There was an immediate scramble of arms and legs pumping as about half of the participants – the ones in the front and eager to win trial rewards – sprinted off. Kenji, his focus on Cor, failed to notice Hudson’s strategically placed foot, and he went sprawling on the ground for the second time in as many seconds.

Stepping gingerly over the prone cheater – no need to leave footprints up his spine and add injury to insult – Hudson loped after Cor, who had gotten a good jump off the start.

The first obstacle was simple – a twenty-foot tall mound of dirt on a steep, 1-to-1 slope. Hudson crested the slope immediately behind Cor, only to discover that there was no slope on the other side of the hill. Instead, there was a drop into a pool of water, about fifty feet long and an unknown depth.

Hudson made a split second decision and paused slightly at the top of the slope, gathering power in his legs and breathing deep. With a sharp exhale and kiai, he pushed off the top of the ledge and shot over Cor and a few more participants ahead of him.

He hit the water feet first and sank ten feet deep immediately. No bottom to the pool in sight and only a muffled darkness beneath his feet, Hudson began swimming down the pool, eventually surfacing about where the pool ended.

After surfacing, he realized he’d made a mistake. Because he had been underwater, he had not been able to breathe, and he’d lost the rhythm of his technique. But he had not stopped pushing as hard as he could, and getting out of the pool he was feeling quite winded.

But the results of his initial jump were quite good – he couldn’t complain about that. There were only five others in front of him at the moment. Picking up his breathing technique again, he forced his winded lungs to follow his directions instead of the panicky flagging they wanted to do on their own.

The next obstacle was a thirty-foot tall wall blocking the entire width of the room. Extending twenty feet in the lead up to the wall was a pit filled with mud, about waist deep. There were four ropes dangling from down from the top of the wall into the mud pit.

Hudson sprinted up to the mud pit and jumped in as far as he could. After a few more slow steps through the mud, he reached the nearest rope and started climbing.

Looking to his left, Hudson could see that the cheater group participants were climbing their ropes much faster than he was. They clearly had practice navigating this type of obstacle and their technique was much better than his. He tried to copy them, somewhat unsuccessfully, but made it to the top not too much further behind the others.

Unfortunately, that slight difference in speed mattered quite a bit. The top of the wall was a bare platform about ten feet wide. Plenty of space for a few people to wait for Hudson to crest the top, and for a power side kick to slam into his chest and knock him back off of the platform.

Hudson had anticipated the blow at all, and was shocked when his breath was knocked out of him and he was launched off the top of the thirty foot tall platform. His back slammed into the mud pit at the bottom of the wall, and he saw stars.

Gasping like a fish, he waved his arms around and struggled to right himself. A strong set of hands grabbed an arm and hoisted him up.

“Easy there partner,” Cor said.

“Dude, are you OK? You got launched off the top of that wall,” Vince said. He was struggling through the mud, but just a few feet behind Cor.

“I-I think I’m OK,” Hudson said as he patted himself down. His chest hurt and was certainly bruised where he had been hit, and his back was a little sore where he had landed on his rucksack.

“Might be best if we stick together,” Cor said. “These guys haven’t played fair before, and they sure ain’t changing their tune.”

“Well tripping that guy at the beginning certainly didn’t help, I’m sure,” Vince said, with a frown on his face.

“He deserved it,” Hudson said. “And a lot more besides. Let’s get going.”

The three pushed through the mud towards the ropes. Instead of all of them climbing up the same rope, they split up and climbed each separately.

As they got closer to the top, Cor – who was the fastest – slowed down and called out, “Let’s also push over the top at the same time, in case they are still there and waiting on us.”

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Vince struggled up as fast as he could, Cor and Hudson waiting a bit, and then with a concerted effort all three pushed over the top of the wall at the same time. Fortunately their plans were unneeded, as there was no longer anyone waiting at the top.

“They must have moved on. Did you count how many are ahead of us?” Hudson asked.

“I think all ten of them – including Clara – are ahead of us. Although I’m not sure Clara is still one of them,” Cor answered. “I saw her right behind you, Cor, but when she saw you get launched off the top, she didn’t go over immediately herself… She held tight towards the top of the rope for a little bit before peeking her head over to take a look.”

Maybe she hadn’t taken too kindly to being left behind on an alien world.

There were two ways down off the top of the wall – a zipline on the right, and a ladder on the left. The zipline extended for about a hundred feet at a gentle angle, but the ground underneath the zipline was neither the standard metallic sheen of the trial area nor a softer dirt or even mud – instead, it was the dark, impossibly black matte color of a portal.

At the end of the zipline, Cor’s new friend Kenji Abe was waiting, and looking directly up at them.

“Let’s take the ladder,” Hudson said, before waving at Kenji.

The left side of the obstacle course, under the ladder, was another mud pit. After seeing the three of them move away from the zipline and down the ladder, Kenji turned as if to continue along the obstacle course, then he paused, and instead walked over to the end of the mud pit to wait.

There was no point in exchanging words with each other. Everyone knew what was going on.

Hudson took the lead, as the only one in his group who had activated a cultivation technique. Kenji was standing out of the mud pit, and had the high ground, making the situation tricky. Hudson wasn’t precisely sure what he could do, as he was sure that as soon as he tried to scramble out of the waist-high mud and onto the firm metallic surface Kenji was standing on, he would receive a kick to the face for his efforts.

While he was waiting, about five feet back from the edge and trying to think of an idea, there was a sudden whistle-plop, and a fistful of mud smacked Kenji in the leg. Hudson looked behind him to see Vince scooping up another handful of mud to sling. This time, Kenji dodged the mud easily. The first time he must have been so focused on Hudson that he didn’t notice Vince at all.

Both Hudson and Cor starting picking up handfuls of mud themselves and slinging them at the increasingly irate Kenji.

After a particularly lucky throw hit Kenji in the face, he stepped forward right to the edge and screamed something at them in a language Cor didn’t understand – although he assumed it wasn’t very polite. Cor had been waiting for this moment, however, and pushed forward, swinging his rucksack off of his shoulder and at Kenji’s legs.

Originally the rucksack and its limited contents weren’t very heavy, but after crawling through multiple mud pits, it had accumulated a significant amount of mud sticking to the outside – enough mud to trip Kenji yet again, and this time he fell forward into the mud pit.

Cor wasted no time pushing up next to Hudson, and the two of them pushed the struggling Kenji deeper into the mud, as far as they could. Vince scrambled out onto the firm surface, turned back and helped both Cor and Hudson up and out of the mud pit as well.

Their victory was short-lived, as the three didn’t even get to the next obstacle – some kind of complicated ropes course – before the angry Kenji had pushed himself out of the mud, caught back up to them, and attacked immediately.

Hudson blocked the first straight punch from Kenji, the second follow-up and then the straight kick. While clearly enraged, Kenji’s punches and kicks were tight and focused, the clear product of hours and hours of repetition. His cultivation technique lent an explosive power to his moves that Hudson, with his own technique running, could only barely keep up and block.

The punches and kicks flew furiously, and Hudson struggled mightily to keep from being pummeled into submission. He bobbed and turned, backing up and dodging where he could, until he realized he had switched around and been forced back towards the zipline.

He couldn’t take the time to look backwards, but he could tell Kenji was trying to get him to fall into the black portal underneath the zipline.

“5 feet!” Cor called out from somewhere, and Hudson realized he must have only five feet of room left before he ran out of real estate. A particularly vicious roundhouse from Kenji forced him back a step..

“Hey, what’s that behind you?” Hudson suddenly said. It had worked on Clara, maybe it would work on Kenji.

It didn’t. He completely ignored Hudson’s words, and closed the gap between them.

At that moment, Vince finally acted, throwing two fistfuls of mud at Kenji’s feet from behind. He slipped slightly, but righted himself quickly, and didn’t trip or fall down.

That little bit of time, however, was enough for Hudson to make a move. Stepping forward quickly, he grabbed Kenji’s tunic at the shoulder and waist, dropped his hips, twisted, and threw the startled Kenji over his left shoulder and directly into the black, lightless hole in reality behind them.

He disappeared without so much as a sound.

“That’s… disturbing,” Vince said.

Hudson could only nod in agreement as he sprinted to the next section of the obstacle course.