Ripper's Change: Survival of the Hunted

Nightmares

     Ripper awoke in darkness. It was becoming normal to him, a common appearance. The dark is his ally as it is his enemy, a cloak of invisibility as is a source of nightmares. It's a thing he grew to appreciate, as is something he dreaded. In this situation, he couldn't tell which side it had chosen for this dark night.

Ripper lifted his eyes from the grass on the ground to the leaves of the trees. The foggy mist clouded his vision and he could only make out the silhouette of trees all around him. The black spiny stumps of the trees stretched far up to the sky, the thin branches reached far out from the sides in a pattern of sorts.

The smell in the air was less of a scent and more of a stench. 

It was dead and dry.

Moonlight filled the darkness with a dim blue hue, barely lighting the fog.

It was quiet, and night forests were never usually quiet. Ripper was disturbed by the silence, it almost reminded him of something he would do almost anything to forget.

Ripper spotted the silhouette of a figure walking through the fog. He moved closer to get a better look at what he was seeing and went pale by the sight.

Ripper was looking at his own image.

The figure kept walking silently through the forest, looking left and right. Mirroring the movements of a past he desired to forget.

Suddenly a shrill screech filled the air and the silhouette of another figure appeared in the distance. The long black slender creature sliced through the fog like a knife, cutting straight towards his image.

"Hey!" Ripper shouted to his figure.

His image didn't respond, it kept walking forward until it stopped suddenly, and turned around. Now looking at the same opposing figure Ripper was looking at.

Ripper watched his projection shout and take off to a run with the other figure giving chase. 

Confusion spread across Ripper's face as he ran to keep up. He watched as his projection tried to outrun the creature. The other Ripper turned around and leaped over the black creature only to be stopped midair by the jaws of the monster. His projection tried to fight back but was overwhelmed. Ripper watched in horror and familiarity, like he experienced it before.

Ripper then came to sudden realization, he was reliving his past.

"No, don't make me go through this again!"

Ripper looked back at his projection and saw him running straight into a glass wall, he quickly followed his other self as it collided with the glass and fell downwards. He jumped down through the hole in the structure and landed on shards of glass, they jabbed into his talons but he ignored them, he was curious as to why he was going through this again.

"Can you hear me?"

Ripper watched as his projection seemed not to hear him and started walking down a dark pathway. Ripper followed and looked around, the walls were all metal and seemed to dust but were fairly new.

"I thought this place was old, but it's not rusting. What even is this place?"

Ripper was interrupted by his projection as it asked questions to its mind, trying to navigate the facility. 'How am I going to get out of here?'

Ripper remembered how confused he was when he fell down here, trapped and scared. No matter how much he ran, he could not get away from the monster. No matter how much he fought back, he could not hurt the monster. It seemed useless at the time and still useless to this day.