Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (knowledgeable books to read .txt) 📗

forearm. “Cut them off or something?”

“Script sinks into the bone,” Warcry said. “You’d need a script artisan or someone with Ink Spirit to get it out. Tattoo artist maybe even.”

“I’m guessing there aren’t any of those down in the Shut-Ins,” I said.

Rali wiggled his eyebrows. “Not living ones...”

“What we need is a cloaking device,” Kest said, frowning as she reasoned through it. “Something that interferes with the signals the script sends to the monitoring HUDs. I have something I’ve been working on for the bazaar. Sort of a script-strength multiplier. If I modified the build to nullify the signals instead of intensify them...”

“Right, that stuff that we all understand,” I said.

She blinked. “You don’t have to understand it, you just have to agree to be my test subject.”

“I’m in,” I said. “Make me invisible.”

Kest looked at Warcry.

“Yeah, go at it, then,” he said.

“It’s going to take some time,” she said.

“Time well spent,” Rali said. He clapped his hands together, then held them open like a basketball player asking for the pass. “Toss me your pick. I’ll take your spot.”

With Kest out in the main cavern working on the cloaking device, our progress slowed down. Rali was a big guy and obviously strong, but he wasn’t breaking off chunks as large as his sister had been with every swing.

After about an hour, he yelled down the tunnel to her, “Were you using something besides Ki abilities to speed this up?”

“Are you striking along the breakage planes?” she called back.

Rali looked at me. I shrugged.

He flicked sweaty hair out of his face. “What’s a breakage plane?”

“The place where the rock is naturally weakest.” Her voice grew closer as she came down the tunnel toward us. “I’ll show you in a second. One of you give me your arm.”

“I went last time,” I said to Warcry. “It’s your turn.”

Warcry sighed, but he sat down the sledgehammer and stuck out his arm.

Just like she’d done three times over the last hour, Kest snapped the wide metal bracer she’d been working on around his OSS tattoo and activated the artificery with a little Metal Spirit.

This time, though, Warcry didn’t spasm uncontrollably. His eyebrows shot up, and he looked at Kest.

“That doesn’t hurt,” he said.

“Don’t get your hopes up yet.” She pulled up her HUD to check the tracking map. “It still might not...”

The lace in her eyes thickened, and she bounced up and down, squeaking a little. It was pretty cute.

“You did it?” I let the stake drop with a clang and hopped up.

Warcry grabbed her HUD wrist and checked the map for himself.

“My signal’s not showing up,” he said. “Just yours.”

“Okay, so the infinite loop rebound is what we’re going for,” she said, putting the storage ring to her forehead and taking out some more scrap metal. “Good to know. Give me ten minutes and I’ll have one for you, Hake.”

It took longer than ten minutes—closer to another hour—because she was building the second bracer completely from scratch. Warcry and I switched holding the stake a few more times, and we had to stop long enough to clear rock from under our feet again, but eventually, Kest looked up from her work.

“Hake, give me your tattoo.”

“One sec.” I finished cracking off the chunk of rock we’d been working on, then went over to where she was sitting.

Attaching the bracer was close work. Kest had to wrap her arm around mine and almost lean into my side while she did it. I was sweaty and nasty, but if she was grossed out at having to touch me, she didn’t act like it. She was really zeroed in on what she was doing, though. I pretended like I didn’t notice all the contact, either.

Finally, she activated the artificery. I braced myself. Nothing happened.

“No jittering or sparks,” I said.

Kest checked her HUD, then turned her wrist over so I could see the empty map.

“Grady Hake, I pronounce you hidden from the OSS,” she said.

“You rock,” I said.

Black lace trickled down into her cheeks. She swiped some hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear.

“You might change your mind about that when I cut you to test whether the healing script is still working or if it’s going to get stuck in the activation stage and drain all your Spirit.”

“That’s likely?” Warcry snapped. “I’ve been getting skinned alive over here by this grav’s idea of aiming—”

“Has your healing script activated since you put on the bracer?” Kest asked.

“Only about a dozen times.”

“And it shut off on its own each time?” She checked his profile on the Spirit rankings. “Your Spirit reserve doesn’t seem to be dropping at a significant rate. Are these numbers normal or were they a lot higher before?”

He checked. “Normal.”

“Then it’s functioning properly. Probably because it doesn’t have to send a signal to an outside location to heal; it’s all in-body. Hake, pull up your reserve.”

She stabbed me in the hand with one of her pointy weights, and when my Spirit stayed steady, she pronounced my bracer functional, too.

“Good deal,” she said. “Going into a fighting tournament without healing script would’ve really put you guys at a disadvantage.”

Sudden Death

ACCORDING TO OUR HUDS, it took a whole day and another night before we finally broke through into the next shut-in. By then, we’d run out of food Rali could fortify for us, and we were all sore, hungry, and tired, but the second we saw blue sunrise through the cracks, the four of us started working for all we were worth. In ten minutes, we had a hole big enough to crawl through, and a couple bruises and scrapes from not being careful enough.

No angels of death rushed in to murder us with enormous scythes, so we stepped out into the dawning daylight next to a wide blue-green creek.

I sucked down a lungful of air. Out here, it felt like I could breathe better. I’d never thought of myself as claustrophobic before, but something about being in that tunnel under all