Night in Blackmoor City was also night in the Nest.
Wind tumbled from the cracks between heaven and earth, tousling the hair on her forehead. Squinting, peering out from the hazy shadow of her lashes, Jin Xueli could barely tell if she was in the Nest or in Blackmoor City.
An abandoned, deserted Blackmoor City, where shadows twisted and the deeper you looked, the more horrifying the details became. At the intersection ahead, the green traffic light went out, replaced by a flashing purple one. The surface of the empty road was gripped by the purple light, then released. Gripped, then released.
Only the silence was honest. She heard no car engines, no rolling tires, no honking horns. She heard no conversations, no barking dogs, no vloggers narrating their selfies… At this moment, the only sound Jin Xueli could hear was the steady beat of footsteps.
TAP. The soft sound of her left foot landing. Before she could even lift her right, she heard another TAP.
The footsteps behind her had been following her for several minutes.
It didn't feel like a Hunter. Hunters who ran into each other in the Nest tended to keep their distance, warily sizing each other up. The constant, extreme danger kept everyone's nerves stretched taut, and no one wanted to stir up unnecessary trouble.
If it wasn't a Hunter, it had to be a resident.
'Should I pretend I don't know?'
Jin Xueli opened her phone's camera. Holding it close to her chest, she raised it just past her shoulder and quickly, covertly, snapped a photo.
She quickened her pace to put some distance between them and glanced at the screen.
In the photo, Jin Xueli's own distorted, smiling face stared back.
The teeth were white and huge, crammed into the mouth so tightly the lips could barely contain them. It looked as if it was resting its face on someone's shoulder while flashing a peace sign.
Jin Xueli recognized the shoulder at once. It was her own.
'What awful luck.'
"Get lost!" Jin Xueli growled without turning her head, slashing behind her with the Hunting Knife she already held, trying to force the thing back. "Who do you think you're messing with? You think I'm on my last legs?"
Silence from behind her. After a few seconds, she heard a low giggle in her own voice. "Hee hee."
'…Looks like it's not going to leave on its own.'
As unlucky as this was, it could have been worse. The thing latched onto her wasn't extremely dangerous.
This kind of resident was common in the Nest. Once they fixated on someone, they would twist their face into a likeness of their target, but it was always slightly off-key—an extra pupil in the right eye, a single black hole for nostrils, or, like this one, a mouth about to burst with teeth.
They followed their targets, wearing their own faces. Aside from being profoundly unsettling, they posed no immediate threat.
Only after the target was killed would this type of resident pounce, writhing on and sucking at the corpse. When it lifted its face again, it would be a perfect, identical copy of the victim. Some said it was because they longed to return to the human world and wanted to return to Blackmoor City in their victims' place—but that was only a rumor, not to be taken seriously.
In other words, they were like vultures in the desert, always circling above dying animals.
This particular resident, it had probably smelled the alcohol on Jin Xueli, noticed her still-unsteady gait, and figured she wouldn't last much longer.
Its skills, however, were inferior to its peers. A typical 'Vulture' could tail Hunters without being detected at all; this one, on the other hand, had loud, heavy footsteps.
But no matter how harmless it was, it was still damned annoying to know that thing's face was constantly floating over her shoulder.
She listened intently, her focus gauging the distance between the footsteps as she calculated a way to shake it off—when a thought suddenly struck her: 'Wait, something's wrong.'
A tremor ran through Jin Xueli. She stopped dead in her tracks and, without even getting a clear look at the road ahead, dodged to the side, her back hitting the fence with a DANG.
'That noise… who knows if it'll attract other residents…'
But this was no time to worry about what-ifs—she'd almost fallen for the "Vulture" resident's trick.
"Jin Xueli" was still standing a step or two away, watching her, the lower half of its face all smile and teeth. Its eyes, however, grew deeper and darker, looking more and more like a pair of holes poked into dough by a child's finger.
Jin Xueli tried not to look at it, instead glancing at the ground she had almost stepped on.
A long hopscotch court drawn in chalk stretched out before her, seemingly without end, covering the entire sidewalk.
The chalk was faded, lost in the dim yellow glow of the streetlight and the shadows of the trees. Without looking closely, it was nearly impossible to see.
The first row had four squares. The first three were blank, but the last one, on the far edge, had the words "right foot" written inside.
"Son of a bitch. So this is what you were waiting for."
Jin Xueli wiped the cold sweat from her neck with her sleeve and swore under her breath at her other self. "No wonder your footsteps were so clear. You were deliberately planting them in the silences between mine, just so I'd hear you..."
It was doing it on purpose.
It wanted Jin Xueli to focus on what was behind her, to fixate on the problem of "how to shake the Vulture." There are only a few ways to lose a tail, and any one of them would have involved her speeding up and stepping right into the chalk drawing.
If she hadn't landed on the "right foot" square with her right foot, she would have been in deep trouble.
"November 17th. Nest, Colorado Avenue. A chalk hopscotch game has appeared."
Jin Xueli opened her voice memo app and briefly described the situation. "'Although the 'Vulture' didn't take any directly harmful action, it displayed behavior indicative of luring someone into a trap… This is a new behavior. It needs to be noted.'"
She hadn't joined a Hunter Family Faction, so her intel gathering in the Nest naturally couldn't compare to the systematic, organized Household Hunters.
But she had her own way of surviving. She'd take the valuable information she gathered to a bar called Between the Backlight, where the owner, a man with a face like a Shar-Pei, would trade her for another piece of intel. He was like a walking information kiosk, or a primitive version of LinkedIn.
Putting away her phone, she looked around and had to resist the urge to sigh.
To her right was a row of stone-brick townhouses. Short stoops climbed to their front doors, separated from each other by hedges. The fence she'd just slammed into was just outside one of them.
Never mind that she was heading to the Museum of Modern Art; even if she weren't, you could never, ever just wander into a house in the Nest.
The street to her left was empty. She could just step off the sidewalk and walk on the road to get around the hopscotch court. Normally, that would work. But not now. The traffic light was still purple.
"If it weren't for all this crap, there's no way fifteen kilometers would take two days..."
Muttering, Jin Xueli secured her knife and phone, adjusted her hiking pack, cinched it tight at her waist, and placed her right foot inside the square.
She stood on one leg in the square. The last dregs of alcohol pushed at her ankle in waves. Covered in a cold sweat, Jin Xueli wobbled, steadying herself with one hand on the fence.
The square only said "right foot," so she couldn't dare add her left.
The smile on "Jin Xueli's" face was frozen solid, then began to slowly distort from the cheekbones out. One cheekbone protruded further and further, while the other began to slide down.
'Is it about to give up, seeing that I didn't fall for the trick?'
Generally speaking, when a Vulture lost hope of "replacing" its target, it would abandon the target's appearance, either morphing into someone else or retreating into the shadows to disappear.
According to other Hunters, watching your own face melt and warp off another's like a summer popsicle was a uniquely unsettling experience.
"Scram now and I won't kill you."
Jin Xueli tossed out the empty threat, turned back, and hopped onto her left foot before hopping to the middle square of the next row. The moment she landed on one foot, the heavy pack yanked her downwards, feeling as if someone had just jumped on her back.
Her arms pinwheeled a few times before she finally found her balance. In her head, she'd already killed that creep Anthony ten times over. 'Of course any trouble is his fault.'
'But if something good came out of this trip, like finding a valuable Illusion, that would be all me.'
The moment the purple light went out, she'd have to find a chance to jump off the sidewalk.
The first four or five rows of squares were still reasonable enough. Hopping forward on one foot while tipsy and carrying a pack weighing over ten kilograms was exhausting, but at least it wasn't impossible.
Starting from some unknown square, the words inside were no longer just "left foot" and "right foot."
"Left hand," one square read.
The squares on either side were filled with penalties— "Coma," "Lose all red blood cells produced in the last year," "Visit No. 87 Colorado Avenue."
Luckily, there was a utility pole beside that square.
Struggling, Jin Xueli hugged her pack with one arm, propped her feet against the utility pole to invert herself, and pressed her left hand into the square. She felt like an acrobat, her body forming a shaky, lopsided "Y" as she stretched a leg out, just barely managing to reach the next square.
"Trade food for the right to stand," said another square.
That wasn't so bad. Jin Xueli had plenty of food in her pack, and good food at that.
She stood on the space she'd purchased with a beef sausage, her limbs trembling as she rested for a moment. When she looked up again, she froze.
In every square ahead, as far as the eye could see, the same two words were written over and over again.
Be Copied Be Copied Be Copied Be Copied Be Copied Be Copied
'...All penalties?'
'Be Copied? What would happen if I stepped on it—'
A chill ran down Jin Xueli's spine. She slowly turned her head. Over her shoulder, she saw a profile, its cheeks full and swollen.
It had caught up again, she didn't know when, and she hadn't heard a thing.
She was only about a hundred meters from the traffic light. The purple light was still flashing, showing no sign of changing.
Her path to the Museum of Modern Art had barely begun, and already she was at a standstill.
Jin Xueli thought of the "Nest's Latest Hit Song No. 1."
Funnily enough, only that "song" could truly express how she felt right now. If sung aloud, it would just be one long, human howl after another.