Mentally, I connected with Hungry Ghost. Show me that Mass Grave ability.
Death cultivator is not advanced enough. Hungry Ghost must perform Mass Grave with Death cultivator’s body.
You’ve made your choice, Shogun Araddon hissed inside my head. Enjoy the show.
Outside, I heard the Contrails’ Shogun yell, “Kill them all!”
Time sped back up, but to five times faster than normal speed.
In a heartbeat, the beetles’ blindness attacks hit Rali and Yoki, the glaive shot through their backs, pinning them together. Explosions jetted toward them like missiles. A few yards from them, the ring sword fell. Warcry rolled out of the way, but not fast enough. The edge of the heavy blade clipped him in the shoulder, and his burning arm went limp. While the winged alien wrenched his blade out of the dirt, electricity crackled. The bird guy with the bleeding leg-stump hit Warcry with a double fist of that electrical Spirit. Warcry writhed in agony, screaming through gritted teeth. The winged alien swung his dirt-crusted ring sword at Warcry’s throat, ready to finish the executioner moth had started.
Do it! I yelled at Hungry Ghost. Use me. Kill every Contrail in this building, just save my friends!
Gladly.
Hungry Ghost sank into my palm, and the Heartchamber disappeared.
Mass Grave
MY REIGN AS KHAN OVER the World was solidified on the banks of a river in a lush valley. I stood on a long wooden execution platform built at the edge of a river. Hundreds of tribes had gathered to acquiesce to my rule and place themselves under my protection. The women and treasures they had brought me as tributes awaited my inspection at the fringes of the multitude.
First, I had to deal with the dozens of tribes who had come outfitted for war. Their captured khans knelt in front of me on the platform, their warriors arrayed around it in ropes and chains.
They could see their fate in my face, in the way strong men from countless battles bent their knee and bowed their head to me in respect and fear. Stories had spread of entire armies left to rot, of a young man barely entering his prime, with the power to empty the planet of life at a whim. They had known my strength before their khans went to war with me, and now they were paying the toll for their khans’ foolish error.
With Mass Grave, I stretched a wave of Miasma across the river valley, taking hold of every life in the immediate area of the platform, and crushed them. Khans twice my age fell dead at my feet. Scores of warriors and their camp followers crumpled to the ground. Some few among them had cultivated to a high enough level to resist Mass Grave, but I ground down their resistance with Moldering Bones and ended them.
As the dead fell in a wave around the platform, onlookers from the allied tribes scuttled back from the corpses as if afraid I would mistake them for one of the willful tribes that had tried to oppose me. Or perhaps afraid that I would kill them just because I could. Their lives were nothing to me but power, after all.
A cold smile stretched across my features as my living subjects dropped to their knees in worship.
The end of my reign was far less impressive. It came decades later, not at the hands of a scheming chieftain or even one of my left-behind bastards, but from one of the sons I’d raised in my own household.
I had kept him because he’d been divined to have a Mortal affinity like mine. I thought I’d instilled loyalty in him by keeping his mother and treating her lavishly, but the ambitious bitch turned him against me while I wasn’t looking, whispering poison in his ear about taking my place as Khan Over the World—power, riches, glory. Not even the whelp himself knew whether he truly wanted that, but his scheming mother sure as the day suns did.
So he determined in his heart to take it all from me for her. Not attacking me alone in his unprotected youth, as a true son and inheritor of my will should, but backed by the strength of adulthood and purchased alliances like a coward.
They came for me while I slept, a Soother and a builder of Spirit apparatuses among them, both salivating over the gold that lay on the other side of their tasks. The Soother sang an occluding melody into my mind, so that even when I heard the women slip out from beneath the silks and furs pooling around us, I couldn’t wrench myself from the dream.
The disloyal whelp crept to my bed, the Spirit builder’s special dagger gleaming in his fist, and without even the spine to turn me over and look his victim in the face, he plunged the blade into my heart through my back.
A force grabbed hold of my Spirit sea, seeking to steal the hoarded power from my very soul.
I bolted upright, roaring in fury and lashing out at the souls closest. In a flash of Mass Grave, the Soother, the Spirit apparatus builder, my whelp’s hired mercenaries, everyone in my encampment died.
Everyone save two—my son and myself.
My soul was coming unmoored from my body, compressing, becoming something hard and small and confined.
I fought through the force trying to steal away my power and grabbed the whelp’s soul in a fist of raging Miasma. He tried to tear the dagger out of my back, but I grabbed his arm and throat, digging my fingers into the cowardly flesh. My glare burned through his eyes, and I saw in them the realization that he had failed. I saw his terror and regret and defeat. It was sweeter than any death I could serve him, and when he pissed himself and began to wail in terror, I screamed with laughter.
My last act before the dagger crushed my soul down into a grinning turquoise cage was to smash the whelp’s
