Rotting, muck-stained bodies leapt out of the water, arms wheeling as they grabbed at the bottom rung. The fingers of one feral curled into the chain, then snapped with a sickening crunch as the feral’s full weight fell on them.
The sudden jerk yanked Kest and me both off balance. I grabbed onto a nearby branch with my free arm, but Kest didn’t have another arm to stop her fall. She tumbled off the branch. I stretched after her, but she was already out of my reach.
“Machete!” she screamed at the storage ring the second before she hit the water.
Droplets geysered into my face from the splash. Bog ferals leapt on her like a shark frenzy.
“Crap!” I jumped after her, sending a tsunami of Miasma to my Death Metal shields. I landed behind a pair of ferals, killing one with a shield bash to the top of the skull and snapping the shoulder of the other.
Red and orange lights flared overhead, Warcry and Rali joining the fight.
Kest came up in the center of the ferals, spitting water and hacking with her homemade machete. The blade chopped through a shark feral’s rotting face, throwing muck and cracking teeth, then sliced through the sloughing neck of what used to be a slug alien.
I twisted my upper body, throwing all my weight into another shield bash to the feral whose shoulder I’d broken. Brains and rotten black bone shards flew as the thing’s skull caved in.
Rali jumped from root ball to root ball, tagging Warcry’s burning shoulder, then Kest’s arm as he passed. His Warm Heart Spirit flowed into them, mixing into the color of their Spirit and intensifying it.
“I’m caught, grav!” Warcry yelled.
“Just a sec!” I slammed into another bog feral that was going for Kest. The hit pitched it forward into the water, and she finished it off with her machete.
“Oi!”
“On it!” I yelled.
With a cold finger of Miasma, I reached out with Dead Man’s Hand, following Warcry’s Spirit seas down into the water. Decaying hands stuck up out of the bayou floor like some kind of weird body garden. Two ferals clutched at his ankles and twisted their fingers in the cuffs of his pants, while another one groped around Kest’s ankles for a hold.
One at a time, I went through the underground ferals and tore out their life points. Oily energy and power rushed into my Spirit sea.
Time slowed to a crawl, and everything around me came into sharp focus. I could sense the life points in every tree and plant and single-celled organism in the water. My friends’ lives glowed like the day suns, red Burning Hatred Spirit, orange Warm Heart Spirit, and blue-white Metal Spirit. Nearby, the brown life points of the last two bog ferals oozed nastily.
But there was something else, too. Something with a sparkly purple life point.
As if it felt me looking, it disappeared.
“Hake, duck!” Kest lunged toward me, machete swinging.
I held my breath and dropped into the water. Above the surface, I sensed the machete blade carving through the space where my throat had been, chopping open a feral skull. The rotting corpse’s oozing brown life point winked out of existence.
I popped back up and sucked in air. One bog feral to go.
A flare of pink light flashed overhead.
“Hold up!” a voice echoed through the swamp, and something crashed down through the canopy of leaves and branches. “Don’t kill it yet!”
A glowing pink Spirit net dropped onto Kest and the last bog feral. A corner of the net almost caught Warcry, too, but he threw himself backward and raked his burning hands through the dark water to get out of the way.
“Get that net off her!” Rali yelled, a ragged edge to his voice. He leapt off his perch on a root system and scooped frantically at the net with his walking stick. “It’s poisoned!”
Already, I could see that Kest was slowing down, her movements getting sluggish. She’d dropped the machete, her hand groping for it in the water, but moving too slow. The bog feral’s struggles were weakening, too.
“Easy, pal, easy!” A hawk-winged dude landed on a root ball nearby, both hands up. “It’s just a paralyzer! It wears off in no time, I swear to it!”
I shot out Dead Man’s Hand and grabbed the life point situated between his wings like a flickering pink torch. He let out a startled squawk.
“Let her go now or you’re dead,” I growled.
The glowing net disappeared. Clumsily, Kest looped her arm around Rali’s neck and went limp, like she was too weak to hold her head above the water. Right away, he started pumping Warm Heart Spirit into her, trying to counteract the poison.
Dead Man’s Hand squeezed tighter, cold fury building in my chest.
“Hey, hang on, pal!” the hawk guy screeched. “She’ll recover in a few minutes, I told you! We don’t want any trouble! We’re just out hunting ferals. I didn’t mean to catch the chickie in my net, it was an accident. It’s not a precision ability.”
Under the noise of him talking, the high-def hearing from the ferals’ life points had picked out a sound that didn’t belong.
Death cultivator should kill Birdman now before Birdman kills Death cultivator and friends, Hungry Ghost said.
“Shut up for a second.” I’d meant to say that in my head, but focusing on the intense amount of stimulus coming in from the life point boost and keeping straight what I was doing wasn’t easy. “Guys, listen.”
A whirring sound filled the swamp. It was an engine.
“We?” Warcry scowled at the hawk guy. “How bleedin’ many of you are there?”
Versus Heavenly Contrails
THE HAWK GUY POINTED a wing at the sky.
“Don’t try anything,” I said, giving Dead Man’s Hand a warning twitch.
He winced.
“I swear on my Spirit.” He put up his hands like I was holding a gun on him. “I’m just letting them know where I am so they can pick me and
