After the Electoral Council, we checked into the Black Pearl, the luxury hotel Kest had snagged us reservations at. As far as I could tell, the building wasn’t actually made of pearl, but it was a huge black stone domescraper, with tinted glass, carpet so dark green that it was almost black, and polished hematite trimmings everywhere.

  The mechanical dragonflies followed us over, hovering too close to imagine that they might be watching somebody else. Despite Rav’s warning about the CPA waiting for me to step out of line, I was more worried about Kest and that Technol bounty.

  A pair of the nosiest bugs in the universe followed us through the lobby to the elevator.

  I stuck out my hand to disintegrate them with Moldering Bones, but Kest shoved my arm down.

  “They’re not a threat right now, Hake. The Technols can’t disappear me yet, I made too big an entrance.” She stared meaningfully into one of the lenses. “Besides, they don’t know how valuable I’ll be to them once I’m crowned.”

  We had adjoining suites on the twelfth floor of the hotel. Mine was situated between Kest’s and Warcry’s so I could get to either of them quickly in case of an attack. The central location also made mine the de facto conference room. We each squeezed into our own, keeping the dragonflies out.

  After we finished settling in separately, we met in the middle.

  Warcry forked over his dead HUD to Kest. In about two seconds, she had the pieces laid out on my bed’s comforter. While she worked, he stretched out on the couch with his real leg propped on a fluffy footstool and flipped on the projection wall.

  I was starving again, so I raided the room’s mini-icebox. Designer jerky, little green cookies, a glass jar of something that looked like milk, onigiri, gourmet granola, and a couple weird fruits cut into ocean-themed shapes.

  “Anybody want anything?” I asked, tearing into a stick of spicy jerky.

  “Yeah, give us a meat stick and one of those seaweed biscuits.”

  “Seaweed biscuits?”

  “The round green things.” Warcry stopped clicking through muted fight channels long enough to point with the remote. “Those. You oughta have one, too, grav. Great for absorbing trace impurities from that trash you eat.”

  I added a green cookie to my pile, then tossed Warcry’s order over to him.

  “Kest?” I waved a cookie at her. “Want some?”

  She couldn’t hear me over the parts she was inspecting.

  “I’ve never seen components this corroded.” With a thumbnail, she scratched buildup off a tiny bundle of wires.

  I grabbed a couple seaweed cookies and sat them on the bed by her knee. One of the things I’d noticed about Kest when she was working: If food or drink was in proximity and she wanted it, she’d take it. She would have no idea whose it was, where it had come from, or how it had got there, but she would eat it.

  “With the right acid, I could clean the pieces without damaging them further, but that will take hours,” she told Warcry, squinting at an oxidized, ant-sized metal comb. “Your best bet is to message the hotel staff for a temporary replacement.”

  “On what?” He held up his empty HUD wrist to show the bright white tan-line.

  “Oh, right. I’m so used to everybody having a HUD except for…” Kest trailed off, then stuck her nose in her screen. “I’ll ask them to send one up along with some acid bath materials.”

  “You don’t need to be a dick about it,” I told Warcry, even though I was more mad at myself for Kest having to stop herself from saying Rali’s name.

  “Remember that wall of fire I slapped you down with on the cruiser, grav? Channel your anger into something constructive and throw us another meat stick.”

  A storm of fury whirled up out of nowhere at his jab. Sudden enough that part of me saw it and knew how off-kilter it was. Warcry was just being the usual abrasive guy he always was, taking shots at anybody within hearing distance. But that black snake inside my chest wanted to attack, to show him who the real victor would be if I went all-out on him.

  What the heck is my problem?

  Death cultivator’s control over the devil corruption is eroding, Hungry Ghost croaked.

  “Grav.” Warcry clapped his hands together, then held them out like he was calling for me to pass the basketball. “Meat stick?”

  “Oh, right.” I had too much input coming in from too many directions. I chucked him another one.

  He caught it, eyes immediately going back to the fight on the projection wall.

  “Cheers.” He tore into the meat stick, bobbing and weaving with the fighters as he chewed. “And you oughta drink that manatee milk. It’s just what you need.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Did you just say manatee milk?”

  “We’re on a sea world, ain’t we? That’s manatee milk in the icebox.” Warcry dodged a kick that the guy onscreen didn’t—K.O. “Probably fresh, too. Next best thing to Workout Force Multiplier. If it doesn’t bulk you up, it’ll at least stop you losing any more mass.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  With all the takeout on all the different planets, I’d probably eaten weirder stuff than manatee milk without knowing about it. The knowing was the problem.

  I stared down the milk jar.

  And realized I wasn’t the only one looking out of my eyes anymore.

  What do you mean my control over the devil corruption is eroding? I asked Hungry Ghost. Are you decaying it somehow? Is that why you can suddenly bother me again?

  Hungry Ghost sent me the image of a shovel with my name on it stuck in the top of a mountain of Miasma and the sensation of an offered trade.

  Forget it, I snapped. I’ll figure it out myself.

  I brought the milk and snacks over to the bed and climbed up, careful not to kick Kest’s component piles. The manatee milk wasn’t as bad as you’d think, considering it came out of a squishy undersea potato. If you chugged it fast, you barely noticed the hint of fishiness. It was the seaweed cookies that got me. I took a bite expecting sweetness and got salty instead. It wasn’t bad, just jarring. Like taking a swig from your canteen and getting a mouthful of tea when you knew you’d filled it with water.

  While I ate, I searched the hyperweb for devil corruption. Just like every other time I’d tried to dig up something about it before, all that came up was sword legend stuff. Dramatic and vague.

  When I’d won the scythe from the angel of death, Hungry Ghost had said the only way for me to stop the devil corruption was by gaining Blessing of the Immortal. From what I could find, immortal blessings were another common sword legend trope. Apparently, heroes would win heavenly weapons in their wanderings, and when they united all the pieces of a set, they would receive whatever blessing the forger had imbued the set with.

  It was based on fiction, but it was the only straw I had to grasp at right then, so I went down a rabbit hole about immortal weapons in sword legends.

  When room service knocked twenty minutes later with the loaner SignalSong and a brown glass bottle of acid, I still hadn’t found anything useful.

  Kest scooped the green-crusted wires, metal strips, and other assorted doohickeys into a bowl.

  “This is even worse than the oldest HUDs I scavenged from the shut-ins,” she said, munching on a seaweed cookie. “How long did you say you’d had it?”

  “Less than a year,” Warcry answered, looking up from the loaner HUD he was programming. “Hindre sent me the newest model when I signed on to do their IFC sponsorship campaign. Bleeders disavowed me after the arson charges came down, even though their sales spiked.” He smirked. “No publicity is bad publicity, yeah?”

  Kest shook her head. “One year couldn’t have done this.”

  I finished off the last gulp of milk. “Rav said the Selken atmosphere messes up lots of HUDs. Maybe that’s what happened.”

  “This corrosion couldn’t have come from the minute or two we were on the surface,” she said. “It would’ve had to be submerged in saltwater for years.” Carefully, she poured the acid over the components. It fizzed. “Too bad you haven’t taken it to anyone for repairs before now, Warcry. Then we would have a baseline to compare the damage to, and we could work backward from there.”

  “It’s never needed repairs,” he said. “That thing’s top of the line.”

  “What if Warcry ticked off somebody with Corruption Spirit?” I suggested. At the ginger’s frown, I shrugged. “It went dead not long after you told Rav to shut up.”

  Flames flickered down Warcry’s head and shoulders. “That slimy cove… And he was laughing, too!”

  “You should be glad he attacked your HUD and not your prosthetic.”

  The possibility of that fancy prosthetic coming under fire made Kest’s eye lace thin out.

  “Warcry, if you lose this tournament for me because you can’t act civilized for five seconds—”

  “Well, he never shuts his bleedin’ mouth, does he?”

  “Give me your prosthetic,” she said.

  “You wot?”

  Kest stuck out her hand and made the gimme motion. “Cinnabar should be impervious to any sort of rust or corrosion, but I want to make sure. I’m going to imbue both our prosthetics with a construct so that anyone who attacks the cinnabar physically or with Spirit gets hit with a concentrated blowback of the force they originally applied.”

  “You can install real-life knockback?” I whistled.

  “In theory, it’s just a riff on the Dent Reversal ability,” she said. “I used it all the time back in Ghost Town to fix up scavenged material for sale.”

  Warcry eyed her. “What’s the odds that the first one-legged cove who straps it on after you install this construct gets smacked across the room?”

  “Low,” she said.

  An hour and one epic launch off the couch later, Kest finished fine-tuning the Instant Dent Reversal Multiplier on Warcry’s prosthetic. With the specifics figured out, it took her two minutes and no unexpected launches to apply to her cinnabar arm.

  “Use me as your test dummy,” Warcry muttered, rolling his pants leg down over the metal.

  “If you get knocked out, the work on your prosthetic continues. If I get knocked out, the work stops.” Standing up, Kest smoothed her welding skirt, then dusted her cinnabar and flesh hands together. “Now I propose we get supper out, somewhere the press can see the three of us patronizing a locally owned business.”

  “Not me.” Warcry headed for the door between our rooms. “Gotta get me sleep schedule lined up with the local rhythms. Opening ceremonies, promotional shots, and official weigh-in tomorrow. Until this tournament’s done, I’m staying in.”

  Kest pulled up the packet she’d gotten from the Electoral Council.

  “You’ve at least got to show your face at the Gala tomorrow night,” she said. “That’s where we’ll start winning our allies.”

  “Allies ain’t gonna help us in the ring. There, you stand or fall on your own.”

  “Not necessarily true,” Kest said. “The bigger our Selken allies are, the more they put their thumbs on the scale for our bracket seeds. Anyway, the more we’re seen around the city, the more tournament coverage we get, the more the voters become familiar with our faces and start to like us and root for us to win. According to everything I could find on the hyperweb, public opinion is huge in these electoral tournaments.”

  “The Emperor picked me as your champ for the ready IFC fanbase, yeah? Well, the fans know Warcry Thompson doesn’t go traipsing about during a tournament. Dedication, focus, intensity—that’s what they’re there for. Check the fight boards if you don’t believe me, Stumpy, they’re blowing up gabbing about me big comeback tourney.”

  That surprised me. “The hyperweb already knows you’re fighting in the electoral tournament?”

  “With all that paparazzi, grav?” The corner of his mouth turned up. “Besides, some anonymous handsome redhead leaked secret footage of Warcry Thompson training on a luxury transport bound for Selk a week ago.” He turned his ugly grin on Kest. “You win your voters your way, I’ll stir up me fans mine.”

  She frowned. “You have two days before the first official popularity polls post. If we’re lagging behind, you’re switching to my way.”

  “Warcry Thompson never lags behind anybody.”

  “He does talk about himself in third person a lot, though,” I said. “Dude, seriously, message me if you end up changing your mind and going somewhere. I’m supposed to be the bodyguard here, which probably entails making sure you don’t get snapped in half on your way to the sauna.”

  “Sauna’s tomorrow morning, three hours before weigh-in,” he said, heading for the door that connected to his room. “Don’t stay out too late.”