Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (best books to read .TXT) 📕

I was in a pretty bad mood considering I hadn’t had anything but a ball of sugar and flour to eat in the last day, but luckily, Warcry cut in before I could mouth off.

“Why are we training at the cracked end of dawn anyway?” Warcry grumbled, rubbing at his eyes. “Does it really matter when a hooligan wakes up if all he’s doing is shaking down store owners and scaring off rival gangs?”

“No, I reckon it doesn’t matter at all when just any old hooligan wakes up,” the Bailiff said in that tone teachers use when they’re about to own some jerk for talking back.

Warcry missed the warning, though. “Could be doing something useful right now, like sleeping off me bleedin’ hangover or cultivating. You can train at any time of day.”

One of the Bailiff’s ghost hands shot out so fast that all I saw was a blur. Then Warcry was picking himself up off the ground, his head on fire and fists up.

The Bailiff’s ghost hand locked around his throat.

“You can train at any old time of day.” The Bailiff nodded. “That you can do. But your opponents in the Wilderness Territorial are going to be waking up with the blue sun and getting stronger every day, all day. And they would’ve dodged that same little love tap you just let through.”

Warcry’s face twisted into a snarl. When the ghost hand let him go, he wiped a smear of blood from his split lip.

“See, lad,” the Bailiff continued, “your opponents want a Big Five affiliation. Want it so bad it wakes them up from a sound sleep and gets them working harder every day. I was under the impression you wanted one, too, Mr. IFC Champ, but I must’ve been mistaken. That must’ve been somebody else who told me he was Big Five material.”

He gave Warcry an opening to shoot his mouth off again, but the redhead just stood there glaring, flames smoldering on his head and shoulders.

The Bailiff smirked. “I want a Big Five affiliation, brother. You better believe that. Of Smoke and Silk is a power out here in the Shut-Ins, but with an affiliation, we could be a power over the whole damn Wilderness Territory. Now, my theory is, if you aren’t moving up in the world, you’re falling down. I want to be moving this gang up, moving me up. And when I rise, you boys do, too. Oh, you’re welcome to stay no-account hooligans at the bottom rung of a little Wilderness gang. But why not step right up with me and take your place as combatants for a true power with connections all over the universe?”

Ripper, the shark guy from the fight the day before, snorted and scuffed his cowboy boots in the dirt.

“You tired of hearing yourself yap yet, Stroyd? We came to fight. Let’s quit burning daylight and get to it.”

A couple of the other guys laughed at that.

“Well put, as always, Ripper.” The Bailiff tipped his bowler hat to the shark. “While I orient these feisty little human things, how’s about you and the boys get started with some rioting? No mortal damage, if you please. Save it for the tournament.”

The shark nodded, and he and the other two aliens broke off and started a three-person rumble that didn’t look like they were trying to avoid killing each other. The first punch sounded like somebody smacking a bag of meat upside a brick wall, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if it’d taken the guy’s head off. But his head stayed attached, and he whaled on the dude who’d hit him. Ripper fought his way into the middle of them, and then things really got ugly.

The Bailiff stepped into my line of sight, blocking Warcry’s and my view and forcing us to pay attention to him.

“You boys put on a decent fight yesterday, just like I knew you would when I saw you. You might say I have a talent for spotting a good show in the making. ’Course,” he said to Warcry, “you’re in just awful shape for an IFC fighter, even if it was the Under-18 division. That match yesterday should’ve ended as soon as it started.” He pointed one ghost hand at me. “You shouldn’t have lasted one second, let alone the eleven it took for him to throw you off the Stand.”

Warcry spat off to the side. “He didn’t use Spirit.”

“Just because your opponent was handicapped, you figured you’d handicap yourself?” The Bailiff shook his head. “That’s loser talk. That’s five more years unaffiliated talk, and for it, you’ll do six rounds of my patented body-conditioning drill when we’re done here today. Best hope your skin toughening is in tip-top form, bucko.”

“I do a week-long blade forest and gravity well training every year,” Warcry sneered, crossing his arms.

“Think you can take a whack from one of these babies standing?” the Bailiff asked, whipping out that huge Mega-Bowie knife.

Warcry finally figured out that he should shut up.

“Then a week a year wasn’t enough.” The Bailiff looked at me. “Speaking of, we’re not going to be able to sharpen our hooligan pal here on your unprotected hide, Smart Boy.” He pulled one webbed gray hand out of his pocket and checked his HUD. “Says here you’ve hardly got enough Spirit to pinch a flea. That just won’t do at all. Out of the kindness of my dratted soft heart, I’ll lend you a Spirit stone. But I expect to have the balance back in full tonight on top of your quota.”

“And your ten percent,” I said.

He typed something on his screen. “Fifteen percent now. Muta’i’s adding on the attitude tax as we speak.” The Bailiff chuckled and grinned from me to Warcry. “You boys sure are a high-steppin’ pair, aren’t you? Let’s see if we can’t work some of that off.”

He made Warcry do some exercises that looked like tai chi, then he turned to me and took out a porous piece of white stone a