A thin line of silver qi flashed towards Hudson. Cor’s tackle from behind brought Hudson to the ground. The qi blade whistled through the air as it slipped past them and scored a thin line across the stone wall, cutting the ropes leading over the edge.

“You gotta move,” Cor said. “Don’t get caught watching the paint dry.”

“Thanks. Sorry about that,” Hudson replied. That attack had been dangerous. He rolled over and up to his feet, then gasped when he saw Cor.

Cor had knocked Hudson out of the way, but hadn’t emerged completely unscathed himself. His left arm hung loosely at his side, a deep gash above his elbow bleeding profusely.

“Oh no, Cor, your arm! I–” Hudson started to panic.

“Really? You think I don’t see it?” Cor replied sarcastically. “Quit yer gawking and help me with this bandage.”

Hudson took the bandage and pressed firmly on the wound to slow the blood loss. At Cor’s direction, he removed a healing salve and powder from the pouch at Cor’s waist and applied it to the wound.

“I’m so sorry Cor,” Hudson said. The salve worked wonders, slowing the bleeding immensely. Hudson wrapped up the wound with additional bandages, then used a piece of vine to form a rough sling.

“Floor and Skillet,” Cor ignored Hudson and yelled at the two grasshoppers who had made it up the ropes with him. “Help team 2 below secure a beachhead – up here, down there, doesn’t matter – and start fishing people out of the water after that big wave crashes down.”

The top of the tsunami forming outside the wall had crested over the top of the tower. The grasshoppers left on the other side were scrambling back to shore, running along the stone bridges, or a combination swim-slosh along the bottom of the lake. Almost all of the water had been pulled out of the lake, exposing patches of mud here and there.

An eerie silence covered the lake for a brief second before the massive tide of water fell forwards and back into the lake, sweeping all of the grasshoppers in its path. The man and woman that Cor had called Floor and Skillet jumped down to the lower level where Hudson had first landed, to help team 2 with rescuing people from the water.

“Hudson – you’re with me, we’re securing the tower,” Cor said. His face was pale, but he stood up steadily. “You’re on point. These two jokers up top first.”

Hudson nodded and trotted over to Eustace, who was collapsed and unconscious on the floor of the tower. He kicked the sword to the side, and then dragged him over to a patch of spider webbing. He did the same for Kenji, then approached the trap door heading down into the tower.

“Help me shorten this spear so I can use it with one hand,” Cor asked Hudson. “Knife chop right here – thanks.”

“Are you sure you’re ok?” Hudson asked, worried and feeling guilty.

“Little flesh-wound like this? Not enough to slow me down,” Cor said. “This ain’t my first rodeo, and you should count yourself lucky I didn’t lose the whole limb pulling your butt of the fire. I’ve grown an arm and a leg back, and it sucked pickled eggs. S.E.C.T., as messed up as they are, they got some potent medicines at their disposal.”

Hudson was confused. Cor had been injured badly in the mining rift, but he hadn't lost his arm. “Hang on a second. You’ve grown limbs back? How? I thought you weren’t with S.E.C.T.”

“Ah shoot,” Cor said. “Must be the shock from blood loss… I shouldn’t have said that. Look, I’m not a member of S.E.C.T., not technically. I ain’t no cultivator. I’ve never breathed in a single drop of qi. I’ve worked with S.E.C.T., but have not been a part of them, not in the way it counts.”

Hudson frowned. He didn’t like hearing that Cor had worked with S.E.C.T. before.

“How can you work with S.E.C.T. and not be a cultivator? And lose limbs, and get medicine to fix that? You’re not making any sense.” The ramifications of Cor being associated with S.E.C.T. were thudding through Hudson’s brain with each rapid beat of his heart.

“Have you been lying to me this whole time?”

“Kid, I ain’t got the time or patience for twenty questions,” Cor said brusquely. “I might have hid some things from you, but I never lied to you. I promise I won’t either in the future, but we are in a situation here, and we need to resolve that first.”

A familiar roar of water began again. The tsunami-causing formation was charging back up. There was a third member of S.E.C.T. somewhere inside the fortress running the formation, and there were their friends and fellow participants floundering out in the lake, looking for help. Hudson ignored it all and continued staring at Cor.

The older man stared back, his face lined in a painful grimace. Slowly, he sighed and looked down at his feet.

“I know it’s hard to trust me. And really, truly, in the world of S.E.C.T., you should trust no one. The person who sent me here on a mission, the leader I follow, she told me that. And it’s good advice.

“But, and this is going to sound corny, I do trust you,” Cor looked Hudson in the eye. “I didn’t know what to expect out of the gawky nerd with the homebrew cultivation technique. It certainly wasn’t that you’d perform most of my mission for me, without having to resort to… things I’d rather not do.

“So look back at the past few months in this trial. I have stood by you, time and again. I might have my secrets, we all do, but we’re on the same side. So. I’m asking you to trust me.”

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

There was a battle raging inside of Hudson’s mind: a deep, irrational rage screaming to trust no one, and the unshakeable integrity pouring out of Cor’s eyes. Cor had been with him, day in and day out, and had always been there with him. But he had hidden things from him…

Hudson froze suddenly, an insight finally connecting the dots and putting the internal battle on hold.

“Who’s your boss?” Hudson asked. “A middle-aged karate teacher, about this tall? And goes by the name of Chiang-sensei when she’s kidnapping people?”

Cor nodded. “Sounds like you have the misfortune of meeting her as well.”

“She told me the same thing. ‘Trust no one,’ she said. Why would she say that?”

Cor shook his head. “I don’t know what kind of four dimensional chess that woman is playing sometimes. But I can guess why. Everyone I have met in S.E.C.T. – well, almost everyone – would kill you without a moment’s hesitation if it would either make them stronger, or remove a future obstacle to their power.

“I say almost everyone, because Elder Chiang is different. She’s proven herself to me. While she is one of the most powerful people within S.E.C.T., she is no friend of S.E.C.T. She is first and foremost a friend of humanity, of the earth, of the billions of non-cultivators like me.”

“You said you had a mission in the trial. What was it?” Hudson asked.

Cor grinned viciously. “What do you think? Burn the whole daggone thing to the ground from the inside.”

“Seems like I did your job for you,” Hudson grinned in return, but shook his head. “I still have a lot of questions. But that second wave is getting bigger by the sound of it, and there may be some of our people out there stuck or drowning or who knows what. Let’s go.”

Hudson turned, and without waiting for Cor, ran over to the trap door. He took a cautious peek over the edge. There was no ladder, but there were hand holds carved into the wall. No sign of anyone else. Cor held his shortened spear in the crook of his left arm and used his good hand to count down three fingers, then two, then one. Hudson jumped down to the floor below.

The windowless chamber was empty. Cor jumped down behind him, landing heavily. Shadows flickered as they walked past recessed lighting to a set of double doors leading further into the mountain. Cor took a ready stance with his spear in his good hand and Hudson pushed the stone doors open.

A circular, glowing formation took up most of the center of the room. A female cultivator sat in the middle of the formation, eyes closed and breathing deeply in a cultivation technique. Her eyes flashed open as the stone doors banged against the walls with the force of Hudson’s entry.

A shortened spear flashed from behind him. Cor’s aim was true, but the cultivator blocked the throw and stood up. Despite moving, her connection with the formation around her remained. It still glowed, and was still faintly gaining in energy.

Hudson dashed forward, accelerating into a brutal tackle. His shoulder hit the woman’s solar plexus hard, and they landed outside of the formation on the far side of the room.

The woman gasped, her breath knocked out and her cultivation technique interrupted. The formation in the center of the room faded away without a cultivator in the center to pull qi into it.

Hudson punched the woman in the face once, twice, and then held his third punch as the woman had fallen unconscious.

“Secure her with the others first, then we will check on the rest of the teams,” Cor said.

Hudson pulled the woman into a fireman’s carry, and carried her back through the formation room and the hallway to the trapdoor. Climbing the ladder back to the top of the tower was tricky to balance, and Hudson would never have been able to carry another person up a ladder before becoming a cultivator, but now – he powered upwards without any problems.

He dumped the woman on a patch of cockroach guts and spider webbing, separate from the other two members of S.E.C.T.

“That spider webbing won’t hold them forever,” Hudson said to Cor. He had climbed back up the ladder as well, much more awkwardly than Hudson.

“Good point,” Cor said. “Grab some rope, and tie their hands and feet. That won’t stop them from cultivating though… but if you can get some more rope, then I can show you a little trick I learned back in the rift incursion of ‘98. Sometimes you gotta stop those pain-in-the-butt cultivators from cultivating in order to save their lives.”

There were some scraps of vines leading off of the makeshift grappling hooks that had been cut off by Eustace’s qi attack, but they weren’t enough. Hudson leaped down to the battlement, where a decent number of the grasshoppers had gathered.

There were three rope lines set up leading back to the stone platforms, and a few ropes also thrown down into the water. About half of the grasshoppers were already on the battlement, with the rest on their way up the ropes.

“Uh, excuse me,” Hudson said to the woman who looked to be most in charge. It was the same woman that had known about maseki in the trial, and who had secured her end of the rope to the bridge with spider webbing (and been caught in it herself).

The woman was looking down over the edge of the battlement and turned to Hudson.

“Yes, yes, excuse you. We are busy here,” she replied, before grabbing him by the cuff of his tunic and pulling him towards the other end of the battlement. “And if you’re not busy I have a job for you.”

“Well, I AM busy,” Hudson managed to get out while stumbling awkwardly behind the woman pulling him forward. “I need some rope to tie up our prisoners.”

She stopped, pulled his face down closer to hers, and squinted at him. “His highness the captain tell you to do that?”

Hudson nodded. He was fairly confident she was talking about Cor.

“Well, you can tell him to shove his spear in his prisoners if he needs to, because I need you to help team 5. Right now. Before they drown.”

She pointed down into the water and the unfortunate team 5, who had somehow managed to get spider webbing stuck between all three of them. Needless to say, it was difficult to swim when stuck to two other people, and they weren’t succeeding very well.

“I see that. Mrs…?”

“Li A-yi.”

“Mrs. Li. I can help.”

“Just call me A-yi,” she smiled primly, and then let go of Hudson’s collar so that he could jump down into the water to unstick the unfortunate team 5 from themselves.