This was my fastest lunge ever. I doubt I could have repeated it again simply because I was already out of strength. At least for today.

He spun around, immediately aiming at me, but he didn't manage to shoot. The moment the gun was pointed at me, I ducked under the hand holding it and crashed into Alex. The gunshot echoed behind my back. Someone was now more brazenly banging on the door and saying something, but I couldn't hear anymore. I slammed Alex into the wall, literally pressing him between myself and the concrete, causing all the air to escape from him in an instant.

But he was far from incapacitated. The blow from the gun fell somewhere on the back of my head, and I nearly lost consciousness. I pulled back, pressing his hand with the gun to the wall, and took a punch to the face with his left fist. One, two, three... My head was already dark, and new punches raining down on my face didn’t make it any better. But sometimes, at moments like these, you remember what you've been told once. It just comes up as if you've been thinking about it all along.

And I remembered what my father taught me. That's why, after the third punch, I quickly moved my head away and headbutted him in the face with all my might.

There was a crunch, something splashed on my forehead, and the punches stopped raining down on my head. A second headbutt - and his resistance weakened. The third blow - he stopped resisting at all.

But I can't hit anymore either; I'm about to lose consciousness myself. So, I grab the gun, sharply twist it, pulling it out of his hands... And Alex clutches it back, not letting me take it away. He tries to hit me in the groin, but hits my stomach. And so several times. I sharply pull him towards me, after which I finally wrest the weapon. And then I fall when he dives to the floor and literally yanks my legs from under me. I drop the gun, which flies God knows where.

And Alex jumps on top of me and starts punching me with all his might. All I can do is cover my head with my hands, making it difficult for him to knock me out. After that, he rises and goes for the gun again, but at the last moment, I grab his leg, causing Alex to sprawl on the floor. I get up quickly, at the same time as him, and we exchange blows to the head. But unlike me, he's much lighter, albeit faster.

We exchange many punches, and even though he's faster, I take each hit to the head much better than he does, so I keep pressing on, not even trying to cover myself. I keep hitting, hitting, hitting, putting on constant pressure, not letting him rest or retreat. My only advantage is my weight, so I simply crush him.

And then I suddenly lunge forward when he retreats into defense again, crash into him, and knock him to the ground. Now I'm on top, and he definitely can't throw me off. He tries to defend himself, to strangle me, and then reaches for my eyes, but I outpace him. I grab his head and start pressing my thumbs into his eyeballs. Harder and harder. Very soon, he starts cursing loudly and seizes my hands in an attempt to pull them away from his face. But he can't do anything.

At some point, I feel soft yet dense orbs under my fingers pop. They literally shrink in size, letting my thumbs go deeper into them. I feel my fingers sinking deeper and deeper into the warm, bloody-white mush. Alex screams incessantly, deafening me in the enclosed space. My fingers hit something solid - the bone at the back of his eye.

Then, I lift his head and slam it as hard as I can against the floor. One hit, two... after that, he stops screaming. Then, the third...

On the fourth hit, all I hear is the crunch of bones. Juicy, vivid, like someone cracking their knuckles with gusto. Alex goes limp in my hands, turning into a ragdoll and ceasing to show signs of life, while blood starts to spread beneath his head. I still don't fully understand if I've won or not, so I'm rushing for the gun, grabbing it, spinning around, and aiming. I fire.

Blood, brains, and bones fly out from the back of his head onto the floor. From the side, it looks like someone stepped on a tube of paint, spewing color everywhere.

The door, meanwhile, is shaking violently. It won't be long before it's busted down. Only now do I notice that they're not knocking - they're breaking in.

We're screwed if we don't get out of here. I quickly look for a hatch and find it under the tables stacked with money. Without a second thought, I flip them over, freeing the hatch, and then run over to Malu.

"Can you walk?"

"Yes, but... I think I'm done for... He shot me in the stomach..."

"Come on, crawl over while I open the hatch."

Luckily, there's a handle here to lift and throw it back, which I do. After that, I grab a stack of money for our needs and help Malu climb down.

The door starts to crack. Bricks begin to fall from the wall. A few more hits and it'll simply be taken out.

"Faster! Jump! Come on!" I keep glancing from Malu to the door.

Unable to stand it, I grabbed a flashlight from the floor, and quickly followed him. Taking a last look at Alex's mutilated corpse caused a pang of pain and sadness in my chest. The truth is, he did the same as me - he risked everything for those dear to him. And when such paths cross, only one can continue.

By the time I caught up with Malu, he had already touched the ground with his foot.

"Can't see a damn thing, and we're underground again..." he muttered.

"Come on, hop on. I can get us out of here."

He didn't even try to argue - just climbed onto my back, after which I started running. I ran as fast as I could, holding a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other, breaking through the darkness of the half-destroyed sewer of the factory complex. I could see the mud and sludge on the floor, already frozen due to the low temperatures, which greatly facilitated our task of moving.

We had barely run fifty meters to the first fork when a crash sounded behind us. I suspect they had just broken down the door. They took their sweet time. Or maybe the door was too robust. Either way, I took a turn and started running again. By the next intersection, I was completely drained of energy.

"I need you to start walking on your own now. You can hold onto my neck if you need to."

"They're going to chase after us," he muttered.

"Obviously. They're already on our tails; let's go."

Malu didn't even need to hold onto my neck. He managed to reach the next fork on his own, albeit with a tremendous effort. Almost immediately after the turn, we found a ladder leading up - just ordinary iron rungs hammered into the wall. We climbed them to get outside. The pounding of our pursuers sounded alarmingly close when I started going up, practically pushing Malu.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Our pursuers must have missed us by a second. When I finally emerged and rolled quickly to the side, I heard their voices right below the hatch. They were stomping and talking so loudly that they were practically deafening themselves. Their main mistake - and our salvation - was that they weren't paying attention to their surroundings.

"Should we keep running? Left, right, straight ahead?"

"If they'd run straight, we would have seen them."

"Or they climbed up?" the first voice guessed.

"Then go take a look. We must catch these bastards, or Arrow's gonna nag the shit out of us again."

I was about to nudge Malu, but he had already understood everything perfectly on his own. He slowly got up and limped over to an old, rusting machine left here since prehistoric times. I quickly and quietly made for a pillar that supported the workshop's roof. I hid behind it, froze, barely breathing, and waited.

At that moment, I merged completely with my surroundings, hearing what the workshop hears every night - nothing. Just the creaking of rusty chains or some mechanisms and the groaning of the building, not counting the distant noise of the much livelier city. For a moment, my endless evening became truly peaceful. Standing behind the pillar, I felt for a moment like I'd become a part of this lifeless world.

Not half a minute had passed when a flashlight beam started scanning the area. It swept over my hiding place, flickered around the workshop, lingering on some units that had probably been machines once. Then it moved on, making a full circle.

"Looks clear!" the man yelled down, but his voice echoed perfectly up here too.

"You sure?" a muffled voice asked from below.

"I can't see anything! It's dark, but I don't think there's anyone here!"

"Alright, come down, and let's go. If others want to, they can comb through this place by car."

The flashlight beam made one last sweep of the dead factory, and then there were soft metallic rustles as the man descended the ladder.

For good measure, I waited another two minutes before rushing to Malu. Waiting any longer was not an option - most likely, not finding us in the tunnels, they would patrol this place in cars while simply searching every workshop.

Or Malu might bleed out by that time, who knows.

"Are you alive in there?" I patted his shoulder. "We need to get going."

"We need to get home, to my place," he croaked, then looked me in the face and smiled sadly. "I think my time is up."

"Don't wet yourself, let's go."

"I'm not. We need to stop by and pick up my sister; otherwise... Otherwise, Arrow himself will go get her. And he can. He truly is a sick bastard with no brakes."

"We need to find a car first," I muttered, looking around. "In this dump, we are unlikely to get anything."

"We will…" he was breathing very hard - as if he lacked oxygen. "There is... there is a garage where a car is parked. A clean one. Syringa's old hatchback."

"She didn't sell it?"

"We kept it just in case. Let's go; I don't want to kick the bucket in some abandoned factory."

We moved between the desolate workshops of an old complex, where something used to be manufactured before it all collapsed with the end of the Manchurian economic boom. Quiet, dilapidated workshops, groaning buildings, biting frost, and a cloudless sky, because of which the moonlight made our task easier, illuminating the road.

We encountered roads several times, crossing them to get to the other side. The way we did it looked like a scary operation. Each time, we hid in the shadows of the walls, peering around the corners, waiting, and only then we ran across the road. At least, Malu tried to run across.

Our caution even saved us once when a car came around the corner, brightly illuminating the alley between the workshops with its headlights. It drove slowly down the road - the passengers were clearly looking for someone, and I have a guess who exactly. We lay down in the dry grass, which rose up in now-dead stalks. Tall, it hid us from the lights, which scanned the area with their beams before the car moved on.

"We are very close," Malu muttered and pointed. "That garage over there."

To be honest, calling what I saw a garage was an overstatement. As well as assuming that there was a car inside at all. Maybe it used to be a garage, but now its roof had collapsed, and the gates were skewed, literally leaning on the decrepit structure. I would never have paid attention to it in my life, honestly. Same as others did, apparently.

However, opening the gates - just dropping them to the ground, I did indeed find Syringa's old hatchback inside. And the roof, as it turned out, had not completely collapsed. Just a few centimeters below it were beams that held it up.

"Can you drive?" I asked immediately.

"You'll drive," he declared categorically. "If I pass out, we'll just crash at best."

There was no point in arguing, as he was indeed correct. And driving turned out to be not so difficult. As soon as I pulled onto the paved road, I felt perfectly in tune with the car, as if I had been driving for at least a month. Indeed, compared to my first experience, where I "marked" about four or five cars with mine while navigating around the houses, this was incomparable.

We left the industrial complex grounds without headlights. I really had to strain my eyes to make out the road in the moonlight and not accidentally wreck our only chance of escape in the nearest ditch. Several times I noticed the flashing lights of cars circling the factory in the distance, but we were already far away – we immediately took a dirt road that Malu showed, which could get us to the highway. Only when the asphalt rustled under the tires was I able to breathe calmly and turn on the headlights.

I drove where Malu, playing the role of a navigator, told me to. Occasionally other cars came into view, but I was more concerned about the police we could run into. We'd be in really deep trouble then, as I have neither a driver's license nor insurance. But we were lucky this time as well. Only once I noticed a patrol car lazily passing through an intersection about a hundred meters from us.

"Alex didn't know the truth," Malu croaked tiredly as we drove through the city to his apartment. "He thought he knew, but he didn't."

"I don't care," I shrugged.

"I do," he said emphatically. "I really did know those guys. I was fifteen at the time, and I messed up big time. They used to kill for that kind of thing. They came to punish me for it, to take away the most precious thing, but they settled for blinding. It did happen because of me," he exhaled heavily. "And I could have taken revenge on them."

"Why didn't you then?"

"Because in our world, there are no ponies shitting fruit rainbows," Malu muttered. "If I had done something to them, they would have killed her for sure. They practically did her a favor by just blinding her. Our relatives are our only weakness."

"You didn't take revenge because you feared they'd kill her?"

"I knew they would kill her if I started to take revenge. But Alex was right: she became like this because of me. If you get involved in this shit, sooner or later, you will drag your entire family into it."

"And the second time?"

"I don't know. There, I really don't know who did it. I haven't messed up since then."

Getting involved in this shit, sooner or later, you'll drag your entire family into it. That was pretty aptly put. It affected my family, too. And if I don't stop this, it will affect my family even more. Of course, I could try to turn to the house...

"If you turn to the house, they will most likely take all the money for themselves," Malu said as if reading my mind.

"Is this a warning?"

"Yes..." he wheezed a few times as if trying to clear his lungs. "You insulted them, spat in their face when you robbed their vault and took the most valuable item. They won't let that slide. They will want the blood of everyone involved, even if you come to them with an apology. Of course, you can negotiate your sister's life in exchange for the flash drive, but you are definitely a goner; there are no other options. The Kun-Suran House has always been known for its firm and sometimes cruel principles, like all the houses, actually."

I didn't want to exchange my life for Nataliel's in this way, considering there were no guarantees she'd be saved. I was ready to die for my sister, but by doing everything possible to save her, not by offering myself up like a lamb to some cocky assholes.

"Turn left here..." his voice was getting weaker and weaker. "That building... Hurry, Box, we need to get her out while we can. Second entrance, fourth floor, last door on the right."

I barely parked the car, pulling up onto the sidewalk, then yanked the keys out of the ignition and bolted out onto the street. I pulled out the gun I'd gotten from Alex while on the move. Malu was limping somewhere behind, having completely depleted all his strength.

Second entrance, second entrance, second entrance...

I repeated it to myself like a mantra, as if afraid of getting lost.

I finally made it to the entrance, and the mantra switched to another:

Fourth floor, fourth floor, fourth floor...

I struggled to make it up the flights, already completely out of breath. There was no strength left, no stamina, no any kind of vigor. By the end, I was leaning on the wall, practically crawling up to the fourth floor. But even then, I knew what I'd find inside already.