The front door of the car exploded off its hinges and embedded itself into a tree off to the side of the road. The driver who had saved them from the teacher days before climbed out of the wrecked vehicle with clenched fists. Blood dripped from a cut near his temple as he turned around to look at his charges.

Angie and Lindsay climbed out of the car a second behind him and joined Nate in facing Jace and his four cultivators.

“What are we going to do?” Lindsay whispered. “I don’t see how we’re going to get out of this without Jace getting his way.”

“So, what, you’re going to take them away and force them to create their cores?” Nate asked, doing his best to ignore the conversation going on behind him.

The girls stilled; their focus concentrated entirely on how Jace would answer.

“You’ll never get away with this,” The driver said, interrupting. “Even if that is your plan, and you did force them into a duel afterward, no one would hold them to the results. That isn’t the purpose of the duels.”

Jace smirked cruelly. “Maybe not in this city, but there are other… more… enlightened ones I can take them to.”

There was an audible popping sound as the driver clenched his fists and stepped in front of them. “I won’t let you take either of the young ladies!”

“You don’t have a choice.” Jace nodded to the cultivators at his side, and three of them jumped forward.

In an instant, the driver had been surrounded and was being pummeled into the ground. The three clearly had experience working together, and they were using it to their advantage now. Each time the driver faced forward to block a punch or a kick, one of the others would take advantage of his distraction and hit him.

It was a well-coordinated offense, and nothing like those hodge-podge scenes Nate used to see in the movies. These people weren’t taking turns attacking someone, but cultivators with experience.

The driver didn’t last long. It was too much of a one-sided fight. They had similar cultivation levels, it seemed, but their coordination and fighting style simply overwhelmed him entirely.

However, that short moment was enough for the three to turn around and run. Only to be caught by the fourth cultivator a few steps later. He dragged them back by their necks across the coarse pavement and threw them at Jace’s feet.

“And just where did you think you were going?” He smirked coldly. “Knock them all out and put them in the car. Get rid of the evidence.”

Nate felt a pinch at the back of his neck and then everything went dark.

***

The rocking of the car was the first thing that registered when Nate came to a while later. His body felt stiff and bruised, as though someone had hit him a few times after he was unconscious. It was a good thing he still had the healing bracelet on. It had been working to mitigate the damage before he even woke.

Opening his eyes, he blinked against the crusted blood on his eyelashes and looked around the dim area he found himself in. Thin streams of light crept in through cracks around the molding and he was able to guess that it was a trunk. The dead body of the driver was in there with him as well. The man’s unblinking eyes and smashed face lay testament to his current unliving state.

Nate said a quick prayer for the man and then began searching his suit for anything useful. In their arrogance, the cultivators hadn’t tied him up or anything. He was completely free to try to escape, not that he would dare to leave the girls to their current fate.

Feeling more than a little disgusted with what he was doing, his hands rifled through the man’s clothes, only to find nothing. Either he had been carrying nothing on him, or his corpse had already been searched.

Nate sighed and felt at his own pockets, confirming what he had already known. His phone and wallet had been taken.

If he needed to, then he could bring the kukris over from his avatar, but weapons weren’t what he needed at the moment. He needed a way to contact other people. Even if he had weapons, he already knew he had no chance of defeating the cultivators that had teamed up with Jace.

As coreless students, they had no way of beating them. The most they could hope to do is get lucky and find a way to escape, though even that was a stretch.

It was a situation in which he had no idea what to do. This wasn’t a situation he had encountered in his past life, and it wasn’t like in the movies either. The enemy was so much more powerful than them that all the cliché plots he could think of were automatically invalidated.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Unfortunately, life was different from fiction.

He had no easy way out of their situation. The only thing he could even think of trying was creating some more signs outside the dungeon again. However, if he did that, then the questions would come pouring in about his and the girl’s relationship with the being who created the dungeon.

Taking that particular course of action was the absolute last thing he wanted to do. Not to mention there was no guarantee that anyone would see it or even respond to what it said in time anyway.

Nate settled back for the remainder of the drive a few minutes later. The air inside the trunk was starting to get warm and rather hard to breathe. The corpse a foot away from him had long since relaxed enough that certain bodily fluids had been released.

A little over ten minutes after he woke up, according to the clock attached to the computer on his wrist, the car came to a stop.

Outside the trunk, he could hear the girls being pulled from the car and Jace yelling at them. It took another minute before anyone bothered to come to check on him in the trunk. Finally, one of the cultivators from before popped the lid, revealing the bright singing lights of an older-style warehouse. The sodium lamps high above their heads whined as they illuminated the stark white interior.

It was clean, without even a trace of dust to be seen.

“This is where you will be creating your cores,” Jace told Angie and Lindsay, not paying Nate a second glance. “We’ll make sure nothing happens to disturb you during the process. That might cripple you in unforeseen ways.” That time, he did glance at him.

“How do you expect us to use this place? There aren’t any qi gathering runes around here. The level of energy in the air here is no different from anywhere else. If we tried to create our cores here, who knows what problems we’d have later on as a result?” Lindsay was grasping at straws. Neither of the girls truly expected to have a future if they went through with this plan.

“That has already been taken care of.” Jace pointed to a few duffel bags that had been left in a corner of the large warehouse. “Inside those bags are all the energy cores I could get my hands on within the last few hours.”

“You expect us to create our cores, using the energy cores of beasts?” Angie demanded, her mouth suddenly dry. “You know what has happened to everyone who has attempted to do something similar! They all lost control of themselves and began to change.” She backed away from the crazed boy in front of her, shaking her head. “No, we won’t do it.”

“She’s right, Jace, what’s the point in having them create their cores if they aren’t even human afterward?” Nate asked the cultivator, who had let him out and forcefully kept him separated from them.

“You do it then!” The other boy snarled. “My companions say you have enough energy to form a low-quality core. Why don’t you go for it then? With such a pitiful amount of energy, the amount you take from the cores shouldn’t be much. If you’re lucky, you’ll even stay human looking afterward.” His eyes had taken on a mad gleam.

“Jace, don’t make him do this! The practice of using energy cores during the creation of a person’s core has been forbidden for over forty years. There is a reason the schools took over everything and created the awakening rooms.” Angie protested.

This was a part of their history that he hadn’t had a chance to look up and was completely confused. “What are you all talking about? What happens when someone uses a beast’s energy core in the creation of their own core?”

Everyone there turned to look at him in stunned amazement.

“Ah,” Lindsay muttered after a moment. “You told us before that you had forgotten pretty much everything from before the attack.” She bit her lower lip and turned helplessly to Angie.

“The energy inside these cores is… volatile?” She seemed unsure of the word choice but continued on regardless. “When people used the energy inside them to aid in the creation of their own cores, two things could happen. If the energy inside the core was a match, then the level of their core would be raised one. If not, then they would lose control of their cultivation and go insane. Typically, their bodies would also begin to change to exhibit characteristics of whatever beast the core originally came from.”

Lindsay sighed and put her hand on Angie’s shoulder, taking over the conversation. “It was deemed safer to spend a little more time simply developing our energy before creating cores. We would get the same result without the rush, or the risk, and in a much safer environment. Each school took over the procedure and created their awakening rooms that aided in the process, and the old method was banned.”

Nate slowly nodded as he processed what they had said. “I see, but if that’s the case, why does Jace want you to create your cores using them? Is he a furry? I assume it isn’t that easy to know a person’s energy type at this stage. If it was, then it wouldn’t have been banned.”

“What’s a furry?” One of the cultivators holding them hostage whispered to their companion, who shrugged in equal confusion.

“It’s not easy, no. Very few people display energy signatures prior to creating their cores.” Angie glared at Jace. “What’s going on here? You are supposedly obsessed with us, but are apparently willing to gamble with our lives at the drop of a hat? What was so wrong with waiting for us to create our cores next week?”

“I wouldn’t be able to control all the variables then if I waited. My parents, or yours, would have found some way to get in the way. This method allowed me the greatest control that I could think of. Plus, it came with the bonus of there not being anyone around that could possibly get in the way of our duel afterward. If I had waited, there is no way I would have been able to get anyone to agree to it normally.”

“At least you’re aware of that,” Nate grumbled. “That still doesn’t answer why you would be willing to force them to use energy they might not be compatible with.”

“Simple. I have no other choice. I can’t use my family’s private awakening room or one of the school's for this. That really only left the oldest method we know of to do it, using a beast’s energy core to make up the difference.”

With that proclamation, the girls backed away from him. Both of their faces were pale, and their legs were shaking. They had an entire lifetime’s worth of terrifying stories to scare them, while Nate only had what they had just told him. Which, while scary, didn’t have nearly the same weight it otherwise would have.

“Fine, I’ll do it. I’ll use those energy cores to create my own core. Just leave them alone.” Nate declared, swallowing around the heavy lump in his throat. He turned to Angie and Lindsay. “Don’t let anyone interrupt the process, please. I don’t think I can handle starting from the beginning yet again.”