Amun's point of view

I started raising my speed to catch up with the three men who were speeding towards a gunfire exchange ahead of us. Since I couldn't stop them even if I wanted to, the only thing I could do was follow them. Although I am lagging behind them because being short comes with short legs that can't keep up with tall me who have tall legs, the other one behind them and in front of me definitely was Raco, who is a couple inches taller than a man. Whether it was a good or bad thing, he was annoyed and smiling at the same time. Though I wanted to question him and try to know what he was doing, I refrained from asking because maybe it was something personal to him and I didn't have the right to ask about his business. We were closer because of the time we spent in the village, and I could ask anything, and he does that frequently, but when it came to personal life, there should be a limit to what you could ask, and you couldn't ask ever. That was the unspoken rule of traveling companions, with rule number one being: don't ask personal questions unless your companion wishes to tell you himself.

My attention drifted from Raco to the site that we are running to, wondering what we are going to encounter since there was no need to ask if it was safe or not; we will simply figure out the answer to that question when we reach our destination soon enough. Only then will I reach the vicinity, and only then will I be able to ask the load of questions I am carrying more and getting heavier at the same time?.

Nothing was that much of a challenge to me or to anyone else at that matter. We were running inside a dense forest with not much space between the trunks of the trees. I even don't know how the guard running in front of us was able to pinpoint the direction he was taking us. We had no other options but to follow him. While we were running and to estimate we were close to the location of the gunshots, suddenly the earth started to shake under our feet. "Is this an earthquake?" I asked that out loud at the same time the shaking that started like tremors started to increase. We all halted and looked around us, and without saying anything else, I grabbed the nearest trunk of a tree near me, at the same time, Azmar also did the same.

The other two looked at us for a second and also did the same, the shaking continued for a couple of minutes and it actually caused several cracks to appear on the ground, which were not that deep but never the less it was a totally scary experience for me. I don't remember ever seeing an earthquake like that except in movies back on earth; this was the first time for me experiencing one, and it happened to be in another world on top of that in a forest, I don't know why but it didn't make any sense to me, and an earthquake of that magnitude would cause a huge landslide; most of the trees would fall down; a forest is often completely removed or submerged by such landslides, but nothing happened except a few cracks on the ground, though I am not a scientist but an earthquake of that magnitude should have caused more than a few cracks.

Obviously this is not a natural earthquake but an artificial one, and that was the conclusion I reached, though I didn't voice it out to anyone simply because I don't have any proof of that. We waited in the same position after the earthquake for a few more minutes, and I was the first one to move and say, "I don’t think there will be any more earthquakes coming, so we better move and see what happened." Ajbadan looked at me for a second and nodded his head in agreement, then looked at the others and said, "Let's keep on going; I also think that we need to find people so we can figure out where we are." Without waiting for any response from anyone, he started moving towards the same destination he was going to before the quake.

.................................

At about 300 meters (1000 feet) from approximately where all our different parties were headed and where the gunshots started and the two parties were exchanging gunfire, there was a middle aged man around 40 years old and a young boy less than 15 years old. A woman and two kids were there, and the man asked the young boy, "How is it going so far?" The young boy answered, "Three are down, another three are remaining, and the ones at their back are coming towards us." "How many?" asked the man back to the young man. He answered, "Another six men." The man's face color changed immediately, and he looked back to his wife and thought, "This is the only way they would be safe." The man looked for a second at the two kids, a man has to do what he has to do for his family, so there is nothing to think about. He looked at the woman and said, "I am sorry, Hina. Luke will take care of you, until you reach the city, and I will take care of this."

Without waiting for any response from the woman he called Hina, he gave a last look at the two kids and turned his face back to the young man, saying, "Farewell brother, I will go now," and immediately he stood up, jumped to his right side, and started running.

The children started crying, and so did the woman. He didn't give them any chance to say anything; all of that just took a few seconds. The young boy, who was called Luke, was shocked as well. From the confusion caused by his brother's action, he stopped firing; him stopping firing, the children crying, and the man running out, all this happened in just around five seconds.

The men who were shooting at them also stopped firing back at the same time, as it appears they were not expecting the man to come out and run in the opposite direction. They had already lost three men to that sharp-shooting young boy, but their goal was to capture the man who had just fled.