Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  “I bleedin’ told you the Bailiff would pull something like this,” Warcry snarled, stomping on the script remote. It crunched under his bootheel. “I can take the Martial Devil, but you’re going to have to get that piece of cove trash it’s attached to.”

  “Warcry?” I blinked hard, trying to focus. “What are you doing here?”

  “Saving your arse, ain’t I?”

  He sprinted off.

  Either the crowd was screaming, or my ears were ringing. I shook my head to clear out the noise. What happened?

  Warcry and the ghost ape were beating the crap out of each other. The official was jammed against the door, dead, a gaping hole in his throat. Kokugikon staffers were yelling and trying to shove the door open past his corpse, but he was a heavy dude.

  The green giant flew past me, long arms and legs flapping like streamers, and slammed into the cage wall. I looked back the direction he’d come from.

  Rali was down in a wide fighting stance with one hand out and his walking stick cocked back. If not for his raggedy shorts and long surfer hair, he would’ve looked like one of those Shaolin monks straight out of a kung fu movie.

  As I watched, the slug guy threw a Spirit attack at his back. Rali slipped it with a twist of his shoulders, then spun and slammed an open palm into the slug’s chest. Brilliant orange Warm Heart Spirit flashed, and the slug flew backward into the opposite cage wall. Slime sprayed through the wire.

  I didn’t see Kest, but her black Selken blood was everywhere.

  Movement off to the side caught my attention. Where the cat lady had been tied up, Ripper was fighting to get free of that braided silver cord, black blood and shredded bits of lacy flesh still stuck in his shark teeth.

  Kest’s severed arm lay on the ground by his head, black lacy patterns rolling up and down it like a distress signal.

  Cold hatred washed through me. I started toward Ripper, pulling in as much Spirit from Hungry Ghost as I could hold. With a thought, I sent Dead Man’s Hand stabbing into the shark’s chest, searching for his life point.

  His eyes bugged out.

  “Oi, grav!” Warcry ducked under a massive swing from the ghost ape. “The Bailiff’s that way!”

  I ignored him and clamped Dead Man’s Hand around the blue candle flickering inside the shark.

  “Where’s Kest?” I demanded.

  Ripper didn’t answer me. I ratcheted up the pressure, and he howled.

  “Hake, stop!” Rali yelled.

  Across the cage, he stomped one foot forward, then shoved a hand toward me. Warm Heart Spirit slammed me flat on my back to the ground. The air woofed out of my lungs. Dead Man’s Hand dropped, and I heard Ripper sob with relief.

  A soft hand squeezed my shoulder. “I’m okay, Hake. I’m here.”

  Black blood dripped onto the dirt beside me.

  “Kest?”

  “The hairpins,” she said. “I’ve got Ripper. You help Warcry.”

  “Got it.” I flipped onto my stomach and pushed up.

  Warcry’s burning red flames streaked through the air at the gray ghost ape. With a roar, the ape tried to tackle the redhead down. On the opposite side of their battle, the Bailiff sent Air Spirit attacks flying at Warcry.

  One spinning ball of gray engulfed the redhead. Every kick immediately slowed to nothing, like he was trying to kick in a swimming pool full of cold sorghum.

  The ape went nuts, tearing into Warcry while he could hardly fight back. The Bailiff rocked on his heels, grinning with those yellowed brush teeth.

  I hit Hungry Ghost again, then sprinted toward them. Three Corpse Sickness exploded off me, barreling toward the Bailiff’s Martial Devil.

  Kill it, I thought.

  They crashed into the ghost ape and, almost like they could feel how serious I was, started whaling on it. They were doing legit damage. With every punch they landed, a fist-sized hole opened up in the gray image. They were erasing it, one strike at a time. The Martial Devil roared and spun around to fight my corpses, leaving Warcry alone.

  The Bailiff wasn’t laughing anymore.

  “Bailiff!” I yelled, raising my hand toward him so he would know it was me when he felt the Dead Man’s Hand.

  His life point was an easy find. A ton of what I’d cultivated had been transferred to the Bailiff over the past month, and my Death Spirit just traced what used to be mine through his channels. His life flickered like a cold gray fire at the back of his throat.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Rali move. A wall of Warm Heart Spirit shot toward me, but this time I ducked it.

  Dead Man’s Hand grabbed onto the Bailiff’s flickering gray flame.

  “Call them off!” I ordered him.

  Instead of panicking, the Bailiff let out a cackle and raised both of his huge ghost hands in surrender.

  “Hell and high water, Smart Boy, you could’ve been so useful to the OSS. Maybe even made Shogun someday.” His eyes glimmered as he pulled his webbed hands out of his pockets. One of them held a revolver. He pointed it at me and cocked back the hammer. “Well, we’ll never know now, will we?”

  Instinctively, I dropped Dead Man’s Hand and threw everything into my Death Metal shields, staggering them in front of me and praying they could stop bullets.

  He squeezed off all six shots.

  But instead of tearing through my shields, the bullets took a sudden corner.

  Kest reappeared and snatched them out of the air with her one remaining hand. Blue-white Metal Spirit crackled, then melted slag ran through her fingers.

  Warcry and I barreled at the Bailiff from opposite directions. Fiery kicks and punches blurred toward the Bailiff from one side and my turquoise Death Metal shields from the other, but he just laughed and dodged.

  “You damn fools,” he said in that cheerful voice. “Try all you want, I whooped your tailfeathers fair and—”

  Rali shot in out of nowhere and nailed him in the temple with his walking stick.

  The Bailiff’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he dropped.

  The kokugikon erupted. In the stands, people were going nuts. Seating cushions and food and drinks showered down on the cage, and I winced as something cold and carbonated splashed down my back.

  Kest listed over to her brother, looking crazy pale, and leaned on him. A metal band was clamped over the end of her stump to stop the bleeding. Rali handed her his walking stick, then grabbed a piece of pita bread off the dirt, dusted it off, and dropped into the lotus position to start infusing it with Healing Restoration.

  Next to me, Warcry yelled something I couldn’t make out and tried to launch a handful of something sticky and squiggly back through the wire at whoever had hit him with it. I stayed by the Bailiff, ready in case he got back up.

  “Silence!” an amplified voice boomed over everything.

  No one listened. The crowd was having a big time throwing and yelling and making a fuss. Fights broke out in the stands, and I wondered if that was what it was like at big city sporting events when celebrations turned into rioting.

  Sudden overwhelming pressure smashed me flat into the dirt. The strength behind it made Shogun Takiru’s pressure trick look like a joke. I thought my lungs were going to pop.

  From my spot on the floor of the cage, I could see the people in the stands flatten out like an inverted version of The Wave. Kest and Warcry dropped, too, and so did the staffers outside the cage. Rali was already sitting in meditation, so he wasn’t flattened, but he did set the food he was infusing aside and politely turn his attention to the Shogun box.

  The two-way glass in the Shoguns’ box slid away. Five figures in fancy tailored suits stepped into the light. The real attention-getter was a huge bipedal white tiger, but there was also a tall blond Ylef, a hunched guy wearing a dark hood, some kind of demonic-looking thing, and a shark with a scarred-up dorsal fin. The leaders of the Big Five.

  Silence filled the kokugikon.

  “Someone will be held responsible for this violation of tournament r
ules.” The amplified voice was coming from the Ylef at the center of the Shoguns.

  As he spoke, huge robots on treads rolled onto the arena floor, surrounding the fight cage. The blond Shogun’s eyes glowed bright blue, and his pale eyebrows lowered.

  “Peacemakers, execute everyone in the cage.”

  The Shoguns Speak and People Die

  THE ROBOTS ROLLED FORWARD. One shoved the pile of kokugikon staffers away from the door of the cage, then threw it open, knocking the dead official across the dirt floor. The rest of the robots started bending and folding like Transformers, their arms shifting into a rifle on the left and a buzz saw on the right.

  I tried to struggle, but the pressure was too much. I couldn’t move.

  Would Dead Man’s Hand work on robots? What if I tried to take that Ylef Shogun hostage like the Bailiff? Would he call off his execution order or would that make this worse? He would probably crush me like a bug, but if I didn’t do anything, my friends were going to die along with the OSS.

  I started to reach out with Miasma.

  Immediately, the pressure doubled. Something in my nose popped and blood poured down my lip into the dirt. Red droplets leaked out of my skin like sweat.

  Warcry let out a low growl, and I turned my face just enough to see that he was covered in blood-sweat, too.

  “Enough!” snarled the white tiger shogun, voice echoing through the kokugikon. “I intended to sign that one, Shogun Connor. If you kill him, the Eight-Legged Dragons will expect the Technol’s right to this year’s champion as reimbursement.”

  The Peacemaker robots froze.

  “Which one?” the Ylef Shogun—Shogun Connor—asked.

  “The human with the Burning Hatred Spirit.”

  “Fine. Take him with my apologies, Shogun Genkei.”

  Warcry sucked in a ragged breath and relaxed as if the pressure had suddenly disappeared. Red fire fwooshed along his head and shoulders.

  “It was these Of Smoke and Silk clowns,” Warcry snarled, pointing at the Bailiff. “An unaffiliated gang from Ghost Town, trying to settle a score with me lads. They’ve got that Ylef cove with the hammers and his crew trussed up on the roof, pinned with the other end of this array.” He grabbed Ripper’s broken necklace out of the dirt and held it up. “If you want to execute someone, do us a favor and kill every last one of the bleeders.”

  I shut my eyes. So much for not getting executed.

  A soft chuckle from my right got my attention. The Bailiff was conscious again.

  “If I may be so very insolent, mighty Shoguns—” That slick snake-oil salesman’s voice was just barely straining under the pressure. “—the OSS may have taken the place of the Quintuple Threat, but we did in fact win every riot this morning, including this last one here. This little ragtag outfit was disqualified the second their flaming pal broke into the cage and interfered with our fight. We’re your rightful riot bracket champs. That is, if the rules the wise Shoguns set forth still apply.”

  I wished I could punch that jerk in his brush teeth.

  “The Jianjiao will now speak,” said a hooded shogun, his quiet hiss ringing through the kokugikon.

  Shogun Connor nodded.

  The Jianjiao shogun tipped his hood down toward the cage. “Having seen the cunning required to complete this infiltration under the noses of the Technols’ highly advanced security, we choose to sign the winners of the small gang riot, Of Smoke and Silk. Henceforth they are under provisionary Jianjiao affiliation. Any attacks on them will be treated as hostile to our organization at large.”

  “Noted,” Shogun Connor said. “You raise a good point, Shogun Drako. This was a failure on the part of the kokugikon security team.” His eyes glowed again. “Peacemakers, restore the honor of the Technol organization. Execute all kokugikon staff.”

  The robots turned on the kokugikon staffers and opened fire. Bullets popped, and the noise of buzz saws rang down the hallways to the bathrooms and outside the arena floor, too. There were a few screams, but those cut off in wet gurgles.

  And there was a worse sound, too. Cheering. Laughing. Appreciative whistles. A few people even started chanting, “Tech-NOLS! Tech-NOLS! Tech-NOLS!”

  This was a million kinds of wrong and evil. I tried to pump tons of Miasma into my muscles, but it felt like a fist clamped down on my Spirit sea. Sweat and blood trickled out of my pores and onto the dirt floor of the cage as I tried to force my Spirit through whatever was holding it.

  When the shooting stopped and the saws ran down, I gave up. I went boneless and let my forehead drop to the cage floor. Every puff of air sent dirt skittering away from my nose and mouth.

  Security staffers were littered across the arena floor in pools of blood. In the corner, registration people slumped over their table and lay tangled in the chairs they’d tried to get out of when the slaughter started. The dude who’d been checking dragonfly cameras was flat on his back staring up at the lights. The face of the lady with the glasses who’d stopped me and Warcry the day before flashed through my head. They were all dead, murdered for something that wasn’t their fault.

  “Peacemakers, shift this mess,” Shogun Connor said. “Tier-eleven Technols report for work draft to your daimyo. We’ve got a championship match in this arena in two hours.”

  Just like that the pressure pinning me in place disappeared. I got up and ran to Kest and Rali.

  “I’m fine,” she said before I could say anything. “The bleeding was the biggest problem, and I got it stopped.”

  The Bailiff, Ripper, and the other two OSS hooligans, now with their array necklaces off, limped past us toward the cage door.

  The Bailiff sent me a wink. “We’ll be seeing you, Smart Boy.”

  I scowled and tried to reach for some Miasma, but that fist was still clamped down tight on my Spirit sea.

  Across the arena floor, I saw the catfish guy from the subway ossuary leaning against the wall at the mouth of the hallway. When he caught my eye, he nodded.

  “Who’s that?” Warcry snarled beside me.

  “I don’t know, but I need to talk to him,” I said. “There’s something going on here.”

  “He’s cloaking his Spirit,” Kest said. “That means he’s dangerous.”

  Rali frowned. “I’d go with you, but Kest—”

  “Yeah, no, you need to get her to a doctor or surgeon or something.” I looked from the metal band clamping Kest’s stump to the severed arm across the cage and cussed. “I’m sorry, Kest. If I’d listened when you said something was wrong with their gang—”

  “There’s nothing you could’ve done,” Kest said. “Two seconds wasn’t enough warning.”

  “We knew the risks when we walked into this,” Rali said. “We’re in this together.” He glanced at Warcry. “Burning Hatred cultivator who came to our rescue included.”

  “Bleedin’ netskins,” Warcry growled, jamming his fists in his pockets. “Shove off, fatso, and take your sister with you. I’ll stick with the grav and make sure he don’t get himself killed.”

  The four of us split up, Rali and Kest picking up her severed arm and heading for the exit. Warcry and I limped out of the cage, around the Peacemakers cleaning up the corpses.

  The catfish was hanging out in the shadows of the hallway, waiting for us.

  “Are you the one blocking my Spirit?” I asked before he could say anything.

  He nodded.

  “I told you to keep your head and not kill anybody. But—” He shrugged. “—I admit that gets complicated sometimes for Mortal supertypes. This was my backup plan. Are you going to do anything stupid if I let you go?”

  “No.” In the moment, Dead Man’s Hand always seemed like the only logical choice, but when I’d had a few seconds to step back and look at the situation, it was hard to believe I’d been ready to use it.

  The fist clamping down on my Spirit sea loosened, and I was able to cycle Miasma through my body again to rebalance my internal alchemy.

  “What’s your
game, fishman?” Warcry snapped. “We ain’t got all day.”

  “I’m a recruiter.” He tapped his sleek black HUD, and my Winchester buzzed with a notification. “My card.”

  I glanced down at the cracked screen. “Buddy Biggerstaff?”

  “Number six in the Eight-Legged Dragons’ Van Diemann branch,” Warcry said. He sounded like he was trying not to be impressed. “You’re the cove who form-rejected me.”

  “Don’t take it personally, Mr. Thompson. I don’t recruit anybody I haven’t seen fight with my own two eyes. After I saw you yesterday, I suggested that Shogun Genkei sign you.” He turned to me. “I also get one wild card each tournament, but we keep that out of the common knowledge. I suggested you, Mr. Hake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a Mortal affinity always comes in handy,” Biggerstaff said. “And you not only don’t have a criminal record, but there’s no record of you existing at all before a month ago. Anyone with half a brain ought to be able to turn that to their advantage. What do you say?”

  Warcry snorted. “You lot expect us to sign for nothing? What’re the Dragons ready to give us for affiliating with them?”

  “Dude.” I glared at him. “We’re not really in a position to negotiate here.”

  “You always negotiate.” He crossed his arms and scowled at Biggerstaff. “That’s rule one. This cove’s counting on you not to know that so he can get you cheap.”

  The catfish whiskers twitched. “Tell me what it is you’d like in return.”

  “Affiliation for my other two friends, the Selken twins,” I said.

  Biggerstaff checked something on his HUD.

  “I can offer to sign them, but the girl’s status is marked as pending by the Technols,” he said, swiping at the screen. He looked at me. “If she refuses the Technols, the Dragons won’t have a problem making a play for her. We focus primarily on physical strength, but we can always use a decent artificer.”

  “Okay, that’s all I—”

  “We both want room and board, too,” Warcry interrupted.

  Biggerstaff nodded. “That’s standard.”

  “And these off,” Warcry said, pointing out my OSS script tattoo.