KON POV
Kon: “The badge is fine, but I will be bringing in some troubles along”
Zack: “Do you mean those BOA guys are chasing after you?”
Kon: “Not sure yet, but smack them anyway regardless”
Zack: “Sure, sounds fun. Where do we meet?”
Kon: “At the edge of Seika’s patrol area. Do you remember the border Sera showed last time?”
Zack: “Gotcha. See you there.”
My call with Zack was done, and now it’s time to plan my escape to the rendezvous point for reinforcement. I have no doubt Venti can take them all on, but I will just be getting in the way if I stay around. The martial arts that I learned are not suitable for one-to-many fights. I’m lacking in striking power, but that much is true given my stature.
So, the best I can do is run or misdirect them. Nope, it’s not a cowardice. It’s called tactical retreat and if I can piss them off while doing so, I will consider it a win, hehe.
Now the question is, how do I get Venti to take as much heat away from me as possible when I start booking it? Running away from 1 chaser is easy, but running away from 12? Not so much.
At this point, I’m barely able to operate my SpeedGear smoothly, let alone do tricks like wall running and wall dashing. Not to mention, I will have to keep my Area of Intent open for the whole duration of running back to Zack.
Sigh, first day of wearing SpeedGear and I’m already participating in a hunt. Except I am the hunt target instead of the hunter. Is this how it feels like to be the falcon bird robot in a hunt? Getting chased around by a bunch of people who want to smash you to pieces?
God forbid they catch the target in those matches instead of kicking them to oblivion. Wonder how much money they have destroyed. The total Should be able to net me a luxurious house in the inner ring.
“So, what’s the plan?” Venti asked.
“Jurong, do you have any rooftop access?” I questioned the store owner instead.
“Sorry kid, staff only. Take your problems outside.” He replied. Eh, it was worth a try.
“Venti, you go outside and greet those five people first. I will go the other way and try to escape from there.”
“And the Badges?”
“I will carry them to the rest of the team at Seika district. The sooner we register the rest of the team, the better we can deal with rogue chasers like these.”
“Then you better not lose them.”
“And you better not lose.”
Venti snorted before he went outside the store to cause havoc. I waited for a moment longer while grabbing the badges until I could feel the opening within their encirclement from my area of intent. Some of them panicked the moment Venti socked a guy in the face out of nowhere.
I see a potential breakthrough the moment a group of guys from the left approaches. Exiting the store, I instantly hit the acceleration and dashed through to the right side of the store building into its narrow alleyway. Some of them had noticed this and started to chase me, but Venti covered my back and guarded the entrance to the alleyway.
That done, now I have to outrun 6 people who are coming right into my flanks. As I got out to the main street and cut to the left, running on the sidewalk, I could feel some of them chasing me by parkouring through the rooftops of the buildings. Two people are directly behind me, and two more are trying to ambush me from the next corner.
Do I go around? No, I will be surrounded the second I slow down my speed.
The term “walk before you can crawl” came to mind as I decided to risk it and do my very first trick ever with this SpeedGear.
[Wall-Run]
The idea of running through the wall by applying swift and powerful leg movements against the wall’s surface. Strength, agility, and momentum will be tested the moment you perform your first dash jump from the ground, then for the next part, it demands your precision, timing, and coordination as you perform another accurate dash on the wall for the forward motion.
The corner where the two people will be coming from to ambush me is fast approaching. There is no time to hesitate. I summoned my orange ember and drew in a handful of prana to mask my intent. I masked myself to gain mental clarity. Right now every bit helps. I rather not accidentally bite my tongue when I panicked.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
I aligned my run parallel to the building and then shifted my direction a couple of angles before dash-jumping onto the walls. The moment my SpeedGear came in contact with the wall, I quickly performed another dash. I applied pressure to the front sole of my shoes to have the Gear revolve on its own carrying my weight.
I felt the rush of wind as I went diagonally higher and higher up through the wall run. Then panic settled in as I asked myself a single question. How do I stop this? I keep on getting higher while being stun-locked from excitement and nervousness at the same time. My first time performing a trick and I looked like a deer caught in headlight.
Somebody, stop me!
I wall-ran to the end of the building and launched myself past its rooftop, arcing 10 meters in the air into another building’s rooftop.
Good lord, the exhilaration and tension riddled my brain in equal measure as my feet touched the air for 2 whole seconds with winds buffeting my face. I was awed at the scenery of the district viewed from so high up before I looked down and felt my stomach drop from the fast-approaching rooftop ground.
Swallowing my nervousness, I gritted my teeth and prepared myself for a couple of broken legs as I dived in feet first.
Fortunately, the safety fall feature of the SpeedGear booted up and corrected my foot posture by auto-aligning the tip of the shoe at an angle to the ground. On contact, the Impact suppressor from the Sole’s air cushion bumped up a bit in a brief second to absorb most of the shock I got from landing.
I almost tumbled down, but I kept my balance and started to run again to leave my stalkers behind.
On the outside, I’m maintaining my run as if what I did just now was another Friday night, but on the inside my heart was pounding furiously as if I had just seen a Zombie in real life. I have no idea whether that was luck or some divine intervention, but all I earned from that wild stunt was a slight tingle on my ankle instead of a pair of shattered kneecaps.
I should count myself lucky for even managing to perform a wall run. I had planned on just wall running enough height to jump over the flanking guys. Instead, I launched myself up like a human cannonball, flew 10 meters in the air, and landed right on top of another building’s rooftop. Should I smugly declare that luck is a form of skill too? If I was a cat, I would be one life down.
Concentrating back on my area of intent, I noticed that I managed to lose a couple of the chasers behind me, but some of them who saw my feats, particularly the one who was running on the rooftop, redoubled their effort to catch me.
I better step on the gas.
Running and jumping from rooftop to rooftop is not hard. It just dashing, running, jumping, landing, and rinse repeat. It’s like the Olympics’ hurdle race. Thankfully, most of them are not fenced. All I had to do was just simply vaulting through various obstacles and dodging a couple of hanging potted plants.
However, soon I had to abort my rooftop traversal.
Up ahead is a wide main street and I can’t make that sort of jump yet. I’m no Aika Stormhunt. So, it’s back to making use of alleyways. Luckily I can tell that the path between buildings is quite narrow, but too bad I can’t stop to sneak around since they know the street better than me. There are not many places to hide in Taikan District.
Although, Suanka would be a different story. I can even take them down one by one if we are to conduct our chase over there. But now is not the time to think about what-ifs.
With no other choice, I jumped off from the rooftop to land on empty pedestrian walkways. The moment I touched the ground, I immediately slipped into a nearby side street. From there I kept on dashing past a couple of people, looking for a more deserted path that I could navigate through without troubling passersby.
I know it’s not completely my fault but I rather not have innocent bystanders getting elbowed away by a bunch of thugs who are chasing after me.
The back streets have gotten narrower and I can hear their voices getting more echoey as they shout out the last direction they thought I was taking.
It’s not as if they are fast or anything. On the contrary, I am slow. I am so slow that they can close in on me even after I did my best at cornering in a way that minimizes my body exposure. They always managed to catch up fast enough to glimpse my retreating form at every corner turn.
This is frustrating-, Oh Marbles! Yoink!
Apologies to the kids I borrowed marbles from, but I did leave some candies in place from my pocket in return. Don’t ask why I have them in my pocket at all times. You hang out with Venti and Zack long enough and your brain will start to crave more sugar to stave off the headaches.
On the next corner turn, I purposely slowed down a bit. When the idiot poked his head out to look left and right, I presented him with a flicked marble to the face. Too bad his optic device was quite durable. A crack would have been nice, but that surprised shout is good too. Music to my ears.
With the stalkers slowing down a tad from the surprise attack, I quickly gained distance as I dashed to the next T-junction that divided the path into left and right. At this point, I was just guessing my way around, so I took my chance and went to the right path. But not before flicking a marble backward and hitting the garbage can behind me.
Hopefully, the sound serves as a misdirection and they took the left path instead of the right.
Unfortunately, my running SpeedGear noise could still be heard and they decided to split up into 2 groups. Only three people were left to chase me. At this point, I am almost out of the Taikan District and fast approaching the Seika district. No doubt that Zack is just a couple of minutes away from the border assuming he immediately took off the moment I ended the call.
Checking the minimap from SpeedOptix’s GPS function it seems that I was right on the money. Both Elizabeth and Zack were notified of my position and they are 4 minutes away from where I am.
One can only hope they would come faster because I ran out of luck and encountered a dead end.
I wanted to try climbing up by kicking the side walls but I held back. As a newbie who barely started using SpeedGear, it’s too dangerous. If something went wrong I could fall on my back or head.
So I tried my luck at opening the nearby doors. After a couple of tries, I managed to find one that had a loosened lock. It’s a back entrance to an abandoned building, so I tackled the door and rushed inside just in time for my stalkers to round the corner and spot me.
And now they are calling the other group to reconvene around this abandoned building.
I quickly traversed my way around the emergency staircase by jumping from stair landing to stair landing, only to discover that the door access to the rooftop was locked tightly. Another dead end huh? A couple more moves and it will be a checkmate, but I’m not too worried.
I decided to settle down in the room with the most spacious floor. A look outside the window there are a couple of people with BOA badges surrounding the building. I sure am in a pickle, heh.
“Well, well, look who we managed to corner at last. Kon Caspier of the Sky Punk.” Says the cliched bad guy number 1. His rotten teeth and bad breath certainly didn't help his case.
Now, let’s see how much information I can extract from these people.