Chapter 52

I felt myself get pushed forward fast like a bolt of lightning through the dense foliage of the forest. I heard incoherent inaudible shouts tailing me swiftly, maybe even from the sides too. I could feel at least ten different essences locking in on me, but there was nothing I could do about that but run through the forest. I knew the ones in pursuit were powerful, with such strength that I would easily be overwhelmed if I even dared to engage them all directly. My speed through the trees wasn’t as great as I would have liked, but I didn’t dare venture into the open ground, that would just be inviting an assault by multitude of projectiles.

I felt one of my Skills activate, a sensing spreading out in nearly all direction for a distance, examining for the presence of signatures that could be identified as the pursuers. It brought back a sense that there were fourteen distinct essences in hot pursuit, and with that information, my mind was already trying to figure out how they intended to surround me, and coming up with the best possible escape routes.

The more all this information was being processed, the more I realized that I wasn’t really in control, I was back in one of those dreams. It had been near five days since the last one, I had been hoping that they were gone, guess I wasn’t that lucky.

It quickly became clear that I was moving at speeds I could only dream of, it felt like the pinnacle of speed to me, but remembering the thought I had just had before, I knew that I could move even faster, at least the body I was in could. But even with all that speed, I could still feel the distance slowly but surely shrinking as the pursuers closed in on me.

I felt some of the essences close in on me, spreading out into a semi-circle as they half surrounded me fast. Deep down, I knew that those alone where enough to kill me, even if I could somehow manage to hold them off, then it would just be buying time for the rest to catch up and get the job done.

The longer I stayed in the body, the more I came to appreciate just how different our minds worked. I could feel the body’s mind get even more focused as the chase stretched on, coming up with multiple different ways it could use to get out of the situation alive.

And when I thought things couldn’t get worse, I felt our speed suddenly drop as the body danced through the trees. It took me a while longer to realize what I, the body, was after; I was circling to one side so that when the pursuers caught up, as they were would to do, I wouldn’t be forced to face all of them at once.

The first person I saw was more of a streak than an actual figure, exceedingly fast, approaching my location like a phantom. But before they could make contact, they somehow slowed down in midair, and it was like I was watching them approach me in slow motion. The little of him I could see, revealed a middle-aged man with a well-kept beard, but before I could make out any more features, his body suddenly dropped to the ground, contorted into a lump of flesh that splatted on impact.

I blinked owlishly at the scene, or tried to, but I was already moving as several attacks landed at the place I had just been. I hadn’t even felt any Skill activate then, and yet I knew a Skill had been used, just how high leveled was the body?

Due to the previous altercation, the other speedy pursuers had already closed in on my location. I felt a Skill begin to activate, but when those streaks appeared in my vision, I already knew it was too late; one moment they had been more than what I would call fifty meters away, and the next they were right on me.

Just like before, they suddenly slowed down, and what happened there after I honestly couldn’t describe. By the end, two were dead and three others had suffered severe injuries, allowing enough time for me to escape from their clutches. But I, the body, hadn’t escaped unscathed either, I could feel a drain running through me and getting worse as the chase stretched on. The body must have used up most of my Stamina and Mana long before I joined up residence. Didn’t I have any potions on me? I didn’t think I had any outer wounds on me, but I could feel a metallic taste in my mouth, telling me that I had suffered a great deal internally.

As I jumped from tree to tree, I felt my body suddenly pulled and slammed to the ground so hard that I was sure I left a Hartie-sized indentation. I quickly got up faster than I expected, already running off to the side. The initial group had been taken care off, but another had caught up in those precious moments. Another body slam to the ground, and I finally caught sight of the new group.

I counted eleven, or at least that’s the number that popped up in my brain as I stared at the circle around me. It had a kind of déjà vu feeling about it. It was the end of the road for me, even I could feel the resignation from the body itself, there was no way out left.

“Well, let’s end this,” I said as I finally fully primed what little Mana I had left in me.

I had thought they would attack almost immediately, but they looked hesitant, as if afraid that I might kill them all. Hadn’t they prepared themselves for such an eventuality? What a bunch of fools? Don’t tell me they are waiting for their colleagues to attack first, cowards, the whole lot of them. I wasn’t sure whether the thoughts running through my mind were completely mine anymore, but I didn’t have any arguments in that regard.

I was surprised, but not entirely, when I moved first, going for the one directly in front of me. I wish I could fly, then I might have a chance. I knew that thought wasn’t mine with certainty, but I was more amazed by the complete shattering of the shield that my chosen opponent had erected when they realized they were the target. I berated myself for not paying attention to what Skill the body had used, I might not have gotten it right, but I could have gotten the basics of it. I could work with basics.

Stolen novel; please report.

The opponent was so surprised that they did nothing for the follow up attack as a sword cleanly sheared off their head, and I was already moving onto the next target, realizing for the first time what kind of weapons the body wielded, double scimitars.

But they were already reacting, shields and attacks already out and about. I cleanly weaved through the attacks as I tried to get at them, but the group knew how to work together, always forcing me to evade when one of theirs was open for an attack. And soon, their attacks were coming faster than even I could evade, and I was getting hit more than I was evading.

Try as I might, I couldn’t keep track of anything that I actually did, I was merely on the back seat, watching barely perceivable events happen. I managed to gain the upper hand when I got lucky and took down two of the assailants one after the other, but that was a short-lived thing as the rest of the group rearranged themselves and coordinated together better to get me back on the defensive.

Soon enough, a cut to the thigh was a little too deep, and even as I plunged one of my scimitars into the lucky assailant’s gut, I knew my time was ticking faster than before. A Mana slash to the left arm, and I could barely lift the arm any more. And before long, I felt the kiss of metal on my neck, and I was out of the body as other projectiles hurtled towards my unprotected body.

…

I shot up right on my bed as I woke up, breathing heavily and heavily drenched in sweat. It took me a while to calm down from the adrenaline high of being hunted down and the death experience that still coursed through me. I proceeded through my morning routine as I thought about the dream, it had been similar and yet different from the previous one. I was sure I had died in the previous dream, then what did the new dream mean? Where they just that, dreams? Nothing else? And if there weren’t just dreams, then how many times had I actually died? And why did all of them involve me getting hunted down like a rabid animal?

I didn’t think my personality was so bad that I could incite such kind of a reaction from people. Had I done something to warrant such kind of treatment? Thinking about it, I knew there were a lot of things that I could do for that, but I would need due reason to embark on such an action.

After taking a shower, I had breakfast and then headed out to the clearing I had practiced on before. It didn’t have the obstacles that the forest in Yange had offered, but I was sure that I could come up with something to help me a little in that department. Besides, I wasn’t in that stage of training yet, first concentrating on shields and my more attack oriented Skills.

With how the fight in the dream had gone, I had been left asking myself why the body hadn’t used a shield at all during the final confrontation. Didn’t it have enough Mana left? Maybe it had no shield Skill to begin with; or a shield that it knew was weak against those attacks, thereby rendering it useless. With the ease I had seen the other shield destroyed, it was safe to assume that the shield being useless in that situation was the more plausible reason.

I still worked on my [Mana Shield], trying to get it to a higher level, maybe it would be different than that assailant’s shield.

I was yet to accomplish the feat of keeping the shield going for long, and that was the focus of my training for the most part of the morning. But after hours of trying and me getting nothing in return, I decided to focus my efforts in the next item on my agenda, agility training.

I didn’t have the trees, or Boni and his crossbow, to help me with my reflexes, so I focused on working on my raw speed. It was one of the easiest exercises to carry out, and also the most likely to get the exercise wrong altogether. Without an expert trainer to tell me otherwise, I assumed that I was doing things right by focusing on high intensity interval training.

I could already feel that I was way faster than I had been in my previous life, but I was starting to have doubts that I was getting anything from the exercise itself anymore. I tried running as fast as I could, but I knew that at certain speeds, it became all about technique and execution, and not just how fast you can move your legs.

But I kept at it, hoping that I would get a little something out of the exercise, at least for the effort. If I could somehow convince someone to race me, or something like that, I had heard that it usually worked wonders to someone’s effort when they were actually competing against someone else. But with my current level of Agility, the only ones who would be able to offer any kind of a challenge would be other competitors. Or maybe dedicated sprinters, did Mesily have those? Or had The Grand Competition overshadowed everything else?

When I got bored with straight up sprinting, I decided to do a little agility training, in the realm of reflexes. I hoped for the running zigzag through cones, I didn’t know what its name was though. I didn’t have the cones, but I had something much better, Mana, and I used it extensively to create the cones I needed.

I began with a simple straight line arrangement of the cones, but after a few runs through, I began mixing things up to create a sense of newness to the obstacles and prevent my brain from just getting used to a single way of dodging, left-right.

I didn’t push myself past that though, even though I really wanted to let loose and create a full on obstacle course to try out a little parkour. I had watched lots of cool videos of people jumping through roof tops, stairs, climbing walls and other crazy stunts. And then there was the flips and somersaults. I had been training myself on how to do those with the [Acrobats] Skill, but I knew that I was far off the coolness showcased in some of those videos. I hoped that one day, when I got the Skill leveled high enough, I might be able to accomplish feats that those traceurs could only dream of.

When my Stamina ran low, I called it quits and put myself through the same torturous routine of running back to the city as fast as I could, before slowing down when I ran too low in Stamina. I didn’t last that much longer than the other day, showing that a single day of doing something wasn’t enough to get me used to it, even in a realm of magic.

With the amount of running I was doing, I was curious as to why I had never earned a Skill related to that, maybe it would make running a little bit that easier for me. But would that apply to when I was in fights though, like when I ran towards, or away from, my opponents? Would I consume less Stamina? But Skills used up Mana, which used up Stamina too, yeah, a Skill like that wouldn’t really work out that great after all.

It was already afternoon when I finally made it to The Competitors’ Inn, and I counted myself lucky to find that no one had chosen to use my so called new table. Then again, it wasn’t exactly busy hour for the restaurant. I had my late lunch before going to my room and took a rest.

I hoped to go to the library for another session before the day was done. Maybe I would finally remember to carry a notebook with me, and also look up on Halle and Khudonia, the story had been cultivating and I was a sucker for such historical stories, or accounts.