The Tyrant's Chase - A DBD Short Story

JDSInfinity

The Nemesis had arrived.

Maybe he hasn't seen me? No, thought Jake, quickly discarding the idea. The blood from his injuries had pooled around his feet, a trickling stream leading to the generator he was hiding near. The killers that hunted him and his friends weren't so blithe as to spare a glance at their empty surroundings and wander off. If he stayed, he was dead.

Jake broke into a sprint towards the structure nearest to him, a tall, wooden shack that creaked and groaned in the moonlight. If he worried the killer would find him skulking about, then his decision to run betrayed his presence beyond any shadow of a doubt. In the fog, the beasts that hunted always knew where you ran. Always. To bet against that, to try to hide from the raging murderers chasing behind you, was the domain of the foolish and the truly brave. Jake was neither. The only choice now he had was to make it to the building, buy enough time for his friends to either power the exit gates or to bait the killer into chasing after them.

The Nemesis' baleful red glare bore down on Jake's back. As he reached the doorway, Jake stuck his foot out and pivoted, changing his path. Now, instead of the interior of the shack, he raced along its outside, hugging the wall tight. He could only hope that it fooled the killer for a millisecond more, long enough for his play to work out. As he rounded the corner, he dared a glance back at the hulking monstrosity charging after him. Had the killer paused for a second? Jake couldn't tell.

But in front of Jake, hope. A narrow window, glass long-since shattered by a thousand swings and a million desperate vaults, rapidly increasing in size as he approached. The angle was a bit tricky, coming in from the side, but if he pumped his legs and left his feet at just the right moment, he could put a solid wall between him and the Nemesis. If he could pull that maneuver off, the precious seconds it bought would allow him to think of something, anything, to put a few more meters between him and the undead abomination behind him.

But the first thing to appear from around the corner behind Jake wasn't the Nemesis' withering gaze, but an angry, writhing tentacle. It almost seemed to have a mind of its own, driving the killer forward as it strained and cried out for blood. Jake willed himself forward, pushing himself as fast as he could go, but he had no defense as the whip came screaming down towards him. How long had the trial gone on? How many zombies had Jake narrowly eluded the clutches of? Now came the real terror, for the Nemesis grew stronger the longer it hunted, and if it had grown powerful enough...

The parasitic tentacle sliced through the tendons of Jake's hamstring and calves, a white-hot bloom of pain searing through the young man's legs. #########! The monster had gambled, leading aggressively with its whip, betting on the fear and pain coursing through Jake's lungs. Jake cursed himself for this mistake, stumbling and trying to keep his feet, when his head whipped forward as the shack raced up to meet him. 

Jake stuck his hands out, reaching for the window, and crashed directly into the wall.

What!?, thought Jake, reeling in fear and despair. The window, it had been... he looked over, just a foot or two to his right. Shock ran through him as he took in the edge of the window, and several meters past, the Nemesis reeling its parasitic whip back into its body. No... the adrenaline from the injury had sped him right past his goal. He was doomed!

Many hundreds of days ago, when he was new to the horrors of the trial, Jake might have given up. He might have run away blubbering as the killer caught up to him with ease, or stubbornly tried to reach back for the window, falling right into the killer's grasp. Once, he fell to his knees, begging the monster for mercy. He'd only received a sledgehammer to the side of his head as a response, and didn't he remember too much after that. But now, Jake knew that the only way to stave off the murderous blows of the killers were to stay alert, to improvise, and to keep moving forward. It didn't matter how much his freshly-bleeding leg hurt. He drove it into the ground and hauled himself towards the next corner.

Even with Jake's blunder, the Nemesis still needed a second to recover from the recoil of its ferocious attack. It was forced to watch as the injured survivor rounded the next corner, a shredded doorway with a large wooden pallet still propped up inside of it. A moment's salvation for the young man, another pinprick of rage assailing the monster's virus-addled mind. But the hunt was not lost, oh no. Many options still remained, and the Nemesis still held control of the situation.

If the wailing boy flung the pallet down, creating a blockage in the killer's path, the Nemesis could simply shred the barrier with ease, coaxing the NE-alpha parasite into the same violent rage that had just wounded his prey. But as quickly and freely as the Nemesis could summon forth this ability, it came with risks. Suppose the boy eschewed this means of safety, continuing straight past it, knowing how little of a threat the pallet was? Or perhaps he was even clever enough to make use of the precious few seconds in which the Nemesis would lose sight of him, using the tiniest lapse in focus to slip away from his pursuer's unending rage? Frustration welled in the Nemesis as it anticipated these strategies, complex vagaries of thought made relevant by such a small obstacle.

The other option was for the Nemesis to slow as he approached the window, observing the survivor's path. If the wounded boy's path should take him into the shack, the Nemesis could decide his fate at its own leisure. If Jake slipped up severely, it could even summon forth the parasite to strike him down from the outside the window, ending the survivor before he knew what hit him. But that had only happened recently with the most hapless of these scurrying little rats. Realistically, to slow down now was to kick the can down the road- and the Nemesis had no desire to wait. 

The Nemesis barreled past the window, following Jake's path exactly. The ground itself screeched with anticipation as the young man ran across it, brilliant scratches flaring up in exotic wavelengths of light visible only to those the Entity had granted the gift of further sight. One quick look around the corner confirmed that the boy had not skipped straight past the doorway, gambling his safety on a moment of confusion that would never come. He'd gone into the shack, just as anticipated. Excellent. The Nemesis willed the parasite out from underneath rock-hard plates of its muscles, promising it fresh blood and pain once again.

Jake swallowed the panic rising in his breast as he ran past the doorway, stepping past the pallet with no intention of throwing it down. He knew from experience how little those pallets meant to the Nemesis. For other killers, these obstacles could be an endless source of frustration, especially the innocuous-looking hunk of wood that always sat propped up against this particular doorway. But for this killer, throwing down that pallet meant flushing one of his best survival tools down the toilet. And he'd seen how aggressive and vindictive the Nemesis was during the hunt. It wasn't hard to picture it lashing out with its tentacle and tearing out his throat while he strained to drop the heavy block of wood. But his leg was tensing up. He couldn't keep running. Even jumping through that window again wouldn't work- the monster could just as easily snare his leg as he leapt through, pulling him back into its murderous grip. There was just one thing that he could do to survive.

With every fiber of his being, Jake willed his injured leg to stomp down hard, halfway between the doorway and the window. The floorboards rattled as he put down the final footprint of his chase. To the killer, it would be a beacon shining like a lighthouse. And the brighter the light...

The Nemesis barreled through the doorway, tentacle whip ready to slam down onto the survivor. The angry scratches led straight inside, towards the window that a scared rat would always run desperately for. But no survivor lay in sight, no trembling, fearful prey ready to be sacrificed to the Nemesis' undying rage. How could this be? Had the survivor used the last burst of his speed to leap towards the window, calling upon all of his grace and guile to glide through it without a sound? No, it couldn't be. The Nemesis had seen the fear in its prey's eyes. That wasn't its plan at all. No, there was only one place he could be...

Jake looked up at the killer, a mountain of blood, muscle, and rage, as it turned its shoulder slowly towards him and cast down its glowing gaze. 

Found you.

The pain in Jake's leg screamed as he tried to make his body move. The pallet was right there. The killer was right here. The Nemesis roared with rage as he spun around, slamming down the razor-sharp wire of flesh at the boy. Jake leaped, the players' wills colliding as killer and survivor both reached out towards their goals with everything they had left.

In the fog, anything less means death.

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This is my first post on these forums at all, so I hope you guys enjoy! Let me know what you think, if you want to see more about other killers, survivors, or perk interactions, and have a fantastic day~