I looked around for Kest, but she must’ve had the hairpin invisibility array on.
“I’m going to take out the ferals underneath,” I told her. “Can you watch my back for a minute?”
“You got it.” The water in front of me stirred as she passed.
“Thanks.”
I grabbed onto the life point of a feral grasping at Warcry’s ankles and tore it out. The oiliness left a bad taste in my mouth, but I ignored that and used the rush of strength to split Dead Man’s Hand in two and catch the other life points below Warcry, ripping both out at once.
As soon as their hold on him let go, Warcry jumped into action, hurling burning kicks at the rotting monsters attacking him aboveground. Feral heads exploded in showers of decomposing brains and skull. Rali backed out of the spray, spitting like he’d gotten some in his mouth.
Inside, my Spirit sea crashed and surged like crazy. Those life points were way more potent than any of the Miasma I’d absorbed from graveyards or ossuaries or Hungry Ghost. This was like a burning semi full of TNT and fireworks running ninety toward a brick wall. I felt like I could blow up the whole universe.
And puke. That oozing, rotten sheen from the life points coated my Spirit sea, making me sick to my stomach.
I shoved that feeling to the back of my brain for dealing with later when we weren’t being attacked.
More hands surged up from below, but with Dead Man’s Hand overcharged like that, I was able to tear out life points two and three at a time before they grabbed us. Kest’s invisible chain gauntlet picked off the ferals coming at me, and Warcry took care of the ones surrounding him and Rali, turning their heads into explosions of corpse juice and teeth.
For some reason, Rali wasn’t fighting anymore. He stood back, watching me with an unreadable expression on his face.
A feral with nothing but ragged arm bones sticking out of its shoulders lunged at him from behind. Rali twisted sideways, letting the thing trip past him. I snatched the feral’s life point and ripped it out. The feral dropped dead into the water.
Warcry and Kest dropped the last two aboveground ferals. No more jumped up from below, but I checked with a superpowered blast of Dead Reckoning just to make sure.
“That’s it,” I said. My lungs were heaving from exertion and adrenaline, even though I’d basically been standing still for most of that fight. If it hadn’t been raining, I probably would’ve been soaked with sweat.
Warcry jerked his chin at me. “You take out those ferals underneath?”
I nodded.
“Savage,” he said approvingly.
Rali was still staring at me all weird, but when he took a breath to say something, Kest interrupted.
“We need to get to dry land,” she said, turning visible again as she picked a couple hairpins out of her messy buns and stuck them in the storage ring. The rest of the pins she left in for speed of triggering the invisibility array. “Somewhere more defensible. Ferals are attracted to Spirit, so there’ll be more of them coming.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Rali exhaled and put his walking stick across his shoulders. “First things first.”
Corpse Fire
GETTING TO DRY LAND was easier said than done. We ended up running into two more bands of bog ferals, both smaller than the first, but just as fast. It wasn’t until after we were well away from the second band that I realized we should’ve been looting them as we went. I didn’t know if we would need credits at Dragon Heartchamber 2, but after a few days in Jade City, my Universal Savings and Loan account was tapped out.
As the night sun hit its apex behind the rain clouds, we came to a bayou of cypress-like trees. The black water there was up to our chests, and there was no telling what lurked down in the dark shadows of the fingered root systems.
My stomach was pitching and rolling like it wanted to barf up all the oily nast from the ferals’ rotten life points, and on top of that, I was wiped out. Those life point surges were crazy powerful, but they didn’t last long, and they came with a big fat crash the second they wore off. I needed to find someplace dry to sleep or I was going to collapse facedown in the water and drown.
“What about making camp up there tonight?” I asked, pointing up at the trees. “Might not be comfortable, but at least we’ll be out of the water.”
Kest frowned down at her HUD. “But we’ve only covered about a quarter of the land between us and Heartchamber 2. We don’t know what the terrain’s like ahead. This could’ve been the easy part.”
“All the more reason to get some rest and recover now,” Rali said.
“I’m done in,” Warcry said. “You do what you like, stumpy. I’m stoppin’ here.”
With a burst of Ki to strengthen his legs, Warcry jumped out of the water. I threw up an arm to block the spray from my face. Even with the extra Spirit, he just barely managed to grab hold of the branch he’d been aiming for. Warcry looked shocked that he hadn’t been able to do better than that, but he pulled himself up onto the branch and slumped against the trunk without saying anything else.
“Isn’t anyone flushing the waste chemicals from their system?” Kest asked in disbelief.
Rali shot his sister a look. “You know we are. This is a lot more strenuous terrain than our internal alchemy is used to. Even mine would appreciate some rest, and I know you’re exhausted, too. Metal’s not the unrelenting element, no matter how much you like to pretend it is. Besides, Hake needs to stop and purge the soul contamination from his system or he’s going to have bigger trouble.”
“Soul contamination?” I asked.
“From the bog ferals,” he said. “They’re sort of between living and dead, kept
