CYBER INSIDES.

juice & bones.

‿෴ don't leave us behind ෴‿

There was a maw dripping pomegranates crawling towards her as she tried to push herself back. Amber eyes stared back at her, their glow increasing as the two had a staredown. It wasn't going to hurt her was it? Could she get the chance to tell them she loved them one final time? Would it allow her to die swiftly?

Soft droplets pinged through the air as they held eye contact and she shivered as her back met the wall, the creature prowling closer as she exhaled. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right, and she didn't deserve this. It stopped and sniffed the air before wiping its chin of the blood.

"Friend." Echoed through her mind and she yelled as it gripped onto her leg, dragging her towards it. Her fist slammed into its head as it yanked her forward, limbs flailing to grab onto anything to use against it, and it slowly lowered its fangs to her shin.

"Skin."

▎cyber insides – arc one, chapter two.

Now that she had decided to show her face and let it be known that she was one of their reapers, multiple patrols had been dispatched to just hunt her down: she knew it too. They weren't stopping anyone that didn't look like her or that had no potential to be her.

Multiple times she had been forced to slip into an alleyway with a hand over her mouth to keep her breath as quiet as possible as a patrol passed by. Panic drumming under her skin while attempting to not move too quickly with the risk that she'd kick a can, and then she'd be drugged back to the compound. The things she was forced to do because they made her into a walking corpse.

The whole time she had been lurking through the streets, she had kept an eye out for 431 or anything that could resemble him, but hadn't seen a single sighting of him. Seoul was big, yes, but she should have seen him once if this was a normal area he came through.

Her backpack hit someone's shoulder and they turned shooting sharp insults out of their mouth that she just grimly smiled at. How polite some people could be to others even when they never knew who they were. Her stomach grumbled loudly enough that the person cut themself off, and they stared at her with wide eyes for a moment. The moment turned awkward enough that she just turned away, her steps light as she walked away leaving the person behind.

Though she couldn't shake the feeling that they were still watching her even two blocks later on when she was scaling the side of a building. Yet every time she turned around there wasn't anyone there. The feeling was making her paranoid as she began to check over her shoulder more and more, enough that when a can was clanking behind her she turned around with panic coursing through her.

She wasn't prepared to be put back under, forcefully or willingly, and it was deteriorating her mental state increasingly per day due to the stress she had accumulated. It was beginning to become a little too much for her to deal with yet she didn't know what to do. Her head hadn't stopped pounding the whole time she had been on the run; the wear and tear only doing worse to her perseverance that she began to hallucinate the further she went.

Sometimes she saw the flames licking up the sides of the buildings as she leaned against a wall holding her neck while muttering to herself, and it wasn't as if she didn't know that she was acting insane. You would think it would have been starvation or the patrol that would be her end but no, it was about to be her bashing her skull into the wall to try to focus for longer than a few minutes. Maybe she had a concussion but who was she to know? Never once had she ever wanted to become a doctor.

The hint to surviving, one of which she had always listened to, was to not draw attention to yourself and she had done the exact opposite. There were two times that a patrol had spotted her and led to her panicking enough to where she had hid away for days, but it still wasn't going to be the last time she was looking out of her peripheral for an armed mecha behind her.