Zombie Survival System

By this time, there were only about twenty minutes left of the cat-and-mouse test. Several kilometers away from the starting area, Alexandre was sprinting as fast as he could move through the forest, darting between trees, leaping over boulders, ignoring thorny blackberry bushes that scraped harmlessly across his genetically super-hardened skin.

Rather than looking at his surroundings, Alexandre was staring intently at the tablet held tightly between his white-knuckled hands. It didn't have good news.

"Thirty thousand," he muttered furiously to himself as he ran. "Thirty damn grand. It seems like everyone on the island's coming for me!" Indeed, there were thirty Hunters within close enough distance that they showed up on the local scanner screen of the tablet, though most were pathetically useless. Only eight students had come within a hundred meters and might be any kind of real threat.

On one hand, Alexandre was very proud of his enhanced speed and agility. If they'd all been on a straight racetrack, Alexandre was confident that he could maintain the gap between himself and the others until the end of the test.

However, there were other factors at play. The students knew this island much better than he did, and there were other students a long distance directly ahead of him, so Alexandre might have to adjust his course any number of times if he wanted to evade everyone. Moreover, it was always possible that an obstacle might arise which would slow him down for a moment or two—and that's all it might take for his pursuers to get close enough that he'd be forced to fight.

As he ducked under a thick tree branch, Alexandre decided on a plan: He'd lure the group following him to come into contact with the group up ahead. Everyone wanted the bounty, so the two groups would likely come into conflict. Hopefully, they'd be tricked into a full-on brawl. So long as there was at least a little confusion, Alexandre could make more distance between himself and his attackers. Perhaps he could even cover his tracks and lose them.

The thought occurred that none of the students knew his face but were only tracking him on their tablets by his watch. He began considering how to use that fact against them—

He was pulled out of his thoughts by glimpsing three students coming toward him from the north. This was it! Time to put his plan into action.

Alexandre stood still, forcing himself to remain calm and only look at the tablet in his hands, tracking exactly how many students were approaching from every direction.

Then he took a deep breath, concentrated his Hunter energy in his lower body, and made an explosive leap from the ground, several meters into the air, and toward the branches of a huge oak!

A split second later, a huge fireball slammed the spot where Alexandre had jumped from. More fireballs filled the air, along with screams of pain and rage! Just as Alexandre had hoped, the students had caught each other with attacks intended for him, and they'd all realized that the others present were their rivals in pursuit of a massive bounty. Several fights broke out at once.

Alexandre didn't linger to gloat but instead leaped to a different tree branch, then to another, making his way carefully from the impromptu battlefield.

Once he felt he was far enough away and out of sight, Alexandre jumped down to the ground, landing silently on his feet. He smiled to himself. "Fight smarter, not harder. Sun Tzu would be proud." Then he set off sprinting again, making the most of every precious second he'd earned.

Those seconds didn't add up to much. Less than a minute later, Alexandre saw five men at the edge of a large clearing, their arms folded.

Alexandre cursed himself. He'd only been tracking students by the number of watches they'd been carrying, since the ones with more watches would be the more effective fighters and therefore the people to avoid. These students must have stashed their watches in order to hide...

But just as Alexandre planted his foot heavily in the ground, preparing to spring off it and veer in a different direction, a massive weight slammed into him from above and knocked him to the ground.

Alexandre wheezed as all the breath left his lungs. His limbs felt like they were pinned by boulders, and it felt like a giant was crushing his ribs. A net! They'd trapped him in some kind of Hunter-Crafted, super-heavy net.

The five figures moved slowly in, surrounding Alexandre on every side.