Hudson was jerked to a stop, mid-jump and only a few feet away from the portal. The hand clamped around his neck gradually appeared, as well as the arm and body it was connected to.

George’s face was a rictus of strange emotions, one playing after the other. Pain, anger, but also cruelty, hate and perversely, a euphoric joy.

Hudson struggled in George’s grip. He tried to kick his leg out to touch the portal, but couldn’t quite reach. He couldn’t activate his sigil of Rooted Strength, and George’s grip was cutting off his breathing, so he couldn’t activate his Engine Breath technique.

George’s cruel laugh warbled and echoed through the cavern.

Is this it? Hudson thought to himself. George’s fingers were digging deep furrows in his throat, and his lungs were starting to burn from oxygen, in addition to the pain from his broken bones.

With one last focus of will, Hudson put every last bit of strength into hurling Clara as far towards the portal as possible. If she could make it back, she would tell everyone about George.

She landed on the ground and slumped forward, her broken arm flopping unnaturally. Unfortunately she stopped inches from the portal and safety back on Earth.

I couldn’t even succeed with that one last bit of revenge, Hudson thought.

Dark spots began to appear on the edges of his vision.

“The flailing, desperate act of a dying man trying to save the life of a failure,” George laughed.

Was there truly nothing he could do? Hudson wracked his brain. He couldn’t breathe and his chest was spasming. He tried his sigil of Rooted Strength, but still couldn’t get it to activate – he was held too far off the ground, and not rooted to anything. Without any aids to his strength, there was no way he could pry himself loose from George’s grasp.

His fingers clawed at George’s hand, but he might as well have been trying to bend steel with a pool noodle. It simply wasn’t possible; the difference in strength was too great.

Could he try and enter his mindscape, to at least slow down time? He was already losing consciousness, and didn’t know how to force himself to enter it either. Every time he had entered his mind, he had been taken there by someone else. In any case, it wouldn’t help him fight back at George, nor would the fruit of the oak tree or the lotus root help him in this situation.

There might be one more thing… Hudson grasped at a final straw. There had been other sigils he had seen. Nothing so easy as the sigil of Rooted Strength he had cemented in his mind already… there was the sigil of Liminality, from the petrified jackalope. The form was not fixed in his mind, though, and it was a struggle to recall. He didn’t even know what it would do, and he quickly gave up in favor of another possibility.

He’d already seen how effective Clara’s flame sigil had been. Could that work? He had not been gifted the sigil, but he could recall the basic shape and concept.

Hudson concentrated as hard as he could on the pattern of the Eternal Flame that Sal had shown him once before. The loops and swirls came through his thoughts slowly and sluggishly, pried loose from his oxygen-starved memory.

He lost his focus and the intricate pattern fell apart. He tried again, closing his eyes and letting his arms fall loose at his sides. Seconds ticked by. George squeezed his neck even harder, purplish bruises already forming, and shook Hudson from side to side.

George could break his neck if he wanted to, but chose instead to choke the life from him instead.

There was a dim and faint voice – Director Ix’s voice – counting down the time until the portal closed. Hudson ignored it and focused solely on recalling the sigil for the Eternal Flame.

The loops and whirls built on each other, crossing and consuming each other until the image of the sigil began to take on substance in his mind’s eye. The image began to smolder with latent heat, but stopped there.

He had succeeded in forming a basic understanding, after tens of seconds and all of his focus, but there seemed to be an extra step he was missing.

With his sigil of Rooted Strength, the sigil came far easier to his mind, and there was no hitch in the activation – it was a simple mental push to start it and keep it going. His mind and body knew what to do instinctively, because he had already incorporated the sigil into himself.

For the sigil of Eternal Flame, he was unprepared. There was no pre-formed activation channel in his mind. There was no predetermined target nor a pre-paid cost.

Fundamentally, the concept of fire requires three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Hudson understood intuitively that to activate the Eternal Flame, comprehension and understanding of the sigil were not enough. That only provided the oxygen in this equation; or the environment in which it could occur. He also needed something to spark the flame, and then something to fuel it.

He struggled to keep his focus on the image of the sigil as he tried to figure out how to activate it. He began to feel his consciousness slip away, and in that moment, he threw everything he had at the sigil. He had nothing left to lose.

His anger and rage leaped out of their cage, sparking the smoldering sigil in his mind’s eye. His body offered itself up, pointing to George’s fingers on his neck.

BURN.

Flames sprung up over his entire body, wicking upwards towards his neck and out over George’s fingers.

BURN IT ALL.

The flames, dark and almost black, surged over George’s hands and arms. He screamed at the blisters forming on his skin. He shook Hudson again by the neck, then threw him away in a scream of pain and spite. His qi technique sputtered to life, dim and patchy from the lack of qi, as he tried to smother the flames.

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Hudson landed on his side, choking and coughing as hot air rushed into his damaged chest. The fresh pain stoked his anger higher, and the flames surged, covering the upper part of his body and head. His tunic began to burn and the acrid smell of singed hair filled the air.

He stared through blurry eyes as George stalked over towards him. He struggled to stand up, but only made it to his knees.

He couldn’t stop the flames. His hair was on fire. The flames were starting to burn through his skin now too, fueled by his own body. He struggled against the pain and heat, but he couldn’t remove the sigil from his mind. It was burning its own place, searing his consciousness like a poker branding the hide of a steer.

Hudson screamed hoarsely.

“You can’t even die properly,” George said, moving towards the portal instead of towards Hudson. He cradled his burned hand in his arm – he’d managed to put out the flames with the last of his qi, but Hudson had done significant damage.

The burning sensation on his head and shoulders was becoming excruciating. If he didn’t figure out how to stop channeling the sigil of Eternal Flame, he was going to burn himself to death.

The concept of this flame was eternal, though; so how could he put it out? There was a trap here; no wonder Sal had pushed Hudson to adopt this sigil. His anger and impotence at his situation continued to push the flames hotter and hotter, and without another target, the flames had no fuel other than his body and mind.

“The portal will close in twenty seconds. Please evacuate immediately,” Director Ix said.

There was no way Hudson could make it. He couldn’t even walk; he was currently on fire; and George stood between him and the portal.

No, he thought to himself. No! The same stubbornness that hadn’t let him give up before didn’t let him give up now. He could lie down and burn to death, or he could keep trying. Something – anything – but giving up.

Hudson activated his Engine Breath technique. The flames surged higher and with a greater intensity on each exhale.

He reached in his mind for the sigil of Rooted Strength. It resisted – it was as if there wasn’t enough room in his mind for two sigils to be active at one time, or that the two sigils were mutually incompatible with one another. He insisted, and pulled on the sigil to come again.

He commanded the roots to rise and protect him. This sigil had originally come from a tree; a tree that naturally feared fire. Its understanding of the dao, of the Way and how its existence fit in with the natural order of the world, reflected that fear of fire, and wood’s natural weakness to flame.

Hudson saw that fear and ruthlessly cut it out. He trimmed the sigil; changing it on the fly, challenging the natural order of the world. His roots would have no fear of flame, and would burn without being fully consumed.

It felt as if something broke in his mind, but his breathing technique roared, and the sigil of Rooted Strength finally activated.

Images of roots surged up and covered his entire body. As individual roots touched a flame, they would singe, and blacken, but they continued nonetheless to grow over the flames. Eventually roots covered all of the flames licking up his body, suppressing the fire on his head and shoulders.

Small trickles of blood leaked from his eyes, nose and ears. His hair was completely gone, as was his tunic, and first and second degree burns covered his upper body. His skin on his chest was almost completely covered by hyper-realistic images of seared and smoldering roots coiling and climbing up to his head.

Hudson opened his eyes and stared at George, who met his gaze. Gone were the arrogance and cruelty on George’s face, and in their place was awe, jealousy – and even a little fear.

Hudson broke eye contact and sprinted directly at George, the images of roots fading from his skin. They had seconds left, if that, before the portal closed.

As George turned and fled towards the portal himself, the rift began to flicker on the edges. It shrank even further, but didn’t quite collapse entirely.

George leaped for the portal. It looked like he would make it – just barely – but Hudson wouldn’t. He had run out of time.

Before Hudson could curse his fate… the portal flickered and someone appeared in front of George. Two people, actually.

Cor and Vince had come back for them. There was a series of sharp cracks and George flew backwards several feet, landing on his back.

“Ya miss me?” Cor said dramatically, an automatic rifle slung low at his hip and pointed towards George. Vince bent down and scooped Clara up in his arms, then retreated quickly back through the portal.

Hudson continued sprinting towards the flickering portal as Cor fired his rifle in short bursts, pushing George back further and further from the stone dais. Hope blossomed in Hudson’s chest, then immediately died as the dark rift shrank to a pin-prick and disappeared entirely.

Hudson, Cor, and George were left behind. They hadn’t made it through.

“What have you done!” George screamed as he launched to his feet. A few bullets fell from George’s chest to the ground, having made only shallow wounds. “You crazy old man. We are stuck here now!”

“Oh man,” Cor said with a laugh. “You don’t get it, do you? To paraphrase a childhood hero of mine…”

Cor fired another three-round burst from his rifle into George’s torso, knocking him back a few more steps.

“I ain’t stuck in here with you. All y’all are stuck in here with me.”

Cor proceeded to empty the rest of his clip into George’s torso to emphasize his point. The bullets couldn’t do much more than pierce George’s skin, even without his qi technique active, but each explosive round packed enough energy to knock him backwards.

Tired of being peppered with bullets, George activated his sigil and disappeared from view after the clip ran out.

“Well, that’s a neat trick, ain’t it,” Cor said, dropping the empty clip out and replacing it firmly and quickly, even with his injured arm. “Look lively there, Hudson. This ain’t no time to be taking a break.”

“Why did you come back for me?” Hudson said. Cor glared at him briefly, then ignored the question and searched intensely around the cavern for any sign of George.

“Are those grenades? And where did you get that gun?”

“Same place I got my ex-wives,” Cor said absently, as he continued to move his head on a swivel. “Stole it from some officer who wasn’t using it.”

Hudson stared at him, a bundle of confused emotions, and then, unable to help himself, burst out laughing. He’d been fighting at the edge of despair. Deep down he had hoped someone would come back to help, knowing that no one would because it was effectively a death sentence.

But Cor had come back for him. The man would never leave anyone behind.

“Thank you,” Hudson said, not sure what to say, but feeling the need to say something.

“You’re welcome. Now, if we’re done with that, I’m gonna need you to focus up, chucklenuts,” Cor admonished Hudson. “We got an angry, invisible psycho running around trying to snipe us and a literal horde of slimy, tentacled monsters coming our way.”

Hudson felt his desperation, the immense anger and frustration, even the fear and despair – all of those emotions fade away a little bit. They didn’t disappear; they just became marginally less important.

“Alright then. Let’s do this,” Hudson said.