Hudson didn’t know what his top speed was now, but it was far faster than what he had been able to hit just a few months prior. As he passed Cor, he swooped down and grabbed his legs, carrying him up on his shoulder.

“Whoa there, partner,” Cor said, leaning backwards. “At least ask me to dance, first.”

Despite having one arm in a sling, hanging upside down, and flopping around on someone else’s back going thirty to forty miles per hour down a rocky, narrow tunnel, Cor managed to pull another clip from his tactical vest and jam it into his rifle.

“Faster!” Cor said in between bursts of gunfire. “They’re gaining on us!”

Hudson doubled down and pumped his legs as fast as they could go. At the bottom of the tunnel, Hudson could see the familiar metallic gleam of the trial area. He sprinted through a narrow opening in the hanger and heard a slam behind him as the trial director closed the opening.

The silicates that had been chasing them hit the outside of the trial area with a series of large thuds.

Hudson stopped and eased Cor to the ground. To his horror, one of the flying silicates had caught up with them and its tentacles were latched onto Cor’s leg. Cor’s face was in a rictus of pain.

Hudson yanked the rifle out of Cor’s stiff grasp and fired into the main body of the silicate, which was floating weightlessly in the air like a helium balloon.

The rifle bucked in Hudson’s hands, but at this close a range he couldn’t miss. Each bullet hit the silicate solidly and didn’t penetrate, appearing to not do much damage. But after each impact the silicate flashed a darker and darker shade of orange.

After the sixth bullet, and when the silicate’s main body was almost a reddish color, it exploded into a fine mist of sand.

Cor gasped awake and looked over at Hudson.

“Oh no,” he said, scrambling to his feet. He had a strange look in his eyes – like he was struggling to focus on what was in front of him.

“What–” Hudson started to say, then dodged out of the way as Cor pulled a pistol out of a holster under his tactical vest. Cor emptied the clip into the air, but still hit Hudson twice.

Getting shot hurt like crazy. Bullets might not have had much penetrating power against George, mostly just knocking him back, but Hudson wasn’t at Foundation Building stage. He stumbled to his knees, having taken one in his torso and one in his upper leg.

“Cor!” Hudson whispered weakly. “What are you doing? You’ve gone crazy!”

He pushed through the fresh pain, but it was very difficult to keep his breathing technique going.

“Only one of these left,” Cor said to himself, pulling out a grenade from his vest. “Welp, it was a good run…”

He walked over to stand next to Hudson, pulling the pin and letting it drop to the ground. “I can’t allow anyone, not even you and me, to become fodder for those daggone silicates.”

Hudson was not having any of this. He surged to his feet and slammed the grenade out of Cor’s hands and to the side. It ricocheted off the ground and into the distance before exploding, darkening the metallic floor.

Hudson tackled Cor to the ground, easily overpowering the older man, and then sat on Cor’s chest as he struggled to free himself. He slapped Cor a few times with his open hand.

“Get a grip on yourself!” Hudson yelled, but it didn’t seem to help at all.

“You’ll never take me alive,” Cor growled and continued to struggle.

What could he do? His friend – the one who had actually come back and saved him – was going crazy. There was no way he was going to let him go, or kill him, like Cor had been ready to do to George.

Somehow touching the silicate had done this. Hudson wracked his brain. What did he know about silicates? Precious little, and none of it trustworthy… but a few things tickled his brain. Sal. Sal was a silicate, and had tried to infect his brain, but what had countered it?

The lotus. That lotus root had helped him see the things Sal had snuck into his mind.

Hudson tore through the pockets of the tactical vest, throwing a few extra clips onto the ground. He dug through the other pouches around Cor’s waist, throwing odds and ends and little chunks of maseki onto the ground before he found it – the bit of lotus root that he had saved and given to Cor.

As he took it in his hand, the urge to eat it himself was almost overpowering, but he shrugged off the compulsion and shoved the lotus root into Cor’s mouth.

Cor screamed in rage and tried to spit it out. Hudson held his hand over Cor’s mouth until Cor choked the lotus down.

As he did, the faraway look his eyes began to die down and he stopped struggling. A look of immense horror came over his features.

“Are you good now?” Hudson asked, taking his hand off of Cor’s mouth.

“No,” Cor said, his voice low and shaking, in a way that was completely unlike Cor. “No, I am the furthest from good I reckon I have ever been.”

“You got any more grenades hidden anywhere?” Hudson asked. “Or pistols?”

He was still pretty upset about being shot.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

“Uh… no,” Cor said. “Just the back-up in my left boot. Was that you asking me about weapons?”

“Yeah. And you’re not going to try and shoot me with them?”

“No…” he said. “Just making sure which of the voices I’m hearing are real.”

“You’re hearing voices now?” Hudson asked.

“Yeah. And seeing weird things in my vision that I know are fake. I can’t stop them… but at least I know… I think? They aren’t real.”

“What happened to you?” Hudson asked, getting off of Cor and sitting on the ground next to him. He activated his sigil to help prop himself up, and let his breathing technique go.

“Looks like one of the silicates got me,” Cor said simply. “Rule #1: never let them touch you. The higher evolved ones can insert some of their consciousnesses into your mind. Lots of times, people just… die. Turn into vegetables.

“That’s one of the reasons why Elder Chiang preferred to work with us mortals. Even if one of us got touched and corrupted, they couldn’t do much – at least not to her. She could also insert a qi technique into our minds to offer some minimal protection, but it was not always enough…

“A cultivator’s mind apparently becomes more… segmented? compartmented? compartmentalized? I’m not sure… Elder Chiang, she explained it to us one time… but the net effect is that cultivators don’t always start hallucinating right away. They can start seeing and hearing the voices over time, and thus are potentially hidden dangers.”

“Which begs the question… how did you get me out of that trance? I can still hear the voices, but at least I can tell they aren’t real.”

“That lotus root I made you eat – it has some kind of effect. The Sage called it the Philosopher’s Lotus or something like. It helps sharpen the mind against illusions. It must have helped your mind figure out what was real vs what the silicate consciousnesses inside your head are trying to get you to believe.”

“So how do I get rid of these daggone voices?” Cor asked. “Aside from a long fall and a short stop.”

“I don’t know,” Hudson shrugged. “And don’t talk like that. There’s gotta be a way. I think that I was able to use the root somehow in my mindscape, so maybe if you progressed in cultivation and developed a mindscape? That might help? I really don’t know what I’m talking about though.”

Cor nodded and visibly pulled himself together.

“Well then… maybe we should wait on worrying about the voices in my head until after we fix up those wounds you’re bleeding out from. And then figure out a way off of this rock that doesn’t involve being eaten by monsters.

“How’d you get those bullet holes anyway?”

“Har, har, funny,” Hudson said, grimacing. “Director Ix… it’s a long shot, but do you have any medical supplies?”

“You may trade trial merit points for various medical supplies,” Director Ix’s robotic voice whispered in his ear.

“Seriously? You’re talking about trial merit points when silicates are literally pounding the door in as we speak?” Hudson grumbled.

He’d cashed out all of his trial points before the sigil challenge. He glanced around the hangar in frustration, then remembered the bits of maseki he had thrown on the ground when rifling through Cor’s pockets. He pulled some of his own maseki out of his pouch, just a few pounds, and held them up.

“How are these? Can I trade these back in for trial points?”

“Acceptable,” Ix said.

“Is this enough maseki to open a portal back to Earth?” Hudson asked.

“The amount of resources that Participants Hudson and Cor have is less than 1% of the resources needed to open a rift across that distance.”

Hudson had expected that answer, but it was worth confirming.

A few more grumbling transactions later, and they had a basic medical kit. It didn’t appear out of a portal, like they were used to seeing from Ix. Instead, a portion of the wall opened up and allowed them to access it. Apparently manipulating the metal that comprised the walls took much less energy than opening rifts.

When Cor helped extract the bullets from his wounds, Hudson almost passed out. He was feeling weak from blood loss, and felt like the only thing keeping him conscious was his sigil of Rooted Strength – even though that seemed to bring its own burning pains now.

Cor applied a salve to his arm and laid down to rest, while Hudson popped one of the large healing pills into his mouth and tried to cultivate. This time he didn’t swallow the entire pill, but let it sit in his mouth and dissolve slowly. Even breathing normally was excruciatingly painful, with a few broken ribs, collarbone, and hole in his gut, but he managed to get his technique started.

Hudson cultivated in a haze of pain as the strength of the healing pill coursed through his body. He lost track of time, but was shaken out of his trance by Cor when he had used up about half of the pill in his mouth.

“Hudson, wake up buddy,” Cor said, his hand on Hudson’s shoulder. “We gotta talk options here.”

Hudson opened his eyes and gingerly took stock of his body. Overall, he felt like he had first been run over by truck, then the truck stopped, backed up, and ran him over again, just to make sure to finish the job. While everything felt extremely sore, the burns on his head and torso were healed, the sharp pains in his ribs were gone, and all of his bullet wounds were closed.

The pounding on the outside of the trial area was louder – and much closer. Hudson looked around the hangar and noticed it was now much smaller in size. The ambient light level was also much lower.

“How long was I cultivating for?”

“An hour, tops,” Cor said. “The silicates have been busy trying to break in, and the trial director has kept them out… but that’s not likely to last for much longer.”

“So what are our options?”

“Bad, and worse, far as I can tell.”

“OK then,” Hudson said. “What’s bad? and then worse?”

“Bad option is to try and hide. At the mortal or qi gathering stage, it’s technically possible… We’ve found survivors before. But then there is the problem of how to live on a desolate rock afterwards, in the scant chance someone comes for us – which I don’t need to tell you is unlikely.”

“The worse option?”

“Fight. Get some spears, swords, hammers, bombs, whatever else we got, and go out with a bang.”

“Yeah, not sure I’m a fan of that option,” Hudson said. “How would we hide?”

“Well, aside from digging a hole and trying not to breathe, the trial director here might be able to help us, if they’re still able to open portals around this star system. Typically, silicates will swarm a target like a planet or asteroid, moving in waves across the surface. If we can get past or through the waves, to where the silicates have already passed through…”

“...then maybe they won’t come back and look for us,” Hudson finished the thought.

Hudson thought about the two options for a second and shook his head. He had a glimmer of an idea, but he needed to confirm a few things with Director Ix first.

“I don’t really like your ‘bad’ or ‘worse’ options… so how about ‘crazy’ instead?”