What did people feel about life? How did people make decisions on crucial moments? Many people did many things, and many methods are used for many choices. Such was individuality. It was near impossible that two people would make the exact same considerations as each other in any similar situations.

It isn't about leading a fulfilling life. Living one was hard enough. Everything else followed. After all, you cannot make decisions if you are dead. That was a universal truth.

… But whether or not you can make the right decision mattered, because for many, happiness was the grand prize.

More importantly, choices decided how people’s stories began, how it was lived, how it ended, and more often than not, how soon it ended. And this is one such story.

Once upon a time, a girl at the end of her teenage years was running through a dense forest. One of her decisions in life was already the target of regret; she wished she had taken track and field seriously.

It was ridiculous to say that she was running away from something arguably slower than worms when on the ground. But a cursory look behind her showed that she wasn't seeing things.

Leeches – perhaps hundreds of thousands, but with the size of cats and the legs of spiders; they formed what became a wall of flesh and teeth that tore apart every unfortunate creature it ran into. She had seen a beast a couple of times her size collapse in exhaustion and explode from those monsters bursting from inside.

There was nowhere else to go but forward. The trees were all too high to climb and the other paths too dark to traverse.

How long has she been running at full sprint? An hour?

She had been running for so long. She felt her ligaments tearing from the exertion. But she pressed on, scorching her dry lungs with the cold night air. Her breaths grew shorter and shorter, a sure sign of oxygen deprivation. And her heart – each beat felt like a punch to her chest.

She didn't like the feeling. She hated it, despised it. She didn't want to feel it. But she continued to run, grasping for every additional second of her life she could cling on to.

Anything was better than suffering the kind of death those monsters would deliver onto her.

The sounds of their insectile legs kept creeping closer and closer. Every so often, the desperate shrieks of small animals would assault her ears before those, too, were drowned out. Time passed; her strides became more and more erratic, with each step shorter and heavier. The end of the line was near. They were about to reach her. She could feel their heat on her cold neck.

But, much like every prey, she had her limits. It was the first time she had experienced tunnel vision from exhaustion. Still, she ran. If there was anything she could do to keep herself alive, she would do it. As long as she could hear them scuttling towards her, she would keep running. Even if her knees tore themselves from her legs, even if her lungs burned from the effort, even if her heart gave out. Conviction burned at the back of her mind.

In a moment's whim born from her lightheadedness, funnily enough, pride in being able to escape for so long, she looked back and...

“Stupid ide—owowowow!”

It was talking that was a bad idea.

At the face of a mountain, along a cliff edge sat a girl who was tossing a coin absentmindedly with one hand. Half of her face was hidden by her long bangs, while the other half had a restrained look of anguish. Blood flowed sparingly, but steadily from the right, hidden side. Her hands hovered before it, as if cradling a wound she could not touch.

Her slippers were shredded and her feet had blisters and wounds all over. It looked like it had been used enough for a lifetime in a short period of time. Her knees were swollen, and appeared as if it had bent in the wrong direction at least once.

Gently, she lifted her bangs and tucked them over her right ear. Underneath it was a ruined patch of what used to be flesh and an eye. It was barely recognizable. What was evident, however, were traces that appeared eerily similar to bite marks on it. She sighed. Thankfully the wound had somehow been cauterized soon after, which prevented her from possibly bleeding out.

The cold wind felt both soothing and stinging on her wound. She knew it was a bad idea to have what may still be an open wound out in the open, but she could not help the situation. Every comfort counted.

Her gaze took in the sight of a vast, foreign forest at night. Above her, two moons, different in color and shattered where they met, produced an otherworldly light that still somehow felt like home. But what it illuminated caused the girl no shortage of fear and wonder.

– barely twenty kilometers from where she was, a mountain-sized mass of tentacles writhed in the air, reaching for the sky.

– barely thirty kilometers from where she was, a jellyfish-looking monster the size of a small island floated in the sky, its tendrils dropping down towards the ground.

Surreal sights for sure. But for her, who had already spent the better parts of the last hour observing them, it had become a simple show of awe-inspiring fear.

She looked up to the moon once again. There were still two moons. She looked towards the monsters again. Giants of fantasy. Lastly, she held up her left hand in front of her –

Elaine was a rather unique girl. She made decisions in a way that raised the eyebrows of almost everybody around her. For her, the only choices that mattered were those not made by herself. It was a baffling mindset; one that did not have a place in the situation she found herself in. Truthfully, it was suicidal.

But then she thought, ah...

“Guess I'll take my cha-aaahhh...!”

–

And she yelped in pain once again. Talking really wasn't a good idea.