Shatterpoint: An Amari Kato Novella
Amari Kato turns a corner at neck-breaking speed and nearly runs straight into a pole before slipping around it. She weaves through pedestrians and jumps over or slides below any obstacles in her way. Her small size helps her in this instance, letting the girl escape her pursuers more quickly than it would be otherwise. Her ram horns scrape the underside of a table as she drops down and past it.
The backpack, tightly strapped on, weighs heavily on her in more ways than one, especially as she notices the heads of people she passes turning in her direction. Are the guards still chasing her? How close?
Her sense of hearing has been terrible now for years, but it still makes Amari’s heart race in moments like this.
Thankfully, she has more than the standard five senses to rely on.
An instinctive warning is all she gets before she has to duck a flying net. It hits the wall where she had just been, and she feels the cement reverberating with the impact. Even she hears the screams of alarmed bystanders that follow, muffled as it is.
The danger is mounting, and Amari keeps running through the streets of Castor’s Merchant District as she follows the whims of her instincts. They’ve kept her out of the guard’s claws so far. She has to slide beneath a cart as someone lunges from an alleyway.
How long can Amari keep this up? Relying so heavily on magic only works for so long before there’s a steep price to pay. The girl already feels pain sprouting in her mind, a full-blown migraine all but imminent.
An urge to move in a specific direction comes over her so strongly it nearly throws Amari off her feet. Instead of questioning the magically spurred idea, she ducks into the alleyway it leads her down.
Only to see a brick wall a dozen meters down. Too high for her to climb with the time she has, and she would have stopped running if her feet weren’t practically being moved on their own. She closes her eyes as she approaches the wall at full speed—
—and then trips over a tree root, falling onto her face into a soft grass field.
