The Rapid Sparks of the Cord; A Hunger Games Novel

CHAPTER 5

Before Lith could even think, the countdown had ended, and people were sprinting towards the cornucopia. The blonde girl next to him dashed towards a bow, and the boy next to him runs away, into a snow capped forest. The District 4 girl who was eyeballing him earlier had charged at him with a kunai. Lith hardly got the chance to duck, and the kunai just barely scraped the top of his head, leaving a blood streak across the top of his head, staining his hair a deep maroon.

Upon seeing her failure, the District 4 girl ran, presumably to grab another weapon. Lith couldn't find the sickle he had his eyes on earlier, and spotted a pitchfork deeper inside. He raced towards the weapon, leaning on one of the metal walls. He looked and found the District 2 boy, Kieran, he heard during training, dashing for the same weapon. Kieran was no tortoise at running, but Lith had years of experience running from wasps and tracker jackers who had made their home in the groves. Just barely had Lith reached the pitchfork before Kieran, and held it in front of him, creating both space and a defense between the two. Kieran backed off, grabbing a spear from the rack next to him, and ran off.

Lith hadn't quite yet registered the 6 cannon shots he had heard, signifying the deaths of the tributes. But as people started to leave the cornucopia, he looked around, noticing 4 bodies off the bat. The boy from District 10, he remembered was named Izzy, was lying on the ground right outside the cornucopia's entrance, his forehead sliced open. The girl from District 7, who he couldn't quite recall her name, was not too far from him, and was slumped up against the outside wall, her blood splattered on the cornucopia's metal.

The next body he spotted was a shock. The girl from District 1, Cass, he thought, was lying on the ground near one of the bordering rocks. It appeared she was running away from someone.  He wondered how a Career tribute couldn't manage to avoid death on the first day, something rare to see in the Hunger Games.

The last body he could see was a District 9 girl, one of the younger ones, probably 14, he thought. Her blonde, messy hair covered her face completely, possibly hiding deadly battle scars that he wasn't hanging around to reveal.

The other two bodies, he wouldn't discover. With a few stragglers still at the cornucopia, he grabbed a half empty dark red back pack, looted from a tribute who go to it first, and hoped for something of use to be inside. He ran for about 34 minutes, but stopped dead in his tracks when he heard a twig snap. The snow was thick, meaning any number of people could be stalking him, and he wouldn't hear them. He turned around in a flash, holding his pitchfork out in front of him, hoping to scare off anyone behind him. He sat still for 2 whole minutes, waiting for the other person to make a move.

The bushes rustled, causing snow to fall so gently, he almost forgot how brutish these games were. Finally, out stepped Lith's perpetrator. Thankfully for him, the person following was actually not a person, but a serow. He recognized this animal during training, despite not participating in the identifying animals section. It almost looked like a dark goat, and he knew he didn't have to worry about it attacking. He quickly shoved the pitchfork into the animal's thick skin on the neck, paralyzing it almost instantly. Lith knew he didn't have much time to cut pieces of its meat off before someone would find him, so he worked as quickly as he could, hacking off legs with the pitchfork.

The serow's limbs barely fit into the backpack, but with enough scrunching and pushing, they managed to squeeze in. Lith was impressed, he'd never even IMAGINED hunting an animal before, and he did it with such ease that he felt he stood a high chance amongst many of the other tributes. If he could find Bean, he'd never shut up about it.

As he moved deeper and deeper into the woods, he heard bickering in the distance. He kept his space away from them, but he noticed both girls from District 3 arguing in between two trees. He thought about it for a minute, killing them both. However, he liked what little entertainment he was given in the arena, so he decided to stay put behind a bush, sitting with his legs crossed.