130 Freeing His Prisoners (1/2)

In truth, there was little he could have done to prevent what had happened. They wouldn't have accepted him anyway, even if he'd tried to reason with them. His feelings of guilt and sorrow had festered for so long in depths of his heart that they'd taken a life wholly of their own.

The three tormented prisoners passed the point of no return the instant the fight began…

A loud, resounding crack echoed across the empty labyrinth, followed by a chilling scream. Reed puked up a gallon of blood as he struggled to fight back against their oncoming attacks the best he could.

He had nearly died. The clever ladies had gone for his heart. Her ebony hair and golden eyes would have been a sight for sore eyes had she not tried to rip his heart out of his chest.

Five fractured ribs.

Punctured left lung.

Bruised heart.

Partially dislocated right shoulder.

Overall, Reed was not feeling too hot. Thankfully, he was still alive. Barely. Had he not reacted fast enough, she would have torn his heart out without him even realizing it'd happened in the first place.

She was that fast. Her fighting style focused primarily on pushing her opponents into indefensible positions with peculiar, unpredictable techniques and superior speed. She preferred to strike only when a kill was guaranteed, for she was a perfectionist at heart.

The other one was an entirely different beast. She was an all-rounder who was capable of adapting to her prey's fighting style on the fly with her overwhelming combat experience. Of the two, she was greater evil by far.

She preferred to toy with her prey until she fully comprehended how they fought. Not out of curiosity for her prey, nor a desire to further grow her fighting repertoire and combat experience.

No… she just liked to completely break her prey before she killed them. And there was no better way to do that than to systematically prove to them that they did not stand a chance. That their death was all but guaranteed.

Reed panted in pain as he ran through a hundred different scenarios in the blink of an eye. None of them were viable, though. He saw within those hundred possibilities nothing more than a hundred dead endings.

Bisected in half. Heart torn out. Neck twisted off. Limbs ripped off.

Anima surged through every neuron in his overheating head as he pushed his power to the limit. He glimpsed into half-formed, unstable paths. An infinitude of future possibilities contained with the next five seconds.

He was frying his brain, but he could think of no other means of defeating them. They were far too skilled for him to handle, even if he did possess the upper hand when it came to raw power.

Was it cheating being able to see into the future? He didn't think it was, considering who he was up against. In fact, it was the only reason he hadn't died gruesomely… yet.

They were slowly whittling down every possibility that might deny them their kill — pushing him into a corner he'd never be able to back out of, even with his future predictions.

The more experienced one of the two had caught on to Reed's little trick. She found it amusing; befitting the nature of a rat — always looking for a way to escape and hide from predators. His predictive technique was troublesome, but it wouldn't be enough to stop her.

He needed to end the fight now and as if to answer his pleas, a single path appeared in front of him. A hopeless, suicidal path that fulfilled his conditions — that they both be slain at the same time.

Other paths focused on killing one of them at a time, but all of those resulted in brutal endings for Reed. It didn't matter which one he picked to kill first because they all ended the same way. The remaining huntress would always end up returning the favor afterward.

…So that's how it's gonna be, huh? I guess I deserve this…

Reed took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and focused on the Anima around him. He was going to need every last mote of it for what he was going to do.

The labyrinth groaned in protest as an enormous aurora formed above it.

A tiny sphere of brilliant light formed in Reed's hands — it was an old classic of Reed's pushed to Nth degree within his own subconscious where Anima was in infinite abundance.

Once Reed finally realized that he was not bound by the rules and limitations of the real world within his subconscious, he knew that anything was possible for him, too.