It was almost an hour into our escape training. As I had learned from our long-distance training, carnivore beastborn were faster than other races, regardless of distance. There was no hope of catching up with the tiger- or pantherborns. The dragon girl was the one exception. At the very start of the race, she pulled ahead of the leaders and vanished into the rain. It would probably do me good mentally to just consider her an outlier.
Snakeborns were not easy to classify compared to other beastborns, and I was currently keeping an average pace in relation to the cohort. There were several children running alongside me. As for the traps, by following the paths of those ahead who had avoided them, I wouldn’t have to look out for every single one. They were only a concern for those at the front and those isolated at the back. Now and then, I did see children trigger one and collapse. Exhaustion must have been clouding their judgment.
I heard panting from behind me, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw a group of four, maybe five, children closing in. I moved to let them pass. As they did so, one of them barged into my shoulder, pushing me off-balance. I fell face first into the mud.
They laughed at me. When I raised my face from the ground, I was unsurprised to see that I recognized them. The deerborn (or perhaps reindeerborn) boy at their center was the same kid who was whispering with the snakeborn girl.
“I don’t remember doing anything to you,” I said. “Care to fill me in?”
The children exchanged a glance before laughing again.
“Hieda told us to mess with you, so we are,” the boy said without a hint of shame.
Hieda was the snakeborn girl. I had heard the other kids calling her that in the dining hall. From what I knew about her, this was probably revenge against the dragon girl. She wasn’t powerful enough to retaliate directly, so she instead sought satisfaction by bringing the dragon girl’s “follower” down a peg. I couldn’t understand the mentality behind strategizing this childish bullying during a potentially lethal training exercise. Didn’t she have any hobbies?
I didn’t immediately respond to the boy.
“Wanna make him take another trip?”
“Yeah. Hieda’ll be happy if we beat him up! But let’s not kill him!”
“Right!”
The kids openly discussed the violence they would inflict on me. None of them had grown past the point of lisping. From the dragon girl’s punishment, I’d learned that the innocence of children made it easier to provoke them to savagery and violence.
I studied the kids’ positions and the terrain around us. Then, surrounding my body with essence, I kicked off the ground, right toward the boy blocking my immediate path.
“Hey, what are—”
The sole of my foot buried itself into his face before he could finish his sentence. I gathered even more power in my leg to send him flying. With that, I darted through the newly open gap in the ring of children surrounding me and started to run.
There were four left. All of them were beastborn, types that were superior in speed. They would catch up with me in no time if all I did was run. Instead, I jumped up a tree off to the side, kicked off its trunk, and twisted back toward the way I had come.
From right behind me, the deerborn widened his eyes as he watched. “Wh-What?!”
The jump gave me some height, allowing me to drive my knee into his jaw.
Sputtering, he shouted, “You’re not getting away!”
He snatched the hem of my clothing. Blood was streaming from his chin, but he was still grinning. I delivered a backhanded blow to the side of his skull. He let out a short laugh, not releasing me even as he staggered. I tried to twist his arm, but the other three kids caught up.
Using the deerborn boy as a shield, I continued moving so that they couldn’t surround me, and then I kicked him forward as far as I could. His companions caught him before he hit the ground.
In the pouring rain, the least fun game of tag I had ever been in began.