That night, we hit three Technol locations around Pearl City. One in a middleclass neighborhood, one in the back of a high-end restaurant, and the last one in the warehouse district where I’d first met Donnie. Our target sat right up against the edge of the dome, an airplane hangar sized monster of a place that used to be a sub-building factory. Now apparently it was a factory for the sort of tech I couldn’t put a name to, let alone understand.

  Donnie could, though.

  “It’s organitech,” he said, pushing his glasses higher on his nose. “The secret ingredient to the highest-tier of Technol power. Organitech gave Technological Edge Mining the final push that put them so far ahead of their closest technological competitor that they’re not even on the same plane anymore.”

  “Organi- like living?” I said.

  “Yes and no. It grows and reproduces. It thinks, learns, and adapts. But is it living?” Donnie shook his head. “Not literally. No Organic affinity could cultivate Spirit from it. But I can’t shut it down using my Spirit, either. Digital Architecture can’t affect organitech. It’s entirely nondigital and powered from within. That’s why we had to wait to hit this spot until we had the manpower to take it out.”

  We’d brought everybody together for this last raid. Nearby, the S-Rats and half a dozen other agents were checking loadouts. A turquoise fog of Miasma from that undersea temple off to the south rolled around their boots and curled down the road, much thicker here than it had been around the Neon Kelpie club. At either end of the street, more of our guys were stationed as lookouts-slash-snipers on the roofs of the buildings flanking the hangar.

  “This is it, Death cultivator.” Donnie gave me a grim smile. “This is the motherlode for this planet. If we take this place down, we cripple the Technols across Selk.”

  His HUD screen flashed a silent message notification.

  “Squib’s team?” I asked.

  Donnie closed out of the message. “They’re in place and ready to seize Chillion and take over the hub as soon as they get the signal.”

  “Then let’s finish this.”

  While the two S-Rats and I stacked up on the front door, Donnie and the rest of our raid team split into squads and jogged to their positions around the hangar.

  Normally, Donnie wasn’t an inside team member on raids, but he wanted in on this one because of the tech. He might not be able to shut it down with his Spirit abilities, but he was the only agent with the know-how to physically attack something that technologically complex.

  I was supposed to hit the place first with Sleep of Death, which would take out the weaker links in our resistance right off. Then the S-rats and I would crash in the front, drawing fire and causing a major ruckus, so the other teams could charge in from the rear and sides batting cleanup. In the midst of the chaos, Donnie would sabotage the organitech.

  When everyone was in place, one of our lookouts hit each team leader with an Alertness pulse. His Mental Spirit was invisible and silent, but the pulse felt like that hit of adrenaline when you’re facing down your opponent in a tournament fight and the official drops his hand and yells go.

  “Sleep of Death!” I sent the cloaked Miasma wave rolling through the hangar.

  Sleep had a wider effective range than Dead Reckoning, but it didn’t send me back any information on how many life points were inside, so I chased it as far as I could with my early warning ability.

  Twenty greasy brown candles oozed.

  Ferals. I hadn’t heard anything about the decaying zombie-like creatures since we’d left the outer planets. I had just assumed inner planets like Selk didn’t have any. Suddenly the extra concentration of Miasma hanging around outside the hangar made sense.

  “Twenty ferals around the door,” I warned the S-Rats. “Any living hostiles inside are out of my range. I’ll clear the ferals, then we go in.”

  Both S-Rats sent me the Understood signal.

  One by one, I went through tearing out oozing feral life points.

  My Damnation ability didn’t affect ferals like it did living people, maybe because ferals were technically already dead, their corpses just hadn’t stopped moving yet. Instead of consuming their soul with Cursed Death hellfire, Damnation operated just like the vanilla version of Dead Man’s Hand—yank one of those disgusting brown life points out and the decaying body would drop like a bagful of rotten watermelons.

  Nausea pushed up the back of my throat from the ferals’ soul contamination. In Last Light, Last Breath, the taste was weirdly intense. I blasted Corpse Fire to burn off the contamination, keeping the blaze going while I dragged in more of that oily nast.

  I managed to keep my gorge down while I cleared out all the ferals Dead Reckoning could see. Then I signaled to the S-Rats.

  The one on breeching duty squared up with the door. He set his feet in a wide stance and shoved a Spirit-boosted palm strike at the entrance.

  BOOM.

  The door flew off its hinges. The S-Rat backpedaled out of my way.

  I ducked inside first, eyes and Dead Reckoning searching for threats.

  From outside, the hangar had looked big. Inside, it felt endless. You could have fit the Pearl City Kokugikan in there and still had room for a few football stadiums and maybe a small town.

  A huge, convoluted contraption hung from the ceiling—enormous green glass globes, cubes, and pyramids all suspended on platinum arms covered in unreadable script. Slowly, gently, the glass shapes rotated and revolved around the cube sitting at the axis of all those moving pieces, like the Sun at the center of a model solar system.

  The hangar floor was filled with ferals. Hundreds of them shambled around beneath that giant not-quite-solar system model, snarling and snapping at each other when they milled too close. The air in the hangar was humid and thick with the putrid stink of them.

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  A feeding frenzy started up on the fringes of the radius I had cleared, still-moving ferals finding the emptied, motionless corpses where they’d fallen and jumping on them like they might suddenly get away. Growls, gulps, and chomps rose from the feast.

  The gag of an S-Rat behind me snapped me out of my staring.

  One S-Rat opened up on the ferals with his belt-fed rifle, and the other double-fisted shots from his matching handguns. Cadaver juices splashed as bullets tore through rotting flesh.

  The ferals they shot didn’t go down. The S-Rats were concentrating all their shots at center mass.

  These agents were trained to stop threats coming from living opponents, I realized. They’d never faced ferals before.

  “Headshots!” I yelled. “Only headshots stop ferals!”

  Easy to say, not so easy to execute with a horde of mindless, ravenous, juicy monsters sloshing at you. The S-Rats had to slow down, adjust their aim, and pick off one threat at a time.

  From the far ends of the hangar, I heard the other raid teams yelling and firing. If the S-Rats had no idea how to deal with ferals when they were supposed to be Selk’s version of the SWAT team, then it stood to reason that the rest of the CPA agents on Selk had never dealt with them either.

  I shut my eyes, concentrating on just those oily contaminated life points, and unreeled two full spirals of Miasma.

  “Mass Grave.” I didn’t yell the words, but they shook the hangar.

  Across the cavernous space, thousands of oozing brown candles extinguished. Rotting bodies tumbled wetly to the floor.

  When the life points hit my Spirit sea, I dropped, too, on my hands and knees. My guts heaved like they were trying to flip me inside out. The bile and half-digested seaweed cookies and meat sticks I’d had earlier while waiting for Hyla to turn up with the healing elixirs burned as they poured of my mouth and nose, plopping and splattering on the concrete. I sent Corpse Fire charging through my sea and rivers to cleanse the sludgy brown flood of soul contamination trying to drown me in my own vomit.

  “Now,” a feminine voice said.

  Pressure slammed down like someone had dropped a planet on me.

  Every Shogun’s favorite way to assert dominance. Under normal circumstances nowadays I was strong enough to resist the pressure trick, but I’d been so swamped with sickness from soul contamination that this one had got me. I crashed facedown on dirty concrete.

  Tough as they were, neither of the S-Rats had advanced beyond Sho. They went down, too, hardware clattering and tactical vests thumping on the concrete.

  All around the hangar, metal shutters rolled, sealing off the exits.

  A storm of gunshots and Spirit attacks echoed from the far ends of the hangar. The other raid teams taking fire.

  Closer to me, footsteps clicked across the floor.

  I ramped up Corpse Fire and dragged my arms and legs under me. Swallowing the urge to barf again, I threw off the Shogun pressure trick and pushed to my feet.

  A tall, curvy Ylef with violet hair, a matching pants suit, and violet-tinted eyeglasses stopped ten yards from me.

  “So you’re the Dragon who thinks he can waltz onto my planet and turn my CPA against me.”

  She sounded casual, but wariness glinted behind her violet lenses, and I could see the faint outline of a targeting app locking on me. Shoguns weren’t used to dealing with people who could punch in their weight class, and besides that, this one was a Death cultivator.

  “Geez, it’s like there are more Ylefs on this planet than Selkens.” I made a big show of rolling my eyes. “What is this, the Technol idea of an ambush?”

  The Shogun let out a musical laugh that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle, even in Last Light, Last Breath. There was something unnatural about her laughter, like screaming into a voice recorder app so loud that the sound statics out.

  “Ambush implies the possibility of escape,” she said in the most Bless your heart but you must have brain damage tone ever. “I thought a Death cultivator of all people would recognize a grave when he walked into one.”

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling.

  From behind one of the metal and glass globes in the not-solar system model, a familiar blue demon-winged guy swooped down and tossed a lifeless body to the floor in front of me.

  A set of coke-bottle glasses with a bullet hole in the left lens bounced across the concrete.

  I stared at them, numb, thinking that was really going to hurt when I left Last Light, Last Breath again. If I left it again.

  “Look familiar, Death cultivator?” Tatsu Shin Be smirked at me over Donnie’s corpse. “Four-Eyes was your buddy, wasn’t he?”

  A dozen more Contrails swooped down from the cubes and spheres and pyramids, dumping the rest of Donny’s raid team on the pile.

  Righteous fury bloomed along the edges of oblivion. They were disgracing the dead. My dead. No one disrespected my dead without suffering the consequences.

  At the same time inside that emotionless void, a cooler part of my mind identified each man they threw down. It was Donny’s team only. Nobody else. There were two more squads, potentially still alive. Them, and the two S-Rats behind me struggling under the Violet Shogun’s pressure.

  Without moving, I sent a cloaked Sleep of Death blast at the S-Rats, then two more rampaging off toward the other raid teams. Maybe I could get at least a few good guys out of this alive if our enemies thought they were already dead.

  The Shogun took my silence as her cue to monologue.

  “I know what’s running through your skull now, Death cultivator,” the Shogun said. “You think somebody betrayed you. Perhaps one of the members of your precious raid team was a plant. Perhaps someone closer to home has been selling your secrets our way.”

  Nothing about this was funny, but in oblivion it was easy to laugh at her.

  “Wow, I must really look stupid if you think you can play me like that.” Kest and Warcry always had my back. Always. And the raid team? Give me a break. I’d fought and bled multiple times with those guys. They might not like me, but they wouldn’t sell me out. “What, did you just map the locations we hit and decide that if you couldn’t stop us here, you were screwed anyway?”

  Like most Shoguns, she did not like being laughed at.

  “Stupid and arrogant,” she said. “Hasn’t anyone warned you that’s a lethal combination for a meat roach?”

  She doubled up on her pressure trick.

  Sweat trickled down my back and ribs, but now that I was done heaving up my guts, my stance didn’t waver. I let my internal alchemy slow down a little so the Miasma I breathed in every time I inhaled would cool me off.

  “What I don’t get,” I went on like I didn’t notice she was doing anything, “is why you waited so long to come after us. Are you planning to broadcast this massacre as a way to tank Kest’s chances of winning the electoral tournament tomorrow?”

  Then I realized I was facing down a Technol Shogun surrounded by Heavenly Contrail hooligans. Not just any Contrail hooligans, either, but the Quiet Storm’s champion and security team.

  “But maybe you had to wait,” I said to the Shogun, sending my Three Corpses, invisible in the cloaking, to check how many of these jerks I could take out at once without breaking my Ten covenant. “Maybe you had to use me as a bargaining chip.” I nodded at Tatsu. “Did the Technols and Contrails strike up a compromise? The Technols get Selk and you guys get to take me out?”

  The blue douchebag raised one hand to his ram’s horns and acknowledged my hit with a flourishy bow.

  “I told you my friends wanted me to crush you, Death cultivator.” Judgment Beyond the Veil scrolled Tatsu’s sins across his black Daimoyed eyes as he grinned at me. “Now here we are.”

  “Your friends must not like you very much,” I said.

  His smug grin slipped as it dawned on him what that meant.

  The rulings were in, for him and for his Contrail buddies—evil, across the board.

  Tatsu shoved both hands at me. “Breaking Strain!”

  Compression clamped down on my head, squeezing until my skull creaked and my teeth ground together. The Lunar Scythe raced to reinforce the area Tatsu was attacking.

  “Mass Grave,” I growled.

  The Miasma quake rolled outward from me a second time, extinguishing every life point within a hundred feet except the S-Rats. Tatsu and a few of the other Heavenly Contrails had protections around their flickering candles, but I wore those down with Moldering Bones, froze them with Rigor Mortis, or burnt them off with Corpse Fire. The compression trying to crack my skull disappeared abruptly when Tatsu died.

  In seconds, the Shogun and I were the only ones still standing.

  She lifted a delicate eyebrow. The motion sent an iridescent sheen rippling across her skin.

  “What do you think I am, Death cultivator? Some living creature you can fuel your tainted kishotenketsu with?” She laughed that static-tinged laugh again. “Didn’t Donnie tell you what organitech is?”

  She raised her arms and turned in a slow circle like, Feast your eyes, buddy.