Like Rali, the angel of death didn’t own a HUD or have a universal implant.

  “A Reaper has no need for electronic crutches,” she told Rali, marble lips curling in disgust.

  She explained that she had acquired a substantial collection of physical currency and Spirit stones on Van Diemann when she realized that even Reapers had to pay if they wanted to travel by physical vehicle. She had cut down an entire Bogland full of ferals to pay for her ticket to Sarca.

  She had arrived, however, with empty pockets.

  “I guess that means we’re back to garbage diving for our food, Sushi,” Rali said. He turned to the angel. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  “I am—was—Reaper 11 of the Second Flight,” the angel growled. “I do not touch garbage.”

  But she did follow him and the little fish as they left the spaceport.

  In spite of her gruff demeanor, Rali couldn’t help but think that the angel seemed lost. She glared up and down the streets as they wandered deeper into Laitrong, but the longer they walked without miraculously running into Hake in the early evening crowd, the lower her shoulders sank and the more despondent her scowl became.

  “We’re in luck,” Rali said, leading their odd trio around a corner. “I found the fried mochi restaurant. This is almost certain to make you feel better.” He grinned. “If I still had my Warm Heart Spirit, I could guarantee it or double your money back, but these days I can’t infuse food with morale-boosting abilities. You’ll just have to settle for the ancient magic of pure caramel deliciousness.”

  Her perfect white brows furrowed. “I don’t need my morale boosted. I’m not some pathetic mortal.”

  “Immortality won’t detract from the deliciousness.”

  Rali guided them down the alleyway behind the mochi place.

  “Buzzy bugs!” Sushi darted ahead and pounced on one of the swarming insects circling the pile of garbage bags.

  Rali leaned his walking stick against the dingy gray brick of the building and selected a bag from what looked to be the most recent layer. He started picking at the knotted end.

  The angel hung back, arms crossed.

  “Do you have a name you prefer to be called?” Rali asked while he plucked at the ties. “I don’t mind ‘Honored Reaper 11 of the Second Flight,’ but it’s hard to build a friendship on formalities.”

  “We are not friends, mortal.”

  “I think friendship is in the hand of the offerer. You might not be my friend, but I’ve decided to be your friend.”

  “That’s idiotic. You can’t be friends with someone who won’t have you as a friend.”

  Rali grinned down at the knot as it slipped loose. “I’ve always been fascinated by impossibilities. You’re welcome to keep calling me ‘pathetic mortal,’ or you can call me ‘Rali.’ I’m also trying to get ‘Sage Rali’ to catch on, but so far no progress.”

  “If I tell you my name, will you stop rambling?”

  “Finally, someone who understands the barter system!” He sifted through the old napkins, paper plates, straws, and an empty hundred-pound rice flour sack in the trash bag. “Yes, I will be quiet in exchange for your name. That seems like a fair trade.”

  “When I was mortal, they called me Uchiko.”

  Carefully, Rali set the trash bag aside so he could show his gratitude with a proper bow.

  “It’s my great pleasure to make your acquaintance, Uchiko,” he said solemnly, straightening back up. “And now it’s my great pleasure to repay you with silence.”

  He moved on to the next trash bag, but gave up on that one when he felt that it was full of more empty ingredient containers.

  It was slightly eerie being watched by the angel. She stayed perfectly still. So still that her robes didn’t even rustle. She could have been a carved marble statue, just staring in suspicious disapproval.

  The third bag’s knot refused to yield, so he poked his fingers through the soft plastic and ripped it open.

  “We just struck sugary gold,” he said.

  Sushi darted into the bag over his hands, snuffling around the sticky, grease-spotted cardboard containers of half-eaten orders. Unimpressed, she turned back to Rali.

  “Not tasty.”

  “That’s where we have to agree to disagree,” he told the little fish. “To me, this is very tasty.”

  “Chee-ing bugs is tasty. Sushi brings Rali chee-ing bug. Rali learns.”

  With that, the little fish swam off, squeezing into a cave between two trash bags.

  “This one’s hardly been touched.” Rali pulled out a mostly full carton and offered it to Uchiko. “Care to try a bite?”

  The angel looked at it doubtfully.

  Rali shrugged. “I’ll set it here for now. You can decide later.”

  The sun sank and the sky darkened as he worked. His stomach grumbled. Uchiko didn’t move once, but he could hear her stomach demanding food now, too.

  Rali chuckled to himself. Just hours ago, he and Sushi had been eating delicacies at Jim-nang’s luxurious feast table. Real or illusion, life was a miracle of surprises entirely unconcerned with believability or continuity.

  In time, he found enough fried deliciousness for the three of them, along with a few mostly clean napkins, and even two sets of unused chopsticks still in their paper wrapping.

  He washed the trash stickiness from his hands with the dregs from a crumpled plastic water bottle, then settled down against the wall with a fried mochi sampler—curry, cinnamon-sugar, chocolate, and best of all, caramel drizzled.

  With superlative reluctance, Uchiko knelt with her back against the opposite wall. Sullenly she pulled over the containers he’d left for her. She picked up the chopsticks and searched their wrapper for any hint of damage or trash-juice seepage.

  Far from satisfied, she tore the utensils open.

  “It’s an honor to share a meal with you, Uchiko,” Rali said.

  She scowled. “Why are you so annoyingly friendly?”

  “I want people to feel welcome while they’re with me.”

  “Exactly the sort of idiocy that led you to become attached to a Cursed Death cultivator.”

  That caught Rali off guard. He chewed his bite longer than necessary while he considered his reply.

  “It’s true, I did become attached to Hake,” he said. “I’d never had a friend before except my twin. And he acted as a conduit for more friends such as Warcry and Sushi…” And a pretty green girl with Chlorophyll Spirit who had kissed Rali for saving her from the Heavenly Contrails. “Even now, I wouldn’t have met you without the connection to him. As far as I could tell, Hake was a generally good guy with noble intentions.”

  A strand of caramel stretched from the chopsticks to the piece of mochi Rali was popping in his mouth. The strand broke, dropping across his chin. He scrubbed it off with a napkin.

  “But something happened,” Rali said, laying the napkin on his knee. He nudged a piece of mochi around the box with his chopsticks. “Hake became evil. Maybe all the slaughter in the Heartchamber and being forced to kill for the Dragon Emperor broke him. I know—at least I thought I knew—that he didn’t want to become that stereotypical Death cultivator committing wanton murder. But maybe he tricked me. Maybe he’s always been that guy, and I was too caught up playing the hero of the sword legend to see that my friend was the villain.”

  For a moment, Uchiko glowered down at her untouched food, allowing his words to hang in the air between them.

  Then she said, “Grady Hake wasn’t a villain. But that will make no difference to the Reapers coming for him. They will destroy him whether he means well or he means evil.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Rali frowned, caught between wanting to believe her about Hake and wanting to ask what she meant about the Reapers.

  “You mentioned the Reapers at the spaceport,” he finally said. “Hake thought you were chasing him because you wanted to cover up the fact that you had reaped him from his world by mistake. But—”

  Uchiko’s silver eyes flashed in the growing darkness. “I did not make a mistake! Reapers do not make mistakes! Do you think the Grand Reaper would promote a mistake-prone fool to the Second Flight? Don’t make me laugh!”

  “I’ll try not to,” Rali assured her. “Back on Van Diemann, when Hake saved you from the Heavenly Contrail’s Beauty vs Beasts cages, when that Lightning Spirit psycho tried to kill him, you stopped her.”

  Talking about that adventure hurt. Remembering the ugliness of that fight, the beauty of the Chlorophyll cultivator’s words and the sweetness of her kiss. The shining nobility of Hake’s refusal to stop short of saving all the women imprisoned there—even the angel who wanted him dead. Hake had been the hero of the sword legend that day.

  Rali pushed the memories aside and forged ahead. “And you said that while he was advancing to Ten, you two were connected and you warned him to choose a different path, because you knew it would trigger this trouble.”

  Violently ignoring him, Uchiko snatched up one of her boxes and dug in. She pinched a chocolate-covered glob up with her chopsticks and dropped it down her gullet, swallowing probably before she even had the opportunity to taste it.

  “Uchiko,” Rali asked softly, “are you looking for Hake to protect him from your fellow Reapers?”

  Her marble lips twisted with scorn. “Reapers do not make mistakes, but mortals do. All the time. Grady Hake has made the gravest of mistakes in choosing to specialize in Cursed Death. They will destroy him for it.”

  “But a cultivator can’t choose a Ten specialization contrary to his kishotenketsu,” Rali argued. “There are other things Hake’s done that I object to, unforgivable things that he’s got to answer for, but Cursed Death wasn’t responsible for those decisions, he was. Cursed Death was just a part of his destiny. How can the Reapers have an objection to destiny?”

  Uchiko studied the contents of her cardboard container. “We necessarily keep Death cultivators under special observation from birth. They are the only ones who can become Reapers, like us, the immortal hands of death. But they are few and far between. Even fewer are the ones who advance far enough to choose a Ten specialization, and there are endless potential specializations. I myself specialized in Unforeseen Death. Other Reapers chose Inevitable Death, Martyrdom, Violent Death, Lawless Death, Beautiful Death—the possibilities are infinitely numerous, just like the individualities in living beings. There hasn’t been a Cursed Death cultivator in this universe in millennia.”

  She paused to plucked up a second triangle and swirl it in a glob of chocolate before sending it down the hatch after its friend.

  “The last Cursed Death cultivator became too powerful before she was stopped.” The angel gulped down that bite and readied another. “She reigned supreme across the inner and outer planets, calling herself the Goddess of Death. Her worshippers raised temples to her on every world, sacrificing billions of lives in her name. Every sacrifice at her altars sent Miasma directly to her. No one is certain now how she managed to draw that Miasma from all over the universe, but in time, she grew powerful enough to resist death itself. The self-proclaimed Goddess of Death killed the Reaper who came to collect her.”

  Uchiko locked eyes with Rali. “That should have been impossible. Every Reaper’s cultivation has surpassed the mortal realms of kishotenketsu and achieved immortality.”

  “Through hakkeyoi?” Rali couldn’t help asking.

  Sushi returned from the depths of the garbage pile and settled on Rali’s lap.

  “Sushi would tell Rali if angry stone fairy was hakkeyoi,” the little fish said. She pulled the hem of his shirt over her tail and tucked it under her pectoral fins like a blanket. She closed her mismatched eyes. “Shh. Sushi sleeps now.”

  Uchiko scoffed. “Hakkeyoi is nothing but a stupid mortal fable.”

  Sushi glared at the angel.

  “Shhhh, stone fairy.” She dropped her little fish voice to a whisper. “Like this.”

  Then she flopped over and pulled Rali’s hem up to cover the side of her face.

  Frowning, Uchiko went on in a lower voice.

  “Every mortal wants to believe they can fly past the trials of advancing to Ketsu and go straight to enlightenment.” The angel shook her head, her fine white hair whispering over her shoulders. “Nothing works like that. The most intense dedication and determination will not overpower the natural order.”

  Sushi grunted, wiggling around until she was turned back to face Uchiko. She opened her mouth like she was going to say something.

  Then she blew a long, loud raspberry.

  “See, Rali?” Sushi rolled her mismatched blue and brown eyes. “Stone fairy not is hakkeyoi. Stone fairy not knows about Dragon Gate or keep swimming.”

  “Dragon Gate?” Uchiko asked.

  “It’s from a children’s story,” Rali explained, petting his scaley friend. “An ordinary fish fought her way up stream, until against all odds she leaped over the Dragon Gate and became the first dragon. It’s said that’s how Spirit creatures gain the ability to speak nowadays.” He grinned at the Reaper. “We pathetic mortals enjoy the idea of blossoming into something grander and more amazing than anyone thought we could be.”

  Uchiko snorted. “It’s no wonder so few of you reach immortality.”

  Rali finished off the last of his mochi and licked his chopsticks clean.

  “If this self-proclaimed Goddess of Death had become so powerful, what happened to her?” he asked. “Did she ascend to true godhood?”

  Uchiko upended her empty cardboard mochi container. Getting nothing else out of it, she tossed that one down and grabbed the next closest one.

  “That question caused the first Reaper War,” she said, opening its flaps. “The Dark Reapers believed that she had become a goddess, and they flocked to serve her. The Pale Reapers believed she had become a demoness and knew that she must be stopped.

  “The armies battled for generations. In the end, a single Dark Reaper saw the truth—that the demoness’s rule over the universe was destroying the balance. Her worshippers sacrificed all to her. Whole races were wiped out, whole planets emptied. Worst of all, every death was a Cursed Death. Every final destination was Damnation. Not only for the evil, but for the innocent, the good, and those endeavoring to become good.

  “He switched to our side,” Uchiko said, her harsh cadence softening. “That Dark Reaper. He created Wrathblade, a spectral sword that captured the final resentments of the dead. He hid the blade in his Spirit and returned to the Demoness of Death. She knew of his betrayal and murdered him torturously over the course of decades. But he had known all along it would be so. Finally, when his last gasp escaped him, Wrathblade passed into the demoness’s hands. The voices of everyone she had ever killed whispered to her at once, a deluge of fury and pain.

  “In that heartbeat of distraction, the army of Pale Reapers attacked. Because the demoness would not submit to death, they captured her and sealed her in the hell dimension for eternity.”

  Demons and gods, immortal battles between good and evil, sacrifices both of the willing and unwilling sort. It was like something out of a sword legend. But, Rali supposed, those stories had to originate somewhere.

  Uchiko scooped the last bit of mochi out of her current container, then flung it away as well, licking caramel from the side of her pinkie.

  “The Reapers will do the same to Grady Hake. They cannot repeat their—” She realized what she’d been about to say and swerved around the word mistake. “—delay. They will stop him before he follows in the demoness’s accursed footsteps.”

  Rali idly plucked at his bottom lip with his chopsticks while he considered that.

  “How do they know he’s going to?” he asked.

  Uchiko’s white brows lowered. “How do you know he isn’t?”

  “I don’t. That’s the thing. I can’t say what Hake will do. Two months ago, I would never have believed he could justify killing innocent bystanders. Then he slaughtered a camp of Technols in order to revenge-kill the man he thought had killed my twin. He admitted he knew some of them were innocent bystanders.” Rali met Uchiko’s silver eyes. “You said he wasn’t the villain here. If not him, what is? The sheer stupid luck of being born a Death cultivator? Did you ever murder innocents when you were mortal? Can a Spirit type truly be that destructive, that it can erode who someone is?”

  “Stop that!” Uchiko snapped. “You are ranting, and I can’t answer all your questions if you never stop asking them.”

  Realizing she was right, Rali forced himself to take a deep breath and re-center.

  “I’m sorry, esteemed Reaper,” he said. “It’s just that this has been tearing me up inside for months now. He was good. I believed my friend was good, and now you’re saying that he might be. How did this happen? What did this?”

  “Devil corruption.”

  Chills ran down the back of Rali’s neck in sharp contrast to Laitrong’s blistering heat, and his dual hearts thundered. He couldn’t have heard that right.

  “Did you just say…”

  “Devil corruption,” she repeated. “Every mortal contains furies, both good and bad. When the bad furies outweigh the good furies, that mortal begins to transform into a demon. The balance of their furies can be affected by their choices, by high-level Spirit poisons, by sicknesses, by catastrophic injury, or by curses. It accumulates in mortals, wearing down their good furies. The day Grady Hake killed the Heavenly Scale Balancer and stole my Lunar Scythe, he began taking devil corruption.”

  “This is insane,” Rali whispered. “Just like…”

  He gulped and pulled himself together. This was no time to nerd out. His friend’s life and soul were on the line.

  “In the sword legends,” he tried again, hoping he sounded calm and analytical like Kest would in this conversation, “characters generally start taking devil corruption after insulting an immortal, which leads the immortal to curse them. Did you curse Hake for stealing your scythe?”

  Uchiko scoffed. “I had nothing to do with that. Grady Hake killed one of the creatures that guards the balance of the universes. Such an act was an open defiance of nature by nothing more than a puny mortal who isn’t even supposed to be here. The backlash from that unprecedented act unbalanced his furies, not me.”

  “But didn’t you bring the balancer to Hake?”

  “He was advancing too rapidly and having too much effect on this universe to be rid of any other way. Drastic times call for drastic measures.”

  “But Hake’s only here because he you dropped him here, right? Please forgive me for pushing the point, esteemed Reaper, but that certainly makes it seem as if you’re somewhat responsible.”

  “I didn’t make him kill that balancer! He could have submitted peacefully to his demise—

  “—a demise which wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place.”

  “I did not make a mistake!”

  Clearly, accusations would get them nowhere.

  Rali tried another tack. “Can we stop the devil corruption? Rebalance his furies and reverse whatever damage it’s done to him?”

  “If he’s still resisting the devil corruption, he could reunite the other pieces of the heavenly weapons set with the Lunar Scythe. Together, they would bestow the Blessing of the Immortal upon him. That would stop him from taking any further devil corruption, and with great effort and intense healing, his furies could be rebalanced. Wielding the full set would also prove that he’s worthy of a place in this universe.”

  Uchiko’s bright marble features darkened. “But this is only if he’s still resisting the devil corruption. Once he gives in, it will be too late. He’ll become a demon, and nothing will be able to save him. Like the Demoness of Death.” She tossed aside her last mochi container. “If that’s the case, then an army of Reapers is the only answer.”

  Rali shook his head. “No.”

  “No?” Uchiko scowled. “Why are you saying no?”

  “I swore it would be me,” he told her. Every word felt as if it weighed more than the city surrounding them. “I told Hake that I would be the one to stop him. I can’t let an army of Reapers kill my best friend. If it has to be done, I have to do it. Save him or to stop him—that’s my job.”