Another kimono hits the dojang’s polysynthetic floor.

The plastic-faced courtesan winces in pain as her tailbone collides with the mat. Her canid face contorts, her spine writhing from neck to tailtip. The jindo’s pudgy jowls pull back long whiskers in pain to reveal black lacquer-encrusted teeth in a Utamaroesque still life of defeat. The silver-plated dagger in her furred left hand, its modern, stoic Nahkampfmessr hilt refashioned into a decadent yab-yum scene of intertwining legs, arms, necks, has yet to make a single scratch.

The opponent leers down at the defeated jindo. It’s a mare. Your mare, braying with an alcoholic decadence, her hooded eyed bloodshot with spezie huffed hours earlier. She drunkenly spits onto the pseudo-bamboo mat with a laugh at the expense of her student.

“You girlies need to do better than that,” she taunts to the other opponent. “Come on, already.”

The second oiran approaches, the girlie’s sharpened, plastic flail spinning in a rigid left hand. The room shakes as the wind outside ruptures. Another maglev freight train rattles against the walls, its several-hundred cars existing only for a moment, casting flashing lights across the criss-crossed flooring, moldy piping ceiling lattices, before disappearing. The commotion shakes the grime from the metal rafters, disturbing dust bunnies of cigarette ash and hairball.

Like the others, this foxy oiran’s face is painted white, the lead shiroi makeup triggering the girl’s hyperosmia, causing her to salivate, snout perpetually wet. Her serious teumessian face is familiar. It’s a copy of billions of others on Tiangong. Of the jindo’s, flat on the floor. Gingered. Once-soft eyes coated in heavy black eyeliner, lashes tainted with irradiated dust.

Her emaciated form is enclothed in a see-through sokbaji garment that cups her mid-thigh. Clavicles tense against her thin skin, shoulders on bare-chested display. Every beat of the snarling girl’s heart creates ripples across your drink as you watch, sitting lotus style across the room with the vixen’s owner, the local representative of the Yugure Consortium.

Bossman Shishito blurts out in his usual milquetoast tonality.

“Girlies, please, let’s try to give it our best. I’m not paying Miss Ø here to whip you around for nothing.”

“Hear your bossman? Bring it, ‘girlies,’” Ø sneers. The mare’s hands are at southpaw, a wry smile supplanting across her face. She bounces from hoof to hoof with loud clops, switching from right to left, lost in the joy of another sparring session.

It’s her fourth this cycle, twenty-fifth this week.

The oiran steps forward, the huli girlie leaning into her left fox’s paw. They’re both short, bound with toes broken, nearly hooves themselves and wrapped in white puresilk. The fox flicks her wrist, letting her morningstar’s head swirl in the humid evening air, the flanges forcing light from the nearby organic warosoku candles to dance.

She pivots with the flair of a vixen, whipping her shoulders to pick up momentum, and advances. Your mare stands nonplussed, her pugilist form weaving across the mat, in and out of danger. A screech rings out, and the bony courtesan lunges, baring her black-lipped vulpine scowl, her mouth filled with cosmetically sharpened teeth.

Ø bobs to the right and easily dodges the ornate weapon’s head, bringing a leg behind that of the courtesan. In a single rotation, she grips the vixen’s shoulders, mace disarmed with surprise, flinging her onto the floor next to the still-laying jindo, who has declined to rise and meet a second challenge. The fox coughs pitifully, letting her chest rise and fall into a coquettish display of submission as her jindo companion investigates her injuries with slack-jawed empty eyes.

Your sitting companion lets loose a groan of anguish. The bossman’s human face forms into one of disappointment, only for a moment, before returning to its regular placidity. Rather than show emotion, he’ll keep his demeanor stoic, as always.

His defeated hands reach below his hanten overcoat, its expensive texture embroidered with a simple lavender, anthropomorphic komainu. The lion-bitch’s eyes are wide, fanged mouth agape in yet another erotic piece, fictional buxom chest on display, gripping its own breasts for the enjoyment of the viewer. The bossman’s hands return with a red package of cigarettes, its cheap plastic cover decorated with the familiar goldenrod pictographs of luxury. Before he can light his release, he produces his silver-plated lighter emblazoned with the upward-facing crescent moon symbol of the Yugure Consortium and chuffs.

Your host sighs under his breath.

“Aiya…”

“Want me to go easier on your girls, Shishi?” the mare yells from across the room, obnoxiously pleased with herself.

“No, but I’m paying you to teach them, not brutalize them. Look at Huhu over there, all bent out of shape. I’ve got her working tomorrow, you know. And watch her feet. You don’t know how much I spent on her binding.”

The fox turns towards you both, her odalisque form on full display. Her eyes roll into her head as she puts on a show of pain, to the chagrin of all involved. Black lips recede to show a grimace of defeat, no matter how feigned. Ø’s hoof probes her neck, eliciting wide eyes of surprise.

“Alright, get up. Save it for the Johns, I’m not buying it. You think I come cheap either?” Ø heaves the two girls to their feet, their unbalanced forms steadying themselves as they are flung ninety degrees. “Remember, your bossman needs you to learn some self-defense. It’s all for your benefit, anyways,” she chastises.

You’ve watched Ø act like this for weeks. Every night, in the company of your host, Boss Shishito of the Yugure Consortium, the mare has trained his veritable army of concubines. Tall, short, animalistic, human, male, female, anything in between, she relishes her contracted position as combat instructor. She has the experience, after all.

And the drive.

Every pinned partner is credits earned. Their thuds against the cold mat are cash registers. Low-impact earning that expresses her naturally destructive energy without putting you both in legal jeopardy.

So she stifles her drunken smile, her calloused hands positioning the girls, equipping them with as much killing knowledge that a gladiatrix can impart on students in only an evening or two. After all, there’s almost a hundred of these girlies to take up her time. Not to mention the Yugure’s tough-guys, with their ill-fitting suit jackets color-clashing with flowery, chafing button-ups, paying under the table for Ø’s criminal wisdom, to sit at the hooves of the mistress.

You hope Ø’s work is making an impact.

However, as she arranges the jindo’s hands correctly on the dagger, fat fingers caressing the carved, kissing bodhisattva figurines, Ø’s mind broadcasts her thoughts over your mutual telepathy. It’s one of uncharacteristic levity, in her own smoky, sorrel voice. Revelations as she floats down from a spezie spike into the waiting arms of drunkenness, uppers and downers intertwined with a celestial sort give-and-take.

“These girls are gonna be meat.”

It’s been nearly a year since your journey began, when the pirate queen had shanghaied you from your job as a courier. Now a year older, after a few months of oppressive rain on New Port Moresby, a stop-over to the casinos of Fontvieille for sieste, and other miscellaneous money-making opportunities, you’re doing better. Your nomadic life of crime remains unfamiliar, but at least you’re finding regular gigs. Or, rather, they’re finding you; the Old Man planet hadn’t lied when he said his benefactor’s network of referrals was robust.

Through such encrypted channels, figures like Boss Shishito hire your services.

Your mare handles most of the work; you handle most of the negotiating.

Prices for a former pirate queen run high, and your combined bounty grows higher with every contract taken. Your valuation includes Ø’s trafficable mystique; a former gladiatrix, a disgraced slave, family brand and barcode on her sternum. An illustrious hundred-and-forty-second clone in a lineage stretching back to the ancient times. Even her formal registration, Our Girl Saturday CXLII, carries marketability.

In short, the buyers line up.

After all, if you’re worth that much dead or alive to your growing list of enemies, you must be worth hiring for a job or two.

You feel eyes on your neck, those of your male companion. Boss Shishito’s rose-tinted lenses glare at you through steel quadrilateral frames. Smoke billows from his nose, its small shape broken in three places and zig-zagging. As a gesture of friendship, he lights a second stick between his lips, and passes one to you. You bring the tobacco to your lungs, letting it dance, before allowing it to waft throughout the floor’s banquet-hall-cum-training-dojo.

He gives a political smile, careful to hide his perfect row of neatly installed ceramic teeth, the luxury too much to show off to the likes of you.

“I apologize for the state of my girlies. They’re not accustomed to fighting. For good reason, I say.”

“Don’t apologize. We’re happy to work with you on their development,” you smile. “Besides, you know Ø. It’s probably for the best that they can’t put up much of a fight. Wouldn’t want her getting too carried away.”

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“Yes, but after several weeks, one expects development from his underlings.” He watches as the jindo is once more thrown into the air, tail between her bare legs, landing face-first on the mat with a whimper. You remember all the times you’ve been in the same position; launched out of place, feeling the uncaring sting of pain gifted by a familiar mare.

It’s always break, or be broken, when it comes to your partner, isn’t it? You exhale with your usual look of dissatisfaction.

“Unlike you and Ø, I can empathize with your girls,” you sigh. “Not everyone’s cut out for murder within a week or two.”

“Now that, that I can empathize with,” he laughs, bringing his metal hand to your shoulder. The gangster gives you a tungsten squeeze of friendship as a vulpine form is ejected above the both of you, barely missing the hand-cut chabudai table at your knees, nearly sending the multi-hundred-credit bottle of aromatic erguotou liquor to the floor. His stench of tobacco mixes with fermented sorghum as you pour him yet another cup of alcohol, as a polite guest should.

“I hope you don’t mind that I get rough with the merchandise, Shishi,” Ø laughs, sitting before you both on an open zabuton pillow. “Don’t gotta pay, do I?”

“You? Never. Who would I send to collect your tab?”

She lands her manicured shoulder on the nearby armrest, nearly breaking it in two under her weight. The mare leans forward, drunkenly picking up the ornate porcelain decanter and serving herself another glass before over-topping-off that of your host. His eyes spell disappointment, almost distaste as the liquid pools atop the wood, staining within its grooves.

Ø raises her glass. An equine snout juts across the table with a sadistic grin. She’s grateful for her old friend, her new part-time employer, and the criminal collective he represents.

“They just don’t make fighters like they used to, do they, Shishi? Come on,” she slurs, “to stablemates,” she raises her cup, splashing more alcohol onto the mat. Your host lets a murderous smile eke across his own face, betrayed by his own mutual intoxication.

As one of the many non-gladiators in the room, you decline the toast. Instead, you look to the oiron. The two girlies shamble to their feet, re-robing, stowing away their assets. They’re unharmed, it looks.

You’re thankful for the mare’s continued civility.

“To stablemates,” Shishito laughs, slurping down the shot, his commotion allowing the two disheveled girlies to return to their corner, where they await further instructions atop their individual ottomans. They fix their hair, spit-shining pelts, their dishabille figures on display just out of sight. Like gimcracks on shelves, objects, cheap ones.

Ø’s eyes flash amber at the sight of Boss Shishito, the alcohol coursing through her fetlocks. You feel her memory. It reeks of petroleum, vibrating with the maglev train that passes nearby.

Childlike, abject terrors of combat. She’s barely a filly, forced to fight in the Spartan ring. Some are slaves like her, some budding criminals like Shishito, some just plain unlucky enough to be forced into a private gladiatorial education. Stablemates, all of them, entrapped within the same martial Eita, training in one of the many infamous facilities nestled inside the craters of Agapito.

Geodesic domes reach high into the dark nothingness of space, birthed in pain from the surface of the asteroid, the thousands of rooms and tunnels bored for resources, repurposed and resold, retrofitted into educational facilities for the newest generations of killers, both privately and publicly funded, depending on the case.

Ø looks down, past her youthful, cut knuckles, into Shishi’s eyes during another sparring match. To you, they’re almost innocent. To her, vulnerable. He’s two bruised, bloodied slits with a mouth of broken teeth, trapped in the ring as the other children jeer at his continued losses.

There, Shishi’s small, weak, unable to put up much of a fight against the rest of his weight class. His fingers grip Ø’s neck with impotent defense as she brings her juvenile fist to his nose, splitting it in half for the first time, sending his blood coursing across the dusty surface of the asteroid. The filly licks her young lips in her dream, savoring the taste of blood, her soft, tank-bred mind gladly acclimating to a life of violence.

Your host is just another in a long list of the mare’s victims, a list that many would argue includes you as well. And you’d be inclined to agree.

In reality, Shishito’s false metal hand clicks and whirrs against his emptied cup of alcohol. It’s the signal for the girlies, who shuffle around the room ferrying booze and narcotics. Although he’s no longer a gladiator, and was never much of one, he’s earned your mare’s respect, and built the relationship of a mutual one. It’s why you’re here, after all.

Not everyone rolls out the white khata for wanted criminals.

Your host brings his other, fleshy, hand to the Jindo’s shoulder on his left. Her fawn coat is still disheveled from her training, and she nurses a bruised paw. It is broken in two places, she assumes incorrectly.

“You two have to start taking your training seriously,” he pleads. “I don’t know if I told you ladies, I know I told Cherry and Lulu, but you two don’t understand the importance of our guest. The expertise of the woman, mare, who’s sitting across from you…”

Ø’s equine nostrils flare in response, her steady hand pouring another glass for herself. She looks at you, mind empty, with the hooded eyes that you have grown a begrudging familiarity towards. It’s a knowing look. One can almost call it romantic amidst the haze of another comped night of expensive wines. Placid, comparatively, like she looks when she’s unconscious next to you, sucking up oxygen and snoring, murderous nightmares not yet materializing.

Whatever it is, it’s prideful.

“You won't meet a dangerous woman like this again,” the bossman claims. “At least, you two should hope so. In the ring, I once saw Ø here rip a man’s arm clear off his body.”

“Oh,” the mare interjects, pointing a finger, twirling it towards the metal appendage. “Want me to show the girls?”

“If you break it, you pay for it.”

“Which one, the real one, or the fake one?”

“How did that happen, Boss?” the jindo asks. Her empty eyes are devoid of context. Mouth agape with the lack of compassion that only a whore can offer. She points a manicured finger, nails long, painted red, towards Shishito’s replacement arm.

“That’s a good story, right?” Ø turns to you, gesturing to your drink. It’s true. You’re liquored up, yourself. “Mind hearing it again?”

“Sure,” you smile, “after all, we thought you’d tell all the ladies this story, Shishito. Ø keeps saying you’re an excellent host, after all.”

“Okay, okay,” he lightens up. “I’ll tell the girls, you two, listen up. It was after I met your sensei here, back during the war.”

“The war?” the bound-footed vixen asks. It’s a faux-interest. One that makes her purse her lips and lean in, chest first, towards her bossman.

“The war, the war,” he pauses. “Which war was it? The Sant’Agostino Emergency. Not a war, technically, for insurance purposes. But, you see, the Consortium was running guns to a local warlord after the EMP’s hit. And the Agostinians, they’re a tough crowd, almost as bloodthirsty as the Imperial remnants we have here in the wastes outside the Old City.

“But, we got into orbit. Broke the blockade alongside a couple ships from The Eight Legs family, back when we had the truce going. And you think you’re home free by then, right? Past the patrols? Wrong. Once you’re through the blockade, you’ve got to get through the atmosphere, which was semi-toxic at the time—”

A commotion interrupts your host.

Behind you and the mare, within the paper-thin internal doors of the compound, five sets of feet pound the plastic-bamboo flooring. They draw closer, erratic, the group swarming. Opposition, police, whatever they may be, your hand dips below your noragi jacket and nurses the sturdy handle of your antique 415 semi-automatic pistol. Ø’s stealthily plucks the dagger from the jindo’s waist, the dog’s visage transfixed in an empty surprise. The mare’s furred hand clutches at its sexualized hilt, tracing the interlocking arms and legs of two demonic entities. Your host’s wakizashi never strays far from his hip, but now he hooks it closer and springs to his feet.

The dojo’s paper door slams open, thudding at its rosewood jambs, revealing five hurried gangsters, their finto-silk button-ups, cheap slacks, and ramshackle kimono covered in the dark crimson of dried blood and clay, two of them sporting snub-nosed nuclear-tipped pistols stuffed in their dingy pseudo-leather belts.

In front, the tallest and most senior—Ke—his androgynous face bespectacled with tortoise-rimmed Languedoc designer sunglasses at his forehead. His blonde side-cut is smeared with grime, evidence of a nervous hand drawing across his head, scratching with palpable anxiety. He reeks of agarwood cologne. Behind, the four other goons hoist a small, covered palanquin, its hammock hand-stitched with dyed blacks, blues, reds, and yellows, crescent symbols on all sides, hiding an unmoving lump of flesh.

It’s gaudy, fitting for the deceased occupant within.

Shishito sits. His sober politeness returns, and purposefully contrasts the kabuki his underlings perform, chests heaving in over-acted displays of exhaustion and abject terror, crocodile tears swelling and knees shaking. Ø scoffs in admonishment as she reaches once more for a drink.

However, to you, the play is infectious, tearing into your rookie’s sensibilities, leaving you on edge along with the two trembling girlies.

Your host stoically gestures to his side, and the two ladies scramble to reform in their corner. Five shadows draw over your party of three as the underlings lower the satin palanquin atop the girlies’ vacated twin ottomans. Shishito’s look is suspiciously knowing, and he lowers his rose-lensed sunglasses, showing off his bright eyes, face darkened from a presumed lack of sleep.

He brings a hand to the palanquin’s flap, peeling it aside as you would wax from a milk candy, careful to avoid a tear. The cocoon opens slowly, barely budging. Your crowd waits with bated breath.

Finally, with a tumble comes a woman, out like a sack of jackfruit into the chabudai table, sending alcohol splattering through the cream-colored matting, crimson blood flowing from a thousand of her cut orifices.

Shishito flinches, his sunglasses falling to the floor as he stands in surprise once more. You and Ø follow suit, dodging alcohol, as screeches ring from the scared girlies and a howling from Ke’s shatei gangster chorus. One gangbanger reeking of cheap beer, of middling height, brings his four-fingered hand to his mouth, and vomits onto the mats, corner wall, and his sharkleather brogue shoes, intricately carved with cloud imagery and one size too big.

Atop the mess of liquor and bodily fluid is the palanquin’s corpse. An attractive one. She’s another one of Boss Shishito’s bitches.

The deceased nureongi’s doggish snout is agape, digitized teeth askew from some act of blunt violence. Long, black, real eyelashes cover her heterochromatic eyes. One, the blue, is false and electrical, still buzzing and flapping, refusing to believe its organic host has expired. Her blonde hair, fixed into a thin liangbatou style, ornamented with gaudy fake magnolias, has crumpled under the weight of her skull like a trampled bouquet.

At her neck, her stylized, bastardized white hanbok slips from her shoulders. Her jeogori upper garment is nearly see-through, its georgette make originally a proud white, now a sickly red. Her jima skirt is short, slit-cut, high-waisted, and patterned with yellow and pink peonies. It draws from her petite kneecaps, to what’s left of her chest.

Beneath her jowls, still dripping fresh blood, her ribcage is cavernous. Upturned, each individual rib has been broken, re-fashioned, sutured with iron to create a circular blood eagle. Surrounding her chest cavity, her body has been further mutilated.

Thin dagger lines curl and pinch, enveloping her whole torso in ribbons of skin, which must have slowly came undone as her pelt had become worn, abused, and lifted from her muscle. The courtesan’s now-permanent look of quiet fear bores past you all, into the ceiling, lifeless and broken into some murderously beautiful totem of sacrifice.

Another maglev train rattles the room, drowning out the soft clicking of the undead eye.

Near a lifeless rear paw, your party’s toppled decanter lies drained of its expensive fermented sorghum. Ø stares at the liquid seeping into the mats, wearing a grimace of disgust and disappointment. The smell of blood makes her thirsty.

She snaps her fingers for another bottle.