• Chapter One

    She sat in the street, blood flowing down her side. This time she had pushed herself too hard, had gone too far in her fights. She knew better, but still she had pushed herself past her limits. She had fought one too many this night and probably in the nights past too. Too many injuries had accumulated now. She had managed to stop the bleeding and clot up the wounds but it was the numerous internal injuries that were the problem at the moment. She couldn’t fight again in this condition so she was hoping that time would just start again without anymore difficulties.

    She sat, slouched against a stair, her head down, her strawberry blond hair a frizzy mess around her head while she clutched her sides with her thin arms. She wouldn’t be able to fight again against the nightmarish creatures called ruches until she healed. If she had to again tonight she would probably die. Ever since she had arrived in this city numerous ruches would come out during twilight and she could tell where they were and approximately how strong they were. Every twilight she roamed the streets searching for the strongest ruches that appeared and attempt to kill them.

    Occasionally she would see others like her and would avoid them. If they were around she would simply find somewhere else to be, something else to fight. It worked well enough for her; after all it meant a diversion of manpower that would be able to hunt more of the ruches. But tonight after accumulating so much wear and tear over the past for days she just had to fight against a couple of ghouls. Like dark shadows they rose around her, parts of them still flickered in and out of existence while they attacked her with no discernable shape to attack except for their claws. They had tried to disembowel her and had almost succeeded with those long dark claws.

    There were still around five more minutes to the twilight time. The ghouls had been destroyed eventually and were dissolving away while she had wandered off away from their stinking corpses' blood dripping down her legs and staining her purple and red stripped leggings. The world around her still frozen ignorant of the passing time. For one second before sunrise time would freeze and the fabrics between worlds would become thin and that one second would stretch into twenty-one minutes for those separate from reality. And she was one of the few people that stayed awake during this time. So she pushed herself to protect those who were helpless from the dangers that were abundant during twilight, from the ruches, the creatures from myths and fairy tales. But now she had gone too long without a healer so she was in trouble. There may not be that much time until sunrise but until the sun actually started to peak around the corner of the horizon she was in danger of being picked off in her weakened condition. If she could have some time to patch herself up she’d be all right, but should need more time then a single day, especially considering that some of her internal organs were kind of crushed. She couldn’t tell what exactly the extent of the damage was though, she was too numb, and she could feel her consciousness fading.

    It wasn’t as if she could go to a hospital. They would ask too many questions. Like how she managed to get herself so badly hurt and why the hell she was healing so damn. That last one would create the most trouble. Or maybe the abnormal healing rate would. Maybe they’d try to detain her for scientific studies. That wouldn’t just be simply bothersome it would be… oh, who the hell would know what it’d be, it’d just be extremely irritating to be treated like a lab rat for some mad scientists pleasure. No way in hell would she allow herself to be trapped in such a circumstance, even if she was becoming light-headed from blood loss. The stars started to swirl in her vision; it looked like they were dancing around the moon.