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

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 breathe 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.

“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