My footing was uneven, but adrenaline forced forward as I pushed through the grass, scanning for anything I could use. That was when I noticed a low-hanging branch on a large tree ahead, thick enough to support my weight.
Teleporters couldn’t teleport upward, right? I had to trust Mio on this one.
If I could get up there, I might buy myself a few seconds.
I sprinted toward it and jumped, grabbing the thick branch with both hands. The sudden strain sent a sharp jolt through my shoulder, but I ignored it and let my montum carry into a swing.
Behind , the Teleporter closed the distance almost instantly.
Its arm swung sideways in a fast, clean arc aid at my legs, but I shifted my weight forward and swung my body ahead of the strike, feeling the air move where the blade passed just a mont too late. Using that motion, I pulled myself up and got my chest over the branch before forcing my body onto it.
I climbed imdiately, grabbing the next branch and hauling myself higher until I was nearly ten ters above the ground. My shoulder burned with every movent, but the adrenaline kept the pain from slowing down.
Below , the Teleporter stood still, looking up.
For a brief mont, it did nothing.
Then its body tightened, and it attacked the tree.
Its arm struck the trunk with heavy force, like an axe driven into wood. The entire tree shook beneath as the impact traveled upward through the branches. It struck again, and again, each hit biting deeper, each vibration throwing off my balance as I tried to hold on.
"Shit..." I muttered, panic rising. "Oh, no... fuck, fuck, fuck..."
The trunk split with a loud crack and began to fall to the right, pulling the branches down with it. I lost my footing as the branch tilted and dropped, and I pushed off at the last second, jumping toward a nearby tree.
I managed to grab onto one of its branches, my fingers locking around it as my body swung violently.
For a brief second, I thought I had it. Then the branch snapped under my weight.
My grip gave out, and I fell. Below , the Teleporter was already in position. Its arm was raised, the blade-like edge angled upward, perfectly aligned with my descent. There was no way I could adjust my fall.
SHNNK!
The scream died in my throat as the sharpened limb drove straight through my abdon. The montum of my fall slamd the rest of my weight onto the blade, the tip erupting out of my back. I hung there, suspended three feet off the ground, my legs twitching uselessly in the air.
The pain wasn’t a sharp sting... it was a white-hot iron bar cauterizing from the inside out. My hands clamped instinctively onto the cold, oily surface of its arm, blood bubbling past my lips.
With a dismissive, jerky motion, the Teleporter flicked its arm.
I was tossed aside like a broken doll, sliding off the blade and hitting the dirt face-first. I tumbled across the sickly green grass, leaving a dark trail behind . I lay there, staring at the dirt, the "Critical Condition" notification flashing so rapidly it was blinding.
I heard the scritch-scritch-scritch of its shifting form. It was moving in for the kill.
Not yet.
I didn’t wait to see if it would follow. I turned and bolted, my boots skidding on the sickly grass as I pushed toward the denser tree line. My lungs burned, and every heartbeat sent a fresh wave of agony through my mangled shoulder.
Twenty three health. Only fifteen stamina.
Behind , there was no sound of footsteps—only that rhythmic, glitching snap of the air as the Teleporter bypassed space to close the gap.
I lunged behind a massive, gnarled oak, hoping the trunk would buy a second.
Thwack!
A projectile hissed through the air, narrowly missing my ear and burying itself deep into the wood of the tree. I looked over my shoulder. It wasn’t a physical knife; it was a jagged, solidified shard of the entity’s own black, oily mass, still vibrating with a strange, humming energy.
The Teleporter appeared ten ters away, its form flickering violently as it prepared to lunge.
My strength was bottoming out. My vision was starting to tunnel. If I kept running, I’d just die with a hole in my back.
I reached out, my fingers trembling, and gripped the protruding end of the black shard stuck in the tree. With a guttural scream, I wrenched it free. The substance was freezing, biting into my palm like dry ice.
The entity snapped into position right in front of , its arm sharpening into a long, obsidian blade. It swung horizontally, a move ant to bisect .
I dropped.
I let my knees hit the dirt, the blade whistling through the air where my chest had been a millisecond before, shearing a clean line through the oak tree behind . Before it could recover, I lunged upward from the ground.
"My turn," I hissed.
I drove the stolen black shard into the center of its flickering chest. It didn’t slide in—it tore through, the entity’s own essence reacting violently to the shard. The Teleporter jerked, its form stuttering like a dying television screen.
I didn’t pull back. I shoved my free hand into the ragged wound the shard had opened.
It was like plunging my arm into a freezing, pressurized vacuum. I ignored the sensation of my skin peeling back from the sheer cold and focused every remaining spark of mana into my buried palm.
"GHAAAH!!"
I didn’t let the spell fly. I held the explosion in my fist, detonating it directly inside the creature’s core.
A muffled, heavy THUMP echoed through the clearing. The Teleporter’s torso bloated, glowing a sickening, molten orange as the fire expanded within its distorted dinsions. An instant later, it ruptured. A shockwave of heat and black soot blasted backward, sending tumbling across the grass.
The entity was gone, reduced to nothing but fading embers and oily smoke.
I lay on my back, staring up at the canopy. The "Critical Condition" icons were the only things I could see clearly. My stomach felt like it had been put through a at grinder, and my mana bar was a flat, gray line.
"I... I did it... oh..."
I tried... I really tried to stay awake... but I couldn’t.
╔══════════════════╗
> ENEMY SLAIN
╠══════════════════╣
> 20 EXP
> 10 LC
╚══════════════════╝
ꨄ︎ꨄ︎ꨄ︎
Every ti I fell asleep, I saw her in my dreams, or rather, my nightmares. She was a troubled person, deeply troubled. I rembered my father shouting the word "bipolar" at her, at my mother. I hadn’t understood what it ant when I was little, but as I grew older, I began to understand, even when I didn’t want to.
"Co take your pills, honey," she said with a smile that never quite reached her eyes.
"Yes, Mommy."
I never knew where I was in those dreams. The world was always dark, unfinished, like sothing half-rembered. The only thing I could see clearly was my mother’s open palm. Not her face, never her face, just her hand stretching out of the darkness toward . Resting on her palm was a small pill.
It always looked different. Sotis white, sotis yellow, sotis sothing I couldn’t na. But it was always there, waiting.
After my sister died in a traffic accident, my mother beca paranoid, very paranoid. She kept saying that the governnt was after her, and now after us, that my sister’s death had been planned. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been. She had been holding the stroller at a red light. She dropped her phone, bent down to pick it up, and the stroller rolled forward. A taxi. A sound I thought I had imagined for years, until I realized I hadn’t.
Just like that, a life was gone.
I had been five years old. Too young, everyone said, to rember anything clearly. But I rembered the sound. I always rembered the sound.
"Yummy pill," she said softly. "Right, honey?"
"Yes, Mommy."
Gulp.
Because of my mother, I had beco dependent on sleeping pills. I couldn’t sleep without them, even if I tried. My body refused. My mind refused. The night before had been the only exception; I must have been completely exhausted, or maybe sothing else had been waiting for .
I looked down.
There was another pill.
My mother’s hand hadn’t moved. It never moved. It just waited.
Gulp.
Another pill appeared, or maybe it had always been there and I had only just noticed it.
Gulp.
The darkness around us seed closer now, pressing in, listening.
Gulp.
I tried to look up, to see her face, just once, but sothing in knew I shouldn’t. I knew that if I did, sothing would be wrong. Sothing would be worse than wrong.
"Good boy," she whispered, though I didn’t see her lips move.
Gulp.
Another pill.
Gulp.
Another.
Gulp.
Another pill.
Then another.
Another.
Another.
Another fucking pill.
Another.
"Do you believe daddy?" She whispered. "Do you think I’m crazy, Ace?"
"N-no, mommy."
My mother’s face slid out of the darkness. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling, unblinking, the whites exposed and gleaming. Her mouth opened into a grin that went too far, too wide, stretching past where it should have stopped, trembling at the edges.
She leaned in until her face filled everything. "Good boy," she said, her voice wet and close. "Good. Boy."
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