She dropped the rag and it immediately caught fire. She jumped back as the flames ate at the path of rags all the way to the car's gas tank, in which they silently disappeared for a split second, followed by an enormous explosion. Twelve had turned and run the very moment she had dropped that last rag, but she still got blown in the air and landed on the half broken down wall of what must have once been a house. 

She groaned and rolled onto the ground, holding her left side. How badly does it hurt to break your ribs, she wondered, because I’m at a ten out of ten here.

She breathed through her teeth and watched the beast throw itself into the air, almost like a horse rearing, and then run towards the blazing fire she had created so fast that she wouldn’t have had time to hide anymore even if she could have.

It pulled its long, wiry arm back and slammed it against the car, which flew up in the air and landed only about a meter away from her, releasing hungry flames in every direction.

She screamed before she even realized it. It was just an instinctive reaction, one single slip, but with that she had pretty much signed her own death warrant.

The monster snapped his head up, its reptilian eyes widening as they focused on her. Flames licked at its feet and stomach but aside from a low growling, it didn’t even react. Or it at least cared more about her than it did about burning.

She scratched her palm on the rough stone of the wall behind her as she grabbed it to pull herself up. She crawled into a sort of half standing position, but the sharp pain shooting throughout her entire body made it hard for her to breathe. Had her lungs been punctured? Would she even be able to breathe at all if they had?

She shuffled back, bumping into that wall and falling over it as she tried to move back even farther.

Run, she told herself. Don’t think about the pain, don’t think about the consequences. You were prepared to die, that’s why you offered yourself up as a sacrifice, right? So just run as far away as you can for as long as you can and be happy everyone else gets to survive because of you.

Somehow, her body obeyed and her feet moved at the same time the monster’s did. The fire hadn’t seemed to hurt it, but it did appear to have slowed it down, since it hadn’t already torn her to pieces yet. Not that she could bring herself to look over her shoulder to check. She just ran, half tripping over loose rubble, broken down walls, and pieces of cars and houses, but somehow pushing through as the beast closed more distance between them with every step it took. It was as if she could feel its hot breath in her neck and she couldn’t stop tears from forming in her eyes. Just because she had opened her big mouth and offered to do this, didn’t mean she wanted to die. Who the hell wanted to die by being eaten by a freaking dragon?

She gasped. From the corner of her eye, she had suddenly noticed something big and sharp sticking out of a house that seemed to have been cleaved in two by something much bigger than whatever was following her now.

She swerved to the side, tightly hugging her rib cage, and jumped onto the wooden frame sticking out of one half of that house. She clenched her teeth to suppress a painful groan as she pulled herself up and somehow swung her leg over a straight wooden beam. Already out of breath, she spread her arms to both sides to keep her balance, carefully walking over that narrow beam like a tightrope, until she reached what she had come for. It seemed to be one of few steel beams in the entire house, about as wide as she was. It reached up to about a quarter of the house, where it had been sliced in half at an angle sharp enough that it should be able to pierce even a monster like the one on her heels.

She grabbed onto it and allowed herself to gasp for air only once before she put her foot on the thick bolt sticking out the flat middle of the beam, pulling herself up. Her ribs felt as if they stretched and broke all over again and she cried out, unable to stop herself.

The monster reacted with a low growl, his pace speeding up, and she cursed loudly. If it didn’t matter if she stayed quiet now anymore anyway, then she decided that she was at least going to go out cursing this horrible new world she had ended up in.

She pulled herself up while pushing her back against the wall, moving far too slow. She climbed until she reached that frighteningly sharp ending and, without even trying to find a place to sit, she just planted both her feet firmly against it and pushed.

Her back scratched against the splinters and broken wood and stone of the wall behind her. She could hear a loud creaking, but the beam didn’t budge even a centimeter.

"No! What are you doing? Keep running!” A high pitched scream reached her from the distance and only at that moment, as she snapped her head up to see Seren being held back and dragged off by Row and Lily, did she realize her vision had gone blurry.

The monster stopped and swung around and as stupid as it seemed to be, it immediately forgot about the prey it had been chasing and turned around completely, starting to trample in the opposite direction.

"No!” Twelve yelled. “Over here! Seren, you idiot!” She blindly reached behind her, pulling small pieces of rotting wood and loose pieces of stone off the wall, throwing them at the monster that moved away from her much faster than it had been approaching her. Had the heat that had slowed it down subsided?

"Hey!” She yelled and threw a piece of brick about the size of her hand at the monster. It hid the back of its head, somewhere right above its neck and to her shock, she saw just a trickle of blood run down the scales on its shoulder. Blood so dark that it almost seemed black.

"Shit…” She mumbled as it reared with a loud growl and swung back around to her, running so fast it almost seemed to turn into a blur. “Shit, shit, shit, shit!”

She anchored her bloody palms against the wall and let out a deafening cry as she pushed against that creaking steel beam with all her might. It had been rusted through almost completely at the bottom, even someone as relatively small and weak as her should be able to move it. So please, she thought, just move!

A cracking so loud that she thought she had instantly broken all bones in her legs tore through the air and the beam went down with her on it. She held her breath and grabbed onto the flat steel slicing through the air. That shimmering, slightly ragged point pierced through the smaller scales right under the monster’s jaw before the beam had even come to a stop.

Twelve jumped up and staggered a few unbalanced steps back as the speed of the monster forced it to get impaled deeper and deeper, bringing it too close to her too fast. On the third or fourth step, her foot slipped on the side and she fell off, hitting her shoulder against the beam on the way down. A sickening, wet kind of pop resounded in her ear right before she hit the ground.

She groaned softly, more so to check for herself that she was actually still alive than that she could even feel the pain anymore. She closed her eyes. All she wanted was to just sleep. To pass out. Maybe this time, she would wake up at the bottom of that cliff again and someone would have found and rescued her and none of this had even been real.

A cliff? She suddenly thought. Why did the sensation of endlessly falling suddenly take over her body? The sensation of hitting the ground and lying there, rain falling on her face?

Rain? She registered that thought somewhere in the back of her mind. Was rain always this hot?

She opened one eye and brought her right arm to her face. The only arm she seemed to be able to move. She pressed her fingers against her cheek, a warm, sticky liquid squishing beneath them. She pulled her hand back and looked at it. Dark red, so dark it was almost black.

She somehow managed to roll onto her back and looked up at the blood dripping down from where the monster had been impaled by that broken beam.

It hung right above her, its arms and legs twitching, its chest still moving despite the state it was in. Were these things just immortal, she wondered with a shiver. But even if they were, it at least didn’t seem to be able to move.

“I… I did it…” she mumbled, as if saying it out loud was the only thing that could actually make it real. “I di-”

Suddenly, the beast threw back his head and opened its enormous jaw. It released a cry so loud and inhuman from deep within its throat that it made Twelve grab her head, contracting her entire body to somehow try to withstand it. That sound rang through her brain, making it impossible to think, to even breathe. A second later, its dying screech was answered from three different directions, each with a distinctly different cry.

“What are you doing, you idiot! Get up and run!” Seren grabbed the back of her collar and yanked her to her feet, almost throwing her ahead in front of him, toward the base he should have already been in.

She staggered a few steps and then stopped, standing so wobbly they both knew she would collapse again in the next two or three seconds.

“Seren?” She mumbled as he walked up to her. “Why are you he-”

“Shut up!” He cut her off. “You really think I’m going to leave you behind to die? Start running!”

She tried, she tried so hard to move her feet that she couldn’t even afford to smile at his words, but it was impossible. Her leg hurt too badly, her entire body felt too broken.

“Run ahead, please,” she told him as she somehow managed to take a single, unsteady step. “I’ll follow right behind you, so there’s no need to wait for m-”

“Shut up!” He repeated in a far too high pitch and turned around to her. “I’m sorry about this, but there’s no time,” he told her with a bright red face and then leaned over, putting his hands on her waist. With one go, he lifted her off the ground and threw her over his shoulder before he ran off.

“What are y-” she covered her eyes. “Put me back down, this is too embarrassing!”

“It’s no party for me either!” He shot back, one arm wrapped tightly around her waist, while he had grabbed her upper leg with his other hand. “But do you want to live and be embarrassed or do you want to die, stupid?”

She grabbed the back of his shirt with her one good hand, clenching it tightly for support as she fought the pain from her broken ribs and entire, mangled body. “I want to live, of course!” She yelled back and somehow, she could just tell how he grinned smugly.

“Good, because we’re going have to make a dive for it,” he told her dryly.

She swung around to look at the enormous garage door of the base over her shoulder. It had closed far enough already to almost reach the ground. But they were so close, just a few more meters.

“Grit your teeth!” Seren yelled and before she could react, he took her off his shoulder and threw her ahead through the opening that was getting smaller with every second. She slid over the smooth concrete floor and slapped her hand down to stop herself, after which she immediately crawled back and reached out to Seren. He jumped towards her, rolling over and grabbing her hand in the process. She pulled with all her might and somehow, he managed to fly inside, rolling over her right at the moment the heavy door hit the ground and they got surrounded by nothing but an eerily silent darkness.