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Midnight flung herself sideways, narrowly evading the lunging shadebeast with a desperate twist of her body. A primal roar of frustration and rage tore from her throat as she whirled around to face him. He had the discernible form of a beast on four legs. Twice the size of Midnight, he towered over her, his silhouette a cascade of ripples within the darkness, his hunger palpable in the air. For a moment, he stood and stared, then he surged forward once more, his form elongating into a grotesque manifestation of power and darkness. In an instant, Midnight recognised his intent. He lunged to strike, an outright attack, but he came too close, built himself up too high, as if to strike at something behind her — this was a superior predator fighting an inferior one; he expected her to back away, to dodge backwards. Instead, Midnight rushed in headfirst, her movement calculated evasion amplified by intuition. She jumped at him from below and ran her claws from his neck to his chest — but struck nothing; there was no resistance, no matter, her paws just went into the rippling black as if it were air.
Midnight landed off balance, scurried to the side before he came down on her, weaved past the onslaught of his paws and ran. Overtaken by raw panic, her body reacted before she could consciously grasp what had happened. Her paws were fine, just fine, all there, not injured, but upon touching the shadebeast, it had felt as if they were ripped apart.
The shadebeast chased her, matching her every leap, driving her into a frantic race along the narrow confines of the tunnel. She zigzagged between walls, contorting her lithe body to evade the relentless hunter. He pursued with an undeterred determination, not adhering to the twisting path but chasing her in a straight line, seamlessly traversing in and out of the walls.
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image [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Glass-Wizard_Fantasy-Adventure-Magic-Webnovel-by-The-Duckman_Depressed-Wizard-Online-Webseries_ArtGlassWizard_Albweiss-Mountains_Midnight_Tunnel-1.png]-
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Midnight’s breath came in quick bursts that matched her frenzy, her heart drummed fiercely in her chest, and her manoeuvres became increasingly daring as she fought to maintain speed. She could not slow down for any hindrances. With powerful leaps, she sought distance, her body repeatedly grazing against the jagged edges of protruding wall segments, leaving traces of crimson in her wake.
As she darted and weaved through the tunnel, Midnight attempted to shift into the darkness several times. Yet, with every attempt, the sprites hurled her back into her pathera form.
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-------So full of yourself
-------------just beggin’ for a beatin’
------Touch him again
-------------and you’ll be eaten!
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The tunnel widened. Midnight’s darkness sense revealed an expansive cavern filled with towering stalactites that reached down to the ground, where they solidified into dense pillars. The faint layer of salt-crystalline ground crunched beneath her paws as she darted and slithered around the columns. The shadebeast spurred Midnight onward. In her frantic flight, she wove erratic patterns around the pillars, her darkness already exploring potential exits.
Even in this harrowing chase, the sprites remained a persistent menace, their ethereal forms constantly flitting in and out of Midnight’s line of sight. They danced through the air with unnerving agility, obscuring her vision, unsettling her senses and disrupting her concentration with their taunts and jeers.
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Little shad-ow, little shad-ow
Through the darkness you flee
Through the darkness you flow
Any yet you do not see
And yet you do not know
Only true affinity
A double-forged synergy
A form of full opacity
Yet absolute transparency
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Will grant you life and victory
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They were sabotaging and simultaneously helping her? What did any of this mean? How was it possible that they prevented Midnight from shifting into darkness? How could she get rid —
The shadebeast jumped her from behind. Midnight evaded to the right, whirled around in mid-air and threw herself at his side, with her obsidian claws extended into the darkness currents surrounding her. She had to fight darkness with darkness. If she could not shift, she would turn the darkness into her weapon. She had before made it an extension of her senses, using it to touch upon the arrays of bones like elongated whiskers. Now manifesting the darkness around her claws, Midnight unleashed a barrage of savage strikes upon the shadebeast, evading a direct clash by ripping his neck and shoulder before he could turn towards her. The shadebeast’s movement faltered, his momentum disrupted and form disturbed, but his rippling darkness closed the clefts right after — barely enough time for Midnight to vault upwards.
She jumped one of the grand vertical pillars. She had already smelt that the stalactite structures were moist and slippery. With the darkness claws still woven around her own, she threw her paws against the rock at full force. She had attempted to dig into the rock, but while her natural claws made contact, the extended darkness simply slit through the rock as if it were air. The unexpected lack of grip left Midnight scrattering and slipping, her muscles straining as she flung herself to the adjacent pillar, now relying on her own claws as she jumped from one structure to the next. Each leap brought her closer to a platform beneath the high ceiling.
The shadebeast’s massive form followed with a single bound. He reached the platform right after her, closing the distance instantly, as Midnight dashed into the tunnel that exited from there.
--------Could he not have intercepted her and blocked the tunnel?
----Had he let her escape on purpose?
Midnight felt the words emerging but was unable to grasp them fully amidst the demanding chase. Within seconds, she reached a junction of diverging tunnels. Struggling to keep her darkness sense at pace with her rapid movements, Midnight chose by intuition, only to feel another junction approaching. The sprites' commentary added to the overwhelming sensory barrage, each voice urging her to choose a different tunnel and then both complaining about her choice, even though she inevitably did what at least one of them wanted. Midnight rushed into the wider right tunnel, its walls shimmering stalactite. Left, right, left, a small cavern, right, left, high-up right and right again. She raced through the winding passages, her heightened senses attuned to the subtle shifts in temperature and atmosphere. The scent of the mountain's breath grew stronger, now hinting at the proximity of snow. The darkness flowed forth, discerning looming dangers and viable paths, guiding her through the labyrinthine twists and turns.
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image [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Glass-Wizard_Fantasy-Adventure-Magic-Webnovel-by-The-Duckman_Depressed-Wizard-Online-Webseries_ArtGlassWizard_Albweiss-Mountains_Midnight_Tunnel-Passage.png]
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Midnight needed to turn this hunt around, but amidst the frantic flurry of senses and actions, she struggled to think. She could not outrun the shadebeast forever, nor could she fight him with her claws alone. She could not face him as long as her pathera body left her vulnerable. Running had been her instinctual response, and it still seemed the only viable action. Yet, she knew that she needed to do more, to understand more, but her thoughts were all chaos and confusion. In the heat of the chase, she found herself reacting purely on impulse, her mind fully consumed by the urgency of the moment. Against all that felt natural, she strained to think ahead, to let her body handle the running and sensing, so that her mind could strategise.
Midnight needed to shift – better. It was imperative if she wanted to evade the sprites' interference. They still swirled around her, manifesting in and out of the walls in an attempt to distract and trip her, ever laughing and shouting misleading directions. Their power over her infuriated her. Before encountering them, every shift into darkness had filled Midnight with exhilaration. Everything had felt exactly right, but they insisted she was wrong. She did not know what that meant. She did not know what they wanted; their many words rushed through her mind with a forcefulness that left her reeling. Midnight's thoughts became increasingly muddled, drowned in an overwhelming surge of emotions; a flood of rage, a torrent of angst and anger that came not from her body, not from something she sensed, but from her own words.
image [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-Glass-WIzard-Webstory_Psychological-Fantasy-Magic-Webseries_The-Duckman_Midnight_Anger-and-Angst.png]
How was she supposed to figure any of this out? Midnight did not understand new things out of nothing; she learned through her body, through instinct and intuition. From the earliest days of her existence, Midnight had relied on her innate knowledge and abilities to survive. She had known how to run and climb and fight. Her intuition had told her what to eat and how to hunt. She had been able to do all of these things while her wizard needed years just to learn how to walk. He had needed to be shown how feed on his own, which had also taken years. It would have probably taken many more, if she had not been there, because if he ever got anything out of their bond, Midnight was sure that it was this necessary independence for basic survival. Nothing wizards did came from innate knowledge. While her instincts guided her to safety, and her senses provided all she needed to know about new places and plants and beasts, her wizard needed to be instructed about the world and about how to behave amongst others and even on how to speak to other wizards. Wizards had so much potential to develop different abilities, but they needed decades of academy schooling to realise them. Midnight had been instructed on many things, too, but even when honing her midnight stalker abilities, she had only ever done what felt natural. She had all the knowledge and all the abilities within her. Practice just made her better. When Yves had practiced his magic at Emery Thurm, he had very often been told that he needed to do things differently from the way he was doing them. To him, the wrong things had often felt good and easy, and the right things had felt difficult. And yet, despite all of this, he could learn and understand and foresee things by himself, out of sheer nothing. Midnight did not learn or feel like this. She only felt that she was doing things right, and because she only did what felt right, she was never in a situation where she had to feel otherwise. But now the sprites told her that what felt so right was wrong, but how could she discern the truth? How could she learn to understand on her own? How could she understand what she did wrong? How could she improve, how could she do something better if everything already felt exactly right? No, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her; she was a powerful beast, imbued with strength and skill and acknowledged by her Gods of Darkness. Yet, these twisted sprites continued to toy with her. This was not a lesson, nor an attempt to guide her, and there was no guarantee that they would ever cease their interference, regardless of what she did. All of this was just another cowardly ploy to get her killed.
Midnight had wanted her thoughts to cease reacting to her senses, but now everything was turned around, now the words directed her body instead, drowning both her senses and themselves with the same raw intensity of rage they induced in the first place. The words were supposed to help her strategise like her wizard, but instead, they turned her into a senseless beast. It was a maddening loss of control. Where all senses drowned, the fear of prey found breath.
There was nothing she could do. All that Midnight could do was run. She needed to run, she must run, the shadebeast was behind her, she must run, he was reaching for her, she must run, the darkness would rip her apart upon touch, she must run, keep running, run fast, run faster, run, run, run, run, run run run run run runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun—
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The green sprite sat on her back.
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