Play it smart

Before either you or Citrinas can react, Fenri leaps forward, her speed befitting the hero of the hunt as she appears mere inches away from the two of you. You try to use ice magic to block her, but curse mentally as you remember that Citrinas' previous spell drained all the moisture in the air. You feel a pain in your gut as she sucker punches both you and Citrinas in the gut, knocking the air out of the two of you as she grabs you both by the arm. Still stunned from her attack, you can't even get a single breath in as she throws you across the room, both you and Citrinas flying through the open doorway and entering the toxic smoke cloud she emerged from.

You crash into the hallway outside, sucking in a mouthful of smoke on accident as Citrinas joins you, slamming into your body as she also inhales the smoke. Though you're unaffected by the smoke, you see Citrinas' eyes droop as she exhales quickly, fighting to stay conscious in the thick cloud. She weakly tries to **** her eyes open, but it's a futile gesture as she passes out in mere seconds, the poison far more effective on humans than monsters. Grabbing her **** body in a princess carry, you try to run away from her, puffing up your cheeks to pretend you hadn't inhaled the smoke with Fenri on your heels.

Though she is following you, You can sense that she is just walking towards you without a care in the world. From her point of view, the area was locked down and you were a level 1 alchemist one breath away from passing out. There was no rush for her to chase you, giving you some breathing room as you ran to the guild's front doors.

You see the handle for the door is frozen shut, while the windows have ice covering them. You grab the doorknob and try to use instinctive magic to **** the ice to move, only to find the ice actively resisted your magic power. You don't waste your time trying to brute **** it, your power far beneath Citrinas' or Tristiana's. You detect Fenri descending the stairs and look at you, the beastly woman tracking you with ease despite the blinding smoke concealing your presence.

You run to a window and look through it, finding that it too was sealed off with magical ice. Despite that, you punch the window, hoping to shatter the ice and only shattering your fist in the process. You repeat this process, running around the guild and searching for some exit from this hell as Fenri continues to slowly walk forward, the hero's pursuit a slow march. The only reason you weren't captured wasn't because you were particularly clever or fast, but because Fenri was actively trying not to catch you and mentally rebelling against her orders.

Wait.

That's it!

A genius idea hits you as you run to the second floor, entering one of the alchemy labs with the fume hoods still closed. Since the fume hood was closed and had a vent directly to the outside world, the air in there was technically still clean. This didn't mean much for you, but you didn't want Fenri realizing you were immune to poison just yet. Grabbing a metal knife used for cutting herbs, you enter the fume hood and close the door behind you, sitting within the clean air as you try to stay calm.

There had to be an exit to this place, or else Tristiana wouldn't have sent Fenri in to pick the two of you up. You tell yourself this was your only shot of surviving as you sense Fenri open the door and slowly walk towards you. She stops in front of the fume hood, her face indisputably one of disappointment as the green eyes peer down on you, still retaining the eerie glow they had earlier. It seems she expected you to keep running. You hold up the knife you stole from the lab and place it against your own throat, preparing for the gamble of a lifetime.

"Another step and I'll slit my throat!" You warn, her green eyes glowing brightly as every muscle in her body tenses up like you had shocked her. You see that even she's shocked at her body's response, Tristiana's orders far more potent than she had anticipated. She was ordered to capture the two of you as unharmed as possible. Can't capture a dead body. Maybe you were bluffing, but she couldn't take that chance. After all, she had to do everything in her power to harm you as little as possible.

"Okay, I'm not moving." Fenri says, smiling within the smoke as you worked to ruin her mission. From her previous outburst, you could tell she was still conscious despite the mind control. Rather than being aggravated by your scampering around and desperation, it felt like she was mentally cheering you on.

"Tell me where the exit is to this place!" You demand, drawing blood with the knife to let her you meant business.

"One of the windows on the 2nd floor only looks frozen. You can break through with a swift kick." Fenri answered giddily as you nod.

"Go break that window and return here." You demand as she nods, the glowing green eyes fading into the purple smoke as you close your eyes, honing your senses to keep track of Fenri as she makes her way through the building. You hear glass shatter before she makes her way back to you, the glowing eyes once again focused on you. You can't tell her to just leave you alone since it would go against her primary directive, and you can't hope to overpower her with your body weakened by the city. There's only one card for you to play to give you a snowball's chance in hell of escaping. You pray Citrinas' little trivia from day one wasn't BS.

"I want you to explain to me the rules regarding a hunt." You order as the glow in her eyes fades slightly, the mind control loosening as she grins, her face now completely bestial as she begins speaking. It seems the goddess of the hunt was willing to help her hero out if it meant she could see a fun fight. Crying shame she wasn't getting anything of the sort from you.

"A hunt can be declared against anyone I desire once a month. If the target is killed, then they give triple the experience points and I'm allowed to permanently claim 10% of their highest stat for myself. If I fail to capture or kill my target within 24 hours, I'll suffer a debuff for a week. Outsiders who interfere suffer a debuff to all stats and are given a bounty. Since you're weaker than me, you'll get a 5 minute head start and all my blessing from the goddess of the hunt will be suspended against you." She says, her words coinciding with the intel Citrinas gave you on the first day.

The two of you share a smile, realizing there was a way for everyone to make it out of this mess. Both of you knew you could never take Fenri in a fight and escaping her was impossible. You could, however, run to someone like Harvin or Mathias to beat her into submission. As long as you found someone like them or even a team of guards who could still beat her despite the debuff, all of you would be able to survive.

"If you declare a hunt on me, you have my word I won't try to harm myself or Citrinas." You state as she wastes zero time, holding her hand up and clearing her throat. You feel some unknown **** wrap around you, the sensation not unlike Citrinas' Domain ability as your heart begins beating erratically. You feel some sort of chain wrapping around your heart, every pump agitating the chain as it tightens around you. You'd felt your heart get vaporized by holy magic, but this felt different. It felt like your very soul was being shackled as every cell in your body now a sacrifice to the goddess of the hunt.

"Hunt!" Fenri shouts, the chain tightening around your heart as you throw the fume hood open, abandoning your knife as you sprint to the broken window with Citrinas on your back. Leaping out the window, you use instinctive magic to seal the window shut with a fresh layer of ice while condensing the mist around you into loosely compacted snow to cushion your fall. Despite cushioning your fall, you feel something snap as the combined weight of yourself and Citrinas bears down on your legs, your fractured limb healing in the blink of an eye. Standing back to your feet, you begin running to Mathias' estate in the vain hope of being saved.

4 minutes.

Though the thick fog does nothing to restrict your perception of the area, you're nonetheless unnerved as you hear thousands of low moans of pain around you, the fighting completely halted in the few minutes you'd been attacked by Fenri. Your heightened perception only worsens your nausea as you find men from both sides of the conflict barely able to stand, each and every one of them suffering third to fourth degree burns. It didn't take you a lot of time to deduce that they had been burnt by the superheated steam that resulted from Citrinas' golems being destroyed, their proximity to them leading to both sides being eliminated in one fell swoop. It was doubtful any of the soldiers would be useful in even slowing Fenri down. With that in mind, you begin chanting an ice spell, praying you didn't need to use it.

3 minutes

The estate was 5 miles away from the guild, but you could take an alternative path or trip Fenri up by leaving a false trail. No, there wasn't a point to that. She was a specialist in tracking targets and you had zero time to prep. You continue chanting while you run, storing the data in your head. You'd have a spell ready for her the second she arrived.

2 minutes

As you run, you can't help but think of what you're in for when Fenri arrives. A light exchange from a self proclaimed former hero of magic and a hero companion was enough to destroy the city, wipe out thousands of men, and fracture the land itself. Fenri was supposedly a newly summoned hero, but you were also a newly summoned monster. There was little doubt that she could stomp you into the ground.

1 minute

You finish calculating your spell, committing the values to long term memory in one of your monster cores. Though the fog engulfing the city was eerie, it gave you a stable source of moisture and restricted sight, allowing you some semblance of stealth as you ran and the ability to repeat the same spell if you stayed in areas high in moisture. You begin calculating another spell, preparing to store it into your second monster core. You also begin thinking about a plan to deal with her absurd speed. There was no way to beat her, but there had be a way to slow her down.

And time

You don't know how long it will take, but you know she'll catch up to you in no time. Your only benefit is that the first minute or so, she'll take it easy on you due to her orders of avoiding as much harm as possible. Threatening suicide won't work again since she'll probably just dump a healing potion down your throat if she thinks it's impossible to catch you without you slitting your throat. Still, you've got some distance between her. You've ran about half a mile since you started. You'd have run further, but carrying Citrinas on your back added an extra 100 pounds.

-15 seconds

You sense something in the fog. It's faint, but it's fast. Absurdly fast. It's following your trail. It's at the very corner of your perception, but it's gaining on you. You don't need to focus on it to know who it is. You're almost embarrassed to think you had a chance of outrunning her. Top athletes in your home world clocked in at about 23 miles an hour at their top sprint speed. Considering the scale of this world, hitting a 30 mile per hour sprint speed wasn't too absurd.

-90 seconds

Fenri catches up to you as she holds her hand up, as though she were trying to grab the air. Though she isn't too far away from you, she's dead silent. Had it not been for your heightened perception, you doubted you would even realize she was running behind you. Suddenly, you see a pair of bolas appear in her hand, the hero likely pulling them out of some pocket dimension. It seems Fenri had the Gamer HUD cheat and could pull things from her pocket dimension at will.

Holding the bolas above her head, she begins spinning them around, the weights at the end of the string reaching maximum velocity in seconds. You feign ignorance, focused solely on escaping her as she prepares to let go. You can sense that she's devastated by this and actively resisting, trying to shift a finger to release the bolas prematurely. Soon, she throws them full speed at your legs, her every movement as silent as ever.

CLANG

Using instinctive magic, you create an ice spike behind you, the throwing weapon wrapping around the decoy while you continued running forward. You can see her break into a glowing smile at her botched attack, continuing to chase you as you swallow a mouthful of spit. It was an easy enough counter, but you knew this was the last time it would be this easy. The longer you ran, the more power she'd be justified to use to stop you, and the the more she'd be able to hurt you.

The real fight was starting now.