You hear a noise again, closer this time, and you just about realize that the sound is the quiet shushing of something moving across the leaves littering the ground before you are bowled over by something hitting you from behind. Your sketchbook escapes your grasp, bouncing away, forgotten as you are pinned to the ground with something on your back. It takes a moment for your mind to catch up and realize that one of your arms is being pulled up behind your back by who or whatever is atop you, and trying to do the same to your other arm. Your first thought is that someone is trying to rape or mug you, but that thought is mostly cleared by a quick glance over your shoulder shows a roughly human shape squatting over your prone body, seemingly wearing some type of armor, though it is hard to be sure since you can’t quite focus your eyes on it, the edges of the figure blending with the environment behind it; not exactly standard wear for someone attacking a teenage woman in a forest.
You can’t get any leverage to try and flip your attacker off, so you try the next best thing: smashing your free arm back into the face. You are rewarded with a slightly loosened grasp, as well as the oddity of a splotch of color matching your jacket slowly spreading partway across the angular and extended helmet. You can’t take advantage of the situation or see the color starting to retract as you are seeing nothing but stars, blinded from the sharp lance of pain radiating up and down your arm from cracking your not-so-funny bone on a hard and relatively unmoving object. You manage to recover enough, certainly faster than your attacker, and twist your other arm free, shoving out from underneath and bolting off. Darting between the trees, you don’t even pay much attention to where you are going, just wanting to put as much distance between you and whoever that was. Your breathing comes fast and ragged and you can hear your heartbeat pounding in your ears as you run as fast as you can, avoiding slipping in the damp leaf litter.
A quick backwards glance to see if they are still pursuing confirms that they are, and quickly gaining. Just as you turn to look where you are running, you crash into something hard and unyielding. Slumped on the ground, you hold your head, trying to will the stars away again. As your vision clears, you wonder if you had blindly ran into a tree or something, but find that you had run into something far worse. Towering over you is another armored figure, roughly humanoid again but even larger, standing about ten feet tall and around three quarters as wide with an elongated helmet perched atop. This one’s armor doesn’t have that warping effect at the edges, metallic plates easily visible and shifting as it bends forward over you, a huge hand reaching down. Scrambling backwards to get away, you instead bump right into the legs of the first one. The big one takes a long step towards you and easily picks you up by your collar in a single hand, holding you in the air with your feet dangling above the ground. Hammering on the arm does little to the giant, only serving to injure yourself some more. The smaller one reaches up and grabs the back of your head, forcing it to the side and holding it as steady as it can with your thrashing. Striking out with your legs does just as well, but you continue to try anything as you see a pistol shaped device in the other hand of the one behind you. Your panicked flailing increases but can’t prevent the thing from being jammed into the side of your neck. A sharp hiss issues from it, and a warmth rapidly spreads around your body from that point, darkness quickly enveloping your mind, your struggles ceasing.
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