didn’t hear anything I said about letting me be the obstacle they trip over and you running cleanup?” she asked.

  I grimaced. “Sorry. My brain wasn’t in the game. It is now, though. What’s your plan for the next match?”

  Because so few small gangs had entered the riot bracket, the loser of the next round would be in third place, and the round after that would decide the overall winner.

  Our second fight went by in a blur.

  Kest led with her bolas attack, knocking one guy out of the fight right away and tangling up their support guy after he’d only boosted one fighter, a shark lady with a huge ring through her dorsal fin.

  While Rali bounced around the cage, laughingly drawing the shark’s attacks, Kest went invisible with the hairpin array. I KO’d their tangled support guy, then went after their other two fighters. I didn’t see what happened, but I saw the shark hit the ground a step away from Rali. Kest must’ve gotten her. One of the fighters I was shield bashing peeled off me to take a run at Rali, assuming it was the heavy guy with the stick who’d taken out the shark. I staggered his buddy, then hit the runner with a roundhouse to the back of the head that Warcry would’ve been jealous of. The guy whipped around and dropped to the dirt, unconscious.

  Then all of a sudden, Kest, Rali, and I were standing in the cage, facing down our opponents for the riot championship. A bulky slug dude, a cat lady with a pair of sabers, an eight-foot-tall greenish humanoid with ridiculously long arms...

  ...and the Ylef with the glass hammers who was supposed to be fighting for the individual championship that afternoon.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said, flashing me a toothy grin.

  Cornered

  “THERE’S SUPPOSED TO be five of them,” Kest hissed, just loud enough for me and Rali to hear. “It said so in the bracket. Quintuple Threat, five members.”

  “Does that matter right now?” I bowed to the Ylef’s gang like the official instructed.

  “They registered with a support fighter,” she insisted.

  “Invisible maybe?” Rali suggested, searching the cage.

  Kest’s brows crinkled together. “The rules require participating members to be visible at the beginning of each match. If you pop visible later, your team’s dis—”

  “Fight!” the official bellowed.

  Quintuple Threat charged across the cage toward us, heads down and ready to kill. Rali tagged me with a Spirit boost. I took off and pumped a huge amount of Spirit into a longer-range Dead Reckoning, expecting the Ylef to lay me out in a few seconds like he had the day before.

  Except he wasn’t moving as fast as he had in the individual fights. Kest shot a bolas at his legs. He hopped over the spinning chains, but just barely.

  Maybe he was running low on Spirit. Or maybe he was tired. But his gang had gotten the most recent bye; in theory, he should’ve been rested up and ready to go all out.

  The second he hit the edge of Dead Reckoning, I knew something was wrong. The Ylef still looked out of hammer-range, but Dead Reckoning made me duck anyway. Something invisible whiffed past my ear.

  Instead of sending a counterattack at his unprotected jaw, the Miasma screamed at me to punch straight through his raised hammer and nail him in the chest just below the hollow of his throat, in that hard mass of bones where clavicles and sternum and everything comes together like armor.

  Forcing that crap out of my head, I aimed a distracting jab at his face and stomped down at the side of his knee with a shovel kick.

  My foot sliced through empty air, but my jab bumped something. Not head. There was no resistance at all, and it made a hollow knocking sound.

  A bowler hat appeared out of nowhere and rolled across the dirt floor.

  “Crap! Guys, it’s the—”

  A ghost ape exploded out of nowhere and caught me in the windpipe. The blow ripped me off the ground and threw me into the cage’s wire wall. I bounced off and hit the ground.

  My throat felt like it’d been caved in. I couldn’t yell, and the panic kept me scrabbling at my neck, trying to br
eathe while the ghost ape charged me.

  In the half-second before the ape got to me, I saw the cat lady on the other side of the cage. She leapt at Kest, sabers catching the light. Kest turned sideways and threw out her hand, the cinnabar in her gauntlet melting together to form a braided rope of rolling silver.

  The sabers never touched Kest. The metal ropes bound the cat lady’s legs and arms as she tumbled past.

  But something was wrong. Kest staggered a step, then turned. She was holding the place where her left arm had been. Black Selken blood geysered out of the ragged stump.

  “Kest?!” Rali stopped where he was, eyes wide and white with horror.

  The slug and the jolly green giant both hit him at once, pummeling him with huge kicks and Spirit attacks.

  I tried to get up, but the ghost ape’s huge fist came down on the forearm with my OSS tattoo, pinning me to the dirt. The script-rebounding bracer Kest had made snapped under the impact.

  The whole world disappeared as agony tore through my body, ripping my cells apart and setting my organs on fire. My teeth chattered and snapped, and my muscles contracted like I was taking a ride on an electric chair.

  When it finally stopped, the thing that was supposed to be the Ylef was standing over me, face stretched into a wide grin.

  “Ready to pay, Smart Boy?”

  “Bailiff—” I tried to rip my arm out from under the ghost ape’s fist, but couldn’t budge it. “How—”

  The image of the Ylef disappeared. In his place, the Bailiff stood holding up a necklace glinting with a Celestial disguise array in one webbed hand and a script remote in the other.

  “A fancy little trinket from the OSS collection, and a reminder from the Shogun that nobody beats the house.”

  He sent another flood of Spirit into the script on the remote, and I got lost in that endless hell again.

  Somewhere, way out past the edge of the pain, I heard yelling and fighting.

  The pain disappeared, and a hand grabbed me and jerked me to my feet.