Delirium (Creepypasta x reader)

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You couldn't really conceptualize how long you had been doing these training nights for, but it had been quite a while.

Long enough that you couldn't remember when they started.

The thought had come upon you when you were with the man in the orange hoodie, participating in tracking like you had every time the forest – and his red stitched frown – had come into view. You were not the one being tracked, however; like the last couple of sessions, the methodology had given you a different opportunity. You were the tracker now.

The change seemed to occur during and after the session where you were made to hunt down the Hooded guy. Now, your assignment was to find animals hiding in the silent forest using some of the things you learned, and other new ones you had to pick up like grazing patterns, print and dung identification. It was intriguing because, until now, there had been no animal presence in the woods; had he captured the fauna for this purpose in some way? How would he have done so, without a lot of equipment, manpower, or money?

One of many unanswered questions for this place.

Hooded guy stuck to your side the whole time, watching you work with his hands tucked away in his pockets. At first, you had been sweating bullets being placed under the microscope. But just shrugging it off was easier. Plus, it wasn't like he hadn't been watching you before. This was just more obvious.

He also hadn't laid a hand on you since, again, that one session. You realized pretty quick that it had been a test of your abilities and willingness to follow orders, even without a presence to force you. It had been a turning point.

That was the clincher that riddled you with anxiety for the future. A turning point for what? To what end? You could see the cogs of the machine turning without knowing what exactly the machine would do. It was beyond your ability to understand.

Did you even want to understand? Maybe the ostrich had it right in some way. Sticking your head in the sand felt better than agonizing over the possibilities of what was going to happen to you.

So, you batted the thoughts away as quick as they came. Letting them linger just gave you a stomachache.

These nights in the forest were long and laborious. You pushed your physical and mental capacity to their limits trying to catch onto the animals. Millions of years of evolution as prey made the deer, rabbits, raccoons and others excellent at staying undetected. You adapted to the circumstances and tracked them for hours. There was a certain distance you had to close for the assignments, denoted by a shake of the Hooded guy's head or a thumbs up. You still hadn't figured out what the right distance was.

Any sane person would call him and his companions' kidnappers. But were they kidnappers if they returned you to your life after each night? And was it Stockholm syndrome to even question such a title?

The dilapidated barn came into view, the doors shut with a huge padlock. It stood on a stretch of flat land within the forest's boundaries, with two well-worn trails arcing off in opposite directions. Inside the barn, you knew, were a variety of weapons and things to use them on like a DIY rage room operated by Goggles. Down the lefthand trail (sometimes, but not always) was the field of ankle-tall grass where you sparred with the Masked man.

You were so familiar with the landscape that you hardly spared another glance at anything but the ground, following scattered hoofprints that lay in the drying mud. A group of deer had passed through the area, more than two judging by the number of prints. It had to be recent considering the shape and quality of the impression. You followed them until the ground transitioned back to grass, then scanned the treeline.

Grass crushed or pushed aside, bark stripped off a tree or needles stripped from a low hanging branch; both signs to look out for to know where the herd went. They could have circled the area and went in another direction entirely, so you had to observe carefully.