Shade continued running, deep into the city.
He had taken a good minute to stand on a rooftop, as stupid as it was, to scout the whole layout.
He knew where he was now, and he knew how to get out. The city had three walls. The outer wall, which kept people out entirely. The middle wall, which separated the slums from the normal living district. And the inner wall, where the rich people, nobles, and high-brow officials lived, with the fanciest restaurants and establishments money could buy.
He was currently in the middle district. His goal was the outer wall. To get there, he needed to keep moving.
Guards had already been mobilized. By now he bet every single one of them had received word about him. He was running through the market, having ditched his hoodie for a cloak pulled off a clothing line, when he got spotted.
The guards were on edge, stopping anyone that looked remotely suspicious. He slowed, tried to blend in, but they started pointing and charging toward him anyway.
He kept running, trying to figure out what was giving him away. Then he realized. His prosthetic leg. It stood out no matter how he dressed. And if he wore a cloak long enough to cover it, that would only make him look more suspicious.
Either way he was stuck in the same dilemma, so he kept running. He killed the few that got directly in his way, pushing down market stalls, leaping over grills and butchered meats and skewers, running through shops and out through their back alleys.
He changed directions multiple times, but his destination stayed the same. Every time he got cornered he shadow stepped out. Every dead end he hit he went over the wall and took to the rooftops.
The guards gave chase but couldn't keep up, their armor slowing them down against a man wearing nothing but clothes with no underwear.
He kept moving. Jumping, ducking, redirecting. Eventually he shook them off and reached the middle wall. This one had fewer guards, fewer eyes on the ramparts, badly maintained stonework with gaps where the mortar had given up.
He shadow stepped over it without breaking stride. The other side hit him immediately.
Rundown houses packed together like they were holding each other up.
Clothes hung on thin lines strung across every gap between buildings. It stank like redditors basement.
The streets were narrow and filthy with human waste. This was where the darkside of the city lived. Where people who had lost hope stayed, alongside the cutthroats and criminals who fed on them.
Running here would make him stand out, so he slowed to a walk. He hadn't gone twenty steps before he noticed someone following him.
The footsteps were light and careful, it couldn't be a guard. Most likely a pickpocket or a thief trying to get lucky.
He kept walking, till another set of footsteps were coming from ahead. TS was a group, clocking them both before they stepped into view.
To his right, a taller, bulkier man with a club. Behind him, the scrawny one who had been following him, brandishing a dagger.
The bulky man spoke first.
"So you finally noticed us, saved me the hassle." He rolled his shoulders.
"Hand over everything you have. Right now. Unless you want to get fucking killed. Only people running through here are people tryna escape."
"So we'll let you through for a little toll fee. You pay up, or he stabs you, I beat you to death, and we take whatever we want off your body anyway."
Shade looked at the two of them.
He almost laughed. He had been staring down the tigreal less than an hour ago and now he was being robbed in the projects by obesity and malnutrition.
He blinked slowly. He wanted to mess with them, genuinely, but he was still being chased and was now at the city limits. There was no time to waste."
He shadow stepped behind the big man before he could speak. One kick directly to the back of the knee, dropping him. Then an elbow to the back of the head as he bent over.
Before the man could process what had happened, Shade grabbed him, used his own weight against him, and slammed him into the ground, ending the conversation.
The scrawny man took one look at what happened to his partner and ran.
Shade went through the big man's pockets without ceremony, grabbing whatever his hand closed around without even looking at it, pocketed the coin, stealing his clothes, and kept moving.
The houses thinned as the city gate appeared ahead. The guards here were fewer, shit armor, with the awareness of Helen keller.
He watched them from a distance, working through the carts and people passing in and out, inspecting contents, waving people through, all of em were tired.
He waited until a cart was rolling toward the gate, shadow stepped underneath it, and grabbed hold.
The cart stopped at the checkpoint. He held his breath, pressed flat against the axle, listening to the guards move around above him.
The thud of crates being shifted. They let it through. He smiled, word hadn't reached the lower walls yet.
Most likely they expected him to hide somewhere in the city and wait for things to settle before trying to slip out. That was the rookie move. He had been in this game far too long to make it.
The cart wheeled out of the city and kept going. Five minutes later he heard it. Shouting, then hoofbeats, a group of soldiers riding hard toward the road. Word had finally reached them.
He shadow stepped off the cart and into the bushes before they got close, landing low, already moving.
He kept shadow stepping forward through the undergrowth, deeper and deeper, putting distance between himself and the road until the shouting faded and there was nothing around him but trees the dark and the sound of his own breathing.
He searched until he found a small alcove cut into a rock face, barely large enough to call a cave, hidden behind a curtain of hanging moss..
He crawled inside and stopped. For the first time since the window, he was still.
He sat with his back against the stone and tried to catch his breath, and that was when he felt it.
Something was wrong, fundamentally wrong inside his body. He started coughing, wet and ragged, and when he pulled his hand away from his mouth it was dark with blood.
Then he felt the warmth running from his eyes and knew without looking that it was blood too. He opened the system.
WARNING.
HOST BODY IS FAILING.
The vessel is too damaged and too weak to sustain the volume of power channelled into it by the God of Destruction and Darkness.
At current rate of deterioration, the host will die. Shade stared at it.
"What the fuck."
He tried to move and couldn't. His limbs felt like they belonged to someone else. He could feel himself getting weaker with every breath, the strength Nolthar had poured into him now tearing through him from the inside like a current through tin wires.
His lungs were heavy, his breathing became ragged. His body hit the ground Gracelessly. He hasmd lost total control his movements.
He watched as his skin began to peel away from his arms, dropping in dark wet sloughs like something rotting from the inside out.
He tried to lift a hand to look at it properly and the motion felt like moving through concrete.
Then his prosthetic leg slid off, there was no longer enough flesh on the bone to hold it. It just separated from him and lay on the cave floor like it had never been part of him at all.
He lay there watching his own body come apart and found, somewhere underneath the fear and the confusion and the blood filling his throat, that he was angry.
"You bastard," he said, or tried to. It came out as something between a word and a cough.
"You brought me all this way just to kill me. I swear if I get you when I die, Sean combs gonna have nothing on me"
He felt his vision going dim at the edges.
"You're gonna regret this you spineless loser."
Then everything went dark