The Next Day Chapter 7

I walk out, chest up, head held high, looking around, left and right, making sure nothing's coming directly for me, and if it is, that not too many are after me.

These Mist animals are popping by and there are a lot of them. It seems that the green circles, that I sorta kinda glimpsed the last time I was making my way to my dorms, have expanded a bit. They're now covering the sidewalks, some parts of the road, and a good bit of the buildings. Not many, of course, but more in a direct route with some breaks here and there from what I can see.

The animals seem to be actively avoiding that green field. It acts as a doorway of protection, or Dorothy's golden road, I should say. You don't step off the golden road, or green walkway in this case, and you won't get mauled. Pretty self explanatory. Step by step, I confidently, but carefully, make my way on the walkway and it seems that my theory was correct. Nothing's trying to kill me. Immediately, anyway. It seems fine. As I walk through, I look around and see the animals and bugs ignore me.

I stay silent nonetheless. It would be my luck if it only works when quiet. A word and I'm vermin bait. Or you can party and run a music festival and they would still ignore you. Either way, being quiet is best.

I make it a good block and a half before tragedy strikes its head. I'm trying to head a bit further out from the cities, because you never know what's gonna happen in a city filled with rats and cockroaches and all sorts of birds.

I wanna head out of the city, and I wanna see if I can rendezvous with my family later. I'm pretty sure my family can survive. They're pretty hardy people. They've immigrated to Itla, so you know how it goes, we've all seen things.

Now, they're pretty hardy people. They can probably take care of themselves. I'm more worried about myself right now. Though we may not own guns, we definitely have our collection of knives, tools, and large-headed objects. So, I'm pretty sure they'll be fine with a few rats

and a few cockroaches. A wolf or ten might cause some issues but we have the backup. Good luck wolves, the backup is nasty and I would rather get eaten by rats than go out that way.

My mom is probably gonna scream once, and then get very irrationally angry, scream “Kill it with fire.” and bludgeon it to death with great prejudice. Well, my dad is probably gonna do the same with the rats. My dad is a pretty good person, overall. Calm, confident, understanding. Not without his flaws. A little bit condescending, but under pressure, he makes a pretty good father, and a very, very good, strategist and soldier, when necessary.

I haven't asked and I don't know much about my parents' past. I don't ask too much about it. I remember a war here or there where they participated. They helped one way or another. So, pretty sure they're good. I should get going to meet them quickly. If I have time, saving another girl or guy hanging around being harassed by these things might help the overall situation.

Walking along, I find things are calm, no rats or roaches looking my way and the birds are docile. Now, the tragedy I find myself in currently. There's no walkway.

There is no continuing walkway between me, and the other side of the block in this squarish urban area. Looks like somebody drew some lines on a sheet, or a map, erased some things, and decided that, hey, let's cut off this lifesaving green walkway right here. They made it so that there is no safe area right in this huge intersection where four different corners meet. And now, that bites me in the ass, because there's no green protective walkway to my destination.

I can probably go to the left, but taking a gander to the left and right I see breaks all around. I yell some incoherent babble in frustration and stress and freeze. I am currently surrounded by one, two, three, four, four rats, six birds and two roaches. They look over the green field and slowly walk away. They spread out and I think that as long as I don't step out of this green protective covering, halo or barrier of some sort, I should be fine.

I mean, I'm not gonna believe in it too much, but it seems to be working, so, huzzah!

I go back a bit and I put the hockey stick in my bookbag, strap it down real good, and do the same with Stabby the dagger and get ready to run. I run, I bolt across the gap like the gods, the devils, the demons, or what have you, are behind me.

Religion caused a good bunch of wars, and I'm not gonna lie, not a fan of war. That destruction, not fun. Now,well, step by step, the thudding of my feet against the concrete is stupid loud. The thudding of my feet, the jangling of my bag and my heavy inhalations. It all culminated into every single Mist animal looking at me. Rats, cockroaches, the birds, everything around me turned and looked directly at me the moment my body got out of the green protective field.

I didn't care right now, because I was going full tilt just to make sure I would not get killed, stabbed, maimed, or disarmed, quite literally, by the birds, the rats, and the fuck off cockroaches. Not a good way to go, definitely not. Step by step, meter by meter, foot in front of the other, I run. A few moments pass as the animals seem shell shocked that I was there and running.

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The birds react first, angling down to look. Birds being in the sky are pretty high up so I give myself a few extra seconds of safety. A few birds, though, are lapping up the remains of a dead thing I don't want to think about, on the ground.

It seems the birds, being the fastest, are in a dead dive, to make me dead, of course. A dead dive, to puncture and make my insides my outsides, quite violently.

I dodge the first, don't ask me how, don't ask me why, but I stumble a little to the left, and the crow misses. It's a metallic sheen, black as the night like a flying mammal man. I'm flying mammal man.

The crow embedded itself into the concrete, chunks flying when I turned to take a look. The crow dived to my right and made an arm length hole with about a a foot in width.

I pick up my pace a bit more, get back to a full sprint from my stumble jog and I trip again, fall, and do a barrel roll. This time, a bug and a rat that were trying to pincer me crashed into each other and quite promptly decided to maul each other.

As I recover from the barrel roll, get back to my feet, and start sprinting once again, the second bird pops to my left. I freeze midstep. The bird hits right in front of me, grazing my cheek and into the ground it goes with a squawk.

I understood that I barely escaped death. If I didn’t freeze the beak would have pierced my left temple and the brain goes splat. But nope, I didn't escape. It was a temporary reprieve.

Somehow or some way, I fell forward again. This time, quite flat, and decided to roll forward and tuck my head in. I went over the hole in the concrete that had a smashed bird in it.

That bird was small, it was smaller than the huge ones everywhere. It was fast and made a huge hole. It must have been aiming at me from the back at an angle down. When I tripped, it plunged through where my head would have been and made a huge hole in front of me.

Quite deep by the way, a good arm length or two, pretty much down there, pretty wide hole too. So, barrel roll over that and I finally, finally stumble into the protective field.

This is right as my bookbag gets cut by two birds doing a simultaneous dive from the top right and top left diagonally. With a cross centering on my bag.

It's like X marks the spot. They were aiming for my head and body, not my bag. I stumbled through, and if not I would be pieces. They were gonna pop me like a balloon right through my head and into my body.

Instead they diagonally cut into my bag and into the freaking concrete road. Two holes in a horizontal line behind me. And as I make my way onto the protective field I stumble, fall and kiss the floor. Let me tell you, best kiss ever. I turn around and find what was once my bag filled with snacks, essentials, my stick and Stabby lay in shreds on the floor.

The metal hockey stick survived, not even a ding, and Stabby's perfectly fine on the ground, but they're both a bit more than a hand length away from the green field. They're just right there, lying about a foot and a half, maybe two feet, so about two-third of a meter, give or take, away from me.

I….I want them back… they're mine and I earned them. If I ever need to protect myself again on the walkways, those two are gonna come in pretty handy. And, uh, well, I want them back, they're mine.

Some people, like the Buddhists, say you should never let objects rule your being, right. Yeah, I believe in that too. I believe in the idea of religion, and the general purpose that religion can help some people, and that it does have its good points.

I don't believe in a specific, truly defined religion. I take parts from religions that I like, and ignore the bad. Who cares about abortion, not my place to say anything. Let the girl do what the girl wants to do, okay! Right!

Who wants to be hung, because their spouse died. It's in a religion somewhere. No, you die, I don't die, because that's just antique rules. That's just old laws. I'm not gonna follow that BS nonsense.

I take what I want, the good, and I leave the bad to rot in the dark somewhere. It works for me. Other people follow everything to the letter, and cause so many problems.

Whatever…I want that object. It's mine. I don't need it. I would probably leave it alone, and I would probably just donate it if I didn't need it.

I need it, and yes, this object isn't gonna rule me, but currently, it definitely is gonna be something that is necessary. Looking around I find none of the animals staring at me. It seems the moment I am in the field, no matter what happened before, everything ignores me.

I want to test this and put my hand outside the field. None of the Mist animals look over. I lay down and push my leg out hoping to use it to hook my weapons. It gets there and my foot pulls them toward me. It causes some of the animals to look at me. I freeze for a few moments but no attacks happen and I continue on. The animals go back to mauling each other in one case and ignoring everything for the rest.

The weapons enter the field and I stand up. Grabbing them I put the dagger in my belt rings sideways. Stabby holds well enough and I grab my stick. While calming the heck down from this impromptu race of death I feel energy flowing into my Soul. It increases my Fog by a few times and I feel some confusion.

I'm pretty sure I didn't smash a skull in so where did the energy come from. As I look around I spot the holes and realize that the birds are not coming out. I'm confident that they killed themselves with the dive. I feel smug joy, that in trying to kill me they killed themselves.

I spot the rat and roach and see that it ended a while ago. The rat won, hands down and the roach also seems to decompress and some of the Mist flows into the rat. A small piece of Mist dissolves and a tiny bit of Fog also flows into me.

I feel multiple flavors of Fog, some light and flighty, thick with strength and voluminous, with others heavy and solid but jittery and skittish barely a breeze. The last is light and skittish but dense in amount. Equating everything the first is the birds, the second type the rat and the final the roach. Makes sense.

With a turn toward my destination I freeze. Right in front of me is a rat. Breathing heavy and licking its personal Stabbys.