Drip. Drip. Drip.
The twilight above leaked through East Forest. Its silken glow merged with the stinging cold of rain onto Tomoe's cheeks. As he lay there huddled against a tree, crimson leaked out of his abdomen through an open hole slashed horizontally across his grey shirt. His eyes were void of thought - of feeling, of emotion. Scanning aimlessly across his body, his gaze wandered. How long had he been here? Was it a miracle that he had yet to die, or a curse that his death would be drawn out agonizingly slow? In the rare occasion that he read on his travels, he researched across his year of adventure - browsing tomes to discover the secret powers of vampirism. Legends held that vampires could regenerate due to their lack of internal organs, but Tomoe held neither the intelligence or the willpower to activate that latent power.
Thus, the rogue could only pathetically slide up the tree against his back slick with falling rain, meandering to the left and right in an attempt to regain himself and at least have his soles touch soil once more. Try as he might however, there were cuts and bruises lining up and down his body; some of which indicated a dislocated ankle or perhaps even a broken leg.
His eyes dashed to the right side of his vision when he heard muddy footsteps and grunting a number of yards east of him. Tomoe's survival instincts kicked in at that moment, and maneuvering to slide across the wet dirt and grime with a wooden spike sticking out of his chest, he threw himself into the thick bushes like a marionette on a string.
Rolling into the brush, he had just enough strength to turn his head to the left to peer through the bushes to see weighty boots covered in dirt and blood walk by the main path he was slumped next to mere seconds ago. If not for his unnatural silence it's likely he would not have made it this long, but especially now he found himself praising whatever forces conspired among each other out there to grant him that skill in that specific instance.
Digging his nails into the dirt, he pulled himself along further parallel to their path to continue observing them.
Sure enough...
Tomoe saw their familiar attire and gear. They were the same group that dragged him into this mess, and given their patrol along this road and shifty eyes there was no doubt in his mind they were here to finish the job.
The injured and bloodied vampire decided that his ability to reject noise itself would be a curse after all once a macabre thought invaded his mind. Before the thought could even finish, his hand moved with instinctual precision on its own to rip the spike out of Tomoe's chest like a glued bandage off of a since-healed wound. To a normal man this would be the part where his screams of anguish and misery alerted everybody in a kilometer's radius to his location. With help from his own innate stealth though, his pain was so quiet that one could hear their own heartbeat before they would ever hear him scream.
In the evening glow the man would look as a shambling corpse rising from the grave the way he leaned on his sword and his left foot to drag the rest of the useless parts of his body forward.
With death in his eyes, Tomoe moved forward on the energy reserves of sheer rage and killing intent to blend in with the shadows as he pursued the hunting squad ahead of him.
To take his mind off of the pain, all the moonlit corpse could do was reflect on his past actions, and how he arrived at this position in the first place.
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Last edited by Tomoe on Tue May 07, 2019 2:05 am; edited 2 times in total