Cyrus Solaris
I was thankful for what the teachers did; getting rid of two hundred students felt like a blessing from the high pantheon itself. Even though I'm currently in fourteenth place, what I did to accomplish that came at a great cost.
Beaten and battered, I felt like my body was barely holding on by a thread, my mind trapped in a fog, struggling to operate the way I needed it to.
I needed rest, but there was no way I could afford to stop. With all of our names displayed on the map, I would soon become a target for many. The cave I found could only protect me for so long.
With my back against the cave wall, I tried to meditate, hoping to ease the mental backlash from overusing gravisense.
I needed it desperately.
Clasping my index fingers to my thumbs, I allowed the moist cave air to fill my nostrils slowly before releasing it through a shallow exhale. My heart rate finally settling after having an exhausting bout with my adrenaline. It took ten cycles before my body was fully relaxed.
My body needed sleep, but Gramps taught me this was the next best thing. The fog slowly started to clear out, and I could feel my brain begin to fire as it did before.
Even though I felt I shouldn't, I let myself sink deeper into meditation, hoping to find my way back into the gravisense state.
The fatigue dulled my senses; I could feel distortions, but the sensations of mass rippling through space were faint, and the range was drastically shortened. I exhaled.
Better than nothing.
Maintaining the state, I finally opened my eyes, and the darkness of the cave greeted me. I pulled out my communicator, and saw an hour had passed. Leaning over to my good arm, I hoisted myself off the ground.
Opening my dimensional storage, I grabbed a couple of celestial cores from behemoths I had slain during the past few days. I wanted to save them for later, but the leak from my core and the overuse of gravity well said otherwise.
While I drained cosmic energy from the cores, I felt a few faint ripples over the cave. With my senses dulled, I pulled out the map, and I saw four students on top of the cave.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I hurried and absorbed a few more cores. Just as I finished, I felt dozens of ripples start to bombard my senses.
Opening my map again, I saw that the number of students was the same, and they didn't seem to have moved. What is going on out there? A shiver ran down my spine as an eerie feeling overcame me, leaving me feeling like a sitting duck.
Forcing cosmic energy into my legs, I darted out of the entrance of the cave. The only direction I focused on was straight ahead, knowing that if I took any observation elsewhere, I would slow myself down.
Just as I felt I was putting distance between myself and the four students, something tightened around my ankle and lurched me upward.
Hanging upside down, I saw a fine thread laced with cosmic energy wrapped around my ankle; the more I struggled, the more it tightened.
"So this is the guy in fourteenth place," A kid with red eyes and grey skin said, crawling down the trunk of a tree on all fours.
"Doesn't seem that impressive," another kid identical to the first said while playing with a wire-like substance.
Immediately, I grabbed the stag horn wrapped around my back, imbued it with cosmic energy, and cut through the thread. Right as I severed the connection, a piercing sensation penetrated my layer of cosmic energy and punctured my abdomen.
Crashing onto the ground, barely missing a boulder, my eyes locked on a massive falcon. I activated Gravity Well, accelerating its descent into my blade, I thrusted upward. My blade plunged through its wing, forcing it backward with a screech of agony.
"Looks like he has some fight in him," teased a voice from behind me.
Snapping my head toward the voice, I saw a panther stalking me, its fangs glinting in the moonlight.
"Great Sol, I'm screwed," I muttered quickly, trying to deduce my next course of action.
In the midst of trying to form a plan, the panther lunged, closing the fifty-foot distance in an instant. With cosmic energy surging through my tattoo, I desperately felt for the sinking plane of space under the boulder in front of me and forced it up with my cosmic energy. Making the boulder float in the air at the last second, blocking the panther's assault.
Quickly, I jumped and flipped over the boulder, prepared to strike the panther with the stag horn, but I was snatched out of the air mid descent and flung back near the opening of the cave.
I expected to crash into the hard and wet surface of the cave, but what caught me was something entirely different: a net, no, a web of thread lined with cosmic energy, the color of steel. "I would stop if I were you," a kid crawling on the web said.
"Brother, he's a Bennu. They don't think much," the other said, snapping his fingers, causing razor-thin hairs to pierce my body.
"Funny how the school chose an enclosed forest. The perfect place for a spider to cast their web."
"Thanks for the save, I thought I had him for sure," the panther said as it shifted into the form of a student.
"It's fine, we're a team, that's what we are supposed to do. But is your cousin ok? I think his arm is injured."
'He'll be fine, missed all the important parts. But what are we gonna do now that we've got him trapped?" the shape-shifting kid asked.
"We use him as bait."