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

I tried not to grin at the fact that she was making excuses to stay out there.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said. “We’ll message you when we’re out.”

“I’m going to stick with her,” Rali said. “All this signing up for things and hoping to win is sort of against everything I’m about.”

That made me a little nervous. I wasn’t really sure where to go or what to do to register.

I looked at Warcry. “What about you?”

“I never miss a registration, grav. They’ll put you down as agreeing to all kinds of garbage if you don’t watch ’em—and that’s on law-abiding worlds. I wouldn’t trust Van Diemann as far as I can hurl this stinking planet.”

Inside, we hit a line of bruisers who all looked like they knew their way around a fight cage. You probably could’ve built an army out of the scar tissue alone.

“That’s our line,” Warcry said, striding toward the end of it. “The sign-up for the small gang riot’ll have more support players and specialists mixed in.”

He didn’t seem freaked out by how big most of these guys were, but it really started to settle in for me that I was not going to win this thing. I wasn’t even going to get close.

I shoved my fists down into my pockets. These guys might beat me—would almost a hundred percent definitely beat me—but I had to try my hardest to attract one of the Big Five’s attention. Rali and Kest were in this now because of me. They were counting on me.

Death cultivator could kill competitors easily, Hungry Ghost said, bumping against my hand in my pocket. Hungry Ghost can show Death cultivator the most powerful Mortal technique.

No thanks, I said. I don’t want to kill anybody.

With a flash of resentment, Hungry Ghost went silent again.

I looked at Warcry. “Did you really get sent here for burning down a motel?”

“Nah.” He smirked. “It was an orphanage.”

“Yeah, right.” I rolled my eyes. “What’d you do?”

“Murder. Robbery. Something that makes me look hard in front of all these class acts,” he said, sneering at the bruisers in the line on either side of us. “What about you? Panty-sniffing?”

“I got sent here by accident.”

“You know, grav, most people drop the innocent act once the trial’s over. No one’s going to believe you anyway, with Death affinity.” He crossed his arms and stared at the backs of the guys in front of us. “You murdered your whole family. That’s the kind of thing Death cultivators do. No wonder the angel of death was chasing you down. She probably wants to recruit you.”

“She wants to cover up her mistake,” I said. “She was supposed to take this druggie whose name sounded like mine. I saw the paperwork after she killed me.”

“If that’s true, then it’s some bollix luck.”

“Tell me about it.”

After we signed up for the individual competition, Warcry headed back to the hotel while I signed Kest, Rali, and myself up for the riot competition. I couldn’t think of a good gang name, so I put us down as the Hungry Ghosts.

Missed Connection at the Ossuary

ONCE ALL THE SIGNING up was done, I headed outside and found Kest at the outside edge of the bazaar. I wanted to ask her where Rali went, but she was busy talking to someone about her Portable Shield Wall. She had cut her old scavenging bag so it would lay flat and set out a bunch of her builds on it. People were filtering by and glancing over her stuff as they wandered through the unlicensed sellers. No one was as eager this far out of the legit bazaar, but a few of them were stopping to ask Kest about the goods.

Right after my mom OD’d, we’d had a garage sale of her stuff. Gramps didn’t want to do it, but we needed cash to pay for the funeral and hospital bills. My dad had said he could get the money, but Gramps didn’t want Dad doing anything stupid. Which he ended up doing anyway. But the point was, while Gramps and I were having this garage sale, he taught me a trick that draws in customers. One of you goes out and pretends to be looking at stuff like you might want to buy it. I thought it was dumb at first, but every time we did it, somebody would stop and see what we had that was so interesting.

Since Kest was busy talking, I squatted down by the corner of her display and studied a drill-gun-looking thing like I knew what it was. A few more people crowded around, looking over my shoulder, including this Ylef lady about a foot taller than me with a spikey mohawk and both arms covered in HUDs and metal stuff I couldn’t even begin to identify.

Mohawk Lady pointed a metal-clipped finger at the bracer covering my OSS tattoo.

“What kind of work is that?”

“Hers,” I said, nodding at Kest.

“Let me see it.”

I stood up and held out my arm. Mohawk Lady fingered the welds, then put half a pair of glasses on over her left eye and leaned in close, turning my arm over while she checked the bracer out.

By then, Kest was finished with her other customer, so I got her attention.

“You’ve got another interested party over here,” I said.

Mohawk Lady straightened up and looked at Kest. “This your build?”

Kest nodded. “It’s a modification on a script amplifier I was working on. I wanted to make something that would nullify script, but I didn’t have the right materials at the time. It’s kind of rough, but so far it appears to function without any unwanted glitches.”

“You do know it’s illegal on all the Confederated planets to create or sell location-cloaking tech?” Mohawk Lady asked, sticking a metal-plated hand on her hip.

She said it like a threat, which kind of ticked me off, but Kest didn’t seem to care.

“I didn’t sell it to him,” Kest said. “He’s my friend. It was a gift, which