“But you can’t mean—” gasped Rainsford.

  “And why not?”

  “I can’t believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke.”

  “Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting.”

  “Hunting? Good God, General Zaroff, what you speak of is murder.”

  ― Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game

  ___________________________________________________________________________

  I can’t feel anything. It’s honestly almost fun. I’m behind the glass by choice, but my body agrees with me, natural human evolution pushing every concern and feeling beyond adrenaline and what’s necessary to move to the back. I know, logically, that if I could feel my breath, my throat and lungs would hurt. I know that if I focused, I could worry and be stressed about how loud my heartbeat is, how it’s pressing against my ribcage and already aching.

  I should really do more cardio, if I make it through this.

  I might not make it through this.

  I hear it behind me, getting closer and closer as I dash through the opening of the building. Right at my back, close enough that I can hear it panting, inhaling like an engine feeding fuel to vast chambers within it. Something cracks behind me- wood, splintering from an impact, the sound granular and sharp. I am already turning the corner, my hands scraping and stinging as I forcefully grab a wooden beam to turn the corner faster.

  Up the stairs. That’s my only chance, the only thing I can think of. The hallways down here aren’t huge, but they’re big enough for the thing to move through, especially if it still has the sort of agility it showed by running across rooftops. The stairs, on the other hand, are a bit smaller, especially with the way they turn halfway up, forcing verticality into the mix.

  It’s kind of funny, actually. It feels sort of like dreaming, like when you’re in a nightmare, and your body is full of adrenaline and fear-chemicals, but your mind is just sort of going through things, enjoying the scenery as you move along.

  In so many nightmares, your brain knows, deep, way back down, that you won’t die if it gets you. It’s like mine is trying to emulate that, here, now.

  I might not make it through this.

  The banister behind me cracks under catastrophic force, a hand as large as my torso putting the weight of a truly massive body onto the wood. My feet slam, pitter-patter heavy over the steps, my shoes sticky from work and nearly making me slip as I turn and sprint up the second set of stairs-

  I see it. In the pitch dark, as I scramble like an animal, desperate for escape, I see it below me, coming up the same steps.

  It has long, floppy ears and eyes deep-set into its face, but not like a dog, more like a man that’s been somehow stretched, the face pushed in until it’s half-concave and the back of the head pulled back until it droops in layers. The ears aren’t long like a beagle’s ears or an elephant, they are long, empty vats of skin, with earlobes at the far ends of them. Its eyes glint, black and empty like a doll’s eyes, like the eyes of an animal, all-black, only hits of white at the edges, and what takes me six steps takes barely a single reach of its arms.

  I am six feet tall, and it is taller than me while squatting. I weigh… more than I’d like to casually admit in conversation, and it could fit three of me in its belly alone.

  It bears repeating that its hand is the size of my entire torso- and the fingers beyond it are thick as arms, each of them bearing the strength required to crush me to death.

  I make it to the second floor, listening to the stairwell splinter explosively behind me as it’s briefly trapped. It tears its way free, the weight and force of it enough that the stairs fall apart- and then it just pulls itself up behind me, ripping the doorway open and shoving its bulk into the upstairs hallway.

  That’s the last thing I see before I turn the corner into a half-finished room, thin wooden walls blocking line of sight. I can feel my throat breathing, the cold and the sawdust thrown up mixing to make it feel ragged and raw. I can feel my heart beating so hard that it’s starting to hurt.

  I might not make it through this.

  If it gets me, it kills me. If it gets me, it kills me. If it gets me it kills me.

  It’s kind of fun, in a sort of weird, abstract way. I can feel my mind splitting along lines that I didn’t know were there. In one place, I am running so hard it hurts, grabbing an unfinished windowsill, pulling myself out onto scaffolding and unfinished roofing. In another, I’m whispering the same words, non-stop, over and over; if it gets me, it kills me. If it gets me, it kills me. If it gets me if kills me.

  And in another, I’m… here. Watching them both. Wondering about the fact that I might not make it through this.

  Isn’t that something?

  The wall behind me explodes, and it barely even slows the creature. It makes it through the room in a single loping motion, hitting the exterior wall and bursting through that just as easily, like a drunkard falling through paper doorways. I feel the house straining, pieces of its architecture swaying under its weight and with the force of its movement, and it very nearly throws me off my footing entirely.

  Ifitgetsmeitkillsmeifitgetsmeitkillsme pleasepleaseplease Idon’twanttodie

  I run over the rooftop, each step fumbling and awkward, desperate for balance. Its weight and size are impossibly well-managed by it, but they still exist, and that, in turn, works to my advantage, at least so long as it doesn’t get me. The momentum from its charge out the side of the house forces it to grab hold or fall off the roof entirely, and it has to pull itself up, the process tearing apart more of the structure before it succeeds, at which point I am already at the edge.

  There is another building. Half-finished, mostly wood, barely intact- and I force myself to jump.

  Each of the houses is built in a row, and that is one of the smallest possible advantages. I know what the interior of this condo is like, having lived for two years in the finished version next-door.

  I do not know if this roof will hold my weight.

  I know that ifitgetsmeitkillsme so it doesn’t really matter.

  I jump.

  I land.

  My ankle twists beneath me as I collapse forward, my face and hands slamming into sawdust and half-finished roofing. I feel heat in my face- I might have just broken my nose. I’ve never done that before. It’s hot, mostly. It’s wet, too, and I try to breathe through the pain and it hurts and it fucking chokes me, hot blood in my throat, in my face, hurting.

  The roof didn’t break. I’m still on it.

  If it gets me, it kills me.

  I get up. I have to get up. The alternative is to die, and I can’t die here, I don’t want to die here, and so I move.

  I limp, every step making my ankle scream, breathing through my mouth in heaving, ragged breaths, but I can walk, and I crawl-limp-walk as fast as I can to the nearest window, throwing myself through it.

  The roof behind me shatters as the creature gets its hands on it.

  It’s smart, or at least smart enough. Leaping, here, would send it to the lower floors- if I was worried about the roofing holding my weight, then it has to know that its own would destroy it entirely, force it down onto the ground floor and away from me.

  So it pulls itself directly, carefully, and in being careful is still so much faster than me.

  I’m in the room, my ribs and shoulder aching from launching myself through the window onto the wooden floor. I’m moving to the doorway, getting my feet under me, ignoring the pain my ankle makes in protest. It’s not broken, so it still works, so I force it to work because I’m going to run because if not this thing is going to pull me apart like a badly-made dog toy.

  I just barely make it out through the door before the creature makes it into the room. It doesn’t fit through the window, though it tries to, and it ends up distorting the frame before it gives up entirely, just pushing a hand through the wall and pulling itself in.

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

  I’m down the hallway, nearing another room, ready to repeat the trick- if I can get far enough ahead of this thing, if I can-

  No. From back behind the terrified little thing still running, I know for a fact that I need to do more than just run from one spot to another. Whether that means that I trap it, kill it, even just slow it down, doesn’t matter, but just running isn’t going to work. Moving from one house to the next was enough to fuck me up pretty badly already, I won’t be able to maintain it for the next dozen, and even if I could, what then? This thing is either going to smarten up and start tearing houses down or it’s just going to follow me.

  It doesn’t need to be smart- it’s shown animal intelligence at most, but that’s already more than enough to kill me, considering all that it can do. I need to do more than just run, because I need to be more than an animal. Between predator and prey, once the chase is begun, the prey rarely wins, especially not when it’s so outclassed as a creature as I am.

  I’m human. It’s beyond that.

  I need to do something it won’t expect.

  Rather than dashing to the next window, I turn, and head down the stairs. I hear it breach the walls, shatter the pillars holding up the ceiling above, following me at an almost casual, loping pace. It’s implacable, unstoppable, violence incarnate, and it intends to force itself unto me, with all that that violence entails. I can’t fight it conventionally, I can’t run faster than it, I-

  Focus.

  I dash back out the front door, but- no. No, I have to wait, I have to ignore the desperate animal instincts screaming in the back of my mind demanding that I run. If I leave now, it’ll just come out the next side wall.

  I don’t stop- but I do force myself to hesitate.

  Except once again, all my good wits are outplayed by the fact that this thing is fucking terrifying. Rather than go down the stairs, it hears me down below, somehow checks that I’m not upstairs, and then just… pushes the ground. Like a pushup- except that the hands go straight through the floor, straight into and through the wooden beams holding it up, spears of wood failing to go past the muscle of its palms.

  But not the skin. I see black fluid run down from the rafters above as it pulls the house apart around it, explosive movement and languid, predatory musculature opening a hole through the building rather than around it.

  I’m running again. It’s faster than I’d hoped, faster than I’d like, faster than me- so I have to be quick. The hesitation worked, if a bit too well, and now it’s where I need it, right behind me once again, the construction site in mid-demolition from its presence.

  I sprint away from the road, away from the ruined house behind me, away from the other intact homes- back towards the first building, the one half-collapsed that I just escaped.

  I make it in through the cavernous arch it turned the front door into just as it makes it out of the building behind me, not even bothering to maintain that doorway. It is torn open, ripped apart as if a car broke into and then through it, as the beast lets out the first sound I’ve heard from it besides that scraping noise- an annoyed little huff.

  Its so big, its lungs so vast, that it sounds an awful lot like an engine, some monstrosity of a truck roaring out as ignition runs through itself.

  And it’s just a huff.

  I think it would shatter my eardrums if it roared. If it got up too close to me.

  Barely noteworthy though, is it?

  If it gets me, it kills me.

  I’m in the hallway, looking around, half-limping, and- there. Amidst the debris, a piece of wood with the nails still sticking out of it, heavy and thick- not the sort of nails you use to hammer something in, but the sort that you use to secure a building with. Thick, heavy things that remind me of railroad spikes on a much smaller scale.

  If it gets me, it kills me.

  So I have to get it first.

  I take one big, deep breath, and then hold it.

  I have to be quiet. Being fast won’t win me anything here, and while hiding won’t save me, it might buy me an opportunity.

  One chance. Even if this works it might still get me.

  I track what I know of the thing- it’s unbelievably strong, impressively fast, and its back legs have, so far, gone underutilized. It’s still moving with them, but without being able to leap, and without a desire to sprint, it seems to prefer loping with its forearms, almost pulling itself forward rather than pushing with its hindquarters. It’s got long, stretched-out face, with tiny, recessed eyes, but eyes that are active, eyes that are tracking me and flicking around actively, consciously, awarely.

  It wants to hurt me.

  Its breathing is quiet, restrained- this isn’t even forcing it to pant, which I’m assuming means that it isn’t exerting itself much here- at its size, it wouldn’t be able to move at all, or even inflate its chest, without a powerful set of lungs. Its skin is tough, but the muscles beneath, tougher, denser, are able to push through wood that would impale a normal person all the way through.

  It’s so fucking dangerous, and I know so little about it, but in that list, there is one thing that I can use.

  Small, recessed eyes, but dilated. Wide, black, tracking my movement in the dark. It’s not using sound, at least not exclusively, and despite the shape of the “ears”, and the fact that it clearly can still hear me, that’s a lot of skin and stretched tissue rather than an oversized organ. It probably has a decent sense of smell, it would be too convenient if it didn’t, but that still leaves it, to my view, primarily focused on sight.

  I’m still holding my breath. It hurts.

  The front wall of the building is unmade.

  It would appear that I’ve annoyed it.

  What was once a busted-open frame, bent out of shape, is now nothing at all, an empty void of shrapnel and dark blood as the creature waves its arms and tears the front off of the construction site. It grunts, the sound like a slap of bass echoing through the first floor. It steps forward, its head sweeping from side to side, eyes wide and strange. From where I am, dead quiet, holding my breath, feeling the pain of it burning in my chest, I can see it.

  I’m holding perfectly still, perfectly quiet, underneath the ruin of the stairs. The details, banisters, steps themselves are ruined, but the frame is still present, leaning over awkwardly but held in place by nearby beams. If it has true darkvision, then I can only hope that wearing all-black in an all-black alcove is giving me something.

  The eyes are so fast. It looks stupid, pug or ape-like, but I can see them now, and the white at the very edges of them almost stutters, appearing and disappearing so fast that it confuses me- until I figure it out. The eyes are looking everywhere, pinballing, rolling like it’s in the midst of a seizure- and yet it stands, still, quiet, perfectly steady.

  I don’t know that I’m going to survive this.

  The creature takes one step into the space, two, covering most of what would be the living room in barely any time at all.

  My lungs are screaming. My throat hurts. I can feel my sternum aching, hurting, burning like it’s full of needles, my head starting to feel full, my eyes starting to ache- but I hold my breath.

  One large, slow sniff as its head pans back and forth, every bit the image of a gargoyle come to life and writ large.

  It’s so close.

  It takes one more step, one arm reaching into the framework of the staircase to secure it, to pull it up towards the second floor-

  I step out, swing and breathe, all at the same time.

  It’s a thunderous exhale. It’s a scream that makes my whole sternum shake and my throat burn. It’s a strike with my full weight behind it, swung in a desperate, last-ditch attempt that pushes everything into it.

  The improvised weapon is almost beautiful, here. Almost poetic. The nails, like the stinger on a scorpion’s tail, go for its face, arcing towards its forehead, almost inevitably reaching sharpened tips for its eyes-

  Eyes that are focused right on me.

  It doesn’t bother grabbing the bat. It just grabs my arm, in a movement so fast that I feel wind on my face.

  I inhale, feeling the pain of that more than the agony of my arm breaking, for some reason. Maybe it’s because I was expecting it, you know? It’s almost like-

  Oh fuck my arm.

  It snapped like a twig, and I can feel things I’ve never felt in my arm before. I can feel the shape of my bone, the space where it should be, and the many places where it now is. I can feel where my tendons should connect to my wrist, the space feeling weirdly loose without the tension of muscle. I can feel where my elbow should be connected to my arm bone, and where it’s been indelicately plucked.

  Ithurtsithurtsithurtsithurts

  I can see how blood flows from between its fingers, taken from what was once my forearm and is now pulp and shrapnel. I can taste my own blood in the air, stronger than even my nosebleed, taste some of the blood that spurted onto my face, into my mouth, and-

  ITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTS

  Huh. It’s interesting, watching this from behind the glass.

  Not that there’s much glass left. It mostly shattered alongside my arm, letting the world flood into me, forcing crimson into my mind in a way that should not be. But from behind what little is left in my rapidly flooding little control booth, I can see one thing.

  It was toying with me.

  It could have caught me before I ever ran. It could have caught me at any of the houses. The speed it moved at, the control it exhibited to move that fast, that precisely… it’s the difference between watching a cat lounge around and seeing it actually hunt.

  If I’d run, it would have caught me. If I’d hidden, it would have found me. If I fought back… well.

  IT HURTS

  It got me.

  Now it’s going to end me.

  It’s almost funny enough to laugh at.

  All that fear, all that animal desperation, and I was always going to die anyways.

  It politely tugs at my arm, and I see my hand, at the end of a clump of severed meat, land wetly among the ruin of wood and architecture.

  I don’t manage to laugh- but I get about halfway into a smile.

  It’s almost funny.

  I can feel blood leaving my head, leaving my body, flooding out into the world, killing me.

  The beast just… looks at me.

  Smiling.

  It’s got human teeth.

  I fall onto my knees.

  I feel myself going cold as blood spurts from my newly-acquired stump.

  I’m going to die here.

  OVERRIDE ACCEPTED

  Hmm? That’s interesting. Like little swimmers in my eye, but they’re forming words. Is this what going into shock is like? Maybe? It seems a bit strange.

  CONNECTION REINFORCED

  SYMBIONT ACQUIRED: Divine Bloodling.

  And then I’m no longer here.

  I’m… nowhere.

  And it’s quiet.

  And cold.

  And I’m gone.

  +8 (officially! KEEPS GROWING!) chapters on Patreon (one more than last week AGAIN! The value increases!), and more to come!

  And just for funsies, here's the discord!