Another bolt of sailed over their heads, impacting a mushroom trunk and scorching it black.

“They’re shooting! I’ll try to return fire!” Sonja warned.

She let one fly but she had trouble aiming properly. She tried again but the second and third shot didn’t go much better.

Without being prompted by the others, Michael weaved his fingers behind his back as he ran, trying to get one of the opponents caught in his Bind. The golden strings sprung forth from the moss, grasping for feet but finding nothing to trip. The ability had activated a handful of paces short of the man with the braided hair acting as vanguard for the pursuit.

“My ability can’t reach!” the healer screamed, frustration and fear evident in his voice. “It can’t get to any of them!”

“Evolve it!” Eik yelled back. “Didn’t you get an evolution that extends its range?”

“But we don’t know if that’s what it actually does, though! The name was a little misleading!”

“Just try it, Mike!”

Michael huffed and did his best to drag a finger through Tangle of Thorns and Vice Grip while keeping up with the others.

The moment the glowing text faded from the flat surface he spun mid run and swept his hand toward the haughty knight. This time the strings of Bind sprung forth right in front of him and caught his feet, delivering him to the ground with a metallic clang.

With an awkward flourish, Michael repeated the movement and sent the Gohkamorian stumbling as well, although the giant managed to keep his feet under him.

Meanwhile, the archer must have gotten his bow ready because arrows started flying. The flaming projectiles also kept coming but with the exception of the first one, the attack seemed to have pretty terrible accuracy in general.

As Michael turned to get in another Bind an arrow took him through the bicep, the shaft burying itself halfway through the limb.

“Mike!” Eik shouted as the healer screamed in shock and agony. “Mike, you can’t fall and you can’t stop! Are you listening to me? Don’t stop!”

Eik grabbed the hand of the young man’s other arm and pulled him along. Tears flowed but Michael kept running.

“Mike, listen to me. You slowed down two of them really well, man! We’ll be okay,” Eik said, squeezing his friend’s hand in what he hoped was a comforting manner. “We will definitely go home again!”

He just hoped he could keep that promise.

Abruptly, Sonja turned into cover behind a trunk and pulled the string of her bow back to its full length.

“Sonja!” Heath screamed as he dug his heels into the soft ground, sliding to a stop.

“Keep going! I’ll catch up after this!”

“Shit!” the heavy tank cursed but started running again. His expression was one of timorous trust.

Sonja’s first arrow bore through the hip of a woman with the gnarled staff like a drill, instantly crippling her. She shrieked as she went down, the roiling sphere of flame that had been forming on the tip of her staff spluttering as it imploded into nothing with a pop and a puff of smoke.

She shot another and while it only grazed the shoulder of the other archer, it caused his own arrow to fly wide. Glancing back, she activated her Disengage ability, sailing backwards through the air as she turned and landed into the first stride of her sprint.

The golden boy was back on his feet by now and passed by the gasping mage without a single glance in her direction. In fact, none of the four remaining pursuers showed any interest in her well-being whatsoever. They simply left her behind to suffer.

What a bunch of ice cold bastards. Was Menka Tokanami running a school for psychos or something like that?

“We have to lose them somehow!” Eik shouted.

The chase continued for a couple more minutes, Michael and Sonja's combined efforts keeping them away somehow. Finally Heath called. “That cluster of mushrooms up there,” Heath answered, pointing up ahead. “if we can duck behind them and get out of line of sight we might be able to disappear! The growth is getting dense as hell now that we’ve left behind the stream.”

“Let’s do that then!” Eik agreed and altered their course slightly so their path would be obscured by the thick trunk without giving away the fact that they intended disappear completely. It would be useless if the enemy saw it and simply cut across to intercept their escape.

From then on all communication became limited to hand signals and expressive gazes and glances. The moment they lost sight of the killers, they took a hard right into the labyrinth of stems, changing course completely. For a few more seconds they ran full tilt before changing direction yet again, this time back towards the way they’d come.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Maintaining a sense of direction within the sea of fungi was difficult but there was nothing to do but keep going and hoping that they didn’t end up running face first into their hunters. The first sign that the tactic was working as intended was the shouting from somewhere behind them.

Except for the Gohkamorian, whose strange and alien features made it next to impossible to make any reasonable guess about his age, none of Menka Tokanami’s henchmen could have been much older than twenty. With loud voices they argued about to where Eik and company had vanished so suddenly. Eik was beginning to doubt that the five warriors had ever been in a cooperative relationship with each other before this.

With the way they berated and blamed each other and even left a teammate to bleed out in a foreign world, there was just no way that their group had been formed for any other reason than this specific hunt contracted by Menka Tokanami.

One thought that the Earth team had continued along the original path while another insisted on scattering to search a wider perimeter. As the argument escalated, Eik and the others only put more distance between them.

The agitated voices faded gradually until only the sounds of their own foot steps and ragged breathing was audible. To be on the safe side, they kept the pace without rest.

“What’s that?” Sonja said, her huffing far less severe than the men’s.

A pathetic whimper reached their ears from somewhere diagonally ahead. “I think we’ve made it back again,” Eik gasped as they followed the sound.

Seconds later they found the robed woman lying in the moss, blood stains blotting the moss all around her. She must have been struggling to get back on her feet, desperate not to be left behind alone here, gods know where. That had clearly been beyond what her body was currently capable of.

The shaft of the arrow stuck deep inside her hip had been broken in half close to the entry wound, the jagged end thrown to the side, fletching broken and crushed by bloody fingers. An empty vial lay beside her as well, presumably some type of medicine, but it seemed to have had too little time to do its work.

Tears were streaming down the woman’s cheeks, thick and terrified. She didn’t look a day over nineteen. When she heard the crunch of boots in the moss, her head whipped up, the brightest of hopes painted across her face.

“You-You came back for m—” she began but froze when she saw who had actually shown up in her time of need. Her face fell and the despair that visibly washed over her once the realization hit her almost hurt to look at. What she saw then was not four people, but the arrival of death.

“N—… No, please. P-Please don’t ki— kill me. Please!” she wept, sobs barely allowing her to get the words out. “I swear I won’t come after any of your ever again! You-You’ll never see me again! Please believe me! I beg you!”

When the four who were technically still the objectives of her assassination mission didn’t stop moving she attempted to crawl away, her leg dragging limply behind her.

“What should we do with her?” Michael asked as they approached her. “Should we just leave her here or maybe take her with u—”

Sonja’s thin sword was free of its sheath before he could finish his sentence and penetrated the woman’s throat with frightening ease. The archer let the momentum of her body carry the blade through the flesh and bone before ripping it out through the side as she passed the woman.

Michael’s pace faltered as he watched the arterial blood gush out with gusto. His gaze shifted to Sonja’s back as she whipped her sword through the air a few times to clear the worst of the blood from the edge. Nothing else about her indicated that she had just taken a person’s life.

“But you just…” Michael tried as Eik’s palm on his back pushed him back into a run.

“Come on, Mikey. Let’s get going before her teammates figure out that we doubled back,” Eik said gently.

“But Eik…” the healer tried again, glancing constantly over his shoulder at the bleeding mage.

“It’s unfortunate, isn’t it, Mikey?” he said. “But it’s done now. Remember what Atla told us? If they come after us and it’s us or them, then it should be them. This is for our lives, Mikey. This is so we can go home.”

Michael kept looking back at the woman until they could no longer see her body but he didn’t say anything else about it.

They ran and ran, as far as they could.

“I need to stop,” Michael finally said, sweat clinging to his pallid skin. “I have to sit down or I’ll throw up.”

“Let’s rest then,” Sonja said. “We should get that arrow out of your arm as well anyway.”

They had covered several kilometers by now and made several sharp turns in the hopes of throwing the hunters off their scent.

Michael groaned as he sat back against a thick trunk. He was extremely careful to not bump his arm against anything as he moved, the protruding arrow shaft making it difficult to position himself well.

“You’re the best at this, Mike,” Sonja said. “How would you like us to do this?”

Through clenched eyes he looked down at the wound and the dark blood that was mostly blocked from rushing out by the projectile. He whimpered but there was really only one way it was going to end.

“You will have to, uhm… You are going to have to… c-cut off one of the ends and pull the arrow out,” he stammered, his fingers gripping the fabric of his pants so tightly that his knuckles were white. “If we let it be for too long, it’s probably going to become infected, and I’d really rather not find out what kind of bacteria and other microbes are looking to get a piece of me in this godforsaken place. Actually, it probably already is infected but I don't want to think about that.”

Eik pulled out a water skin and let Michael drink as much water as he could. The healer was looking sick and ready to fall over, his clammy skin cool to the touch. They would soon be forced to take a chance on those fluid-filled sacks growing from the backs of the tadpole monsters or thirst would kill them before the assassins could get the job done.

Michael thanked him for the drink and held up his bad arm so he could show them what he wanted done.

“Sorry, guys. I know we’ve only got a few, but I’d like to use one of the healing potions…”

“Of course!” Heath said. “That’s been the plan ever since you got that damn thing stuck in you.”

Michael smiled through the pain and nodded gratefully. “Thank you. You’ll have to pull the arrow out of my arm and stick a finger in the wound.”—He had to pause as he appeared to have become dizzy from the thought alone—“Eik, I was thinking that you could disinfect by washing your hands in your own toxin. If you reabsorb it after then that’s probably the cleanest we’re going to get out here.”

“Good idea,” Eik agreed. “I’ll do that then.”

“Thank you. Heath, I think it would be best if you held me down so I don’t move too much. I have a feeling that I am not going to enjoy this much.”

“Leave it to me!” Heath promised, slapping his bicep.

“And Sonja. I’d like you to pull the arrow out and then get the orb of potion ready for me. I don’t want to risk fumbling it and smashing it on the ground, even if Atla said they were pretty sturdy.”

She nodded with a hand on the young healer’s shoulder.

“Okay,” he said with a deep breath. “Cut it and pull it out now please,” he said as Heath took hold of his arm and lay a knee across his shoulder.