Death Cultivator 2 by eden Hudson (books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📗

Rolling his eyes, Warcry paused the video, then enlarged the shot. Rali pulled the picture over to the scorched and tattered midriff of the angel’s robe. Straight across the middle, where a human would have a belly button, was a mass of silvery scar tissue.

“Something damaged her Spirit sea,” Rali said. “With that plus the Transferogate, I doubt she can retain any Spirit long enough to use it.”

The sound of the angel screaming when I hit that balancer with Sudden Death echoed in my ears.

“I grazed her with Sudden Death.” I thought back to the swamp and the Heavenly Contrails. “That hawk guy and his buddies! They said they were out hunting for Beauties versus Beasts. When they tried to kidnap Kest, they must’ve been taking her back to this place to be one of their fighters. They must’ve come across the angel of death after we ran them off, and she didn’t have her scythe or her Spirit to fight back.”

Beside me, Rali was nodding. “We couldn’t see her because she was using some sort of illusion or invisibility, but when the Heavenly Contrails found her, her Spirit sea was too damaged to hide.”

“You’re both barmy,” Warcry said, jerking his arm away and dropping back into the easy chair. “If your sister were here, she’d tell you so, too.”

“If Kest were here, she would say it’s possible,” Rali said.

He and Warcry started arguing, but my mind tuned them out.

The angel of death was being held captive by the Heavenly Contrails. If she won, she lived, if not... Hadn’t Warcry said something earlier about one of the chicks getting her face torn off?

This was what would’ve happened to Kest if we hadn’t managed to knock that space moth out of the sky and make him and the hawk guy drop her. She would’ve been the one cage-fighting dangerous creatures and other women to survive.

The angel’s dirty face and torn-up clothes ran through my head again. She’d obviously been there for a while. Maybe as long as we’d been in the Heartchamber. My sloppy shot at her balancer had destroyed or at least severely damaged her Spirit sea. She was as defenseless as I’d been when I first got dropped on Van Diemann, and sooner or later, she was going to get killed because of it.

“I’ve got to get her out of there.”

I didn’t realize I’d said anything until Warcry and Rali went dead silent and stared at me.

“I mean, this place is obviously bad,” I said, fumbling for the words to explain. “She can’t fight back without Spirit, so she can’t get out. And if they were going to take Kest and make her fight, then what other kind of evil crap are they doing to the women there? We’ve got to get them out.”

“Can you even hear yourself, grav?” Warcry sneered. “If this even is the angel who keeps trying to murder you, why the bleedin’ hell would you want to spring her?”

“Well... She’s probably not the only one trapped, right? Those Heavenly Contrail dicks we ran into in the swamp were hunting for girls they could kidnap and force into this. You said they have all kinds of women in these fights. Do any of them look, I don’t know, like, happy to be there?”

He scowled down at his HUD. “Ain’t watching it for their faces, am I?”

“Dude,” I said.

“Ah, piss off! I meant it’s about the fight! If they got a brutal technique, who cares if they’re smiling?” He pushed up out of the easy chair and started pacing. “Anyway, this ain’t about me, yeah? Say this gal is your angel of death. She’s trapped where she can’t come after you anymore, and that means you win.” He stabbed a finger at me. “It’s basic fight sense—you control the distance from your opponent, you control the fight.”

I shook my head. “It’s not about the fight.”

“What is it about?” Rali asked in a quiet voice. When I turned to look at him, he was staring at me like he was trying to CT scan the inside of my skull. “She wanted you dead and out of the way, right? Is that different from what that Nameless Ylef wanted?”

“Yes! Well, maybe not exactly...but...” I balled my hands into fists and jammed them down into my pockets. “You don’t get it. This is my fault. If she dies, it’s my fault.”

“Weren’t you going to kill her with the Sudden Death technique?” Rali asked. “Isn’t that why the chaos creatures gave it to you? To take out immortals?”

I took a long breath and tried to think through this without yelling. “Okay, so she’s an immortal. She has no Spirit right now and no way to escape. How many years does she stay trapped with these Heavenly Contrail a-holes, basically enslaved to fight whenever they want her to? That’s worse than insta-death, right? Even if it’s painful, death is at least quick. Here we’re talking endless slavery and who knows what else. That’s evil.”

Neither one of them said anything. They just stared at me.

They didn’t get why I had to do this. It wouldn’t wipe out me killing that Ylef, but maybe if I ever saw Gramps again, this would make it so I could at least look the old man in the eye.

“If you guys aren’t on board, whatever.” I shrugged. “I’m going either way.”

“Are you, yeah?” Warcry said. “To where exactly?”

I turned my Winchester’s cracked screen on and started searching the hyperweb for the Beauties versus Beasts broadcasting HQ. The only Van Diemann location they had listed was the alien equivalent of General Delivery.

“Crap,” I muttered.

Warcry nodded. “They ain’t daft enough to make it public knowledge. You gotta already have an in with the gang to get the location.”

“Biggerstaff might know,” Rali piped up.

Warcry threw up his hands. “Don’t tell me you’re sunk in this fantasy, too!”

“That’s not what I said. But that Heavenly Contrails Raptrian did say the Dragons and their gang