Instinct made him leap away and Hirrus readied his axe.

But only for a moment.

With a grumble and sigh, Hirrus returned the weapon to his hip. He’d already learned it wouldn’t do anything to this man.

“Come on,” GM Dave said, beckoning Hirrus towards him. “Time to go, buddy.”

Hirrus didn’t move. “How do you expect this to go? You just gesture at me and I give up?”

“I mean, I was hoping?” The man in red armor looked tired. “But I don’t need you to.” Without physically crossing the intervening space, GM Dave was suddenly directly in front of Hirrus again. “At all.”

Hirrus flinched back, trying to replace the suddenly lost distance, but a gauntleted hand clamped down on his wrist.

GM Dave’s grip wasn’t just iron. It was like being encased in a ring of stone.

His attempt to leap away almost sent him face-down to the street.

“Alright,” GM Dave said. “We’re done here.”

“Why are you doing this?” Hirrus demanded, grabbing the man’s hand and trying to pry the fingers off of him.

He may as well have tried to dig through the city wall with his bare hands.

“You’re a danger to the game, kid,” GM Dave said, not reacting in the slightest to Hirrus' attempts to free himself. “And not knowing what you are means I can’t fucking find you unless people are reporting you. You’re a big problem, and the only way I know how to deal with you is to put you on ice until someone above my pay grade can solve you.”

Hirrus snarled and did the only thing that made sense.

Sure, he could have activated his newly available transformation. But he wasn’t sure what it would actually do. Without testing it, it felt like an over-reaction to a situation he’d gotten himself out of once before.

Instead, he reached for his Arcana.

Activating Split Second made him temporarily immune to everything. He made a mental bet that it would allow him to slip free. If it didn’t, he might still get free if the dramatic move speed increase gave him the ability to rip his own arm off.

That was still escaping, after a fashion.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to leave his hand behind. The GM’s grip was apparently an effect that the invulnerability liberated him from, and he sprinted back away from the man as fast as the speed boost would let him, giving him a good twenty feet distance in a flash.

GM Dave looked unimpressed. “That’s annoying. Even if it’s ultimately pointless.”

Expecting the freaky supernatural approach this time, Hirrus wasn’t caught off-guard when the GM appeared next to him again. Instead of being startled for long enough for the GM to establish a grip again, Hirrus activated another Arcana, using High Jump immediately to take him out of the GM’s reach.

The Arcana sent him sailing high into the air as the red-gauntleted hand closed on the empty space where Hirrus had just been.

Hirrus felt a moment of vertiginous panic looking down at his sudden height above the street, but his jump had been slightly angled. When he came back down, he landed on a nearby stone rooftop rather than falling all the way down.

Hirrus dropped to one knee, taking a deep breath to try and calm himself. He wasn’t afraid of heights, and he knew that the Arcana would protect him from taking damage, but seeing the street so far below had been strange and terrifying. With an exhaled breath, he braved a look over the edge of the roof to try and see how GM Dave was reacting to his escape.

“Neat trick,” the man in red armor said. He was standing over Hirrus on top of the roof. “I wonder if you having that stuff is important to figuring out what the fuck you actually are.”

Hirrus rolled to the side, away from GM Dave before he could get grabbed again.

“What are you gonna do, run away?”

In the absence of any better ideas on his own end, Hirrus turned and started booking it across the rooftop.

“Hey, wait,” GM Dave protested. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

While Split Second was still on cooldown from its earlier use, Hirrus had some new tools now. He activated one of his newer abilities - Pumped Kicks - and used the small move speed bonus from that to get a head start.

GM Dave, for his part, simply appeared in front of Hirrus, arms spread to block him. But Hirrus had seen that trick three times now, so it had lost some of its effectiveness. Hirrus threw himself to the left, copying the dodge roll he’d seen the adventurer use in the previous fight.

He felt, rather than saw, the GM’s grasping arms barely missing him.

Hirrus came up behind him, startled at the efficiency of such a simple maneuver.

That tired, almost bored, look returned to GM Dave’s form. “Come on, we talked about this, buddy. Just stop being a problem for me, and we don’t have to be enemies.”

“You want to stop me. There was no way we weren’t going to be enemies.”

Without lingering, Hirrus bolted across the rooftop and leapt over the narrow alley at the far end of the building to the next.

Despite his earlier teleporting, GM Dave was giving a noisy chase in his heavy red plate armor. Did it have a cooldown like Arcana?

“Knock it off,” the man yelled after him. “This isn’t funny anymore!”

Hirrus wasn’t laughing. Even if he did find this humorous, he needed every breath for his escape.

He landed on the next rooftop and made use of his speed boost to get a head start to the next. GM Dave appeared next to him, diving at him in a tackle already in the air. But Hirrus managed to pull up short, letting the armored man sail past him and clatter onto the roof. He felt an urge to see if he could shove the man bodily off the roof when he tried to stand. He ignored it. After every previous attempt to physically interact with GM Dave, Hirrus didn’t feel confident in the attempt.

Instead, he continued running.

After reaching the far end of the next roof, Hirrus pulled up short and dropped down. He hung from the lip by his fingers. Looking up, he saw GM Dave step up above him, reaching down to grab his wrist before he could escape.

Hirrus let go.

It was only about fifteen feet to the ground, and already hanging off the edge of the roof meant that was another six feet fewer he had between his feet and the ground.

Hirrus landed hard and had to absorb the impact by dropping to one knee.

“Nice,” GM Dave said right next to him in the alleyway again. “Superhero landing. Big crowd-pleaser.”

Without hesitating, Hirrus activated High Jump again, hurling himself straight up to the roof again.

As he reached the roof level again, he saw a flash of red armor on the rooftop ahead of him.

But Hirrus hadn’t angled his jump this time, and let himself fall back to street level.

“Hey!” GM Dave shouted in sudden surprise, the voice still coming from the rooftop above.

As soon as his feet were on the ground, Hirrus activated Split Second again. In a flash, he was out of the alley and around the corner. He bolted as far as he could with the enhanced move speed, and then made for the nearest cover he could see.

A nearby building had a stairwell that went down into a basement entryway, and he practically threw himself down those stairs and into the shadows.

When he came to a complete stop at the bottom, he froze, holding himself completely still.

A rattle of armor emerged from the alleyway as GM Dave sprinted out after Hirrus. He’d broken line of sight for a bare couple of seconds, and so the man seemed unable to simply teleport to his side again.

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck,” GM Dave said, each time the word growing slightly louder. He stopped only a few feet from Hirrus' hiding spot, but he was looking up and down the street frantically, not down at Hirrus just behind his own feet. “Fuck!”

Hirrus held his breath. He wasn’t familiar with Juri’s armor yet. A breath slightly too deep could have made two plates scrape together. The tiniest movement could make a strap creak or a chain rattle.

He had to stay as still as possible.

“Okay, okay. You’re fine, Dave, you got this,” GM Dave said, only to himself. “Where would I run if I was a… a… fuck! I don’t even know what he is to try and get in his head! Shit!”

The man in red armor turned and punched the nearest wall.

It broke apart like it was sand. The stone corner of the wall was reduced to dust that scattered across the street.

Hirrus tried not to react. But he got the sense that if GM Dave had chosen to kill him rather than attempt to capture him, the fight would not have been a very long or interesting one.

They sat in stalemate for what seemed like eternity. Hirrus’ lungs burned as he continued holding his breath. Spots appeared in his vision. He felt himself starting to fear that he wouldn’t be able to stay hidden for long enough.

Right when he felt the inexorable need to gasp for breath, the man in red armor made a gesture with his hand and vanished.

Taking a huge gulp of air, Hirrus sagged against the wall.

He’d escaped.

Maybe not for long, but for now.

GM Dave had said that players he was fighting were somehow reporting his location, and that without their input, Hirrus' location was somehow obscured. That was good to know.

It was slightly less beneficial since those reports appeared to be coming from beyond the grave. The man in red armor wasn’t appearing until after his foes were dead.

How could he avoid notice if his objective - bringing adventurers to justice through violence - was what was alerting the man to his presence and location?

Just the same, he’d escaped now, and he had some clue of the man’s weaknesses. GM Dave was overconfident. He had godlike powers, but he was prone to their overuse. Discovering and abusing the limitation on his powers was going to be critical to his continued freedom.

Breaking line of sight and hiding was a solution Hirrus hadn’t expected, but it also seemed to be one GM Dave hadn’t prepared for. It was possible that this solution wouldn’t work in the future.

In the meantime, though, he made a point of switching his gear to the leather armor from the last adventurer. He even reluctantly traded his axe for the larger, icy counterpart the same man had wielded. Hirrus was very low on hit points. If he had to run, he might need every tool at his disposal, including the movement speed bonus on Electric Field.

The damage and fatigue crashed into him as he climbed the stairs back to the street.

As he started back towards the Violent Plate Tavern, he figured that despite missing Julissa at his side, he was going to be able to get to sleep after all.