Unlike Death cultivator. Hungry Ghost chuckled in his prison.
Keep laughing, I thought, spooling out enough Miasma to rebury the ancient khan for a century. You’ll be right there with me.
The angel of death’s pale brows furrowed.
“You fool!” She slammed a delicate marble fist against her thigh with a thunderous crack. “With that covenant, you’ll have no recourse when the host comes for you! Every Reaper is above reproach, entirely clean!”
I let Judgement Beyond the Veil go.
The opposing paths of Ten faded, and my connection to the angel of death on that distant planet vanished with them.
Time returned to normal. The dull thuds of fighting, crash of weapons, and flash of Spirit attacks were gone. The only sounds were Rali’s sobbing and Warcry’s harsh breathing. The pale gray of another dawn peeked through the jungle to the east.
My eyes locked on the Bailiff, took in his sweat-slick face, the greasy hair hanging in strings around his ears. The yellowed comb of baleen shined in his wide, triumphant grin. Kest’s black blood flecked his gun arm and dotted his wifebeater.
As I looked, Judgement Beyond the Veil went past the Bailiff’s exterior and showed me the twisted cancer of his soul projected onto his eyes. He was the end result of a lifetime of escalating evil—tormenting anybody who crossed his path, wrecking innocents until they were as warped as he was, turning on the people who trusted him, enslaving whoever he could with lies, debts, drugs, and script. He loved hurting others more than anything else, loved the betrayal in their eyes when he finally showed his hand, loved to yank the puppet strings and laugh while they danced in pain.
If the Bailiff had had even a shred of desire to change, the smallest hope of ever giving up his evil, I couldn’t have touched him without immediately breaking my Ten covenant and destroying my Spirit sea. But there was nothing like that in him. All he had was an increasing desire for more. More blood than he’d already spilled. More suffering than he’d already inflicted. More innocent souls twisted into something cruel and sadistic. Life and death was a game to him, and the only way to win was to make somebody else hurt.
His life point glowed an airy gray at the back of his mouth, standing out like a beacon to my newly advanced Dead Reckoning, a sharp contrast to the dull colors of the world around him.
The Bailiff swept his burly Spirit arms at the bodies littering the field.
“You missed me, Smart Boy.”
“I wanted you to see it coming,” I said. Cursed Miasma surged through my Spirit rivers, preparing my muscles and reflexes. “When you die, I want you to know exactly what hit you.”
I reached out with Damnation—the upgraded version of Dead Man’s Hand, with black-veined turquoise hellfire licking from every Cursed finger—and grabbed the flickering gray candle in his throat.
“I sure hate to disappoint you, especially after you went to all this trouble for little ol’ me,” the Bailiff said, “but you’re too late, Smart Boy.”
He pulled a webbed hand from his pocket.
The Heartblood Crown gleamed dully in the predawn light. It was wrapped around his skinny wrist.
The bracelet’s spikes had sunk into his hide, and they chewed away at the little bit of meat stretched over his wiry bones like a pair of mouths. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped off his elbow.
I flooded the Bailiff’s life point with pain and suffering, tightening the fist of Damnation until it should’ve drowned the flickering gray flame in waves of hellfire.
It was like trying to crush a lump of steel in your fist. Nothing happened.
Damnation burned turquoise and black as it ripped and tore and clawed and strangled, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t smother the Bailiff’s life point.
He winked at me. “I’m what you might call immortal now.”
Master of the Heartblood Crown
I THOUGHT I’D FELT fury before. Unfairness. Hatred. This blew them all away. A nuclear bomb went off in my brain. Agony, wrath, and insanity all boiled over inside my chest and raged out of my mouth in a keening roar.
Grave Wail.
Warcry and Rali collapsed, hands smashed against their ears, eyes clenched shut, faces smashed into the grass as they tried to scream over me to block out the sound. Blood trickled from their ears.
The Bailiff didn’t even flinch. “You can’t touch me now, Smart Boy, not with every ounce of Spirit you got, not with a head start and a ten-foot pole.”
He was never going to get what he deserved. He would get away with murdering Kest and every other evil thing he’d done in his long, disgusting life, completely unscathed.
Unless I got the bracelet off him.
Miasma rampaged through my body, crashing out of my new Spirit sea like a tsunami. Every Ki-sense, every reinforcement and enhancement multiplied. Black-veined Death Metal covered my arms, and I poured out a full spiral on Ki-speed, strength, and superpowered Dead Reckoning, then started into the next one, surrounding the Bailiff with the phantom hands of Death Grip.
They reached up out of the grass and dirt, latching onto his boots, tangling in the laces, grabbing his ankles, tugging at the cuffs of his pants, locking him in place.
The Bailiff didn’t even try to break free. He just stood there with his real hands in his pockets, grinning at me.
“Go ahead, gimme your best shot.”
I tore across the ground, cocking Death Metal back for a bone-crushing shield bash.
With everything I threw into it, that strike should have obliterated the Bailiff’s skull and smashed his infuriating grin out the back of his head. Should have, but didn’t. He flipped backward, torn out of Death Grip’s hands, and ragdolled across the field.
His Martial Devil burst out of that totem on his belt loop and charged.
Black-veined Three Corpse
