“Heavenly Contrails my butt,” I muttered, looking our attackers over.

  Contrail hooligans usually leaned toward speed and maneuverability—and most of them had wings or could naturally fly somehow—but there was enough muscle in that tunnel to clog a black hole. Plus, I remembered seeing the beefed-up hawk following the picture show starlet Ivalya around the night before at the party. His beak was partially obscured by the ninja mask today, but it was the same dude.

  These guys were Holy Body Cult.

  I shoved Warcry against the wall and got in front of him.

  “Stay behind me and protect the baby,” I said.

  Flames lit up the tunnel. “Over me dead—”

  “Not an option, champ. Bodyguard, remember?”

  Three Corpse Sickness exploded off me, sprinting toward our ambushers. Turquoise Miasma flared and fists streaked at the park side of the tunnel as the yellow Incredible Hulk who’d been messing around on his HUD crashed into my first Corpse. On the city side, the other two Corpses ran into a monster of an Anuban with traps so stacked that they almost touched the bottom of his pointed jackal ears.

  Based on my brief few interactions with the local CPA, I doubted I’d get away with killing eight rival gangsters in the entrance to a beloved planetary landmark, but just in case I had to take one for the team, I used my Corpses to do a quick remote view of the first few guys’ Judgment Beyond the Veil.

  Ivalya was smarter than Zheytarr had been. Maybe she hadn’t trusted the worst of the worst to watch her back; she had surrounded herself with non-irredeemably evil hooligans. These had to be the least objectionable Big Five members I’d ever viewed Judgment on. Their most heinous crimes were shoplifting this universe’s version of AirForce Ones and skipping out on their dentist bill from extreme teeth bleaching.

  Meaning that, unless I wanted to break my Ten covenant and destroy my Spirit sea, this was a fight to the escape, not to the death.

  A deep bovine bellow shook the tunnel.

  A buffalo dude with his hood pulled awkwardly over his horns dropped his massive head and charged. Red light radiated from him. He bowled through the Corpses fighting the jackal and rampaged toward Warcry and me.

  I threw out my hand. “Rigor Mortis!”

  The paralyzing attack hit the buffalo on top of his giant skull and shattered.

  It didn’t even slow him down. Hooves the size of frying pans thundered on the pathway. He let out another buffalo berserker cry.

  If I didn’t get him stopped, Warcry, the baby, and I were meat paste.

  I covered my arms with my Death Metal and planted my feet, unspooling a spiral of Miasma for a massive burst of Death Grip.

  A glowing forest of skeletal hands burst from the pathway, covering the ten yards between us and the buffalo. He rampaged through the front line. Desperately, the hands snatched at his thick ankles. He stumbled but kept bulling forward. The hands snapped at him like possessed beartraps, tripping him up.

  But they didn’t stop him.

  I hit the Ki-strength enhancement hard.

  “You might want to take evasive maneuvers,” I warned Warcry. “I’ll try to stop him, but—”

  The buffalo pitched out of the skeletal hands, still maintaining enough forward momentum to smash a semi’s engine block out its trailer’s back doors.

  With Ki-speed, I managed to turn my upper body before he gored me. I launched everything I had into bashing the edge of Death Metal into the side of his neck.

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  Miasma clanged off a thin, berserker-red aura, throwing sparks. His shoulder and outstretched arm ploughed into my gut, knocking the wind and probably ten years of my life out of me.

  We slammed into the ground. I had a split-second to be thankful for the scythe reinforcing my bones and the Proving Forge elixir that had toughened up my body enough to survive a hit like that. Then my ribs crunched.

  The buffalo sat up on my stove-in rib cage, throwing haymakers and bellowing. Gasping for air, I got one Death Metal between us to ward off the brain-pulping shots. The other arm was pinned under a buffalo knee. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. All I could do was pour necrotizing frost onto those ribs to kill the nerves and hope the script in my tattoo would hurry up.

  Punches crashed into Death Metal like cannonballs. My lungs burned. My Dragons tattoo blazed, pushing out the snapped ribs, but the colossal bison butt bouncing around on the bone shards wasn’t making the healing process any faster.

  Dead Man’s Hand pulsed in my Spirit sea, like an instant Get Out of Any Beating Free card.

  But the worst the buffalo’s Judgment had shown me was that he’d once entered a bodybuilding competition under a false name so his creditors wouldn’t take the prize money. He was just a big dumb goober who liked working out and had fallen in with a bad crowd.

  Somewhere close by, the baseball bat ping of Warcry’s prosthetic nailing somebody undercut the buffalo’s enraged mooing. Around the corner of my shield, I saw the ginger cradling a tiny lump of blankets against his neck and chest as he threw a flaming stop-kick into the face of a roided-out jetpack ninja.

  The kick snapped the guy’s head back. He fell sidelong into the wall and hit something on his jetpack. Its rockets screamed and shot him off the ground. Unconscious, he smacked the arched ceiling and swooped off, ricocheting down the tunnel.

  Warcry’s flames went afterburner. He shoulder-dived out of the way with the baby tucked.

  Weirdly, no crying. I guess Bodhi was fine with all this.

  I mentally crossed my fingers when the unconscious jet ninja shot overhead, but he missed nailing the buffalo by a mile and shot toward the city end of the tunnel. Those monster fists kept slamming into Death Metal.

  Through the eyes of one Corpse on the city end of the tunnel, I watched the gecko bodybuilder wade through the melee and grabbed another black-veined turquoise version of me by the throat. The gecko choke slammed it into the tunnel wall.

  Instead of fighting back, that Corpse dropped its jaw open like a snake about to swallow something five times its size.

  “Warcry, cover Bodhi’s ears!” I yelled.

  Grave Wail keened out of my Corpse at eardrum-perforating volumes.

  Blood burst from the gecko’s ear and nose holes and welled up in his eyes. He dropped the Corpse and threw his hands over his ears. All around, hooligans fell to their knees, smashing their hands over whatever organ they heard out of. The Wail was so loud that, for a second, I worried it would shatter the barrier holding out the ocean, but the glass held.

  A shocked snort sent blood mist raining down on Death Metal. The buffalo’s strongman punches stuttered.

  I shield bashed where the Adam’s apple would be on a human. While the buffalo gagged and clutched his throat, I bucked my hips. He had to outweigh me by a literal half-ton, but that first shot had pitched him off balance, so his seat suddenly twisting underneath him threw him sideways.

  Fighting the tangle of his cow-legs, I followed him over, scrambling on top and blasting him in the huge head with my shields until, finally, his eyes rolled back.

  I shoved to my feet.

  “Dust Storm!” someone behind me yelled.

  Past the rest of the incapacitated hooligans, the meathead hawk had ridden out Grave Wail in a wavy bubble of clear Spirit. He flapped his wings, sending off a gust of what looked like heat distortions and stirring up dust from nowhere.

  Visibility in the tunnel dropped to zero, and breathability wasn’t much better. The ping of Warcry’s prosthetic tapered off, replaced by the sound of the ginger hacking up his lungs. A tinier, more pathetic cough came from down that way, too.

  Choking on the dust, I boosted Dead Reckoning, pushing it out until I found him.

  I reached for the hawk’s life point to bluff him with Dead Man’s Hand, but that wavery candle slipped through my fingers like a mirage. I hit his life point with Rigor Mortis, freezing it so it couldn’t slip away, and grabbed ahold.

  A tooth-rattling thunderclap rocked the tunnel. The dust cloud particulates turned instantly to rain and fell out of the air.

  Still choking, I spun around to face the new threat.

  Four identical Ylefs crammed shoulder-to-shoulder into the city end of the tunnel, their blasters aimed downrange at the gang fight. In the center of their black tactical vests, the letters CPA glowed in the blacklight from the safety strips. Metallic dragonflies shot past them, whirring down the tunnel and buzzing around each of our heads, making sure to record us from every angle in case anybody made a break for it.

  “You’re all under arrest for disturbing the peace in the Park of the Tranquil Eye,” the agents shouted in unison. Targeting apps flashed on their identical wraparound sunglasses. “We’ve locked you in our sights. Come out with your hands up.”

  “I—” Warcry coughed. He hocked up a loogie and spat it off to the side. “I got a baby. Can’t put me hands up. Don’t shoot it.”

  my Patreon is like 10-15 chapters ahead. I have no idea the exact count, I just know it's a lot. We just started the final fight of Book 4 over there, and it's a doozy. As one of my patreons put it "Next week on Dragonball Z," lol. Come join the party if you feel like it.

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