They heard. As soon as the engine came to a stop, their heads reared back to Mateo.

"No way." His stomach churned, seeing the figures in the distance moving towards him. He shuffled, his foot sliding off the kickstand before trying again, the gaze of the Walkers piercing his very soul.

They drew close before coming to a stop. They dropped, standing on all fours before letting out ghostly shrills–then dashed.

Mateo didn't want to have any of it.

He pushed himself off, the bike falling to the asphalt with a loud thud. Once he turned tail and ran, something heavy rammed his back and sent him tumbling over the walkway to the nearby forest.

What was that? Mateo got up, brushing a hand behind him. It was cold… and slimy. And it bit into his hand like acid.

Mateo unzipped his jacket and threw it to the ground. The acid blob on it started eating away at the cloth; if he was a second too late, that cloth might have well been his skin.

He raised his gaze, seeing the silhouettes of the Walkers standing between him and the shop. There went the chance for him to get back inside.

But Mateo wasn't planning to anyway.

He raised his arms, heeding the voice inside his head to draw the fire inside his chest, materializing fiery tongues around his hands. "Alright. Don't let me down now–"

"Let me in!" One of the Walkers screeched. It stood under the flickering streetlight, its disfigured body free to look at in all its horror. It was frost blue, with ice spikes protruding from the body, along with worms wriggling just beneath the thin layer of dry skin. It's face contorted to an ugly expression, as if it had something to say but can't get the words out with its tongue.

It then gagged, trying to get something out of its throat. That something was an acid blob, and sending it flying, it splattered against the tree near Mateo, charring the bark off the wood.

Mateo swallowed. Extinguishing the fire around his arms, he made a break for it into the forest.

He couldn't fight that.

"Are you kidding me!?" Adrenaline pumped in his veins as cold sweat poured from his face, his heart racing as fast as his feet could take him. "What the fuck was that?"

He brushed away the leaves and branches, going deeper into the darkness of the woods, leaving him with scrapes and cuts with blood bleeding from his cheek down to his neck. His chest numbed, beaten by almost every offshoot that stood in his path. Yet, he kept on going.

Rustling of leaves followed behind along with faint erratic screams, with the whistle of the wind masking everything else. Those things weren't like the bullies in high school. No, they were something else entirely, and Mateo got the message loud and clear.

There was no way he was going to stop.

But the screams only grew louder. They were fast as dogs, as if sniffing up an old cat on the run. Add to that Mateo's depleting stamina, he could only get so far before they caught up. He needed to think of something. He needed to think. Think.

"I haven't really thought this through." A hint of a sarcastic grin crept on his face. He was so dumb for getting himself into this fucked up situation in the first place, but it wouldn't do well to beat himself up over it. The only thing he could do now was make up for that shit decision making with a good enough plan to get himself out.

"Alright then," Passing through the thicket of the woods, he got his answer. "Let's try this again."

Helios Hands.

He doused his arms in fire. Running through the forest, he brushed the leaves and branches around with the flames coating his arms, leaving a scorching trail of woodland fire as a little present for the Walkers following behind.

The fire engulfed the first trees then spread to the others, effectively making a wall of flame between Mateo and his pursuers. Mateo kept running, making good use of the fire to make distance. When the howls behind finally faded, he tumbled to the ground on all fours, gasping for air as the flames in his hands fizzled out into smoke and ashes.

He took the chance to gather his stamina back up. After all that, he was bound to run out of steam, especially when he was running for dear life. With deep breaths, he turned to sit upright, still panting, staring blankly at the canopy above where snowflakes fell through the gaps to dance on top of his hair.

He used it. Magic. He doubted it would've worked, but the forest fire behind told him otherwise.

"Damn." Mateo looked back. There it was, the faint glow of flickering orange seeping through the thickets of the woods. He felt bad for how much he was contributing to global warming, but at the state the world right now, climate change was the least of his problems. If anything, he's even helping combat global cooling.

He shook his head, trying to make space for thinking. He then snapped his fingers to summon the orb. "Any idea what those are? Weaknesses, strengths, anything?"

The orb didn't answer. It was pretty weird considering it answered almost every other question it got related to all this magic thing going on, but this was another exception in the list of exceptions. It almost seemed as if the orb was joking him.

A rancid scent then caught Mateo's senses. Like the smell of rotten eggs, left for days on the kitchen sink. He darted his eyes around, trying to sniff out where the smell came from. His gaze then stopped to a tall patch of grass over to his right. He could hear buzzing flies. He turned, crawling on all fours, then peeked through the bushes.

There was a dead body.

Sprawled on the ground, guts and bone muddied patches of grass. Its chest was open, with the ribcage standing on ends as if an unholy altar was made from the man's carcass. Its face was disfigured to a permanent scream, with the organs of the upper torso along with the throat missing–taken, with the leftovers swarming with maggots, along with the blood, brown and dry, and–

Mateo stumbled back, pushing himself away in panic as his throat drew a vomit from his stomach. He turned over, the pork and beans Hans gave him earlier now pooled all over on the ground.

"Pork and beans." Mateo pressed his head against the dirt, staring blankly at the vomit. He repeated, 'pork and beans,' over and over and over again, chanting it as if he was trying to summon the God of canned goods. He wanted to think of something else, anything else to stray his mind from the horror he just saw.

These forced thoughts continued for a while, with Mateo stiff in place like a statue. Though it wasn't long until he finally snapped out of it. It was a tough pill to swallow, but he knew there was more of this out there. If he couldn't steel his resolve now, what would happen then when he encounters something worse, something he couldn't go back from?

He'd lose his shit.

"Come on Mateo, it's just… a pig." He smacked his face. "You love eating steak."

He mustered everything inside him, taking a couple seconds to pump himself up before eyeing the body again. He leaned closer, but to get a good look at it, he needed a light. Regretfully, he had magic that could provide just that.

He doused his arms in fire and brought it against the corpse.

It was a middle aged man. Its body had been rotting for a while, probably since a day or two before Mateo found it. Mateo's fingers trembled with his stomach churning at the horrible sight laid bare, but he had to see it through. The world he knew of was gone, and the body in front of him was proof of that.

He paced himself around, looking over the stuff littering the corpse. There was a ripped bag to the side, with Mateo picking it up with a pincer grasp to check what's inside. There were only two things: a wallet and a phone.

Opening the wallet, the old man had a decent wad of cash. Though there wasn't any kind of ID nor credit cards, he had around four grand pesos to work with, amounting to around eighty american dollars. It wasn't much, but it didn't hurt to get a week's worth of working entirely for free.

He then switched to the phone, pocketing the wallet. Mateo used to have a phone back in school–before he dropped out. Things happened after the next, among other not-so-good things, and he ended up selling it off along with a few others for the down-payment of his motorboat.

The screen turned on with a press of a button. To his surprise, it didn't have any password locking the home screen. That was pretty lucky, though the dead body lying on the ground surely wasn't having any of it.

The phone then vibrated, with a pop-up warning 'low battery.'

"Of course."

Closing the window, a small kid greeted him as a background wallpaper. It was a picture of a boy around his early elementary.

"Hold on." Mateo squinted, staring at the picture. This kid was familiar. Mateo traced the kid's face, and surely enough, there it was. A mole right under the left eye.

"Hans?"