“That invisibility trick is a problem… How does he get that, and I get some daggone fancy fishing lure?” Cor grumbled. “Can you find him after he turns invisible?”

“Not really – only if I concentrate hard on my qi sense, and even then it’s very difficult,” Hudson replied. “You know he’s going to come after you first, and you can’t take any hits.”

“OK. Stay glued to my six,” Cor said, then proceeded to press the trigger on his rifle and empty the clip in a wide arc in the direction of the tunnel. None of the bullets seemed to hit anything.

“Move,” Cor said while hustling in the direction that he had fired, confident George wasn’t waiting for them in that area, and loading another clip.

“Turn.” Hudson stayed glued to Cor’s back, protecting him from behind while Cor sprayed a wave of bullets back into the cavern. There was a brief impact and curse at the very end of the clip, almost ninety degrees and to their left. They had a brief glimpse of George’s arm before it disappeared again.

“Contact, 9 o’clock.” Cor rotated so that Hudson was facing the direction George had been, then pulled a grenade out of his tactical vest and popped the pin.

He closed his eyes and held the grenade up in front of his face, as if praying to the gods of war.

“Huh, reminds me of the last time I was down in the bayou…It couldn’t hurt, I suppose.” Cor muttered.

“Have you ever done any blast fishing?” he asked. A detailed depiction of a fisherman in a boat appeared on the hand holding the grenade. He turned slightly, adjusting his aim, then let the grenade fly overhead.

A sharp crack echoed through the cavern, launching a wave of stone shrapnel. Some of the pieces reached as far as Hudson, bouncing off his cultivation-enhanced skin. Cor hunkered down behind Hudson using him as a shield.

The faint outline of George’s body appeared at the edge of the blast radius, covered in smoke and shrapnel.

“I see him,” Hudson said. “Straight ahead, close, maybe 30 feet.” The smoke was pulled quickly towards the other side of the cavern, and George disappeared again.

Cor pulled the pins on two more grenades, one in each hand.

“We’re walking,” Cor said. They shuffled sideways down the cavern towards the tunnel, Hudson facing the direction George was trying to hide, and where Cor was trying to fish him out.

“Here, Georgie, Georgie,” Cor said, throwing a grenade in front of Hudson and another towards the mouth of the tunnel, now only 50 ft away.

The grenade at the mouth of the tunnel was almost a direct hit, knocking George prone onto the ground.

“Go!” Cor urged, slinging his rifle around and taking aim at George. “I’ll try to keep him pinned down.”

Cor began firing short bursts and Hudson swung wide, out of the field of fire. George struggled onto a knee, then managed to stand, constantly knocked off balance from the impacts of the bullets. He was bleeding from shallow cuts all over his body, and a deeper gash on his chest.

George screamed in frustration, a primal thing of rage and hate, modulated by the overlapping tones of different voices.

The constant suction of wind and qi died down slightly. From the far end of the cavern, an eerie scream of a hundred voices voicing hunger and excitement echoed through the cavern, responding to George’s scream.

Hudson dove and hit George with a high tackle, wrapping his arms around George back and shoulders and carrying him to the ground. Hudson activated his sigil of Rooted Strength, wrapping both of his legs around George’s.

The tattoos of roots that covered his body looked slightly different from before. Some of them were blackened or smoldering with reddish embers. Flares of heat accompanied the surge of strength from the sigil, and the pain from the extensive burns on his head and shoulders intensified. Hudson ignored it, and concentrated solely on his nemesis.

George lay with his face on the ground. He tried to push off the ground, but Hudson quickly wrapped his left arm up around George’s, pinning it backwards in a half-Nelson. George collapsed back onto the ground with a curse.

George’s dantian was out of qi, and so he began to use his breathing technique to absorb qi from the atmosphere. Hudson couldn’t let him recover any qi, and needed to press his advantage. He wrapped his right arm under George’s and then back up to grip his neck, completing a full Nelson maneuver.

Hudson pushed his Engine Breath technique as high as he could, ignoring the pain in his ribs and fractured collarbone, then pushed it even further. He drew on his sigil for strength, ignoring the increasingly sharp burning pains, and concentrated all of his power in his arms and trunk. Then, with his fingers interlocked behind George’s neck, he pushed downwards.

George’s face slammed into the ground, grinding into the stone. Hudson kept pushing. A brief flash of silver covered George’s neck and face. Hudson lifted his hands and slammed George’s face into the ground again. And again, and again, until the silvery glow of the technique completely faded away.

It wasn’t enough. The rational part of Hudson’s mind said that his strength might never be enough, but Hudson refused to listen. That wasn’t the right way to think. He was already strong. Strong enough to shove George’s face, and all what it represented about S.E.C.T. and his old life, into the ground for good.

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Hudson pushed harder and harder on George’s neck. His breathing technique was already past max tempo, but he pushed it even harder. A high pitched whistle joined the roar of air moving in out of his lungs. Blood from inside his chest was hitting the air and making a red mist; his muscles and tendons were starting to break down, and hairline breaks in his burnt skin were leaking blood.

CRACK.

There was sharp popping noise, and George’s body went slack..

“Enough!” Cor yelled, pulling Hudson out of his trance.

“You beat him. You broke his neck, he can’t move,” Cor said.

Hudson let his breathing technique die down – not letting it go completely – and stood up. He nudged George’s torso with his foot, kicking him over to lie on his back.

George’s sneer stared back at him. He was still conscious, but like Cor said, he didn’t appear to be able to move, the bones of his spine crushed by Hudson’s hands.

Cor opened a pocket on his vest and took out a special bullet. The entire casing was engraved in silver maseki, and capped with a bullet of some dark black metal that looked like obsidian.

“George might be your worst enemy, but leaving him to the silicates isn’t a fate you allow for anyone if you can help it.” Cor used his good hand to pull the charging handle on his rifle back before loading his special bullet.

Hudson felt empty. He let his breathing technique fade, and he almost passed out. He had won… against all odds, against a cultivator at a higher stage. He had defeated George – with significant help from his friends. But why didn’t he feel much more than pain, exhaustion and a vague sense of emptiness?

“Defeated by mere ants,” George sneered up at them. His neck might be broken, but he could still talk. “The heavens have cursed me.”

“Naw, son, you did enough of the cursing yourself,” Cor said. “You thought you were the main character, that the heavens would bow before you. I’m not a cultivator, I may not know how the world works, but I do know how to win a fight.

“You had greater strength, the advantage of preparation, and the first strike. On paper, you should have won. But you didn’t fight to win… you fought to measure the size of your ego.

“You had no strategy. Your tactics are a mess. Foundation Strength cultivation, but not enough qi in your dantian to finish a decent fight. That invisibility sigil is a neat trick, but it doesn’t mesh with your fighting style. You can’t strengthen your body with your qi technique while utilizing the sigil – preventing you from striking with full strength.

“Instead of complimenting techniques, and bringing allies to help, you had a dog’s breakfast of mismatched techniques and tactics. Rookie moves all the way around.”

“If you kill me, my father will know,” George spat out. “And he will know who did it.”

“I’d like to say that’s a bunch of bull, but it’s possible,” Cor shrugged. “Still doesn’t change the math. We don’t kill you, the silicates will, and they will grow stronger in the process. I can’t let that happen.”

“Wait,” Hudson said. “So we’re just going to shoot him?”

“Yes,” Cor replied simply, standing close and taking aim. “You can kill out of anger, or hate. Lots of people do that, but I don’t recommend it. And this ain’t that. It’s a mercy killing, same as you would for any rabid dog.

“And the same as I’ve done for soldiers a lot better than this guy,” Cor said the last part as a whisper, under his breath, so that Hudson couldn’t hear him. He lined up his shot, sighting down the barrel, and moved his finger to the trigger.

It still felt wrong to Hudson. Logically, what Cor was saying made sense, but practically, the vague calm he had felt was being slowly replaced by a crawling sense of unease. He had been angry enough to kill George – had even been trying to, with his bare hands – but this type of killing felt different. Cold. Calculated.

While Hudson and Cor had been focused on George, they had not been paying attention to the cavern behind them. At some point, the wind blowing towards the far end of the cavern had completely died down, leaving the cavern eerily quiet… and colder. The temperature in the cavern had dropped by at least ten degrees.

In the middle of that quiet, while Cor was lining up his final shot, a strange grinding sound, like a coffee maker, began echoing through the cavern. Hudson looked up at the sound, and saw an entire army of nightmares, covering the floor, walls, ceiling, and all the areas in between.

Amorphous, translucent slimes rolled across the floor and walls, separating from each other into basketball-sized shapes before rejoining the jerking, heaving mass. They grouped into larger piles around the parts of the floor that the silencing formation had been carved into. Masses of hooked teeth appeared on top of these giant blobs, rotating down the sides to cut through the underlying stone, grinding it into small pieces and creating that strange sound that had alerted Hudson to their presence. Any tendrils of silvery qi released by the crushed stone were immediately sucked up into the translucent bodies.

Smaller spheres floated through the air of the cavern, breaking off in clumps from an enormous, cylinder-shaped mass that stretched back up the hole to the surface. Some had vertically-slitted eyes, some had no eyes but were carrying rows of serrated teeth in circles on their bodies, and even more had a tendril or two testing the air in front of them, pulling in the ambient qi in the air into their bodies in small, silvery pulses.

The worst were similar to one of the shapes that Hudson had seen Sal take: a floating mass of tentacles, surrounding a central, donut-shaped mass with rings of eyes. They were also the fastest fliers, and would quickly reach their position.

“Cor! Behind you!” Hudson managed to blurt out, before ramping up his Engine Breath technique.

Several things happened at once. Cor looked back behind him, just in time to see the vanguard of flying silicates accelerate immediately towards Hudson. By activating his Engine Breath technique, Hudson had made a critical mistake: he had pulled in large quantities of ambient qi and identified himself as a target.

The qi coursing through him was like a bright flame to moths; the silicates couldn’t help but be immediately attracted to it.

When Cor turned back around, George had disappeared – he must have activated his sigil. Knowing that George’s neck was broken, so even if he wasn’t visible, he shouldn’t be able to move, Cor quickly fired the specially enchanted round he had chambered at where he thought George’s head was.

He missed somehow. The bullet tore into the ground, the special formation inscribed on the bullet making it penetrate deep into the rock. There was no blood, though, only a few sparks and a small explosion of rock shards towards the tunnel.

“Move!” Cor said, cursing under his breath as he sprinted towards the tunnel. They were out of time.

Hudson sprinted behind Cor for the tunnel, the flying silicates hot on their heels.