Lina struggled, but she knew it was useless. They had caught her at last. This is what she got for running away from the shadow.
The shadow had control over everything. Your life, your money, your business, you couldn't do anything without the shadow knowing.
And now he had found her.
"Find her and bring her to me!" The shadow demanded. "Wait a moment, no, leave her be. I will take care of her." He looked like a normal human being, but his fingers were a little bit too long, and his abilities were certainly not human. They were demonic. We don't know if it was because when he looked you in the eye, your soul fell to pieces and you followed him for the rest of eternity. We don't know if, when you disobeyed him, the shadow would simply stare at you with those cold, empty eyes, and you died. Just died. But that was all of the obvious stuff. No one had every defied him beyond death. Except Lina.
Lina Inverse had come in to the village and she went straight up to a restaurant. She ate her fill, paid her bill, and tried to leave the village. Those weren't the shadows rules. If you left the village, he killed you. Simple as that.
But Lina hadn't wanted to die, so she lived. Apparently anyway. The shadow had been busy so he sent his most merciless killing machine after her. Zelgadis Graywords. Zelgadis had never failed to get the job done. He had always gone in, killed them, gone back. But not this time. It was simply assumed that he had died, and Lina had walked away a winner.
But the shadow didn't believe it. Zelgadis was an assassin. He didn't care if his object of murder was looking at him or not, when he killed them. He just cut off the head and brought it to the shadow.
The shadow didn't thoroughly approve of Zelgadis's ways, he himself liked to toy with his object first. The fear is what drove him. But he never got Lina's fear, and neither had he gotten her head. And that left only one solution. Hunt her down and kill her himself. The fun way.