The night wind chills the lone woman to the bone as she walks along the moonlit path of dirt, the leaves and grass rustling in her ears as the surrounding trees shake with an almost ghastly ease. ‘Where the fuck is the town,’ her wary mind wonders. Her patience was wearing thin, and it was becoming almost too dark. She kept on her journey regardless.
Snap.
A twig breaks somewhere behind the tiring traveler. Upon instinct, she turns, but her eyes, after scanning the immediate area, produce nothing. A sigh, a prolonged glance behind her, then she moves on. ‘Don’t start playing tricks on me, brain.’
Next comes the audible breathing. At least, what sounds to be. Heavy, yet calculated and muffled breaths behind her on the same side the twig broke-the woman freezes, back completely straightened up now. She focuses hard on the mostly-clear noise, then whips around when it still goes on, heart now thumping in her chest.
Nothing.
‘That couldn’t have been the wind.’ The thought is enough to make her left hand slowly begin to let the small, engraved dagger slip from the sleeve. Another twig seems to break, and the woman’s eyes dart from the path to the brush on her far left.
‘Slow breaths, clear mind, focused senses. Remember your training, Lara,’ she thinks.
But her stalker doesn’t care for trivial matters like fair combat.
The breathing is behind her now.
Standing hairs, trickling skin, and wide eyes as the woman known as Lara swipes her dagger horizontally in the air behind her as she whirls around with a warrior’s quickness.
All she hits is air, however. A blank, literally wooden face sends a wave of hot washing fear down her entire body as she stares into the two seemingly never ending, black, empty abysses that are the eyeholes. She can barely make out a minuscule glint in the right one that show an eye. A few seconds go by as Lara just stares. The breathing continues the same as her vision slowly picks up an eye behind the mask in the ethereal darkness.
A black, soulless orb. Devoid of care, empathy, or compassion. The longer she stares, the colder and harder the stranger’s stare becomes.
The orbs are filled with rage now, but it’s one she’s never even imagined before. A new kind. Anger in its purest form: black, unlimited, untamed, uncontrolled wrath. Unbound and free from the chains and shackles of a regular human soul.
“Wha-” is all Lara can muster before her trained instincts break her from her fearful state. She strikes first again, this time aiming her dagger downward as she steps forward with mock determination.
A hand seizes her weapon one, and the other forcefully grips her throat. The figure’s shoulders and chest rise and fall as the breathing becomes enraged now; all calculated prose in it now seemingly entirely absent.
Just anger. Just hate.
Lara is about to scream, before training her composure once more, avoiding any and all eye contact with that dreadful mask that will simply paralyze her once more. She brings a knee up to her attacker’s ribs as hard as her mind will allow.
Nothing. There’s no armor, no obvious protective muscle or fat she could feel beneath those black clothes; nothing. He had to have felt that. Wait…is it a he?
Lara’s eyes invuntarily climb back up to meet that artificial face once more.
They just stare into her. Those fucking eyes.
That fucking mask. It…looks like a woman’s face!
Another knee is brought up to the stranger’s groin this time. ‘Let’s see which one you are!’
Still nothing. Not even a mere grunt from behind that hollow, lifeless faceplate.
Lara’s adrenaline is lightening her head and clouding her thoughts at this point as she stares into the chest of the opposer.
“What…are…you?!”
The strong hands holding both her wrists still in the air begin to shake, both grips tightening. Significantly. The stranger simply and slowly tilts their head to one side, the breathing somehow subsided completely for some reason.
For a short while that seems an eternity, there’s just the silence and the stare as the two are unwillingly embraced in the moonlight.
Then there’s the scream. The lone cry lost in the invisible, inconceivable blackness of the night. The cry no one in the nearby town, Lara’s destination, will hear. The cry even the animals will have forgotten in the mercy of dawn.
The same cry the killer has heard so many times now.
Just like mother…
