Living in Me (Sequel to Not Gonna Die)

|Chapter 23| Goodbye long walks

Hello, I'm back, not dead yet!

          The three targets were lined up in a row, facing the same direction and standing only a few steps from each other, their three peg legs partly buried in the ground. Or, at least, they were standing.

          Three spheres flashed by nearly too fast for the human mind to process, golden flames flickering off them like a cloak, and slamming into the targets so hard that it sent them flying but they had barely gotten off the ground before ropes of magic wrapped around their legs and pulled them back down, securing them in the second that it took for the second fireballs to slam into the targets and they went flying again only to be pulled back down in preparation for the next attack.

          While simple repeat of moves may have seemed laborious and boring to some, it was giving General Adam a workout. Although each move was mostly simple, doing them all in the span of a few seconds for close to an hour was exhausting. All around him, the base of Team Crafted was a flurry of activity: With two of Entity's bases destroyed and only one remaining as a threat, their allies were returning for one final regroup before the assault.

          When Herobrine had died, a huge portion of their advantage in this war had gone with him, leaving a void that Adam now had to fill. So he had spent nearly all of his time in that corner of the training ground Herobrine had taught him in, repeatedly going over what he had learned, but it felt strange without Herobrine's shadow next to his, and despite the chaos of the base, the air was horribly silent without his constant stream of instructions and suggestions and jests.

          The targets flew back at the latest barrage of flaming spheres and this time, Adam let them go. He bent over with his hands on his knees, panting, sweat dripping from his forehead, closing his golden eyes for a few moments before taking a deep breath and standing up, walking towards the collapsed targets, stretching his legs as he did so. One by one, he pulled up the targets, manually putting them back in their upright positions. All three were badly scorched, but one had a singed, gaping hole in it, so Adam tossed it to the side. He sat down with a groan in the shadow of one of the remaining targets, arms resting on his knees as he steadied his breathing.

          "Come on Adam, get back up," he said to himself, knowing that if he didn't get himself moving now, he would probably sit there until the world ended. He balefully eyed the scorch line he had burned into the grass to mark where he would take shots from. "Come on, up you get," he tried to order himself

          He didn't get up, but he mentally went through all the movements of standing up, walking over to that scorch line, stepping over it, turning to face the two targets-

          Without warning, the ground he was sitting on disappeared and instead he was up on his feet except that the world seemed to spin around him and his balance was completely off, which meant that he fell over with a curse. In an instant, he had spun around, sitting on the ground again but in a different place. The scorched line was at the end of his feet and ahead of him stood the two slightly burned targets, the sunlight beating down on him.

          "No way," Adam breathed to himself.

          Eagerly, pulse racing, he focused on the spot where he had just been sitting, back against the leg of the target. He imagined looking towards where he was standing now, seeing the scorched line, the faint figures of the recruits training, the coolness of the shadow stretching over him-

          His view shifted without warning but now that he was expecting it, he caught more details. There was a split second where his vision blurred together and when every fibre of his body buzzed with energy as if he had been injected with ultra-strength pure caffeine. He felt like the world spun as his vision cleared but as he was already sitting on the ground, he didn't lose his balance and the feeling disappeared as quickly as it had come, but he knew what it was.