Chapter 4

The First Destination Part 4

I was listening to what Ajbadan was telling us and was wondering at the same time how I reached the same conclusion even before he reported to us, how was my estimate that correct with having all the facts, strange as they may be, that was happening at the moment, so I had to naturally complete his last sentence for him, saying "In that case the option for us is to wait it out, until everything becomes clear, it's not in our best interest to intervene in a situation we don't know anything about it." When I finished saying that, I noticed that everyone was looking at me with a surprise on their faces.

Even I was surprised at how easily and naturally I said what I said, I didn't even think about what I was saying, it just came to mind and I said it without thinking about it at all. Everyone kept looking at me for a few seconds, then Ajbadan was the first one to recover from the surprise and say, "That was exactly what I was about to suggest; good work, Amran." I didn't have anything to add; I just nodded. Beside me, Azmar stopped looking at me and turned to Ajbadan and asked him, "Sow what should we do now?" Ajbadan thought for a few seconds and said, "We just wait here. Soon the shooting will start, and we can't interfere with that. Let's see how it goes, then we will decide our course of action."

I don't know why, but although he was addressing Azmar, he was looking at me. That made me feel like I did something wrong, but I didn't care much about it. I was somehow anxious to know what was going on in front of us. I am totally in a different world, a world that I don't know much about, except for the information that I obtained from the A.I. chip, of which I had doubts about the accuracy and if it was complete information. I was sure that there was someone who was controlling the information I was receiving, but I didn't know how or why.

Obviously our kidnappers were capable of doing something ridiculously sophisticated and not normal at all, which means they could do more than I could think of, or anyone near me for that matter, and I was sure that they were responsible for the situation we are in at the moment. Even I couldn't guess how far their capability went, so I had to be cautious of everything and try to minimize their control over me, which was something I couldn't do at the

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moment, but I had to steer my life the way I wanted it as much as possible.

Less than a couple minutes later and the shooting started. As per my estimate, the distance was less than two hundred meters away, and don't ask me how or what my estimate was based on, just since we started on this trip, I have been able to guess, see, and think of things I didn't use to before. At that time, I was not aware of the changes that were happening to me. I will talk about these things later anyway, but now let me continue what was going on that day.

The shooting lasted for less than a minute. I don’t know who or even why, but I was able to distinguish between the two parties of men we saw versus one shooter. Yes, it was only one, but apparently, he or she was a sharp shooter because within that single minute, he was able to take down three. I was able to even know that without being able to see them just from their shooting position, which has been silenced, the one who was shooting was approximately seven, although their numbers seemed more to me.

We have been waiting in our place and listening for about another minute, but the shooting didn't resume. I had an urge to go and see what's going on, but there was no way to do that, so I asked Ajbadan, "Is it possible for you to go and check? I think there will not be any more shootings." He didn't say anything; he just looked at me, then looked at Raco, and said, "I will go and check out what's happening there, stay here and don't move until I come back." Once more, he looked at me like he was telling me that applies to me too.

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Julian looked at his wrist communicator and typed a short message to his mother, telling her that he had arrived and not to worry about him. That was when he felt a scary aura coming from behind him. He looked around, there was nothing that he could see, there was nothing except trees everywhere, and nothing was there as far as his sight could reach. The feeling of something dangerous was getting closer, and his instinct was screaming at him to run and run as fast as he could.

The only thing he could do was run, and he started running, running as fast as he could. He never had before the stamina to run even for a few blocks, let alone the strength to run this fast, but that never occurred to him even once while he was running. The forest he was running through was so thick that the distance between each tree was less than one meter, the floor was filled with dried branches and tree roots, and walking normally on the ground was very difficult, let alone running.

After continuing to run for almost five minutes, he finally lost the feeling of the fear he had felt and the something that was chasing him. He stopped to take a breath and had a chance to look around himself. The scene was not that different from the first location where he appeared, he realized that he was in a huge forest. He tried to remember the closest forest around his country, but unfortunately there was none around his area, not even his continent, so the biggest question was where in the world he ended up and what type of experiment this was. Then he remembered the screen that he saw earlier, and it suddenly appeared in front of him once more.