Over the course of their fight, Hudson and Kenji had switched places, and Hudson was now in between Kenji and the central drawbridge tower. Behind him, he heard a solid thump on the stone battlement.
“Eustace. This is my fight. We decided,” Kenji said angrily to the person now standing behind Hudson.
“No, you had your chance at redemption and you failed. George will hear of this,” Eustace said smugly, drawing a thin sword from the sheath at his side. “We don’t have enough time. We need him off of the castle, now.”
Surrounded on two sides, Hudson backed up to the side of the mountain, turning so that he could see both Kenji and Eustace. Tactically, this wasn’t a good position to be in.
A quick glance outside of the walls showed Cor and Teams 5, 6, and 7 preparing for phase 3, which was good – but it also meant he wasn’t going to get any support from them. He was also not yet in position for phase 3, and needed to clear this battlement.
Kenji growled in anger but staggered to his feet. Whatever technique he had used previously to increase his speed was gone, and there appeared to be some backlash as well – he was moving much more slowly than before. Eustace approached cautiously, sword held in a high guard position, balancing hand held low.
Hudson had practiced against the sword a few times with Clara over the last few months, but usually with a weapon of his own in hand. The deep feeling of focus that he had fallen into when fighting Kenji had evaporated, and he wasn’t confident at all going barehanded against a cultivator wielding a sword – much less in a two vs. one.
He needed to change the situation, and change it fast. Kenji was the obvious weak link – how could he use that?
Eustace wasted no more time, striking forward with a simple, conservative thrust. Back against a wall and surrounded on two sides, Hudson’s ability to dodge was limited. He leapt away from Eustace and towards Kenji, who while weakened and angry, was still no slouch.
Kenji was ready and waiting to nail Hudson with one of his preferred kicks. Hudson wouldn’t be able to avoid the blow, so instead of a standard block, he gambled a bit on where the blow would land. He jumped waist-high off of the ground, tucking his knees into his chest and rotating slightly.
Kenji’s forward kick hit him square in the right butt cheek, launching him back towards Eustace at high speed. Hudson kept his arms covering his head as he shot past the startled swordsman. A passing slash left a light wound on Hudson’s back, but Hudson was past Eustace and now sprinting for the tower in front of him.
Hudson didn’t bother looking back as he sprinted to the corner where the central tower melded into the solid side of the mountain it was carved from. He launched himself up the corner, maintaining his momentum with quick and powerful strides up the walls – left foot on the mountain side, right foot on the tower.
Just as he began to run out of speed, he reached the top of the tower and grasped the edge with his right hand. The wound in his palm smarted, but he ignored the pain and pulled himself upwards and over the edge.
He immediately turned and punched downwards to strike Eustace, hot on his heels, directly in the face. Eustace fell twenty feet to the stone below, taking Kenji with him on the way down and landing in a pile of arms and legs.
The top of the tower was a foul-smelling platform littered with rocks, cockroach guts, and clumps of spider webbing, but it was empty of the third S.E.C.T. member they’d seen previously. There was an open trap door at the back of the tower; Hudson assumed they had retreated below. There was also the possibility of George being present, but the way that Eustace and Kenji had interacted made him doubt that the young master of the Adam’s clan was close by. George was at least very consistent, and he consistently left his minions to deal with his problems while he went ahead to capture any benefits for himself.
Hudson quickly located several blobs of spider webbing and marked their location before hurrying over to the front of the tower. Three golems sat on top of the guardrail, masquerading as stone blocks while waiting for attacks from the lakeside. He wrapped his arms around the first, and pulled back as hard as could.
He staggered backwards, having misjudged the weight and resistance. The golem extended its arms and legs outwards, upending Hudson’s balance. His foot slipped on a bit of cockroach slime, and he tripped and crashed on the ground, landing on top of the stone golem. He scrambled over the ground, pushing the golem awkwardly beneath him until it caught onto a piece of webbing, securing it in place to the floor.
Cursing the stench and wiping his hands on his tunic, Hudson hurried over to the second golem. He was thankful that the golems were not immediately resisting attack from behind, but he hadn’t bargained for the slickness of the slime covered floor. He needed to hurry to clear the way for phase 3, before Kenji and Eustance climbed back up on top of the tower.
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Phase 1 was making a gap in the wall; phase 2 was inserting Hudson into that gap to force it open further. Phase 3 was securing a beachhead (or two), making a path, and getting the rest of the team up onto the fortress.
Hudson was wrestling the second golem onto the floor of the tower when an irate Eustace crested the wall. Hudson lost control of the golem as he dodged away from a slashing sword. He took a small cut in his arm as he rolled away.
In his haste, his foot caught on a bit of the webbing as he rolled on the stone floor, catching fast and arresting his movement.
Hudson increased the tempo of his breathing technique and brought his hands close to the trapped leg. The qi exiting his open meridians dissolved the spider webbing holding his foot to the ground, but he didn’t make a move yet.
Eustace had noticed that Hudson was caught and immediately paused his follow-up attack. “Serves you right,” he crowed in triumph as he walked up slowly to Hudson. Behind him, a heavily fatigued Kenji heaved himself over the edge of the tower.
“Never in the history of S.E.C.T. have we seen such shameful behavior,” Eustace said. “Cockroach guts? Spider webs? Do you think fighting this way leads to strength? Everything you do destroys the dignity and traditions of S.E.C.T., you ignorant fool.” Angry spittle escaped his mouth.
Eustace stopped a pace away from Hudson and raised his sword. Kenji stood beside him, in obvious pain but gloating nonetheless.
“No,” Hudson replied, readying himself to spring forward. He sought the level of focus he had touched on when fighting Kenji earlier, where his thoughts and actions had seemed to become one with each other.
“I don’t think fighting this way leads to strength,” Hudson said. “But I’m not interested in fighting, or in strength."
He stared into Eustace’s eyes, his own burning rage leaping out of its cage. “I’m only interested in winning.”
When expressions of confusion hit Eustace and Kenji’s face, Hudson instinctively knew the moment had come, and he was ready for it. His body and will acted simultaneously, and he surged forward.
His left fist snuck inside Eustace’s hastily raised guard, striking the left side of Eustace’s chest. Ribs fractured with a snap, piercing his liver, and the breath whooshed from his lungs. Eustace’s body slammed into the guardrail on the side of the tower and slid down to the ground.
A follow-up backwards crescent kick slammed Kenji’s confused expression into the stone floor of the tower, knocking him out cold.
Hudson stared at the two unmoving cultivators, mind and body waiting together for any reaction. When neither moved, he trotted over to the last golem and began wrestling it off of the wall. He maneuvered it onto a piece of spider webbing, then ran over to signal Cor and the rest of the team.
Half of the teams waited on the central platform, Cor at the head. The others were busy on the side where Hudson had breached the wall. The teams there had retrieved additional spears from the beach, and now had two spears attached to the top of the fortress walls, with team members crawling up the ropes as he watched.
Now that they had the all clear from Hudson, Cor directed the teams on the central platform to launch their sticky spears. One struck low, but two flew over Hudson's head to land on the tower floor behind him. One didn’t stick immediately, the bug guts on the floor of the tower preventing the spider webs from making a solid connection.
He went to grab the spear that was still loose, but then he heard a low rumbling. What now? Had the third S.E.C.T. member managed to pull off some other trick? He quickly attached the spear to a clean-ish spot on the stone floor and ran to look over the edge.
Below him, a faintly blue light etched a formation pattern covering the entire wall of the fortress. The water in the lake was gradually rising up in a wave, piling up against the wall of the castle. He heard a wet chuckle from behind him.
“Bea finally got enough qi into the formation,” Eustace said, then spat out a mouthful of blood. He stood on the opposite side of the tower, leaning against the parapet and swaying on unsteady legs. He activated his breathing technique, even though Hudson could tell that doing so with broken ribs was incredibly painful.
He raised his sword in front of him in a salute, tip straight to the sky, and as he continued his cultivation technique, Hudson could see the blade of the sword begin to glow with a silvery glow.
Eustace coughed wetly, and the silvery glow flickered then stabilized. Hudson was momentarily frozen, deciding what to do. There was a tsunami piling up below him, threatening his friends; Eustace was charging up some qi-based attack. Should he charge Eustace? Attack from a distance somehow? Run for the trap door and try to stop the formation? Jump back over the wall to help his friends?
The roar of the water reached a crescendo and everything seemed to happen at once. Cor, leading the charge up the ropes, breached the top of the fortress wall, several grasshoppers directly behind him. Eustace was over ten feet away, but he lifted his sword up above his head and swung it down.
Why would he do that? Hudson realized with horror that a silvery line of qi had flashed off of the sword and was now traveling through the air towards him. The time for thinking was long past, but Hudson had failed to decide how to respond.
He thought he’d won; he had relaxed his guard and his mindset. That had been a mistake. Not securing his enemies had been another mistake. He raised his arms in a futile effort to block the oncoming blow, hoping the consequences of his mistakes wouldn’t be too painful to bear.