Rali’s walking stick clunked on the concrete as he and the angel of death strode through the nighttime cityscape of Laitrong. A gentle drizzle began to fall as they left the alley behind the mochi shop, pushing down the hot stinks of garbage and exhaust, and sending up a soft hiss that competed with the sounds of traffic and distant shouting. Somewhere a glass bottle hit asphalt and rolled.

  Being Selken, Rali enjoyed a good rain. Uchiko did not. She had grabbed one of the empty rice flour sacks from the alley before they left and was currently holding it over her head. Despite her makeshift rain tarp keeping off the majority of the drizzle, her expression shifted from Severe to Severely Grumped.

  “The way I see it, we have two options,” Rali said, undaunted by his traveling companion’s scowl. Excitement hummed through him, creating a warm glow almost as bright as his Spirit sea had once been. “Option one, we gather the other pieces of the heavenly weapons set and bring them to Hake. He absorbs them like he did the Lunar Scythe, and boom, the devil corruption is cleansed and he’s saved. Option two, we find Hake and tell him that he’s taking devil corruption and the full weapon set will stop it. Then we join him on a wild quest to find the other pieces.”

  Sushi darted across their path, gleefully snapping at the droplets.

  Rali grinned. He knew this mission was of the gravest importance, but just an hour ago he had believed there was no hope for Hake. Now he knew not only that there was the slimmest chance of victory over this evil, but that he hadn’t misjudged his first ever friend. There had once been a good guy inside Hake. Maybe there still was.

  “Both options provide ample opportunity for adventure,” he told the angel, “and both would save our friend. Either way, the sooner we get to it, the better. Personally, I’m leaning toward finding Hake and telling him first, because if he knows about the devil corruption, he can resist it. You can’t resist what you don’t know is there. Besides, the more people who go on an adventure, the more fun you have along the—”

  “He already knows,” Uchiko interrupted from beneath her flour sack.

  Rali blinked. “Huh?”

  The angel stepped into a shallow-looking puddle; her foot splashed down to the ankle in dirty runoff.

  “Precipitation!” She growled the word like a curse. “I never had to deal with rain before my Spirit sea was damaged. Unforeseeable Circumstance took care of such inconveniences.”

  Brow furrowed, she shook puddle water from her marble foot. Somewhat futile in this downpour, but then the little futile acts people clung to were what made consciousness so fascinating.

  “You said Hake already knows about the devil corruption?” Rali prompted, attempting to get Uchiko back on the subject.

  “When the Lunar Scythe accepted him as its master, it informed Hake of the consequences for killing the balancer. It was the last thing I heard my scythe say before I lost all connection to it.”

  That slowed Rali’s pace considerably.

  “You’re saying Hake already knows,” Rali said, studying the dingy sidewalk, “and has known since he got the scythe. But if that’s true, why hasn’t he done anything to stop the devil corruption? What is he waiting for? And why didn’t he tell any of us?”

  Uchiko shrugged. “Some mortals are too proud to confide in their friends. Others believe they can resist indefinitely. The strongest-willed can certainly resist for longer than the weaker, but all mortals succumb to devil corruption eventually if it continues unchecked. Only finding the set can stop it.”

  “So then, if we find the weapon set and bring it to Hake—”

  “Oh, certainly,” Uchiko sneered. “A Reaper whose damaged Spirit sea leaks endlessly and a former cultivator whose sea is broken beyond use. How could we fail?”

  “We’ll find a way,” Rali insisted. “I know you don’t believe in hakkeyoi, but at its heart, isn’t determination the essence of hakkeyoi? Of all kishotenketsu? As long as Hake hasn’t given in to the devil corruption by the time we bring him the pieces, there’s still hope. We can still save him.”

  “Not without sacrificing yourself. Heavenly weapons must be won from their holder. Decisively.” She cringed as her flour sack shifted and let a cupful of accumulated rain pour down her back. “I could not truly defeat the Death cultivator and retake my scythe the last time I faced him.”

  That seemed to be a hard thing for Uchiko to admit.

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  “There was a conflict in my Spirit,” she said, glaring everywhere but in Rali’s direction. “So small that I could barely acknowledge it. But even that small amount of doubt was enough to cause failure. There was no conflict in the Death cultivator when he stole my scythe. He killed the balancer to save you and the others. Knowing that his Sudden Death technique might kill him at the same moment it killed the heavenly creature, he used it anyway. He didn’t hesitate.”

  Heaviness settled around Rali’s shoulders that had nothing to do with the rain increasingly weighing down his clothing. Knowing it might kill him, Hake had saved Rali, Kest, and Warcry. How often had Hake had sacrificed some part of himself—body, soul, or mind—to protect their little gang?

  “Hake never said anything.” Rali heard how lame that sounded before the words even finished leaving his mouth. He shook his head in disgust. “But why would he? At every turn, I was glaring down my nose at him, accusing him of becoming the stereotypical power-hungry Death cultivator. I’m supposed to be the guy who rejects all the corporate labels and biases society puts on our kishotenketsu, but I was so consumed by my own labels and biases that my best friend couldn’t even ask me for help.”

  A delighted giggle from overhead drew his attention to the rooftop. Up there, Sushi skimmed along the bottom of the gutters at top speed, hooting with laughter as her round face smacked droplets off the overhang.

  “Part of me hated him after my Spirit sea broke,” Rali confessed. “I blamed Hake, even though I was the one who broke my Ten restriction. All my big talk about accepting whatever comes, and I couldn’t stop thinking how unfair it was. Me? Die? I had to be meant for more than that. I was a prodigy, I was significant. I couldn’t die in the dirt like the rest of those Dragons and Contrails.” He shook his head. “I told Hake once that I had a worse ego than anybody, but he didn’t believe me.”

  Unable to look at Uchiko, Rali squinted up into the rain. “Ever since the day I betrayed everything I claimed to believe in and broke my own Spirit sea, I’ve wondered, what if I had stuck to my restriction? What if I had decided to die rather than heal myself? What if I had walked into Death’s arms like an old friend, and in that final heartbeat, the nine lightning strikes to Ketsu had hit me? What if that was the final test of my kishotenketsu and I failed?”

  “Do you expect me to answer those questions?” Uchiko demanded.

  The annoyance in her voice surprised a laugh out of Rali. He laughed harder than he had since he’d left his friends behind in that field. So hard his eyes started streaming and he could barely breathe.

  “No,” he told her when he’d calmed down enough to speak. He wiped his eyes with a hand wet from the drizzle. “No, I don’t.”

  Another shuttle rumbled through the rain overhead, causing a stutter in the fall. It was visible for an instant, reflecting Laitrong’s yellow-orange light pollution, then gone.

  Rali started walking again, in the direction it had come from.

  “All right,” he said, “the way I see it now, we’ve got one option. We find the heavenly weapon set and bring them to Hake, hopefully before he gives in to the devil corruption and becomes a demon. Defeating me shouldn’t be too hard, as long as he doesn’t mind fighting a guy without a functioning Spirit sea. He unites the set, we rebalance his furies, and we all live happily ever after.”

  A scaly rocket slammed into Rali’s cheek.

  “Sushi and Rali go to Grady?” The little fish swam out in front of his face, and grabbed hold of his nostrils with both pectoral fins, her mismatched gaze jumping back and forth from one of Rali’s eyes to the other. “We go now?”

  Gently but firmly, Rali pulled Sushi off his nose. He sniffed and scrubbed it with the back of the hand holding his walking stick to stop the itching her grip had caused.

  “First we have to find the other pieces of an immortal weapons set,” he told the little fish. He slowed down and looked back over his shoulder at the angel, who hadn’t started moving again yet. “You don’t happen to know where those are, do you, Uchiko? I suppose it would also be good to know how many of them we need to find.”

  “There are two sibling pieces to the Lunar Scythe,” Uchiko said. “The Void Bracers belong to the Grand Reaper. You can’t possibly expect to take them from him, so your quest is futile from the beginning.”

  “And yet, I’m going to give it my best effort. My friend would do the same for me. What’s the other piece?”

  “The Wings of Infinity,” she said, her silver eyes flaring with a sort of triumphant doom. “And therein all your talk of ‘best efforts’ and your stupid optimism fails utterly, because the Wings were lost. They belonged to the Dark Reaper who sacrificed himself to bring down the Demoness of Death. The Wings disappeared when she killed him. If they still exist, then the demoness must have dragged them into the hell dimension with her.”

  “Well. That’s going to complicate things.”

  Decided, Rali swung back around and took off perpendicular to where he thought the spaceport was, this time at a jog. Jim-nang wouldn’t have returned to his lavish residence already, but maybe one of his many servants would be able to get him on their HUD for Rali.

  The drizzle picked up, becoming a torrential downpour.

  The flour sack flapped and crinkled as Uchiko caught up to him.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted over the slap of rain on her shelter and the splashing smack of their feet on the sidewalk. “Do you know of someplace we can take shelter?”

  “Not one I’m welcome in,” Rali yelled back happily.

  Vehicles honked and drivers and pullers shouted as they darted across the center of a busy intersection. Sushi blew a raspberry at their detractors without slowing down.

  “Then why are we running?” Uchiko yelled. “Have you lost your mind?”

  With a flick of his head, Rali flipped wet hair out of his eyes.

  “Because it’s great!” he cried, throwing his arms out. “We’re on an impossible mission! By definition, we can’t succeed! Can’t you feel it, Uchiko?”

  “Feel it!” Sushi yelled, throwing her fins out, too.

  “Feel what?” Uchiko demanded. “We have discovered that we can do nothing and there is no hope. All there is to feel is wet and defeated.”

  “Exactly,” Rali huffed, his grin wider than ever. “I’ve got a great feeling about this. So, how do we find your Grand Reaper?”

  e