Deep pulsing bass rattled the elevator even before the car lurched to a stop. The electronic ding was barely audible beneath the honking and klaxon sounds interspersed with the thumping beat. The door slid open and a hot, soupy gust of Ryuan air blasted me in the face, ripe with the smell of hundreds of bodies dancing, drinking, and yelling to each other.

  Off to my right, the glowing red crosshairs of Marked for Death stood out against the night sky. My target sat at a table in a roped-off VIP area up a handful of steps to what looked like a round castle tower. The dance floor was straight ahead and completely packed. A bar made of the same stone as the castle tower stood against the wall to the left of the elevator.

  I stepped out onto the rooftop.

  Immediately, all hell broke loose.

  Up in the castle tower, bodyguards pulled cowboy six-shooters and what looked like Mega-blaster tommyguns and opened fire. Dead Reckoning went into an endless alarm as the shots and ricochets pewed and zinged around me. Somebody must have tipped off Zheytarr that Emperor Takeshi had sent the Death cultivator after him.

  A bullet grazed the top of my shoulder. I dove behind the bar and slapped a hand on the burning slice, sending necrotizing frost to the spot to stop the bleeding.

  On the dance floor, people in flashy cowboy hats, fundoshi, spurs, and yukatas screamed. Some stampeded for the elevator. Lethally bad decision. That put them in the direct line with the bodyguard’s strafing. Others hit the deck where they were, clutching sizzling ray gun holes or hugging their dead friends.

  Two guesses whose name tonight’s casualties would go under.

  I dropped all Spirit cloaking and sent Three Corpse Sickness sprinting toward the tower, drawing the bodyguards’ fire away from the bystanders. The Corpses looked just like me—except for the part where they were made of glowing turquoise Miasma with black veins of Cursed Death running through them.

  “Take the tower!” I ordered them.

  A curly-haired lady was already crouched back behind the bar, all six of her arms covering her head. She must’ve been the bartender. One shaking hand still held a cocktail shaker. She scrambled back toward the far corner, where the bar died into the wall, and hunkered down in a ball.

  “Don’t kill me!” she screamed.

  Turns out that’s a pretty common thing to say to Death cultivators.

  “I’m not here for you,” I told her. “Is there another way up to the VIP section?”

  She squeezed down tighter and started sobbing.

  Probably not going to be much help, then.

  Thankfully, I had developed a trick for this. I shut my eyes and remote-viewed the tower through my Corpses’ vision.

  The Corpses met the first wave of bodyguards coming down the stairs. The henchmen peppered the Miasma versions of me with bullets and raygun blasts, but with my new Ten-level and all the cultivating and condensing I’d been doing lately, my Corpses could take a lot of punishment before they dissipated.

  While the first Corpse took the brunt of the volley, the second showed me Judgment Beyond the Veil for the bodyguards. Less high-def than face-to-face, but still effective. Shocker—Zheytarr hadn’t exactly surrounded himself with upstanding citizens. These thugs were kidnappers, murderers, and worse.

  I reached out with Damnation, the Cursed Death version of Dead Man’s Hand. Nineteen life points—eight on the steps, eleven on the tower. Zheytarr’s crackling electric red one I pushed to the back of my priorities. First, I had to deal with the guys standing between me and him.

  I tore out the first two henchmen’s life points. The third had a kind of Barbwire Spirit security system around it, but I wore that down with Moldering Bones, then ripped it out.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The instant the first one dropped into my Spirit sea, unbelievable power swamped me. Consuming life points feels like juggling flaming chainsaws in a thermite dust storm. With three of them pumping through me, it felt like I could grab the universe and crush it in my fist. Miasma leaked from my pores and billowed out of my nose and mouth with every breath. Floating loose like that, my Spirit sea couldn’t contain it all and my brain couldn’t cope with the potency.

  Invincibility is a dangerous feeling in the middle of a firefight. Before I did something stupid, I started the influx of Death spirit condensing, reeling the concentrated dose of Miasma into brilliant turquoise spiral galaxies with lethal black veins.

  On the tower, my lead Corpse finally hit the breaking point and shattered, but I had two left to take its place. With Damnation, I finished off one bodyguard after another.

  The spiral spun, drawing in more and more, condensing it down…

  Crimson lightning bolts tore apart my remaining Corpses, but by then it was too late. There was only one life point left on the tower—a red one, crackling with electricity.

  Revamping Dead Reckoning to ping me if the static in the air started to pick up, I hopped over the bar and headed for the crosshairs.

  The clubgoers who had survived the shooting scrambled out of my way, clearing a path to the steps. Their jewelry and eyes reflected the glowing Miasma seeping from my skin.

  I got that spiral turning a little faster.

  My stupid leather gangster shoes tapped on the steps as I started climbing.

  “Now hang on a minute, Death cultivator!” Zheytarr called down. His yukata flapped in the wind as he waved two pairs of arms in surrender. He kept the other set tucked behind his back. Real clever. “Let’s talk this over like men. What’s the Emperor paying you? I’ll double it if you let me go and tell him you killed me. I’ll never show my face in this system again.”

  Marked for Death didn’t work that way, but I didn’t tell him that. I’m kind of a jerk at the best of times, but since coming to this universe, I’d really leveled up that character flaw by learning how to use people’s preconceived notions about Mortal supertypes against them.

  “Actually, I’m not in this for money,” I told him. “I do it for love of the game.”

  Like somebody had cued him, Zhetarr swung a pair of huge chromed-out pistols from behind his back and went to work emptying the clips.

  I threw out my hand. “Moldering Bones!”

  Miasma scoured the oncoming bullets with the decay of millennia. In a blink, they rusted, flaked apart into microscopic grains, and blew away.

  Clickclickclick.

  Out of ammo.

  I let my hand drop and started climbing again.

  “Okay, okay, I’m done!” Zheytarr chucked the glinting pistols over the parapet. “See? No more guns.”

  Dead Reckoning went off. Static electricity made my hair stand on end.

  I shoved out my right hand, summoning the Lunar Scythe. The second its handle formed in my fist, I grabbed it with the other hand, too. My flesh instantly disappeared. My plan was to take the lightning strike to the skeleton and hope it didn’t make my bones explode.

  The red bolt jagged down out of the sky. The thunder shook my bones. But instead of the lightning slamming into me, the Lunar Scythe pulled it in. The immortal weapon completely absorbed the shot. I didn’t even feel a tingle.

  Pretty handy. I did not know the scythe could do that.

  Of course, in the middle of a fight to the death, your enemies have no idea that you caught an epically lucky break. They assume everything is intentional.

  When Zheytarr saw me shrug off his most powerful attack and keep walking, his face blanched. He stumbled back a step and bumped into the parapet.

  “But I didn’t even skim that much,” he argued. “Seriously, what’s a couple hundred-thou here and there when the Dragons are raking in billions of credits a day from the outer planets alone? Come on!”

  Judgment Beyond the Veil scrolled his sins across his eyes like the most disturbing movie you’ve never wanted to see. Bile burnt the back of my throat.

  I stepped onto the roof of the tower with him.

  Zheytarr dropped to his knees. “I’ll pay it back! Message the Emperor! Tell him I’ll pay back every credit! Twice! Three times as much as I skimmed!”

  I let go of the scythe so my vocal cords would grow back. Immortal weapon tore back into my body.

  “No,” I told him.

  “No?”

  “No, I’m not going to tell Emperor Takeshi you’ll pay it back, because there’s a chance he’ll let you.” I grabbed Zheytarr’s life point with Damnation. He shrieked. “The Emperor sent me to kill you for stealing from the Dragons. He wanted me to make an example of you for anybody else considering doing something so stupid on the Dragon’s freaking home planet.”

  “B-b-but if I pay it back—”

  I gave his life point a squeeze to shut him up.

  “I’m going to make you an example, Zheytarr, but not because of some stupid numbers in a USL account. See, it wasn’t just Takeshi who sent me. Andara from the Pai-Lei Dance Hall—remember her? What about Verity? Sheena? Jae? Any of those names ringing a bell? They’re why I’m here. I’m what you get for a lifetime of brutally murdering women.”

  He blinked, genuinely surprised. “You’re here because of that? But they were just trash. It’s not like anybody misses them.”

  The fact that he thought that made a difference pushed me over the edge.

  “They died screaming because of you,” I growled. “And now you’re going to scream for eternity to pay for what you did to them.”

  Black-flecked turquoise flames of Damnation roared up. Zheytarr wailed in agony as Cursed Death consumed his soul and dragged him off to hell. His screams gurgled into nothing, and his lifeless body slumped in a heap on the tower’s stone floor.

  The Marked for Death crosshairs winked out.

  Mission accomplished.