“Here now,” Tweed snapped. “Can’t you see I’m trying to read?”
Apparently interrupting him wasn’t enough to get him to defend himself. I yanked him off his chair and slugged him in the mouth.
Huge purple kraken tentacles made of Spirit exploded out of him. Two wrapped around me like boa constrictors, pinning my arms to my sides, and the last one grabbed me by the right ankle and jerked. Before the Proving Forge elixir, that would’ve ripped my leg off, easily. With the newly toughened body, it hurt like heck, but my joints and muscle held together.
“He hit me,” Tweed marveled, wiping the grainy purple blood from his mouth with a handkerchief. “Damnable outer planet savages!”
The tentacles tightened around my chest until I could barely breathe. Spirit was trickling into my sea, but too slowly to build up an attack. I twisted and struggled, trying to get an arm free so I could summon the scythe.
The artifact team stared up at me from their seats like I’d just grown two heads but wasn’t the kind of alien who should be able to do that.
Warcry was already in battle mode. Red flames poured down his head and shoulders to cover his fists.
“Traitor,” I choked out so he would know what was going on.
The word seemed to snap the hooligans out of their daze. Cussing and snarling, they jumped up, knocking over stools and scattering saloon gals.
Warcry threw himself in their way. If they were coming after me, then his Emperor-bestowed job was to stop them.
Ligaments in my leg’s joints groaned as Tweed’s Spirit tentacle gave it another wrench. I felt something pop in my hip. Gramps’s old saying, “Are you pullin’ my leg?” flashed through my brain, but I was too deep in oblivion to decide whether it was funny or a sign I was losing my mind.
“Somebody stop him!” Tweed yelled, voice cracking.
He looked to Sanya-ketsu for help, but she’d righted a knocked-over barstool and was settling in to enjoy the show. His face contorted with fear and confusion. You could see the math adding up all wrong in his head. The Emperor’s right-hand Sown Dream cultivator had brought a pair of teenage jerkwads in to meet with their team—one who had immediately attacked him and another who was currently running interference, holding off the hooligans who should’ve been coming to his rescue.
Finally, my right hand twisted free of the tentacles. The scythe ripped across my skeleton, down my arm, and solidified in my fist, turning my right arm into bright white bone from the shoulder down.
The sight made Tweed’s eyes bug out.
It was awkward with the tentacle still locking my arms to my sides, but I whipped my wrist down, slicing the jet-black scythe blade through one thick purple limb.
The scythe passed through the tentacle like it wasn’t there, doing zero damage, but the tentacles retaliated anyway, slamming me into the wall hard enough to shake the whole rickety saloon. My head didn’t hit the bamboo—lucky, since even with the new tougher body, a hit like that probably would’ve cracked it open like an egg—but it whipped backward on my shoulders like a car crash. Pain rang up my spine, ricocheting around inside my skull like lightning.
The good news was I had finally converted enough Miasma for an invisible fist of Dead Man’s Hand.
I sent the cloaked Spirit attack creeping along Tweed’s tentacles, tracing them back to their source, a flickering purple flame in Tweed’s side where a human’s liver would be.
I grabbed it.
Hypodermic needles full of purple Spirit venom shot into Dead Man’s Hand. The fist of Miasma seized up, paralyzed, as the venom sent waves of agony back through the connection, then Dead Man’s Hand shattered.
I couldn’t afford to lose the little Spirit I’d converted, so I started Reclaiming the Dead as fast as I could, dragging the mist back in before it could disperse.
Nearby, glass cracked. The bottom of a liquor bottle had exploded in the rock alien’s fist, leaving a broken, jagged edge attached to the neck. The perfect weapon for a saloon fight.
Warcry ducked under a swing from the muscle-bound jackal, nailing him in the gut with a massive kick. The guy doubled over and stumbled backward, crashing through an abandoned table.
The rock alien was waiting for Warcry. He set his feet and swiped with the bottle, bits of crystal flaking off his body with every motion. Red flames streaked along in the slipstream behind Warcry’s block.
Silvery Spirit flashed. Bone snapped. Warcry’s left forearm flopped sickeningly.
But the break didn’t stop Warcry’s combo. He snarled, baring his teeth as his prosthetic completed its roundhouse arc. The rock alien saw it too late. The metal rang like a bat nailing a homer out of the park, whipping his head around. Shards of crystal sprayed like teeth. Silver Spirit flashed again, but whatever it was, it didn’t work against Warcry’s fake leg.
Tweed’s kraken tentacles ratcheted tighter around my torso. My ribs creaked under the strain, and the messed-up spot in my side throbbed like the pressure was forcing festering pus out into the healthy tissues. The Dragon script tattoo burned hotter as it tried to counteract the damage.
Tweed’s kishotenketsu was way more powerful than mine, as evidenced by that venomous jellyfish barrier he’d constructed around his life point. There was no way I could take him out with the tiny amount of Miasma I’d reclaimed and the trickle of non-Death Spirit I was converting. The scythe was my only option. I just had to get loose so I could use it right. That meant taking out the Spirit tentacles.
I redirected the Miasma.
“Moldering Bones!” I croaked.
Miasma scoured across the tentacles like a sandblaster, but I didn’t have enough for a full-strength attack. It just barely broke down the outer layer
