Alone
The screams of my people still echoed in my ears. The days had blurred together since those fateful moments and part of me wanted those days to end. Only part of me.
I crouched behind a bush, listening for the tell-tale heavy breathing of the Venator – my hunters. Nothing moved in the undergrowth. The trees around me were cold and calculating, their boughs shrewd as they stared down at me. The nights on this planet were some of the coldest I'd experienced. Frost already formed on logs even though the sun had set barely an hour ago. The night air was still, and I wished dearly for a nice warm tent and hot tea. However, no matter how hard I wished for these things, they wouldn't come true.
A mechanical buzzing pierced the silence. The Venator were coming. As I watched, the Ring came to life, blue light whooshing through the metallic circle. A tiny pinprick of light in the distance.
It hadn't always been like this. Once, I was happy. I had a family. I had a home.
Now, all I had left were the clothes on my back, the bag slung over my shoulder and my knife. It was either fight or die and I didn't want to die. Fear drove me more than my desire for survival, and I knew that even if I managed to avoid the Venator that came through the Ring of the ancestors, there would still be more. There were always more. I peered around the bush. They weren't here yet, but it was only a matter of time.
How long had it been since I'd had a full nights' sleep? I was so tired… it would be so easy to close my eyes and finally rest…
A twig snapped. I froze. Nerves swallowed me as I spotted a figure moving through the trees and toward my position. It was humanoid but couldn't be considered human. Their height was much more than the average human – their skin tinged green, their eyes yellow and their feeding slit on their right hand that signalled death. Every Venator that had hunted me looked almost exactly the same.
The Venator trudged along the forest floor, staring into the tracker strapped onto its wrist. I wished that I'd known about those trackers when I was first released. Its heavy breathing reached me, barely a few metres from where I crouched, and it snarled.
Then it cried out as the ground beneath it fell away and it landed in a pit of spikes. It struggled to free its legs from the mass of spikes, and I emerged from my hiding place, knife at the ready. Its head whipped up at the noise and it fastened its hateful glare on me. My resolve hardened. I raised my knife and sliced off its head in one clean sweep.
Once its body ceased twitching, I searched through its person to find anything I could trade. There was only a pair of thermal goggles and a stunner. I left the stunner behind and took the goggles. What would I need with stunners? I didn't want to stun the Venator – I wanted to kill them.
"I won't die like this," I swore.
As long as my death wasn't at the hands of a Venator, I would welcome it with open arms.