Alex desperately hoped time would freeze, that it would stretch into some impossible stillness and grant him the chance to run far from this chase in which he was the prey and the goblins the predators. He wished for time to pull itself thin and last an eternity, because that was the only way he could stay safe and alive. As things stood, time felt as though it could stop at any moment, as though it could cease to exist altogether, only for him, and perhaps only because of him. And yet, if time lasted an eternity it meant he would be alive, but if he died, who would even care about eternity.
What in the world am I thinking? Alex slapped both his cheeks hard, and in doing so he finally managed to calm his thoughts, which were in no way in their normal state. They were in complete disarray, with no proper beginning and no proper flow, just a jumbled mess of nonsense that swirled without meaning. He shook his head. What had he even meant by wanting time to last forever.
Alex stole a glance back at the goblin warrior that had been hellbent on wanting to reduce him to nothing, to leave him like the many skeletons that were scattered across the ground, and found the distance between them had closed to only a few dozen meters. The goblin warrior was far closer to Alex than the rest of the goblin swarm, and from the way it moved, Alex could already piece together the fact that this humongous creature would catch up to him. He could not help but feel threatened as the image of the wooden club the goblin warrior carried over its shoulder rose unbidden in his mind, a club that was as long as Alex himself and wider than even him.
He swiftly grabbed a long femur bone from a skeleton that just so happened to have its lower body lying in his direction. While he had been going for the bone below the knee, he saw that the femur was more robust and that decay had not taken it away completely. And, it even popped out instantly with a crack. However, now that he had the femur gripped in his right hand, Alex could see that it had some black dents along its rear that he had not noticed before. The bone was brown and muddy with a few pale white blemishes, and it almost looked like the bone had not once been cleaned in centuries, perhaps in a millennium.
Alex quickly picked up his pace again, but the few seconds he had wasted claiming the femur from the ground had been a completely wrong decision, as the goblin warrior was viciously closing the gap between them. Then, like some hidden reserve of energy that Alex never knew existed inside him, a surge coursed through his body. It was adrenaline, something he had read about in books, something that humans felt whenever they were in a dangerous flight or fight situation, something that could give a human inhuman strength in their moment of greatest need. Like revising the particular passage he had read about adrenaline, Alex felt his legs stretching out in longer strides, his blood pumping harder against his veins, and he could hear it moving rhythmically along his body in a steady roar. He could feel his veins bulging out and becoming visible along the back of his palm, and for a fleeting moment, he truly believed he could escape and find some place to hide.
But he did not. The last desperate effort from his body, his body understanding its own perilous state and attempting to save itself, turned futile as his back was struck hard by a flying wooden club. He only felt it when it hit him like a giant wagon, and his body arched violently forward. He staggered and fell to the dark solid ground, his body rolling continuously, jumping over cracks and stumbling over small rocks and the scattered remains of bodies belonging to who knows whose or what creatures. He finally stopped as his front slammed against a large dark rock, as dark as his current situation.
"Argh!" Alex screamed, and the world turned dark and distorted into a swirl of myriad colors, mostly a deep void-like black, visceral and gore.
Alex squeezed his eyes shut to stop the swirling of reality, to try to numb the pain, and with a scrambling effort he pushed himself upright. He quickly opened his eyes. His eyes stopped at the goblin warrior who was reaching for the wooden club lying on the ground. He also noticed the femur he had picked up, lying beside the wooden club.
Alex's heart started hammering harder inside his ribcage and his palms became slick with sweat. He felt he could do something, right at this very moment. He could perhaps deal a hit and cause some damage, because the goblin warrior was showing its back to him and was bending its huge body forward in an opposite direction. It was funnily struggling to do given its cruelly large frame, its arms not managing to completely reach for the wooden club from the ground.
Can I? Will my attack even leave a dent on that muscle-filled, steel-like body? Alex could see the veins and bulging muscles of the goblin warrior as it desperately tried again and again to reach for the wooden club, its hands never quite closing around it. He doubted whether his attacks would even register as damage. What if his reckless attempt at demobilizing the goblin only landed him in deeper trouble.
Alex's eyes shifted toward the goblin swarm coming from behind the goblin warrior. They were far back, their small bodies and the huge wooden weapons they carried making their walk clumsy and slow.
Run. Alex immediately turned and dashed in the opposite direction. He felt foolish. Utterly foolish to have wasted even a second thinking about attacking that monster. He should have run long before. He complained and whined at himself inside his own mind.
He did not look back, but he heard a loud, furious shriek from behind him that belonged to that level thirty monster, enraged at having let its prey slip away.
Alex turned his eyes all around, desperately searching for any safe haven that might keep him alive.
"What in the world is this place?" Alex cried out. "Why is there no terrain to hide?"
Then suddenly Alex's gaze turned upward and his breath stopped inside his lungs. His eyes shook and his pulse seemed to pause for a full second, because what he saw was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Two moons hung in the sky, one a vicious dark bloody red, twice the size of the other, which was a pale white just like the moon from his world. Both were apart yet seemed to maintain a consistent distance between themselves, and the red moon looked as though it were seething in anger while the pale white one looked as though it were calming both the red moon and the world below it from the wrath of its friend.
Truly beautiful, for a place like this.
***
"What is this?" Alex muttered, his mouth falling open as he sucked in as much air as his lungs could hold, his hands resting on his knees and his body bent forward. He had been running for so long that he had lost track entirely of how many hours had passed, and he would have allowed himself a smile had he found some place to hide or something worthwhile to fight with, but that was not the moment for it. From the horizon behind him, he could already make out the shapes of goblins still running in his direction.
"What is this bubbling red ocean?" Alex breathed, standing before what he could only call a hell. Or more precisely, the path to one.
What lay before him was a vast red ocean the color and consistency of blood, with jarring dark roots springing up from the ground within that vicious red liquid. It was not the end of the strangeness, either, because this body of water, this pond or ocean or whatever he ought to name it, stretched before his eyes and diminished into the far horizon in the way that only an ocean could, which almost perfectly matched every description of oceans he had read in books or heard in stories from the princess.
It was boundless, red, and bubbling with small red fluorescent bursts that bloomed and cracked apart before sinking back into the surface. He turned his head left, then right, and there was no way across.
With each passing second he stood there trying to understand what he was looking at, he noticed he was sweating heavily. At first he thought it was simply from running, but he had been mistaken. As he dragged in more air, he found he was breathing in heat. This whole place had been warm previously, and he had not noticed in the chaos of simply catching his breath, but when he stepped forward and extended his foot toward the red ocean, the sole of his shoe was reduced to ash before his leg even touched the liquid. A heat so fierce it felt like it had bitten through his very foot laced up through his leg, and Alex screamed and immediately pulled back, rubbing his foot desperately against the ground and trying to calm the burning, but the ground itself was warm and it was not working.
He stumbled back and put as much distance as he could between himself and the red ocean, then dropped to the ground and pressed his saliva against the reddened skin of his foot, which had gone pale and was already beginning to contract and writhe as though it were alive. He could see it turning red, and then slowly darker.
"Aaah," Alex cried out in pain, barely holding his tears back, unable to find any relief. His foot was bare now, the upper part of his shoe had fallen somewhere near the ocean's edge, and the lower part had been completely burned away, some portion of it melted into his skin and mixing with it.
Unable to calm the searing heat in his foot, he rolled across the ground, dabbing more saliva onto the burn, but the pain would not subside. He kept on screaming, biting his tongue, striking his own thigh and even his own foot in a frantic attempt to displace the agony.
"Argh, please, someone save me!" Alex cried out for help.
***
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