"Now you die, human. Slowly and with pain."

The initial fright and shock of the encounter with the alien had left me. All that remained was the pain.

Pain as real as the being that had just mortally wounded me.

Just that sting of the blade and the sinking realization that I was soon to be dead. The two forces seemed to war with each other, my mind playing the mediator between them. A sliver of anger and a notion of revenge panged from within, but I was crippled beyond hope. I had no defense and this thing knew it. I looked upward then, defeat my only attribute. Its form towered over my own, lingering above me for a moment so that its four jaws could spread wide, bearing the inner teeth in what I assumed was its expression of a grin.

Already, the ambience seemed to dim, the foreboding of my passage beyond this existence. I lay on the ground, slowly bleeding from the inside as it stepped over me and paced away with a hearty roar that could almost pass for a scathing laugh.

"Warriors!" It shouted, the voice fading as it ran toward its allies. "Intruder-humans have entered the sacred shrine! Search until you find no others!"

Voices carried on far away, faint and incomprehensible. In a few seconds, it was silent.

The pain was too intense to notice anything else, so I tried not to move. The more I focused my thought on such agony, the worse it felt. Moving made it that much worse. What I'd done to deserve this sort of death, I couldn't know. All I knew for certain this moment was that I had mere minutes remaining here on this far away world.

At least I had Eve in my final hour.

I glanced her direction a few arm lengths away. She'd meet an exact fate. She met my gaze and offered a weary smile.

Her upper body had been gouged out much like mine was. My heart could no longer function correctly and her lungs were surely destroyed. We were both done for.

I wasn't sure if any of this was avoidable. It was our fate, it seemed. In my last moments, all I could do was remember how we got here.

And it's true, what they say…

My life flashed before my eyes.