Four percent energy reserves. He was naked, exhausted, and had to keep fighting anyway.

The gorilla died reaching for Hector with its one remaining arm, hate in its eyes. The cougars Nestor cleared out with wild swings of his fists. Then came a frog the size of Hector. It hopped forward fast as a bullet and bowled him over. Then its tongue flicked out, covered in miasmic nastiness, to wrap around Hector's head.

Nestor started to reach towards the monster's head and the frog belched a cloud of miasma at point blank range at the Titan. Nestor snatched his hand back, shaking it out. That distraction gave Hector the window he needed to thread a cable through a nostril and scramble the brain.

He returned to his feet and took stock. Just two percent energy reserves. "Nestor, I'm spent. I won't be able to use my domain or aura any more."

The Titan squinted at the retreating form of Fred. Then he turned to look at the line of the forest. There was a massive crane walking in their direction, its legs big as trees, its beak the size of a city bus. Eyes fixed on them. "We have to go downstream, Hector. Lead this thing away from Ajax. He's all I got left, man."

"Downstream, then. Slow enough that we keep its attention."

They ran. Slower than either of them could, but still inhumanly fast. The bird came faster. When it was close enough that they judged it fully committed to the chase, they picked up the pace. Thuds shook the earth as the monster gained ground.

"If we die, I am sorry, Hector."

Hector still had a tiny amount of energy reserves. Maybe enough for one final effort. He created a thick cable and clothes-lined the pursuing monster at the ankles. It landed hard enough that the ground rose up to strike both Hector and Nestor. When they looked back, however, they found their pursuer stuck in place with its beak driven deep into the ground.

The two of them sprinted away until they were gasping for breath. They continued their race anyway, conscious of the danger. There was a heavy taint of miasma in the air. Almost they ran off a cliff as the river turned waterfall. Instead, they stumbled to a stop just in time.

Hector stared at the plunge, wondering if Cleo and Leroy went over the edge after leaping into the water. The Arahants weren't much sturdier than a normal person. They were at best on the level of Olympic level athletes, which was a far cry from superhuman durability.

"Let's set up behind the waterfall," Nestor said. "I need to rest."

"Do you think there is a cave back there?"

"There will be." With those words, Nestor jumped feet first. Hector sighed and followed. He hit the water and then hit the bed of the river a moment later. The only real difference was the water went up his nose and the river bed did not.

Nestor swam upstream to the falls and Hector followed. They discovered an overhang that created a space just large enough for the two of them. However, it was knee deep in water. The Titan didn't seem to mind that. He began slamming his fist at the rock wall, causing shards to shatter free.

Hector watched, concerned about the overhang collapsing, as Nestor simultaneously dug their hideaway deeper into the wall and created gravel that raised the level of ground in the shallows above the water line. When Nestor finished, the Titan collapsed onto his back and stared up at the waterfall.

Joining his companion, Hector considered their situation. "Back on my world, there was a television show called Naked and Afraid."

"Are you telling me this because our clothes were destroyed by a swarm of bee monsters?"

"Mostly I'm bringing it up because this is slightly awkward."

"Restore your energy, Hector. We're going to need to fight again soon."

"Right."

The Titan closed his eyes. "Hector? You're a good ally."

"So are you, Nestor."

They lapsed into silence then. Hector was too tired to actively cultivate with his externality at that moment, so he opted to do a more passive version of mental cultivation. He opened his mental aperture to see if their battle had stirred up any cosmic energy and found a gold mine.

Cosmic energy flowed into his parched soul. It wasn't as much as he could get through his normal method, but it came easy. Well, mostly easy. There was still the effort of holding back the miasma on the mental band. That took a measure of willpower, but it didn't exhaust his soul in the same way heavy use of his aura and domain did. It relied more upon conviction than anything and at the moment Hector's blood was up.

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The monsters had scattered his squad. The Arahants were lost. Fred and Ajax were wounded and fleeing. Nestor and Hector were hiding until they could scrape together enough strength to fight again. Honestly, he didn't know if they would be ready in time to protect Breadfruit Village. He didn't even know if their comrades would survive.

Yeah. His blood was up. These creatures wanted to slay all of humanity. If he were to believe the Yazata, the descendants of Tiamat wanted to end the descendants of the Ophanim. The enmity inherited from their higher order ancestors could not be denied. They had to fight until one side or the other ceased to exist. Hector intended to help humanity win that fight however he could.

A white hot burst of cosmic energy flowed through his mental aperture.

Hector sat up in surprise. What caused that surge? He stopped his cultivation to push his mental sense out into his environment. The taint of miasma was thick on the air. Cosmic energy also floated about him far denser than normal. But that wasn't all.

Oh, no, that was far from all.

He sensed something deeply and intensely familiar in this environment. Something he knew with an intimacy that went beyond the bounds of mundane understanding.

Chaos. The primordial essence hung about their artificial cave.

And Hector knew the most important truth about chaos. It was just waiting around for someone to make it become cosmic energy. The transformations took far longer than he expected. He had years of experience doing this with his externality by this point, but this was a new trick for his mind. It was like trying to write his name with his left hand instead of his right hand. He could manage it, but it was a bit sloppy.

Not only was he using a different aperture, but the behavior of energy on the mental band was fundamentally different. It resonated with thought, which necessitated a narrow focus. It also was far more reactive than what he drew from outside of a human universe, requiring a far more delicate touch. And finally, there was the problem of filtering out the plentiful miasma, which both distracted him and tested his willpower.

In the end, though, he successfully cultivated chaos through his mind. Pristine cosmic energy flooded his mental aperture and moved into his soul. It was slow, it was hard, it was inefficient. Nevertheless, he managed.

Daylight faded as they lay in the cave. Nestor slept with great whistling noises.

Meanwhile, Hector cultivated. He occasionally needed to take breaks when his mind became too exhausted, returning to his typical method of cultivation. While doing that, he was free to ponder the oddity that he had discovered. Chaos on the mental band.

There was only one thing that made any sense to him. The rift must let it leak into the world. Miasma didn't teleport to reach human worlds, after all, it swam through the primordial to reach its destinations. When the inimical essence tore open a path to enter a world, the other side of the rift opened onto chaos. It would be odd if no chaos leaked through, now that he thought of it.

Hector paused only to drink water that he caught in his hands from the falls and to relieve himself in the shallow waters beyond their cave. Otherwise he alternated his cultivation methods, working to push his energy reserves back up to useful levels as quickly as possible.

His Titan companion slept for what must have been twelve hours straight. Then he woke and set about restoring his own energy. Nestor sat with his back into the deepest point of their artificial cave, where he was surrounded on three sides by rock, and ate small stones. Hector watched when his mind wasn't otherwise occupied, curious about the process Titans used to gain their substantial energy. He used his mental sense on occasions when his mind wasn't completely exhausted and saw a thick, stubborn energy leach from the rock into his ally like individual drops of molasses.

After a time, they spoke to relieve the boredom of constant energy manipulation.

"So you eat rocks?"

"I swallow rocks. Later on I'll have to bring it back up so it doesn't clog up my insides."

"Is it easier to drain substantial energy that way?"

Nestor shrugged. "It's about surface area. My stomach surrounds the entire rock. I am holding one in each hand, too. The biggest source of energy comes from pressing my back into this wall, though. It's just maximizing surface area."

A little later, a question came his way. "Do Xian really flap their auras to get energy?"

Hector gave a generic explanation of aural cultivation, which Nestor found absolutely fascinating. The Titan shared his outlook on how Arahants and Jinn basically cheated at energy restoration because their process happened passively.

"I know we can restore faster than them with an intentional effort," Nestor complained, "but those guys get recharged without trying. It happens even while they sleep!"

Hector pointedly did not bring up that he possessed the mother of all hacks. Instead, he let the conversation lapse as he labored to prepare himself for further combat. He introduced aural cultivation to the rotation with his mind and his externality. That let him draw energy almost constantly, with only small breaks for quick naps.

Hunger came on strong, then faded away as the days passed.

Fear of facing plentiful monsters while weak kept him in place. As well as a fascination with the new territory opened up to him. He felt his mind growing sturdier as he practiced mental cultivation using chaos. Usually the changes to his mental aperture were too subtle for him to notice. He relied on the System's survey results to measure progress. Not with this. He sensed the improvement happening in real time.

Hector theorized that he was doing more than just rapidly saturating his mental aperture. He had the strong impression that he was actually increasing the quality of cosmic energy bound to his mind. His past gains had largely come from using psychedelic honey pills that opened a path between his brain and his mind. That energy had been far from pure. Most cosmic energy on the mental band was also denatured to some degree. Chaos bending to the power of his insight became perfectly pure cosmic energy, though. And that pure energy was slowly washing away the impurities embedded within his mind. It was a qualitative improvement that promised new strength.

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