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

“You want to street brawl with me, grav, you better bring a shiv.”

“Next time,” I gritted out.

I saw a flare of red flame, but before Warcry could kill me, the Bailiff had my whole torso squeezed in one giant ghost fist and Warcry in the other.

“If you boys have that much get-up-and-go left in you, then we’re quitting training way too early. Let’s see if we can’t work some of that off.”

So we trained through lunch until after dark. I didn’t get a chance to use Hungry Ghost, so I failed the quota, which meant I wasn’t eating, and I still had work I was supposed to do for Muta’i before I got off for the day.

I sorted grass while the minotaur made elixirs until the early hours of the morning. At first, I was just fuming, slapping useable grass down into the Keep pile and throwing the unusuable stuff into the fire, but after a while I calmed down and started thinking with a little clarity.

This whole thing was stupid. Stupid fights between friends could usually be fixed with stupid solutions. Not like crazy elaborate schemes, but the stuff you didn’t even bother to think up because there was no way it could be that simple. When Muta’i said I could quit for the night, I crossed the street to the saloon. Lucky for me, they never closed.

Gang War

I MADE IT TO THE TWINS’ little shack with only a couple hours left until the blue sun came up. In spite of the hour, the place smelled like welding, and blue-white light strobed in the shipping container. Kest was finishing a weld on a rectangular metal box, so she didn’t notice me right away.

When she let the blue-white arc die out and pushed her goggles up, she saw me and jumped.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to interrupt while you were working.”

She shrugged. You could tell she wanted to shove the box under the workbench and hide it, but maybe because she wanted to act cold and indifferent toward me, she pretended like she didn’t care and put it in her bench vise instead.

“Shouldn’t you be at the boneyard?” she asked, cranking the jaws tight.

I set the six pack of sweating cans I’d brought on the workbench. “Can’t get Coffee Drank at the boneyard.”

She glanced over at them, then picked a file off its hook and started filing down the welds on the box’s hinges.

“I don’t want your charity,” she said.

“Your brother said it’s not possible to give friends charity.”

She ignored me. That metallic rasping was crazy loud. I couldn’t believe Rali could sleep through it.

I stared at the filings she was scraping off while I tried to decide what I should say next.

“Sometimes when I’m not thinking, I can be a jerk,” I said.

The rasping stopped.

“I shouldn’t be, though, at least not to you and Rali. You guys are the only people who’ve been nice to me without expecting anything in return since I got here.” I looked down at my elbow, then scratched it like I’d found something there so I didn’t have to look at her. “Where I’m from, everybody but my Gramps thought I was basically the worst, so I’m not used to having friends. But I like hanging out with you guys and stuff.”

When I peeked over at Kest, she was frowning at me. I thought she was going to tell me to get lost.

Then she said, “Apek’s been closed for hours. Where did you get Coffee Drank?”

“The saloon sells them.”

She pulled a can out of the pack and held it out to me. “You won’t be able to sleep tonight if you drink it, though.”

I grinned. I was beat to crap, exhausted, and half-starved, but there was no way I’d be able to sleep tonight anyway. Not now.

“I’ll sleep next time I’m dead,” I said, taking the Coffee Drank.

Kest popped her can and took a sip.

She sighed. “You just can’t beat a Coffee Drank in a can.”

“So, you’re not looking to sleep tonight, either?” I asked as I opened mine.

“I want this done in time for the Wilderness Territorial,” she said, gesturing with her Coffee Drank at the box in the bench vise. “What are there, five days left?”

My eyebrows jumped up. “You’re going to the tournament? Is that, like, a weapon or something?”

“No, that’s a Spirit-dampening apparatus, but I do have a couple combat builds.” She pressed the storage ring to her forehead and started calling out items. “Portable Shield Wall, Rolling Silver Gauntlet, Shield Arm.”

A log chain of heavy metal balls dropped onto the bench, followed by a reddish chain gauntlet made of cinnabar, then a metal bracer.

“Big Five tournaments are a big deal, and not just for the combatants,” she said. “There are huge bazaars outside the tournament. Artificers from all over Van Diemann come to sell stuff and show off their builds. Some major manufacturing corporations actually have contacts there headhunting for their companies.”

I drank some coffee-flavored energy. “Does being a third-genner without a criminal record count as bonus points? Because it should.”

Instead of smiling, Kest took a deep breath and blew it out.

“I hope—”

A boom shook the shipping container, and I inhaled some Coffee Drank. Stuff rattled on the shelves and a couple tools shook off their hooks.

“What the crap was that?” I spluttered.

The lace in Kest’s eyes thinned out. “Stunner bomb.”

Being from a small town in rural Missouri, I’d heard plenty of people shooting guns before, but what I heard next sounded like everyone in Ghost Town had opened up at the same time, popping off rounds like they’d all gone psycho at once.

Kest jerked me down to the floor. She yelled something, but over the noise, all I caught was “rival gang.”

One of those old-fashioned air raid sirens started cranking somewhere.

Rali came crawling into the shipping container on his hands and knees.

“Kest, are you—Hake, when did you get here?”

Another strafe of gunshots popped off. Kest duck-walked over to the generator and killed it. Her