The beasts he had left quickly ignored their former target, who had just disappeared from in front of them, and turned their attention toward me, regaining their single-minded focus I had become used to. I ran around for a bit, dodging their attacks and weaving through them while dealing damage to specific ones. After a short while of this, I managed to deal with the ones that had been left over and was luckily granted a break from the usual flow.
I looked around, double checking that the coast was really clear before making my way towards the fountain and sitting on the edge of it. I took in the carnage around me. Black, dissolving corpses were littered throughout the front half of the courtyard, the two rings we had formed while fighting were nearly completely covered in a thin layer of this Nightmare-juice. There was a haze beginning to form in the air over the battlefield, comprised of the airborne flakes of these creatures as they decomposed. So far, I hadn't felt any ill effects from it, but it wasn't the most pleasant thing to breathe in.
As I sat there, the sound of fighting from a ways off eventually made its way to my ears. The primary sound was rubble being tossed around and the few still-standing buildings being gradually demolished, which implied that there wasn't much actual contact being made between the two combatants; more than likely, one was running from the other. The town was otherwise abnormally quiet, meaning this noise echoed throughout this whole area. This near-cacophony combined, the phosphenic sky, the mostly destroyed town, and the decaying masses of flesh surrounding me created a truly dreadful image.
I sat there looking at this, thinking of all the effort we had put in to get to this point. So much death and it had yet to finish. We, or rather I, had killed so much in this day, and I wondered what gave me the right. I was still alive after all of this, even after admittedly almost dying a few times, and I didn't know why I was unique. Fundamentally, I wasn't much stronger than any of these things on their own, much less when they were in a group this large, and as had been proven, there were many that were much stronger than I was. Yet I had directly been involved in killing many of these and I remained alive. It surely couldn't have been pure luck, could it? Not for this long, surely? At any time, one more thing could've come running out of somewhere, outside my periphery, and that would've been it for me; at any point, I could've slipped on one of the stones that made up the courtyard, and it all would've been over. During any one of the fights, I could've missed a swing and lost my balance, and that would've been it; during the fight against the big beast, had it decided not to gloat and simply gone for the throat, as a beast rightly should have, that would've been it.
For what was a result of my own actions, I could explain it as my own skill. Even though I may not have been the best, I was confident I could at least be consistent. But for everything else? There were so many things that were out of my hands that could've happened that simply didn't. To put it very simply, I got lucky. Thinking of this, I realized that rather than having multiple points at which I came close to death, it would be more accurate to consider this whole day as being close to death. For the last several hours I had been sprinting atop the thin wall that separated the waking nightmare from the infinite dream, teetering between the pure light of day and the abyssal night. The times I had felt I got close to dying I had simply lost my balance for a moment. This idea left me conflicted. I was of course happy to still be alive, but a part of me felt it was undeserved, like I hadn't done anything special to earn this gift, not when so many men and beasts alike had fought just as hard as I had and still ended up dead.
But I had fought, too. It would be a lie to say that I hadn't fought for my right to live, even if I didn't feel that I had necessarily fought hard or well enough. They had fought and lost, I had fought and won. How much luck factored into any of the situations was impossible to know. Fate, if this is what it was, was incalculable, as many who had tried to calculate it had proven. Meanwhile, I was nowhere near as equipped as those people, so any speculations towards fate I may have had were just that, so I pushed it out of my mind. What was, was. There was no changing it now, for better or worse. Time continues forward and us along with it. I decided to try to only focus on what I knew for certain, and that was comprised of two things: I had fought to the best of my ability, and I would be dead if not for the Mayor, and by proxy Erin to a lesser extent.
Thinking of the Mayor again, I began to wonder what he had gone running after. Clearly, it had to be something important for him to drop everything else to deal with it, but I simply didn't have enough information to go off. His exclamation implied that it was something big, maybe not in size, but I got the feeling that whatever it was likely had a big impact on this event as a whole. I felt like I didn't need to worry about him, as he seemed like someone who wouldn't throw himself into a situation he couldn't handle, but a pricking anxiety began to form in the back of my mind, nonetheless. At some point in this, he had become a sort of rock for me, a solid point to cling to amidst this rushing flood. Not being able to see his ever-confident visage that made it seem like everything was under his control began to make me feel like it truly wasn't, a feeling which wasn't entirely wrong.
Thankfully though, the sounds of the chase kept on in the background, meaning he continued to live. Given the echo, it was hard to pinpoint where they were exactly, although I got the impression they had circled me a number of times, and that they were gradually moving closer. Soon, that feeling was confirmed as one specific occurrence of the echo made itself louder than the others. It continued growing louder, and I stood up, realizing there was a decent chance they would end up back at the courtyard. It continued growing louder, eventually starting to drown out the echoes of it, and I began to grow anxious in anticipation. It was coming in at an angle, not straight on from any one direction, meaning it was hard to judge how close they were exactly, and how much time was left until they'd be upon me.
The buildings that remained were scattered but were offset in just the right way to block my view deeper into the city in any direction. Being essentially blind and only being able to hear something approaching heightened my anxiety. I continued to listen closely, trying to gain as much information as I could, when the noise suddenly tapered off, stopping at some point behind one of the few remaining buildings around the courtyard. I readied myself.
Suddenly, the sound of rubble moving briefly and the solid thump of a hard object hitting flesh resounded, followed quickly by the sound of multiple walls being broken through. Soon, less than half a second after the sound of the impact, the center of the wall of the building on the edge of the courtyard exploded outward, a small black mass coming out with it and landing a short distance away, bouncing a few times before stopping. I lifted my gun towards it, but it didn't move. Keeping the barrel pointed towards it, I looked through the hole left in the wall, seeing several more walls with similarly sized holes leading back to a grinning, mustached face. He jumped, landing on the roof of the building before jumping down into the courtyard next to me.
"Little shit gave me a good chase. Flighty and feisty things, incredibly annoying to deal with because there's nothing they avoid more fervently than a frontal confrontation."
I looked at him, then looked down at the thing that was only a bit bigger than a cat, although significantly more grotesque. The skepticism was evident on my face.
"Don't look at me like that, now. They'd give even the fastest sprinters you could find a good run for their money. It's called an Angler, and you can consider it to be the leader of a beast wave."