Chapters
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I. A rented Buick shot through the Jersey pines, rattling and battling against a scarred, pocked road toward a sharp bend around a hill that hid their destination like an asshole. Walter Lattimore folded the road map into his lap and let Vernon do the swearing. Vernon Asch had been swearing since Toms River. He kept swearing and the other two were about to swear. They were three: a Times man, a sociologist, and a writer of sweat-magazines, respectively gravity, framework, and prurience by way of…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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Ashens Square, Armstrong City The bomb found the west atrium at 9:47 PM. The blast peeled marble from the facade in slabs and the fireball that followed consumed oxygen so fast that windows three blocks east bowed inward, held, then gave up. Inside, the Impressionist wing filled with plaster dust and aerosolized pigment drifting in thermals of superheated air. Gerald Mackey, third-shift security, had been eating a turkey sub in the east corridor monitoring station when the blast knocked his chair…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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February 2056 MARIE Aurore walked the Quai de Valmy along the Canal Saint-Martin in the grey-blue light before the cafes opened. The plane trees were bare and black against the zinc rooftops, and the canal water sat flat and green-grey between its stone banks, and the cold was the kind of cold that did not bite but settled into clothing and stayed. Her breath came in small clouds that dissolved before they reached the iron railing at the water's edge. She wore a black double-breasted coat with brass…
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2.7 K • Ongoing
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The Xaxalpa family home was the type any passing driver would not have found extraordinary. Two stories of a Cape Cod house, a manicured front yard, a picket fence as a border, and of course the raven-haired Saiyan girl in the backyard. Sol Yulaan had been out there since midnight, standing over a block of Devilmite Blackstone with a pick-hammer, shaping a skull. Devilmite didn't yield to much. A Gosamyrian noble could fire a star-busting chi wave at a Devilmite wall and knock off a chip no bigger than…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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Saturday, April 30th The last thing Yulaan remembered before she passed out, she was doing the one thing every Saiyan does best: filling her mouth with food. Once she came to, she found herself with her wrists chained and standing at the center of a stone circle that lay beneath an oculus of a grand Romanesque cathedral built with bad intentions. All around her, infernal tags and designs— goat heads on pikes, a giant pentagram of blood around the altar, black candles alit, occult runes given…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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Several slow clouds came and went. The bracket wheel burned and turned and sent ashes fluttering down. Temujin’s name appeared again. With renewed zeal, he stood, beat his palm, and said, “Alright, bring it on!” As he walked, the voices of his new ‘friends’ cheered him on. This drew a complicated, but grateful warmth to his fists. There surged a sound different from the roar that had greeted Qinglong. This was a warmer noise, uglier for being warm. Temujin recognized it as the…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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Mali brought her flag down. “And that will settle the first rounds! Now it’s time for a much-needed food break!” Enekai and Yulaan ran towards the food court, a hundred paces away from the pavilion and arena. The bronze champion hyperventilated around Yulaan and calmed when Enekai rushed along. Sesame shook both fists after them. “I’ll tie your tails into knots if you spend all my money stuffing your goddamn maws again, monkeyfucks!” Temujin felt cooler than the other side of…-
56.5 K • Ongoing
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Bakuga Kōten of the Burning Sparrow School was called next against Kurohane Shigure, the Rain-Crow Ronin, a narrow demon in a lacquered crow mask and a traveler’s cloak darkened by spells of perpetual rain. His sword was longer than his arm and black along the back, the edge flashing clear whenever he breathed; around his shoulders hung wet feathers, though no water touched the ring, and each step he took left a small black footprint that evaporated after his shadow passed. Mali bounced along. “If…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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The lei tai was simple from above and severe from within: a broad circle of bone-white square stone tiles, smoothed enough to be uncanny, and inlaid with eight equidistant bronze trigrams. Beyond it, nothing but red dirt and a moat of smoking black water in the pit below, then the tiers of demons ascending into the mountain’s throat. Four prayer-pillars stood at the cardinal points, wound with iron sutra chains. At the north wall, looming over the ring from a niche of red lacquer and soot, stood the…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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Temujin and Enekai’s respective matches were so quick that the young man had forgotten what happened in them by the time the trumpets sounded. Those were long crooked horns blown by red-faced tengu clinging upside down to the rafters. The doors at the end of the hall opened with a groan. Beyond them, a staircase climbed into a vast chamber lit by fire the color of burning emeralds. Emeralds! What a tease. The gathered fighters moved. The main arena waited beyond the temple: a circular lei tai…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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