Soon, I stopped running. The unevenness of the buildings blocked the figure of the Mayor from my sight. Now, I was alone. There was enough of a gap in front of me to see out towards the edge of the city and beyond. The dark wave had gotten closer. From here, I could no longer see the outline of the forest in the distance. I did my best to ready myself physically and mentally, trying to maintain the courage I had just been flooded with, but I found myself unable to sit still.
Jumping up a few progressively taller buildings, I ended up on a roof which provided me a better view of what would soon reach me. The shape of it hadn't changed since I first saw it. A dark, convulsing mass of shadow and nightmare which almost seemed to move as water. I knew that somewhere in there were individual beasts, Nightmares spawned of the void, but I found it hard to truly convince myself.
These few moments before this battle, the calm before the storm so to speak, may have been the most nerve-wracking of my life. There was nothing I could do. I had no control over anything that may happen. What would happen would happen whenever it chose to, not a second sooner or later. I understood this fact, but it didn't lessen the anticipation. I was stuck here, facing a fight far beyond my capabilities, void of any control of my own situation, and this was something that deeply disturbed me. Always had I had the opportunity to do something else, to run from a fight, to walk away from this life as a hunter, but I had never taken those opportunities.
In these moments before the battle, I contemplated on this mood, on the nature of choice and opportunity, and on what constituted free will. I found myself in a deeply unsettling situation as a result of countless choices I had made, but never had I been conscious of those choices. I was never presented with two outcomes and tasked to determine which was the best for me. I simply did; I took action for the sake of taking action. There was never a grander purpose to those actions. In a sense, I never chose to do anything. It's easy to say that everything can be broken down into action and inaction, but inaction itself is even a form of action. But there has to be a reason for this, surely; there has to be some purpose for these actions, even if I'm unaware of it. But if I am not aware of the meaning of my actions, who is? And if there is someone who knows why I do the things I do, despite putting no conscious thought into it, who's to say I'm even the one to choose? If there is a great, cosmic purpose my actions all point towards, will that change if I do or don't do something? If that purpose is unchanging, do I even truly make choices or have free will? How do I know that there is a potential future, a choice I could've made, where I wasn't stood here?
I didn't know. I don't know. I won't know.
I stood there in my moody, contemplative silence until the sound of a growing rumble pulled me out of it. No matter what, I had my mission, my momentary purpose, and I wasn't about to forsake that. By now, the wave had approached close enough for me to make out some features of its constituents, but nothing I saw made me feel any less helpless. Limbs covered in matted black fur, eyes reflecting the iridescent light of the bottomless sky. Truly a horrible sight to behold and something I wished in that moment, as well as many others, I would never see again.
Then it was upon us.
However, I immediately noticed something odd about the wave. As it reached the edge of the city, it seemed to thin. The innumerous beasts broke into hundreds and into tens, as though the whole scene from before was simply an illusion created out of my own fear. There was something about this change that gave me a weird feeling. Even though there were more Nightmares before me now than I had ever been faced with, the stark contrast the present image formed with the previous oddly set my heart at ease. At least until the first beasts to enter the town had nearly reached the house I stood on but the wave had yet to even slow. I couldn't even see the end.
As the creatures made their way through the town, I saw them dive seemingly at random into houses and buildings, usually causing them to immediately collapse. If it didn't happen immediately, the seemingly random thrashing that would happen after would inevitably bring it down anyway. This action confused me until they got closer, wherein each dive was followed by a scream. As they got closer, these screams were preceded occasionally by the sounds of a brief conflict. As they got closer, the sounds of a fight and the screams were always silenced with a wet squish or a crack. I took a few steps closer to the center of the house I was on as the first of the beasts approached me. I prepared for a fight, but it chose to dive into a building next to me and was shortly followed by the usual sequence of sounds.
More and more horrid animals rushed their way past me and further into the city, but none chose to attack the building I was on. I felt relieved by this, but also confused. All the beasts we as hunters fought had senses unnatural to us, strong enough to pierce walls or pick up on seemingly the smallest movement or noise from a near-impossible distance, and yet none of them noticed my presence. Their vision was possibly their only main weakness, but it shouldn't have been so weak they couldn't see me, even if they never specifically looked up. It gave me some much-needed confidence, but I was once again left with questions I didn't know when I would find the answers to.
I began to form a plan of action in my mind. Clearly, I couldn't jump down and start fighting as things stood, but the inaction made me antsy. I looked back towards the edge of the city, seeing that the horde still seemed endless. I knew there had to be an end at some point, and that it would probably stop just as suddenly as it had started, but all I could do was wait. Looking around one more time, I figured all the houses with people in them had already been taken out, at least in the area around me. Taking a small run-up, I began another roof-jumping chain, headed deeper into the horde. If the end of it wouldn't come to me, I would go to it.
I continued moving until I saw something that stopped me dead in my tracks. In the midst of the rushing tide of shadows, one paced leisurely forward. It was bigger than the others, its limbs thicker, its fur darker, with an unsettling number of eyes nestled around its body. But it wasn't the sight of the thing alone that stopped me, no, but rather the fact that as soon as I saw it I could tell that it had seen me. Unlike the others that simply kept rushing underneath me, heedless of my presence, this one actually took notice of me. Seeing me stop, it too stopped.
There was a moment we looked at one another, my two eyes locked with its many, the beasts parting around it like a tree stuck in a riverbed. I bent my knees slightly, preparing to move, and I saw its legs tense as well.
I flashed a teasing smile at it before turning and sprinting with as much force as my legs could muster, once again rapidly leaping from roof to roof for what was only one of the first times of many to come that day. The thrill of it gave me a rush of energy that completely shook away any nervousness I had. At least, that was until I heard the sound of multiple buildings collapsing in quick succession behind me.