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Save Point: Chase Sequence

As she spins up the back wheel in a short burst before disengaging the lock on the front one, and slews briefly sideways without going anywhere for a moment, gravel sprays out behind her in an arc courtesy of whatever short range field-effect allows the jump bike to operate, giving perfectly smooth flat spherical wheels traction on anything close enough to the surface. The curving lane downhill from the front door toward the main gate is two wide ballast-stoned ruts spaced at the exact separation of a car axle, with lush grass growing luxuriantly up the strip along the middle, so she lets the bike slide into one to improve its grip and, kicking off the brake, leans into the line to launch herself off the mark.

The main gate is an absurd folly of a thing, a trilithon written large in white cement plaster and a roof to turn it into a gatehouse, as though it wants to be the front of a temple itself. Although quite impressively large and wide, it must currently be a damned nuisance to anyone wanting to move a large truck or actual farming equipment up to the main building.

Being Dragoned has not helped it either, as there are now scorch marks on the wood and plaster, forming odd lechatelieritic patterns characteristic of a lightning strike, and an indentation on the upper lintel where a set of enormous sharpened hook-claws caught at the edge. She can mentally reconstruct the Dragon, trailing stray groundings of lightning as a result of its affliction, simply launching itself head-first at the gate and scrambling straight over the top of it up into an even larger leap, rather than bothering to lower itself by passing through, a one-man Rashomon.

As she passes through the shadows of the gate she sees something move, and by the time she's slowed down and swung through ninety degrees to line herself with the main road, it's on her. It seems the gate is more than merely dramatic, there must have been a niche under it to either side where one or more cultists could stand guard on anything entering or anyone trying to escape.

The unaccounted-for Hound seems to have escaped the explosive discharge of lightnings simply by having been undercover, but has now shed any cultish robes, stripped down to its loincloth and is after her with a fury. She always forgets just how fast the sethura and their lesser wolvish descendants can run when they put their mind to it, until she sees them in action again.

She's heard of incidents in which they've chased, and in some case run down cars, in the Merican midwest where skinwalkers rule over the final fragmented remains of their once-great empire.

Some stupid drunk teenagers yell at an old native guy, is how the story usually goes, shouting as they hurtle past and counting on their new second-hand piece of crap ride to get them far out of the range of retribution before it can happen. Hoping to startle or intimidate some random loser and make themselves feel big. Only then the guy _changes,_turning into something else that is huge and fast and angry, which casually sprints after them, snarling, pursuing with its fangs bared at seventy or eighty miles per hour across one county and into the next without ever slowing like some sort of marathon stalker. Sometimes the hunted teens finally escape, take refuge in a cafe or something, only to be startled hours or days later at home or work when they come out and find the same guy, or girl, standing there looking at them patiently.

It's like a really disturbing variant on a love story.

This one is definitely a sprinter, all right, and although she picks up speed steadily as she comes out of the turn and begins to accelerate along the main road, it's not quite enough. The Hound is almost out of range when it finally springs at her and manages to catch the trailing end of the jump bike just behind the seat, at the swan's tail where aerodynamics are fulfilled by closing to an incidental mount point for a backing light and, these days, a clipped on, easily detachable number plate. Getting a grip gives it the additional velocity to take a couple more huge bounding steps, to try and throw itself on top of her. She can't tell whether the Hound is trying to just knock her off the bike, or maybe just tip the whole thing over and take her with him.

The jump bike swoops from side to side like the swan it was originally named after, automatic stabilization routines trying to interpret her actions as something that makes sense and mostly compensating as their weight is slung from side to side. A modern bike would have overturned already, but this is something vastly better and literally clings to the road.

She manages to twist around enough, with one trailing hand at first still on the handlebars and then grudging released just for a moment to let her brace her forearm across both grips, to meet the attack as the Hound leaps on top of her, but then finds that it can't bring its weight to bear as she grabs it by the shoulder, levering it away from her. She's steering with only one hand, fingers on the opposite side from where they should be, and they're veering all over the road but they haven't encountered any other traffic yet and the road is new and wide, a product of some recent transit expansion project she remembers hearing about in the pub but which, at this moment, she can hardly take the time to recall the reasons for.

Trying to keep its balance and grab at her the Hound wavers, its other arm flailing up in the air as though it was riding a mechanical bull. With her free hand, she twists the accelerator control built into the handlebars, the jump bikes equivalent of a throttle, not to slow it down but to speed it up even more, trying to throw the hound off by holding its center of gravity as far away from the bike as she can. As the Hound flails she concentrates and pushes in the cruise control lock, which will automatically increase her speed until the onboard systems decide the maximum safety threshold has been reached, then apply braking as necessary depending on the maneuvers attempted.

She gets the button down in the nick of time as the Hound pauses, visibly thinks about it, then pulls in its arm to improve its balance and reaches for a knife sheathed at its side in a leather belt clip that attaches to one side of the cults standard issue werewolf loincloth, a thin thing made of a vividly azure, almost reflective material with symbolic gold swirls that courses in the slipstream as they continue to pick up speed.

A stray moth collides with one side of the Hounds muzzle and spatters into streaks as though his face was an oncoming windscreen, but this only buys her the tiniest fraction of a second when he ignores it completely, determined to get to the knife. She abandons grip and rolls over completely, winding up flat on her back on the bike with the back of head between the handlebars and the sky hurtling toward her at a rate of knots, practically being mounted by the insane cult Hound as she tries to alternate between steering, and using either hand to fend him off or get the hell out of the way. The whole thing is becoming more ridiculously dangerous with every second.

A flash of oncoming headlight is her only warning as she frantically veers back into the left lane to avoid one of the logging trucks that hurtle down this road with surprising frequency, exposed wash of displaced air smelling of torn pines dragging them in toward it for a fraction of a second before it passes. She expects to hear the snarl of a horn but there's nothing over the sound of the engine dopplering past, then as she looks back again she sees the Hound has tried to stab her and missed, aim thrown off by the sudden swerve.

The knife is quite nice, to her professional eye, likely chosen out of some sort of military supply catalogue but selected with an eye to appearance as well as function. If you're a mad cultist and you get issued a knife, it's practically compulsory that it should look something like this, effective yet convincingly sacrificial, with a decent grip and solid guard but also a series of serrations and curved cutouts that make you proud to be a member of a secret society.

The Hound draws it back for another go and then its eyes widen, just like a humans, as they are clearly heading straight toward another oncoming car or truck. Taking advantage of this warning she swerves blind to her subjective right, not even looking to see what she's now trying to get out of the way of, then frees up one of her feet, plants it solidly right between the Hound cultists top four nipples, and efficiently ejects him from the vehicle in the opposite direction.

There is an impressive crunch as the Hound collides with the windscreen frame of the oncoming car and is abruptly carried away at twice the subjective speed of either vehicle, but she doesn't get to see most of it because she's too busy twisting back around into the correct position in one motocross-style aerial stunt motion, to try and get the jump bike back under control. There are limits to what it can compensate for and she's now pushed most of them already in the past thirty seconds, which is hardly an auspicious start to her pursuit.

She disengages the cruise control and goes back to manual, because you can go faster than the safeties allow if you have good enough visibility. Admittedly it's getting dark and the sunlight is low and long, hardly ideal conditions, but more than enough for a cats eyes. She turns the front light on as well, just in case she needs it, but more for the benefit of anyone else who might be coming the other way.

Across the fields to either side she catches traces of motion, off in the distance. It's too far away to tell but she guesses that the cult has other members stationed in various places locally and they are probably looking for ways to outflank her, either by getting to the main road ahead of her or finding something that might be able to catch up, which around here would be light motorbikes and quad bikes of the sort used to round up sheep and cattle. Someone back at the main building must have pulled it together and radioed his mates about what was going on using a cult-specific frequency she isn't actively monitoring.

Which gives rise to the alarming possibility that these guys may inadvertently attract attentions from the two squads worth of heavily armed commandos who are, of course, still in the area and out hunting the Beast of Exmoor to bring a terminal end to its sheep predations. While the sheep were delicious and she was happy to share, getting chased by a enhanced Heavy Duty Land Rover Stage One V8 with 4WD, full of highly competent professional marksmen with L1A1 SLR's, would be a quite undesirable development at this point.

Why in hell are these (quite literally) lunatics actually chasing her anyway!? Is it just some sort of collective consensus decision, like greyhounds chasing a fleeing plush rabbit at the track? She just vaporized that thing they were worshiping as their goddess in a huge fireball, for fucks sake! They should be running away from her!

She roars in frustration, and the ears of her pursuers prick up as it leaks over the open bands and their planning is disrupted by a leonine snarl. There have already been strange washes of static that sounded like enraged screams, morale is low, and to everyone bar the most devoted fanatics it's starting to seem like there's not much of a cause left here. The more sensible members of the group are already getting the hell out whilst planning to meet up and divide whatever is left once this whole thing is safely over. Unfortunately, the believers have already found a range of possibly suitable farm vehicles and are organizing themselves using a local tourist map.