The sheer, unadulterated chaos was a physical weight pressing down on Alex. His mind, still reeling from the whiplash of death and rebirth, struggled to process the hellscape around him. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to hide, to simply cease existing in this maelstrom of violence. But where? Every direction offered a new vista of slaughter.
He saw the wolf-helmed warrior he'd narrowly avoided earlier regrouping with two others, their grotesque helmets turning, scanning the battlefield. Their attention hadn't been on him for long, but he knew, with a chilling certainty, that a target that vanished into thin air would pique their interest again. He had to move. Not just move, but do something.
Fight? The thought was ludicrous. He was a photographer, not a soldier. His hands, this new body's hands, were soft, uncalloused. He had no weapon, no armor, no training. What could he possibly do against these battle-hardened killers with their glowing swords and energy rifles?
Yet, the tingling energy still hummed through him, a frantic vibration promising… something. Power. Speed.
He spotted a lone figure in the dark, agile gear – one of the ones fighting the heavily armored knights – go down, an energy beam punching a smoking hole clean through their chest. The knight who fired the shot, bulky in his gleaming plate, turned his weapon towards another target. Near the fallen figure, a short sword lay half-buried in the blood-soaked mud.
An idea, desperate and probably suicidal, sparked in Alex's mind. Get the sword. Maybe I can… What? He didn't even know. But doing nothing felt like a death sentence.
He focused on the sword. He focused on the feeling that had preceded his impossible shifts in location. That coiling spring, that internal unwinding. He pushed.
The world didn't still this time. Instead, it jumped. He was by the fallen soldier, the stench of their cooling blood and voided bowels assaulting his nostrils. His hand closed around the sword's hilt – it was surprisingly heavy, cold, and slick. He yanked it free.
Too slow. Or rather, he was too fast in one way, too clumsy in another.
The knight, having dispatched his other target, was already turning back. The barrel of the energy rifle, glowing with residual heat, swung towards Alex. There was no time for finesse, no time for thought, only that raw, panicked urge to move.
Alex lunged, intending to bring the sword up, to deflect, to do something. But his body, this new, unfamiliar vessel, didn't respond with the practiced grace of a warrior. He overshot, his lunge too powerful, too uncontrolled. He stumbled, the sword flailing wildly. The knight, surprised by his sudden appearance, flinched, the energy beam discharging harmlessly into the sky with a deafening CRACK-THOOM.
But Alex was now practically on top of him, off-balance, the sword feeling like a lead weight. The knight, recovering instantly, let out a guttural roar and brought the butt of his rifle around in a vicious arc.
Alex saw it coming. He felt the shift in the air, the subtle telegraph of the knight's muscles. He tried to duck, to twist away.
Snap.
He was five feet to the left, the rifle butt whiffing through the space he'd occupied a millisecond before. But the knight wasn't alone. Another armored figure, this one wielding a massive, crackling energy axe, had seen the exchange. He charged, the axe held high, its edge thrumming with lethal power.
Alex tried to use the sword. He brought it up in what he vaguely remembered from movies was a defensive posture. The axe came down. The impact wasn't the clean clang of steel on steel he might have imagined. It was a brutal, jarring shock that numbed his entire arm. The short sword, not designed for such a blow, shattered, shards of metal flying. The force of the impact sent Alex sprawling backwards, landing hard on his ass, the breath driven from his lungs.
Pain, sharp and immediate, lanced through his arm. He looked down. A deep gash, courtesy of a flying sword fragment, was welling blood just below his elbow. Not life-threatening, but it hurt like hell.
The axe-wielding knight advanced, the weapon raised for a finishing blow. The wolf-helmed warrior and his companions were also now moving in his direction, their crimson optics burning with predatory focus.
This wasn't working. He wasn't a fighter. He was just… fast. And fast without control, without skill, was just a quicker way to die.
Panic, cold and absolute, finally overwhelmed any heroic notions. Escape!
He scrambled backwards, crab-walking through the mud and gore, his eyes darting for any opening, any path away from the converging death. The energy within him felt frantic, chaotic, mirroring his own terror. He pushed with it, not aiming for a specific spot, just away.
The world became a series_of_jerky_snapshots. Snap – He was behind a pile of smoldering corpses, the stench overwhelming. Snap – He was skidding through a pool of oily water, nearly falling. Snap – He was at the edge of the immediate melee, the sounds of battle slightly less deafening.
He wasn't controlling it, not really. He was just a pinball, ricocheting off his own fear-fueled power. Each jump was disorienting, nauseating. He felt like his insides were being twisted.
A stray energy bolt seared the ground where he'd been a heartbeat ago. He didn't even see who fired it. He just felt the heat, smelled the scorched earth, and pushed again.
He ran. Or rather, he jumped, in a series of uncontrolled, desperate bursts of speed, away from the core of the fighting, towards what looked like a line of shattered, burning trees at the edge of the clearing. He tripped over unseen roots, slammed into rocks he didn't perceive until he was on top of them, his new body accumulating a fresh constellation of bruises and cuts.
Each burst of speed left him more disoriented, his vision blurring at the edges, a high-pitched whine building in his ears. The energy felt like it was tearing at him from the inside, a wild horse he had no hope of reining in.
He burst through the treeline, stumbling into a relative darkness, the sounds of the battle receding slightly behind him. He didn't stop. He kept pushing, deeper into the woods, until his legs, despite the supernatural energy, felt like lead, and his lungs burned as if filled with the fires he'd just escaped.
Finally, miles from the battlefield, or so it felt, he collapsed at the base of a colossal, alien-looking tree whose bark felt like cool stone. He lay there, gasping, shaking, blood dripping from his arm and a dozen other minor wounds. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was covered in mud, blood – his and others' – and the grime of battle.
He had survived. Barely. Not through skill, not through bravery, but through a wild, untamed power he didn't understand and couldn't control. He was alive, but he was also utterly, terrifyingly alone in a world that seemed designed to kill him. The exhilaration he'd felt for that brief moment of frozen time was gone, replaced by a bone-deep terror and the bitter taste of his own inadequacy.
He was fast. But fast wasn't enough. Not even close.