Time seemed to slow as the silver spear flew toward him at a ridiculous speed. He was spinning away from the spear as it grew closer and closer. Strangely, his eyes focused on the movement from beyond the spear as it grew closer and closer.

The thralls seemed to move in slow motion. The mages closest to him were turning to face him, following the line of the elite’s pointed finger. The higher level mages were getting out of their seats. Presumably, they needed to close the distance between them before they could close the tunnel.

Behind them were what he deemed to be the largest threat. He was much faster than the mages, even injured. The rogues, however, might still be able to catch up. They were throwing themselves from their seats. Some had already begun charging after Kzedr as it led them toward Octavius.

The thrall elites, however, remained where they were. Some were standing, while others just continued to eat. None of them were moving toward him. He didn’t know why, but he was thankful for the small mercy.

Even as he took all that in, the silver-colored spear closed the distance to reach him. His eyes tracked it over his shoulder as he grew closer. In a sickening moment of realization, he noticed that he wasn’t moving fast enough to dodge it.

The spear slammed into him, and he stumbled. The experience was surreal. He knew that the razor-sharp edge of the blade was slicing through the muscle and tissue of his abdomen, but all he fell was the momentum the impact imparted onto him. It felt like he was shoved in the back rather than pierced by a deadly weapon.

His eyes watched the blood-stained metal exit his lower-left abdomen. It sliced cleanly through him between his ribs and hip bone. The dim light that illuminated the cave reflected off the deep red blood that clung to the spear.

His body failed to stop the spear as he flew straight through him and pinged against the stone floor a dozen paces ahead. He reached out with an arm and caught himself using the tunnel’s wall. The moment his feet were under him once more, he continued his wild sprint. His thoughts were focused on the fact that in another dozen steps, the upward sloping cave would shield him from further attacks.

It was only after a full second that he began to feel the wound. It was slow a first; a slight burning sensation began to radiate from the path the spear traveled as it sliced through him. With every beat of his heart, it spread.

He looked at the health bar the system provided and grit his teeth. It was only a third full, with the numbers slowly ticking down. While he didn’t know a lot about serious abdominal injuries, his health bar told him enough. It was survivable. At the rate that his health was ticking down, he had half an hour before he died. Everything else depended on if he could either treat the would or get his hands on a health potion.

As he ran past his blood-soaked spear, he bent and picked it up. It was extremely light to his enhanced strength, and he ignored what little weight it had. The weapon would barely slow him down, and it would help him deal with any guards or sentries. At that point, he was hoping to encounter a lone sentry that had a health potion.

He ran up the cave, ignoring the dull ache in his leg that punctuated every step. As he ran, he breathed in a slow, even pattern. There was a delicate balance he had to find between a faster heart rate that would bring oxygen to his muscles and let him run with greater speed and a slower heart rate that would decrease the rate of blood loss from his wound.

As his heart rate slowed and steadied, the smell of fresh air reached him. He had nearly reached the exit. Alas, he was far from free yet. Loud footsteps pounded up the tunnel behind him. While he ran, he reached out to the shadows along the dim cave. Once he had forged a connection with them, he closed his eyes.

The shadows let him with far greater precision than his eyes could. He noticed the smallest deviances in the ground and was able to place his feet with greater confidence. Running on autopilot, he focused on compressing a portion of the shadow into a wire-thin strand.

The construct took very little mana to create due to its minuscule volume. Instead, he poured more and more mana into reinforcing it. By the time he had poured a hundred mana into it, he was rapidly nearly the point in which his core would be half empty.

Using the rest of the shadows under his control to scout, he quickly found the perfect place to lay his trap. Two small indents on the walls allowed him to secure the filament with only minor restructuring.

He was so focused on creating his trap that he nearly tripped over a small bump on the cave’s floor but was able to avoid it. Launching himself off his good leg, he cleared the nearly invisible strand of shadows and continued up the path.

Barely a dozen seconds later, he felt it strain and then break free from the anchor points on the walls. Still, the sound of toppling bodies showed the construct’s success. After all, all that was needed was for it to make a single thrall stumble. After that, the momentum of the thralls behind it would do the rest.

The dozens of pounding footsteps disappeared behind a chorus of shouts and curses that echoed up the tunnel to his ears. He allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction as he tore his shirt from his body.

His left hand held his spear as he used the right to pack the shirt partially into his abdomen. It wouldn’t stop the bleeding, only confine the blood to his abdominal cavity. Instead, he used the shirt to keep his organs inside of his body. Dying because he tripped on his own intestines would be a horrible way to go, and infection wasn’t much of a risk to him. He would either get a health potion or die long before infection set in.

It didn’t take long for the first footsteps to resume behind him, first one, then two, then a dozen more. The echoes that filled the tunnel made it impossible for him to guess how far behind him they were.

The smell of fresh air was joined by a breeze as the shadows that he controlled began to dissipate. Opening his eyes, he blinked rapidly at the sunlight that seemed to glow in the distance as the cave leveled out.

Quickly, he was able to see the green grass over the open plains far below. The morning sun shone from the east, casting long shadows from the side of the cave. A gust of wind hit him full force, and he stumbled slightly before recovering. The only movement came from the silhouette of a lone thrall rogue.

It stood with its blade drawn slightly inside the mouth of the cave. It was clear to Octavius that the sound that echoed up the cavern had reached the guard and that it was ready for him. As much as he wanted to fight the lower-level alien in the hopes of getting a health potion, he knew that it would slow him down far too much.

Instead, he didn’t even slow his headlong sprint as he raised the spear horizontally with his left hand. The thrall rogue swung at him with its curved blade, and he caught it with his spear. His momentum carried the thrall over a dozen feet backward. Surprise flashed in its large black eyes, followed quickly by fear as it realized what the injured, shirtless human planned to do to it.

By the time it tried to dive to the side, it was too late. Octavius planted his good leg to halt his significantly slowed form as the thrall toppled over the edge of the cliff to the grassland below. Pivoting around his left leg, he noticed a path that led up the cliff to his right. Breaking out into a stumbling run, he quickly steadied himself and fell into a sprint once more.

The pain in his side pulsed with every footstep, but he just clenched his jaw and kept running. His superhuman regeneration had yet to stop the decline in his health, but it had slowed significantly. Apparently, his stats had managed to overcome the damage he was doing to the wound by running and was still able to at least mitigate the health loss.

The path that he ran on was only about a yard across and covered with loose stones and gravel. He forced himself to focus on the ground with each step, both as a means to avoid slipping and to take his mind off the pain that radiated from his side and his leg.

After two hundred feet of the relatively gentle incline, it switchbacked. Planting the butt of his spear into the rock, he used it to redirect his momentum back up the trail. Wind buffeted him as his speed increased to a sprint once more.

He knew that the path would be both a place of both great danger and great opportunity. If there was a thrall sentry above him, it could hurl rocks down on him and knock him off the cliff. However, the same thing was true the other way around. The bright morning sun that shone on his back would weaken any magical attack he could execute, but he would keep his eyes open for any opportunities to drop rocks or other things on them.

His gait was thrown off by his injured leg and his right hand that was held to the wound on his side. Even so, he was running at a pace that would leave any unenhanced human in the dust and quickly reached the next switchback.

As he started up the next leg of the path, he peered over the edge. Just as he was looking down, a single thrall exploded from the cave’s mouth and started up the path. The sun reflected off the cuirass that it wore and the knife that was in its right hand.

Octavius looked forward once more as the thrall climbed up the ledge toward the top of the cliff. The thrall crossed the first switchback quickly, and Octavius skidded to a stop. Using his left elbow to hold the blood-stained shirt to his wound, he drew the knife at his waist with his right hand.

He waited for the right moment, then tossed it gently out over the path. It whistled through the air as it fell toward the charging thrall. He didn’t wait to see what the results of his attack were as he started his sprint again.

Glancing over the edge once he had built up his momentum once more, he saw the thrall try to slow itself to avoid the falling blade. It appeared to slip on some loose gravel and fell off the side of the path onto the switchback below. Octavius could see the gray dust that expanded from the point of impact as the thrall rolled over and scrambled back to its feet.

The knife itself pinged off the ground a good half dozen feet in front of where the thrall would’ve been if it hadn’t tried to avoid it. The soldier smiled slightly at his good fortune. The thrall might have a high level, and likely a least a bit of skill, but it appeared to be overly cautious. He knew that he could definitely use that information, so he filed it away for later as he spun around another switchback.

Looking up the cliff, he saw that he was over halfway to the top. He put his head down and focused on not making the same mistake the thrall had. At his speed, even a loose pebble might cause him to stumble and fall off of the thin walkway.

When he reached the next switchback, a grunt escaped him as he used his injured leg to propel himself around it. Glancing down the side of the cliff, he saw Kzedr charging up at him. There were also at least two dozen thrall rogues following closely behind the level 39 thrall.

After he rounded the final turn, he began to see the tops of trees far above him. They blew in and out of his line of sight in the buffeting wind. The path curved into the packed dirt of the surface as it terminated.

As soon as he stepped foot onto the top of the cliff, he scanned his surroundings. The howling wind would have prevented any sentries from being alerted by the noise of the chase, but there were other ways to send messages. Octavius was certain that there were a multitude of ways to do so with magic.

Once he was satisfied that he wasn’t being watched, he ran straight into the forest. He figured that the thralls would expect him to follow the same path he had used previously. While they would almost definitely discover his path, if only by virtue of the trail of blood he left behind, it might slow them down a bit.

His breathing lost its steady edge as he stumbled through the trees. The sound of a soft crack was audible over the wind behind him, and he changed direction to avoid it. After a few hundred feet, he changed direction again.

His mind grew fuzzy as the shirt soaked through with blood. Even with the rate of his health loss slowing, he was still losing health. Every one of his actions was instinctual. They were the very same actions that had been drilled into him in SERE school.

He changed direction, backtracked, and did everything he could to throw the thralls off of his trail. Even so, whenever he thought that he was safe enough to attempt to treat his wound, his ears would pick up a sound. The sounds ranged from the sound of a rustling bush to the resonant shouts of the level 39 thrall that had left him in such a poor condition.

After a dozen long minutes, he was forced to switch the spear to his right hand. His sprint slowed to a quick, desperate walk as cold sweat beaded across his forehead. The spear pressed into the ground with every step to support his injured leg. At that moment, it was far more valuable to him as a walking stick than as a deadly enchanted weapon.

The sound of shouting would grow distant before growing louder once more as time passed. It seemed that the thralls would always find his trail. The time they wasted searching for the trail whenever they lost it or backtracking on the false paths he left was almost exactly made up by the speed that they had on him.

At first, it seemed that he would escape into the woods. He had failed to run into any sentries, and his speed allowed him to increase the distance between them. That, however, came to an end far too abruptly for Octavius’s liking. After twenty minutes, it seemed as though the thrall were never more than a quarter-mile behind him.

His vision began to darken around the edges, but he kept going. Every thought was devoted to continuing onward. He no longer had the mental acuity to come up with a way to escape. In fact, he doubted he could even use magic in the state he was in. He just kept on moving. Subconsciously, he angled himself toward the tributary that he knew would eventually lead to the Sanctuary. With all of his zig-zagging and backtracking, he had little idea of his precise location. All he did was head in the general direction opposite the sun.

His fingers felt cold and clammy as his breath came in short, shallow gasps. His heart was beating a mile a minute as the organ tried to pump oxygen to all of his muscles with far too little blood for the task. His stumbling walk turned more into a shamble. Every dozen steps, he was forced to brace himself against the trunk of one of the ancient trees to steady himself.

He backtracked quickly. At first, he would carefully place his feet directly on the footprints he had made when walking forward, but as time passed, all he could do was walk backward and hope for the best. After a dozen steps, he reached the spot he was looking for and leaped to the right.

Normally, he could leap half a dozen feet into the air. Weakened by blood loss as he was, he barely managed to clear the small bush that would shield his new path. His ears picked up the burble of running water, and he turned to face it.

Stumbling forward a hundred feet, the trees opened up to reveal the tributary. Even working on autopilot alone, he had already known what he needed to do. The water would be his best chance of survival.

If he walked a few hundred feet downstream before exiting it, the thralls could waste hours searching before they found his trail. None of that held true if they had some way of magically tracking him, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

He stepped unsteadily into the stream, and cold water flooded his boots. Instead of being revitalized by the crystalline water that ran over the toes of his boots, he didn’t even feel it; his toes had long since gone numb.

Unsteadily, he began to stumble forward. He was nearly at the point where he would be able to rest and tend to his injuries. All he needed to do was go another quarter mile at most. His plans were shattered when his boot slipped on a smooth rock, and he was pitched forward.

He failed to raise his arms in time and fell face-first into the flowing water. As he laid in the stream, his nose barely above water, the darkness took him.

He opened his eyes to water flowing over the rocky streambed. It could have taken him seconds or minutes to wake up, but it didn’t matter. Water flowed over the bare skin of his chest and back, but he didn’t feel it.

Reaching forward with his empty right hand, he dug his shaking fingers into the streambed and pulled himself forward. The blackness faded in and out of his vision as he clawed himself forward inch by inch. Never give up, he repeated the words like a mantra as he hauled his limp body forward. He barely made it a dozen feet before the darkness overtook him once more.

The next time he opened his eyes, it was to shouting and the sound of pounding footsteps. Blurry humanoid figures charged toward him, and he blacked out once more.