“Bring on him a mountain of pain!” The massive dark omen ordered, pointing at the running figure, and screaming at his subordinate shadows. “No one betrays me and gets away with it!” The scrambling man winded through a maze of alleys, deep in the Under City, to get away from the chasing dark; and his mind raced. How could he attempt to escape that which made up every single part of the city of the night? He had no answer and no plan. His thought was just to run. And maybe, just maybe, it would work. He kept sprinting up hall and corner and, most egregiously, stairs. And he could hardly keep running in the same direction, for they would cut him off and were always waiting for him in the shadows that lurked. In those cases, he tried his best to maneuver around the enemies with any of his favorite tactics: a wall run, a wall jump, a leap off a random object, a roll under the dark’s manifestations, he had a great arsenal, and that was the only plan he ever needed.
“Betray you?” He shouted back while, at this moment, hurdling a five-foot-high apparition’s tackle. “You betrayed me! Don’t act like you wouldn’t have stolen your money back as soon as I won it!”
He heard an angry roar in the distance.
“Predictable,” he sighed. But he wasn’t in the clear yet, for the moving shadows gave ever more chase to him in response to their leader’s antics. And so, he kept sprinting up and down and up again with the pure focus of avoiding, rather than escaping. It was then that he stumbled upon a different district of the Under City, the next evilest compared to the slums he had just left, the Workshops. Huge factories and fences of lightning permeated the area. It was not for walking or strolling or escaping for that matter. It was perhaps the most dangerous place in the city and the exact place the teenage boy did not want to end up, but he had no choice. He dropped down from his overlook and began to sprint, not looking back, and looking ahead to avoid all the working hazards. He didn’t even want to mention all the random spikes and holes and random huge crevices. Whoever made the place did not care for architectural design.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
The shadows still gave chase, and their dark bodies painted the walls and floors; they only manifested three-dimensionally when they wanted to do something physical, like capture the boy and do terrible things to him. He hurried his feet up, and his steps on the hard concrete echoed through the underground district. Now that he was mostly in the open ground, especially when compared to the labyrinth of alleys before, his speed played more of a factor than his movement skills or agility or his executions, and the shadows were much, much faster than him. They raced on the ground, getting closer and closer to the boy. And he had no idea what to do.