Corvayne ran. He felt his feet pounding pavement as he dashed between cars and into the gap between two office buildings, trying his best to weave between people as he sprinted down the road. The feeling of malice towards him didn't lessen.

He scrambled around a corner to an awning. Two people blocked his way, so he used [Juxtapose] to slide through them, ignoring the panicked yelp as his focus was on forcing the monk to have follow him on foot. The monk had a limit on teleport range and frequency, so it was possible with the boots of running he could escape. As long as he didn't have every bone in his body broken by a single staff strike.

Corvayne came out from the cover of the awning next to a large four way intersection. He ran along the sidewalk, pedestrians pointing behind him as he shoved his way past. He heard the chopper noises plateau followed by the tell-tale pinging of gunfire behind him. He dove between another pair of buildings and saw lines of green behind him instead of clouds of dust. It was like the street had become a bamboo forest, the impacts throwing up a haze of scattering sand. He heard screams but couldn't gawk and kept running down the alleyway.

He heard the chopper whip past the building as the noise crested then faded, then crested again. He heard shots again, and he used [Flow-Like-Water] to try to dodge the bullets. His vision suddenly was full of green lines and something speared through him as he reformed. In a haze of pain he saw a green line of bamboo, slick with blood, sticking through his gut, sudden agony causing him to throw up as he saw part of an intestine sticking to it, with little wood needles coating it. Pain was bad enough, but his own guts horrified him. His shadow hand pushed something into his hand as he screamed, and by instinct more then thinking he gripped the hilt of his two-handed sword with a single hand. He forced himself to focus, to keep moving, and swung the blade behind him while activating a skill.

[Sundering Blade] cut him free, shaft of bamboo still sticking a few feet out of his front and clacking, hitting another bamboo shaft. He let his shadowy hands take the sword and summoned a healing potion, drinking it then throwing the bottle away and pulling the bamboo out as his reforming body filled in the holes behind it.

The chopper noise was still whirring but ahead of him, so he turned and slipped into the thick wall of bamboo growing both from the ground and walls, using [Flow-Like-Water] to slide between them. Corvayne saw that the line of bamboo thinned out near the lip of the alleyway. Out on the sidewalk, someone was screaming but he didn't dare stop. He had hoped to lose the helicopter in a crowd but the monk was a psychopath who didn't care about collateral damage. Corvayne had to get away from the crowded downtown streets.

He heard the chopper circling around the block. People were scattering now, yelling and running as something they didn't understand was happening. Corvayne dove for a parked car, but heard glass shattering as the chopper strafed the entire line of cars and he dashed to get behind a sturdy looking iron garbage can, which knocked him from crouching to flat as something blasted it into the wall of a building. Behind him, he saw a row of green porcupines where the parked cars had been. Of course, spears of bamboo covered the vehicles and had trashed some of the brickwork on the buildings across the sidewalk. He'd have been dead if not for leaping out of the way.

His heart wrenched as he looked behind him and saw a woman had been skewered through the arm by one of the stray shots. Another man was lying on the ground. He heard the chopper flying down a different street.

Guilt and rage swirled through Corvayne, but he couldn't do anything about it. He had to hope that whatever the monk was doing drained him like the weapon skills did Corvayne. He kept running down the street, turning down an side street with parked cars and less spectators. He ran across the street then up the back of a car and leaped off it's side to plant his feet on a fence between buildings, then leaped and landed in an alleyway too narrow to be followed through. He heard the chopper buzzing around the other side of one of the buildings then lifting off to get above them. He swept his cape around himself and clenched it, blurring into the gray and browns of the alley, as well as touches of the brick around him.

Out on the next road was a traffic jam. He heard the chopper coming back his way. How was he being tracked? He saw the crowds of people, hundreds of cars, and turned and ran back through the alleyway, leaping onto the fence and pulling himself up and over, then diving to the side as he saw another line of green coming. This time two bamboo spears hit his arm, spinning him to scrap and roll against the concrete, his forearm getting ripped up as well as his pants leg and a knee. He pushed himself to stand again, scraped hand protesting in pain as he stood and tried to pick stones out of his palm before running down the street, boots probably the only reason he didn't run into anything.

He came to another busy street and saw a group of people walking towards him, with the chopper behind him. He pulled out his spear and shouted “RUN!” at them, then dashed through the intersection. A line of bamboo sprung up behind him as he dashed along storefronts that exploded in showers of glass as green spikes burst apart the sidewalk. A shower of newspaper shreds fell on him as he dove into another gap between buildings, this time running down the alleyway and leaping to grab a fire escape and pull himself up as the chopper fired a line of seeds and turned the entire alley into a spiked deathtrap.

The bamboo hitting the wall knocked the entire structure loose and for a moment he was dangling by one hand over a sea of sharp spikes, crying out from the searing pain of his hand's wounds grinding against metal and the weight of his body tearing at his shoulder. Corvayne gritted his teeth and willed himself to be lighter a moment and pulled himself up enough that he could use his shadow limbs to further help drag him up. He pushed himself onto the titled metal structure and start climbing the wreckage of the fire escape. Once more he heard clattering and felt something like a rain hitting his back.

Getting onto the roof was a terrible idea, so he kicked a window and stumbled into a darkened apartment. He ran for what he thought looked like the door out to the hall as spikes blasted through the kitchen he had just been in. How was Argyle tracking him through walls? He got into the hall, spotted an elevator opening and screamed at the woman inside to get down as he threw himself flat. Moments later, the window shattered and the hall was filled with spines. The woman was wimpering but unharmed, though the elevator doors tried to close, hit a plant, then opened back up.

Corvayne started belly crawling, soot falling on his head as the chopper fired into the roof and spikes burst from the ceiling, one digging deep enough that he stopped just short of impaling his nose. He rolled around it and saw the red exit sign that would get him to a stairway. He scrambled to his feet past the last lines of green, spitting out plaster as he barrelled into the stairwell and stumbled down the steps. He saw the bottom of the stairs explode in green and he stopped and ran onto the second or third floor and dashed with his boots down the hall in a second then flung himself out the window, balling himself up and activating gravity to try to reduce his weight.

The fear of the ground rushing at him made him force more of his own gravity out of himself, dropping his weight enough that Corvayne only felt like being punched a dozen times when he hit the street. His momentum let him roll rather then splat into traffic. He had only a moment to get his feet as he heard honking and there was swerving and crashing. He saw a truck trying to dodge him veer and he dove for a little girl standing in it's way and managed to grab her and pull her back before the truck itself slammed into a brick wall behind her. For some reason, seeing the truck made him feel very lucky to not get hit. He put the crying girl down and stumbled past the wreckage, covered in grit and blood and aching all over. He started zig-zagging down alleys, moving away from the crowded streets to cut through a parking garage, helicopter blades slowly getting louder. The sound of shards of something hitting cars was followed by a hail of broken glass washing over his back. Corvayne dropped as a row of cars was knocked around by more spears of bamboo growing through them, furious car alarms and the pops of gas tanks going up in flames punctuating the same rattling sound he heard after each attack. Perhaps the break between attacks was just the monk assuming that he had finally killed Corvayne. If not for the boots, he'd have gotten killed a dozen times.

As he sprinted down the alley, legs protesting, he felt something itching in his shoulder as and pulled out what looked like a wood needle.

It started to sprout, growing leaves. He tossed it away as it suddenly burst into a bamboo stake, with only enough force to wedge itself between the buildings with a clatter.

Was that how he was tracked? Corvayne heard the chopper behind him and used [Juxtapose] on the dumpster in front of him, his spear vaulting him over it and pushing it behind him to swap positions in a moment. As the move finished he grabbed part of the dumpster pulled it to the side, forming a wall across the alley.

He had just finished when it kicked and knocked him back as the other side grew thousands of arm-thick spines. He rolled into the base of a few stalks of bamboo that had formed a cage across the exit to the alleyway. Corvayne stood, scanning the brick wall and finding a door. He used [Cross Skill: Sundering Blade] to break the lock with his spear then pulled the door open, rolling into a dark room then slamming it shut as he heard more machine-gun fire and the steel door dented with a spike of bamboo managing to just poke through. He didn't wait, moving through the dark building. It looked like a large garage where they parked or serviced buses.

Even though there was at least another story over his head to protect him, Corvayne could hear the monk just blasting the top floor with bamboo spikes. He was already halfway to the other side of the building before he heard the ceiling groan, and was breaking the next door when he saw lines of green spikes forming from the ceiling. He kicked his way outside and saw a mostly empty parking lot. He whipped his head around for cover, and spotted a storm drain cover. His shadow hands grabbed his two-hander once more, and this time he let them hold his spear and used [Sundering Blade] three times quickly to destroy the cover, then dived into the dark hole. He started walking against the flow of the water, then spotted on his arm a stray seed. He ducked into the water and rubbed himself, then willed his shadow hands to run over his body.

“Nothing?” he whispered while dripping water, and his shadowy limb gave him a thumbs up. He kept sloshing forward in the tunnel when he heard reverberations from behind him of a helicopter. A moment later he saw a green bag fall into the open hole. It had a smiley face marked tree on it, and was trailing bamboo seeds.

Corvayne ran against the current then dove when her heard a clacking noise. Moments later the tunnel exploded into a tangle of bamboo, and he felt a spear take a chunk out of his leg and knock him into the side of the tunnel. He surfaced and had to wedge his sword into the wall to avoid running face first into a wall of spiked plants.

He found his footing and forced his hands to de-seed him again. They flowed away through the bamboo and he sloshed the other direction. From down the tunnel he heard clattering.

Corvayne heard the chopper whip past the sewer grate he was under. He saw ahead of him the entire tunnel get filled with plants and he lept to clutch the grate he was under and watched as seeds floated under him. He looked up and saw the underbelly of the black chopper above him for a moment as it flew away. He heard it flying around, still waiting for him to come out.

How many people had died because Argyle fought like a craven little shit? Corvayne's hands gripped the sewer grate. It wasn't enough to just keep running forever. He felt himself snarling. He wasn't going to let the monk just get away with it.

He dropped back into the water then climbed back up the bamboo. No doubt all the seeds on him would bring the chopper right back. Something in him had snapped though. He was strong. The strong protected people who couldn't protect themselves.

Corvayne pulled himself into sunlight that peaked through afternoon storm clouds and strode into the bus station, his shadow hands throwing all the bamboo seeds against a steel garage door. He walked up to a bus, and pushed his gravity power into it, dropping it's weight. He placed his hands on it, and planted his feet, starting to charge one of his slowest and most powerful skills. It was time to really test the limits of his power.

Bamboo shredded the door, which collapsed in a pile as Argyle's helicopter dropped to hover over the street, not twenty feet away. Corvayne was looking over his shoulder, and saw a yellow robed version of the monk in the cockpit as he took a deep breath, then forced his powers and Arms Master abilities to mesh together.

He could see the monk's clone looking smug. Until Corvayne smiled back, and somehow the monk must have known exactly what was going to happen. He started firing seeds but it was too late.

“[Cross-Skill: Grand Slam]!”

Corvayne swung the bus around, blasting through walls and the frame of the garage door as the bus hit the helicopter and send it flying back with the solid CONK of a baseball. It hit the building on the other side of the street and shattered into a thousand pieces, the monk piloting it wedged in a brick wall, blood spurting from his mouth, but not dead.

“You cannot... beat me!” Argyle's clone screamed, teleporting. Corvayne used [Cross-Skill: Juxtapose] and took a step backwards, pulling the bus he was holding to the side with him. The monk appeared with his back to Corvayne.

His stamina was flagging, but if a powered up bullet could hurt the monk... he clutched the metal bus frame tighter, the metal bending as he yanked the entire bus back, then pulled it forward and changed his grip to push with his whole body, shouting as he thrust it at the monk. He felt something like an ocean of power behind him.

“[[Cross-Skill! BUS-STAB!]]”

The monk only had time to turn and meet his gaze, the hardened face morphing into look of pure surprise, right as the bus slammed into him. The noise it made was a combination of backstab's normal sharp sound turning and a truck horn going off. Corvayne let the momentum of the bus carry it out of his hand, and the monk was driven into the opposite building, boring a hole through it Corvayne could see. He saw the bus had broken cars in a parking lot behind the building, and walked up to the monk clone, spear ready to finish the job.

He lowered his weapon and relaxed as the broken image of the monk blurred and started to melt away, leaving a pile of frozen steaks and bones and scraps of yellow blanket behind, with beer cans on a string clattering as the dropped to the shattered and scraped pavement.

A thin smile crept across his face. If he could do it once, he could do it again.