There used to be this saying back on Earth. It went, “I’d rather reign for eternity in hell than serve forever in heaven.” Obviously the only people who say that have never actually been to the hell dimension. That place sucks. You wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes there, let alone an eternity, even if you were the boss. The wind slices you up like it’s made of razor blades, the air burns like extra-strength acid, the sky looks like pus, and the ground is made of dried blood. Plus, the worst enemies you ever made in your life are all waiting there to pounce on you.

  Or maybe that last part is just me.

  The Bailiff had brought a welcome wagon of every evil cultivator I’d killed since coming to this universe. All the old favorites like his OSS buddies Shogun Takiru and Ripper, along with dozens of Technols, Heavenly Contrails, Jianjiao, and even fellow Eight-Legged Dragons. And of course, my newest enemies like Ling Fey the psycho flying squid and Agent Ravomet the corrupt CPA agent.

  The demonic hell gang closed in on me from all sides.

  They had all changed since dying, like being sent to the hell dimension had mutated them. Sanya-Ketsu had gained muscle and a pair of tusks that poked through her surgical mask. Wicked spurs of bone covered Agent Rav from head to foot like thorns. Shogun Takiru had triple his original number of teeth crammed in his jaws, and they were all fangs. They glinted in the diseased sunlight as he smirked and shuffled his deck of Spirit playing cards one-handed.

  This would’ve been the perfect situation for Mass Grave or Damnation, but I’d already tried that. The death grab didn’t affected these guys, because they didn’t have a life point anymore.

  It made a sick sort of sense. I’d already killed them all once. Where would they go if I did it again, Double Hell?

  “Save me a leg!” the Bailiff called from just outside the circle. As usual, that baleen-toothed jerk was content to wind everybody else up, then sit back and watch the show.

  The wind screamed off my Void Bracers and Lunar Scythe as I spun, trying to keep an eye on all my enemies at once. There were too many. Everybody had a weapon or a Spirit attack in the chamber and ready to go.

  I couldn’t watch them all, so I amped up Dead Reckoning to warn me if anybody in the crowd got within scythe range and focused on Ripper.

  The ’roid-ripped shark clutched a white-hot branding iron in his fist. As he stalked toward me, the glowing end of the iron popped and hissed.

  That was one thing all these former Big Five members had in common—they all had brands somewhere on their faces. Ripper’s was a stylized razor blade inside a circle, scorched black against his gray sharkskin.

  “It’ll only hurt like blue blazes for a minute, Smart Boy,” the Bailiff hollered over the screaming wind. Two of his eight new pairs of ghostly Spirit arms spread wide like they were showing off a grand prize. “And then you’ll get to serve the Lord of Razors for all eternity. The right mighty Lord might even give you to me as an indenture—a little finder’s fee. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Just like old times!”

  “Come on over here and find out,” I yelled back at him.

  “Still got that mouth on you, I see. I find it exceedingly hard to believe nobody’s knocked that out of you yet, but you always did have more than the average starch in your collar, didn’t you?”

  Dead Reckoning went off, warning me about three incoming Spirit attacks. The only one I actually saw move was Sanya-Ketsu. She flung some sort of nightmarish cloud at me, her prismatic Sown Dream Spirit sparkling around the edges.

  I tensed, expecting to be trapped in a dream while the rest of them piled on back here in reality. Having recently almost been pressed through an asphalt road by a Ketsu, I knew Sanya could destroy me and there was nothing I could do about it.

  But the Void Bracers swallowed the Sown Dream assault and the other Spirit attacks, just like they seemed to swallowed the light from the air around them.

  That slowed down everybody who relied on Spirit alone. Unfortunately, I’d taken out a lot of people who favored a good sharp knife.

  And there was that brand Ripper was looking to stamp across my face. What had the Bailiff said? That it would enslave me to some hell lord? Been there, done that for the first two months I’d been on Van Diemann, and I wasn’t going back.

  A yard from me, Ripper lunged. I swung the scythe, but the shark’s lunge had been a feint. The jet-black blade whistled through empty space.

  At the same moment, Dead Reckoning pinged behind me. Three, four, six attackers. I whirled, chopping off hands clutching switchblades and meat hooks, slicing through legs with knife-tipped boots, and even cut a garotte-wielding Jianjiao in half.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Dead Reckoning went nuts, alerting from every angle. Now that some of them had broken the battle ice, the rest of the pack rushed me. I let the early warning system drop since it was nothing but one long, blaring alarm. I whirled and hacked with the Lunar Scythe. I scoured away physical weapons with Moldering Bones and slammed out paralyzing palm-strikes of Rigor Mortis.

  Still, there were so many of them that attacks slipped through the cracks in my defenses. A club slammed into my shoulder. A knife-sharp bone spur on an elbow ripped down my bicep, tearing the bottom of my t-shirt sleeve, then swung back up, slicing for my face. I jerked my head out of the way and chopped the Contrail in half before he could take flight.

  The acidic air burned in my wounds. Blood trickled, but didn’t go far, blasted dry in seconds by the endless howling wind.

  I covered one arm with Death Metal and wielded the scythe one-handed, but I couldn’t block everything. Every impact bled away a little more of my energy.

  Somebody grabbed my ankles. It was that Jianjiao with the garotte—or his top half, anyway. I had assumed because I’d cut him in half that I’d killed him, but he was alive and well and wrapping his wire around my legs.

  In fact, everybody I’d thought I’d killed since this fight started were just fine. Agent Rav grabbed his dismembered arm off the ground and stuck it back to his gushing stump. It stayed. He flexed his fingers. Near him, a Technol was fitting his hacked off leg back on.

  I tried to kick free of the wire and the Jianjiao’s hold, but he cinched the snare tight and I tripped. I hit the rusty, hardpacked blood-dirt.

  I saw the incoming shadow a split second before a rock cracked me upside the head. My vision blacked out.

  When I could see again, I had a pile of hooligans pinning me down. The Lunar Scythe had ripped its way back inside my body to reinforce my skeleton. The Void Bracers kept eating Spirit attacks. With my arms stuck under the mutated, musclebound jerks, Death Metal wasn’t doing any good for blocking. I let it drop and Reclaimed the Miasma, racking my brain for some kind of mega-blast explosion to knock everybody back.

  Damnation? Useless here.

  Wrathblade? I couldn’t get it out without my hands.

  Sudden Death? Another one I needed hands for.

  I kicked and thrashed. There were too many of them restraining me. I whipped my head at the closest faces—a Technol with a goggle-lens for a left eye and the blue-skinned Tatsu Shin Be—but the angle was too awkward, I couldn’t land a headbutt. They pulled back a bit, but not far enough for me to slip loose.

  Ripper appeared in the gap, grinning down at me. He waved the branding iron. Heat distortions wavered around the white-hot end.

  “Ready to join the Lord of Razors’s club, indenture?” the shark growled.

  “Screw you!”

  He huffed a laugh. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  The branding iron descended toward my face.

  You’d think, being dead, that your heart couldn’t go crazy anymore, but mine tried to punch its way out of my chest. I twisted and bucked for all I was worth, almost wrenching my arm out of the socket.

  “Now, don’t go fidgeting on us, Smart Boy,” the Bailiff said from somewhere just out of my sight. “You don’t want to lose an eye. Just ask old Nel[] there.”

  That got a big laugh from the crowd, and a “Boy howdy!” from someone who was probably old Nel.

  The brand wavered, Ripper’s chuckle jiggling it. The smeared burn scar on the Bailiff’s face flashed through my brain again.

  While the glowing metal was still a foot away, I felt the scorching heat. Sweat poured down my face. My eyes teared up at the searing waves coming off the brand.

  The stylized razor hovered closer.

  Six inches away, the sweat droplets evaporated and my skin pulled tight like I was getting the world’s worst sunburn. It felt like my eyes were boiling. I clinched them shut, but that didn’t help.

  I felt Grave Wail’s desperation and pressure building inside me, ready to explode like an overfilled balloon, but when I took a breath to scream, the heat burned my lungs like I’d swallowed fire. I felt the tiny air sacs popping like bubbles. The Wail died in my throat.

  “Powerful Enemy,” I choked out.

  Powerful Enemy was the latest ability I’d gotten from a jade book. It sorted through all the most powerful people you had defeated and summoned one to fight for you. I hadn’t tried that out yet, because all the jade book abilities I’d gotten from ghosts tended to come with major drawbacks, and I didn’t know what the cost for Powerful Enemy was. Also, having somebody I’d killed come back to defend me didn’t sound like a great time.

  But all’s fair in last-ditch efforts and all that.

  As soon as I triggered it, Powerful Enemy whizzed through everybody I’d defeated in a heartbeat, searching for the top power levels. When it chose one, it felt like the click of a spinner settling into place.

  “Oh, this has got to be a joke,” someone muttered. “Everybody get back!”

  The bodies holding down my arms and legs shifted. Through streaming, squinted eyes, I saw blurry demonic hooligans craning their necks.

  The branding iron stopped its descent an inch from my nose.

  As Ripper twisted to face whoever the newcomer was, he let the brand dip and almost finished the job by accident. I jerked my face out of the way. The brand crackled as it touched the ground by my ear, shooting up sparks of burning blood-dust.

  “Get back?” Ripper growled, yanking the brand up and pointing it at the newcomer. “You gonna make us?”

  The newcomer sighed in disgust. “Apparently.”

  His voice nagged at my brain, like I should know him, but it was kind of hard to think in that situation.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t our shiny glass pal!” the Bailiff drawled, still out of my line of sight. “Who knew we’d all meet up again—you, me, and the Smart Boy? I always figured our little Death cultivator had killed you, Nameless, and by golly if I didn’t hit that nail on the head.”

  Crap. I knew where I’d heard that voice before.

  An annoyed-looking Ylef stepped into view, a Glass Hammer in each fist. He settled one on his shoulder and pointed the other at where I guessed the Bailiff was.

  “Eat your tongue, you backwater trash,” Sedryk Nameless said. “It’s Sedryk Queensman now. And on that note…”

  He gave one Glass Hammer an impatient little flutter at the crowd, waving everybody off me. His eyes flashed with turquoise Death Spirit, and his voice rang with command, Miasma rolling from his mouth as he spoke.

  “By order of the Night Rose Nochekitli, Goddess of Death and Queen of Hell, you will release the Death cultivator. He belongs to her, and she demands that he arrive in one piece. Disobey at your peril.”