A sick, dizzy feeling washed up from the pit of my guts. Half an hour ago, I’d been making out with Kest.
The Emperor leaned his hands on his desk. His reptilian stare burned icy holes in my face. I dropped my gaze to the wood grain on the desktop.
“Tell Takeshi, Grady Hake, are you Justice cultivator?”
“No.”
“How long ago are you seeing Sentenced to Death?”
“An hour,” I said. “Probably more.”
“Hour ago you are ignoring the Sentence. Half hour ago, shark family loses only child.”
My face burned. Breathing felt like trying to lift a ten-ton casket with your bare hands.
“Weight of responsibility is heavy, yes?” The Emperor came around his desk and stopped in front of me. “Takeshi knows this. Takeshi also knows the only way to lighten load is to fulfill your responsibility. You choose not to trust Takeshi’s judgment, so you do not prevent this death.” He grabbed me by the shoulders with both massive, clawed hands and pointed me toward the blue guy. “Now all is left is to avenge it.”
A tornado of guilt and anger and sickness were screaming around in my skull, wrecking up the place. This guy had murdered a little shark kid because I hadn’t stopped him. I’d had to choose between doing something that freaked me out and doing nothing, and like a coward, I’d picked the easy way out. A child was dead because of me.
I didn’t realize I was gritting my teeth until a muscle in my jaw started to twitch.
“Untie him,” I rasped.
Sentenced to Death
EMPEROR TAKESHI-KETSU raised a scaly brow ridge at me.
“I’m not killing someone who can’t defend himself,” I said. “Untie him. Sir.”
“Ah.” He nodded at his suited guard.
The guard sliced through the zip ties around the blue guy’s hands and ankles, then stood back.
The blue guy stumbled to his feet and ripped his gag out.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about with this dead shark pup stuff,” he claimed, rubbing his wrists. “I never saw this Ketsu before in my life! I don’t know anything about the Dragons or murder or anything!”
All my Spirit was stored in the door’s inlay, so I stuck my right hand out to my side, summoning the Lunar Scythe. It tore through the muscle of my arm and manifested in a huge gleaming black blade, the jet-black of the handle making the bones of my hand look brilliant white by comparison. My left side throbbed as the tangled Spirit rivers around the knife scars protested the sudden weight shift, but the pain just barely registered.
The blue guy’s eyes bugged out.
“Okay, I’m sorry, I skimmed a little off the top, but you have to believe me, I’d never kill a kid!” He raised his hands, backing up until he ran into the shelf lining the wall. “That ain’t me, I swear on my Spirit!”
He saw the blood on his hands at the same time I did.
I hefted the scythe in both hands. All the soft tissue disappeared from my skeleton, leaving behind nothing but bleached bones and tattered rags the same color as the shirt and pants I’d been wearing.
“Wait, no, this is a setup!” he spluttered. “I’ll pay back the extra! I didn’t mean to skim from the Dragons!”
I faltered for a second, and he latched onto that.
“You’re an honorable guy, you don’t want to do this! I’m unarmed. The Emperor took my Spirit. I don’t have any way to defend myself. You don’t want to fight somebody who can’t fight back, right?”
The Spirit stone inlay in the door flared, and a rush of blue Spirit poured into the guy.
“Not unarmed anymore,” Takeshi-ketsu said.
“Wait, wait, wait!” the blue guy yelled, but he was already throwing a Spirit attack.
An ice spear blasted through the air at me. I sidestepped, and it smashed into the bookshelves behind me with a splintering sound.
The blue guy charged on the spear’s tail, blue Ice Spirit rolling down his arms. The right one coalesced into a huge anime-sized sword, and the left turned into an icy buckler.
I fought with shields often enough to see the bash coming a mile away. I slipped the shot and hacked the scythe at the real threat, his sword arm. The blade sliced through like his bones were made of water.
He screamed and backpedaled away, freezing his gushing stump solid with loads of Ice Spirit. It was similar to what I did with Miasma when I needed to stop bleeding, except mine killed the blood vessels there temporarily instead of just icing them over.
I shot toward him, but without Ki-speed, I wasn’t fast enough to get there before he fired off a volley of ice knives from his remaining hand.
If I’d had access to Dead Reckoning, I probably could’ve dodged every shot, but without it I only managed to avoid two of them. The last knife tore through the top of my shoulder muscle and chipped my scapula before spinning off and shattering on the hardwood floor.
The Dragon script tattoo burned hotter as it got to work healing the cut.
I wove out of the way of another icy blast, then shot in from the side. His Ki-speed spun him around to keep me in his sights, but before he could throw another attack, I swept his legs with the scythe handle.
He hit the deck flat on his back, the air whoofing out of his lungs. I stepped onto his chest and raised the gleaming black blade for the final swing.
But I hesitated.
The blue guy bucked, hooking his one good arm around my foot and rolling. I tried to rip my leg away, but he took me down. With the scythe still in one hand, I landed
