Kill Birdman quickly! Hungry Ghost raged.
He hasn’t done anything yet, I snapped. You can’t just kill someone because you think they might do something bad later.
The hawk guy shot a ball of pink light up through the trees like a rescue flare. The sound of the engine bent in a distant Doppler effect, making a sharp turn toward us.
Warcry put on a burst of Ki-speed, and in a flash he was standing on the root ball next to the hawk guy, a burning hand wrapped around the dude’s throat.
“Oi, bird bones, I asked you how many lads you got coming.”
“Four, that’s it.” The hawk guy squirmed in Warcry’s stranglehold. “We’re just hunting ferals for Beauties Versus Beasts. You know Beauties Versus Beasts, right? Ladies fighting monsters and each other? Surely one of you has seen our products before? You all look like Eight-Legged Dragon types. You’re headed for the Heartchamber, right?”
Warcry’s grip eased up. The hawk guy shook it off and massaged his throat.
“The Contrails don’t want any trouble with the Dragons,” he said. “We’re allies. Ever since the fifteenth Heavenly Contrail Emperor Sasha-ketsu made that trade agreement with the Eight-Legged Dragon Emperor during the war for the Trivalent System...”
The roar of the engine got louder every second.
Birdman jabbers to delay Death cultivator, Hungry Ghost croaked. While Birdman talks, Death cultivator and his friends wait for death.
You don’t know that!
A fan boat tore through the trees, engine screaming as it wove through the root systems. Blinding light exploded from the hawk guy’s fist and slammed into me.
Suddenly, I was glowing like a neon pink version of Earth’s sun.
The boat made a crazy sharp turn and shot straight at me. That dick had made me into a target.
But I couldn’t jump out of the way. Kest and Rali were right behind me, and there was no way they could move in time with her half-paralyzed.
“Get her out of the water!” I yelled to Rali, dropping Dead Man’s Hand and all my internal alchemy regulation so I could send every bit of Spirit in my sea to reinforcing my body. Necrotizing frost crackled down the surface of my arms and chest, but even with the boost from the ferals’ life points, I knew it probably wasn’t going to be enough to stop the fan boat’s forward momentum. This was about to hurt.
“Ya clown!” Red fire blazed, and Warcry splashed into the water beside me.
Right before the hull of the fan boat crashed into us, Warcry lunged forward and slammed burning forearms into the metal hull. I did the same a fraction of a second later.
Pain rang through my frozen arms and into my shoulders, but miraculously, the bones didn’t snap. The boat did a stoppie on the spot, back end coming up off the water before slapping down again. Two of the passengers flew overboard.
“I’ll take the boat, grav, you get the others!” Warcry grabbed the side of the hull and levered himself up into the boat, water sloshing and red flames of Burning Hatred raging. One of the passengers came at him with a glowing ice spear and the other with a boat hook.
The boost from the ferals’ life points dipped, already spent. I couldn’t afford to crash right then, so I inhaled a lungful of Miasma from the air, refilling my Spirit sea, then lashed out with Dead Man’s Hand and ripped the paralyzed feral’s life point out. Greasy, nauseating energy surged through my body, staving off the inevitable exhaustion for a few more minutes.
I swallowed the need to barf and scanned for the guys I was supposed to take out.
All over the place, dead ferals floated in the black water. Rali was pulling himself up onto a root ball with Kest’s paralyzed body thrown over his shoulder.
A couple dozen yards away, the Heavenly Contrails who’d been thrown out of the boat were splashing to their feet. The space moth didn’t look like he’d been hurt at all, but the bigger one, a winged dude with black and white markings like a killer whale, had one wing sticking out at a gross angle, obviously broken.
The bog ferals’ underwater ankle-trap flashed through my brain. I sent a huge wave of Miasma down into the muck, picturing zombified hands reaching up from underground. The hands missed the winged killer whale dude, but managed to grab the space moth by the ankle.
The space moth yelped and stumbled.
Death Grip, I thought.
The move was too new to be perfect, so it couldn’t immobilize the moth like the ferals had done with us, but it did slow him down to a struggle as he tried to fight his way out of the forest of Miasma hands.
With his attack delayed, I splashed toward the killer whale dude with the broken wing. He saw me coming and puffed up with gray Spirit, thick bodybuilder muscles appearing like smoke over his already huge frame.
It occurred to me as I ran how much cooler and more cinematic the movie version of a fight like this would’ve been—fast and explosive instead of slow and grueling. We would’ve been bouncing around the trees and throwing up dramatic showers of water instead of wasting all our energy just trying to get close enough to punch each other.
As soon as I was within arm’s reach, the killer whale threw a big haymaker. I ducked under it, coming up swinging an uppercut to his chin. My sneakers slipped a little in the mud, taking some of the sting off the shot, but it still rocked his head back. My opposite elbow sliced across at an angle and smashed into his cheek, the first in an Eight-Elbow set.
Instead of rotating with the blow, the killer whale guy turned his face into my shot and chomped down. Rows of sharp yellow teeth shredded my arm.
It was just habit to kept going, throwing shots and dodging his punches, expecting the OSS script tattoo to start burning as it healed the damage.
Except the burning never came. I
