Nic walked out into a broad arbortorium, tall pine trees sprouting in rows from a bed of soft wood shavings and mulch. The rich mud squelched underfoot as he walked through the sunny space, considering to himself how quickly, how easily he could use that mud to kill every living person here. If only his aura wasn't bound.

Numerous people were trapped alongside him. The panels of glass were thick and unbreakable with normal strength, and as for escaping by cunning, there were guards.

Standing under each tree was a slender, almost skeletal creature made of interlocking greenwood branches, its skin of smooth bark covered with prickling thorns. Like dryads. But not cuddly and cute and alluring, more...

Relentlessly emotionless. No matter what a prisoner did, they responded with a collected calm. Like they were teachers watching over school children.

As for the prisoners they were a rough lot. Nic took one step out of his room and instantly felt dozens of gazes settle on him. He tilted his head up and looked down his nose at the lot of them, coldly sweeping the room, taking them in.

Invaders.

Nic had encountered precisely one group of Invaders in his time on earth. Sport hunters who'd paid to come early and slaughter Natives before they adapted to the rules of the System. These were a different breed...

These were the warriors of a Settlement.

Whenever the Natives founded a Settlement of their own, the Invaders were teleported in to serve as their opposition. The two would face off and, as the System watched on, the weak would be culled. Those who couldn't stand under their own power would become a grinding stone to sharpen those who could...

And the Invaders would pay untold amounts of wealth for the chance.

The System's hand shaped new worlds into proving grounds. Nic had benefited from dozens of opportunities and trials left for those who had the fortune and strength to seize them. There was nowhere else the System would be so generous, nowhere better to forge a foundation...

But most of all, there was the prize of the world itself. Fresh, untamed, bursting with natural energy. Nic's homeworld had been reduced to a husk of itself over centuries. Cultivators had eaten the flesh and sweetness of the land, consuming everything to fuel their ascents, and left behind a world akin to an empty rind, all concrete and bones forever as far as the eye could see.

Those with the fortunes to escape such a miserable place would pay to come here instead. They would dream of founding a clan. Of sowing their bloodline in fresh soil where it might grow for millennia and become powerful...

Nic stared down the fortunate sons of the System, who fled the destruction of one world by sowing the end of another.

There were five of them.

One was an ogre-blooded. Huge, with a red mane of a beard pleated into braids and massive dark horns that came out above his ears. The telltale sign of ogrish heritage was the snout-like nose and protruding lower jaw, which he had in spades. Flowers covered his face like pestilent blisters, the roots sunk down into one cheek.

He sat with his back against a row of flowerpots, meditating with his eyes closed. But the prickling sense Nic got when his back was turned told him the big guy was watching.

Seated on a wall nearby was a tall, dark-skinned woman with frizzy black hair swept back into braids. Her flowers had been planted in her right leg. She wore a loose canvas tunic, and knotted around the waist was a belt of red rope that had been tied in ornate prayer knots.

Nic wouldn't have let her keep that, if he was the jailers, but it didn't directly radiate any aura.

The two remaining were insect-devils. Short, squat creatures with the heads of jet black locusts, covered by hoods of loose leathery flesh that connected back to their shoulders. The rest of their bodies were bright red, and they crouched on their powerful legs playing a game of dice.

Nic paused. That was four. But he'd seen-

There.

It kept moving from shadow to shadow, blinking from one to the next. Nic didn't understand how it could when it was shackled by the Essence-eating flowers like the rest of them. It was an ugly goblinoid thing, with a massively misshapen head that bulged out on one side and was almost completely flat in front, save for rough, disfiguring lumps. Its sallow skin resembled a wax mask that someone had held a torch to. Everything was melted and warped, with the eye sockets not lining up with the yellow eyes beneath, leaving bright crescents of pink inner flesh exposed underneath each iris.

Nic looked one way and then the other. Aside from the sleeping ogre, everyone was looking right back at him. Measuring him.

He was painfully aware that, while they’d all been infected with the parasite-flowers, Nic was the only one whose hands were bound together. For that matter, he’d been stripped of his armor, his scarf, everything.

This was going to be maybe a little bit hard.

"Well then." He broke the silence with a smile. "Now we've got everyone we'll need for the jail break. I'll be the handsome and charming one!"

The silence rang out again the moment he stopped. Then, cracking open an eye, the ogre grunted...

"You sound ridiculous, little man. All barks and chipper little peeps. Like a big wolf is mauling a toy that keeps squeaking..."

Laughter from all sides. Nic endured it with a grin, eyeing them up for strength. Honestly...

Without their cultivations, he was pretty confident that he saw nothing but dead men before him. Maybe, if it came down to that, the ogre or the shadow-gremlin would be troublesome. But not the rest.

The woman dropped down from her perch. The way she moved...

Pure bravado. Almost too much swagger to take seriously, never looking at him straight on, but always from the side like a cat. Nic twisted his neck until the muscles stretched and strained satisfyingly, and moved to intercept almost before she'd thrown the attack.

Her palm slammed into his crossed hands and pushed him through the dirt, skidding about half a foot through the soft ground. Nic's body twitched with the urge to counter. It wouldn't have been hard to seize control of her arm in that moment, but...

He smiled a stupid, wide-lipped axolotl smile. "Well fuck you too."

"Hey, the little guy isn't total trash." She grinned like she'd done something clever. "You'd think his homeworld could scrape together a few thousand to send him off in a real body. What do you think? A nobody stuck in a sect too big to remember they exist, or a lucky talent stuck on a dead-end world?"

Nic's smile twitched. Oh, fuck it. He never could resist his worst urges.

A single kick flicked him into the air, and his open hand shot towards her chin from below, aiming to drive the heel of his palm into her jawline and shatter her teeth against the upper row.

And then as her guard went up, he twisted and slammed his tail into her throat instead. The moment of shock as his strength slammed her windpipe shut gave him time to land a backwards kick into her forehead, dropping him back to the ground.

He completed the turn he'd start mid-air and swept her legs out from under her with the back of his arms. She hit the dark soil and lay there, stunned, coughing.

It was a clinical dissection. And not ten seconds from the moment he'd been thinking he shouldn't show off his power in front of the Invaders. But...

Some faces needed to be slapped.

The ogreblood was laughing. It was an abrasively loud, snorting sound, with a donkey-like bray at the end of each syllable.

"Okay then, we have a hero! He's come to rescue us from boredom!" The big man grasped the wall next to him, standing up slowly.

The sound of him stretching across the massive scar-struck span of his muscles was like listening to metal ratchets. He bent back and his spine crunched with a sound that, in lesser men, would speak of bones breaking. Limbering up, the ogre planted his feet and extended a short bow, before lifting his hands into massive fists.

"Elder brother mister lizard..." The ogre said, his voice calm and slow. "Please instruct this humble daoist.”

---

By the time the guards came to break them up, Nic was unabashedly enjoying himself. With his usual arsenal of dirty tricks sealed, he was back to square one, fighting on pure skill and for fighting's sake. The ogreblood wasn't holding back, but there was no particular malice or urgency to his strikes.

His palms advanced in huge, crashing blows. Nic couldn't call anything that moved that fast clumsy. In fact, he was barely staying ahead, taking occasional hits across the back of the arms or clipping against his shoulders. Each glancing hit rattled him about inside his own skin and sent him sliding back.

In pure strength? It wasn't a contest.

Nic had met a few blows head-on with strikes of his own, and while he'd been glad to see the ogre's arm tremble under the strain, he was the one who lost ground. Nic went on the evasive, then.

There was something he was missing, Nic realized.

In pure physical strength, this giant and the ghost of Li Blackleaf were one and the same. Neither held a strict advantage.

But the ghost’s attacks had been impossible to escape. They had contained some kind of strange power that made them impossible to evade…

The old bastard had his tricks.

Nic wanted to know how they worked. As the explosive palm strikes rained down and the ogreblood chased him through the forest, advancing like a living fortress on his heavy, defensive footwork, Nic focused on that missing element of speed…

Sofia had said he couldn’t learn a technique simply from seeing it done.

But Nic could capture the feeling. The meaning. The old man’s strikes, they had seemed to bend space around them. His own muscles had frozen and refused to move in order to escape. It was a feeling as if the world itself went cold in fear when that palm reached out…

Why?

It was the meaning the old man given to each blow.

A feeling of utmost confidence, as if your loss was utterly inevitable. As if all you’d built and worked for was coming crumbling down in a second of destruction, and you realized, in that moment, your entire life was nothing but hubris.

Nic shifted his gears. His feet planted in the mud, and he raised his arms, deflecting the ogreblood’s blow. The skin on the back of his arms split open from the force, but he kicked forward and drove towards the giant’s head with a flying leap.

His foot swept towards the ogreblood’s skull.

In that moment, Nic thought he’d captured the spirit of the old goat. The complete and total belief that the strike would land. That he was inescapable.

The ogreblood tried to flinch back-

And at that moment, green vines erupted from the earth. Their bodies were pulled apart, and they were both dragged to kneel in the wet soil as the dryads arrived. Their leader, a tall woman in flowing white robes, looked down on them with disapproval.

“You.” Her voice was harsh and clipped. “The small pink one. Your presence has been requested by the leader of Makepeace.”