-

Something kicks Kai’s leg. He wakes up with a start. It’s dark and the face right below him is pale and ghostly.

Krystal is sleeping on his arm. They’re scooted close to each other, and Kai’s other arm is around her. The kick he felt was just her knee.

It takes intense effort for Kai to ease his arm out from under Krystal’s head. He feels bad for laying her head on the cold floor. But he edges away from her and stands up.

The shack is tiny and it only takes Kai one sweep to see that Taemin isn’t there. Kai carefully creeps to the door and files out into the chilly morning. The salty sea breeze greets him in the face.

Taemin is slumped in the sand against the wall of the shack. Kai can’t believe he let his friend sleep outside in the cold. The sun is just brightening up and hits Taemin with orange rays. The boy stirs and then opens his eyes.

“Are you ing crazy?” Kai mutters as soon as Taemin’s head looks up at him. Taemin runs a hand over his face. He leans forward but doesn’t get up.

“Stop mauling,” Kai adds. He plops down in the cold sand in front of Taemin. “It’s no use.”

Taemin puts his hands behind his head. His face hardens and contorts with mixed emotions. He’s not listening to Kai. “Why wasn’t it me?” Kai’s friend breathes out. “Why did it have to be her?”

Kai shakes his head and feels the stiffness in the back of his neck. He opens his mouth to speak but the door right beside him swings open.

“Don’t,” Krystal’s stern voice makes Taemin look up. “Don’t make yourself think like that.”

At first, Kai just looks at her in shock. But he sees pain in Taemin’s eyes. So he reaches over and pats Taemin’s shoulder. “She’s right,” Kai agrees.

It throws Kai off when he hears the austerity in Krystal’s voice. “I wanna go ahead and jump back, if you two are ready,” she says. Kai locks eyes with Taemin, who seems even more taken back.

“Well?” Krystal presses. Kai’s muscles fight back as he gets up from the sand. “I guess,” he answers.

The three of them return inside the shack. Krystal moves swiftly, grabbing a small fishing net from the ground and handing it to Taemin. She then s her backpack, and Kai watches her pull out the submachine gun Sehun gave her.

“Wha…” Kai starts, but is cut off. “Those hunters will be on our tails once we time travel, right? I don’t wanna play tag this time. I wanna kill them,” Krystal states. She weighs the gun in her hands and grips it in firing position.

“But… but we’ll be outnumbered,” Taemin mutters. He watches Krystal with fear in his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll be ready.”

Kai feels the coldness in Krystal’s voice and frowns. “Even if we’re there ready, they’ll know exactly where we are with their radars. How do you plan on avoiding that?” He asks.

“Once we go back in time, we’ll find somewhere to hide and wait for them. Even if they know where we are, if we’re firing at them, they can’t get close to us,” Krystal argues.

Kai shakes his head in disapproval. “It’s still risky,” he remarks. He meets Krystal’s eyes and is startled at how intensely she’s watching him.

“So? What’s not risky about what we’re doing right now? I saw how you took out those hunters back in district Eta. When they killed my sister, you didn’t seem like you thought of the risks before you shot those killers down,” Krystal snaps. Kai sets his mouth in a line and stares at her. She doesn’t look away. He knows she has her mind made up.

He sighs and turns to Taemin. “You ready for it?” he says.

The color drains from Taemin’s already pallid face, but he gives a slow nod. He turns to Krystal and gestures by putting a hand on the pistol in his belt.

Kai decides to take out his submachine gun. He slings it over his shoulder while Krystal comes and takes his hand. With luck, there will only be a few of them, and he’ll just be alright with his pistol. But Sehun’s words pop up in his head. “We’re going to need these,” Kai remembers.

Holding onto Taemin’s and Krystal’s hands, Kai relaxes his shoulders. He doesn’t feel like questioning how far exactly time travelers can go in multiples. He feels the familiar pull and hears his heartbeat quickening in his ears, and the three of them disappear at the same time.

They appear on the same beach, but the shack is gone.  Kai feels heat beaming down on him. Taemin and Krystal let go of his hands, and he hears Krystal exclaim beside him, “Over there!”

It’s a rectangular brick building in the middle of the street, right where the street meets sand. It has wide openings on all sides and looks like some sort of vendor. Without any warning Krystal begins sprinting toward it. Kai and Taemin have no choice but to follow, and the three of them step inside the stuffy, unimpressive structure. It’s stocked with jewelry made of seashells and bottles of dead sea creatures submerged in liquid.

“Get down and have your guns ready,” Krystal orders, crouching in front of the low shelf with the dead creatures and peeking out at the open street ahead of them. She holds her gun ready, but Kai can tell there’s reluctance in her voice.  

The minute Kai and Taemin duck down next to Krystal, they hear whirring car sounds. Kai pulls the machine gun off of his shoulders. They all watch holding their breaths when two cars roll into view.

The cars stop across the street from the building. “We can do this…” Krystal whispers, when they catch more car sounds.

Kai’s bites his lip as three more vehicles race down from the other side of the street. He hears Taemin curse under his breath. Krystal remains completely still.

Maybe they would have had a chance if they had taken off running, instead of dodging into the building. Not that it matters much now, Kai thinks. He debates throwing down the machine gun to the ground, but then decides maybe he should put up a fight nonetheless. With a pained sigh, he wonders what’s going through Krystal’s mind.

Men in black combat uniforms jump out from all five cars. They carry old-fashioned rifles and create lined formations with one another, weapons up, bodies alert. Kai finds it unusual. The hunters seem too tense to be tracking down just three stray time travelers.

The deafening roars of machine gun fires make Kai jump. He turns toward Krystal, expecting her to be madly firing away by herself. But Krystal looks at him with eyes just as wide, the gun in her hands still and silent. Taemin looks at the two of them, his arms unmoving, too.

The men in the street cry out and fall to the ground, bleeding. Some of them grasp their rifles and fire back, but they don’t aim for the building Kai and the others are in. They aim away, into tall buildings in the adjacent streets.

Kai blinks in confusion as he watches. His eyes first recognize the long tips of automatic machine guns, mounted on tripods and firing down from almost every open window in the ground and second floors. The shooters behind the machine gun heads, Kai sees, are not black-clad hunters. It’s difficult for Kai to tell who they exactly are.

The hunters retaliate, and some dodge through rounds of gun fire to enter the buildings. Kai can make out fist fights breaking out through the windows. The rest of the hunters take cover and fire back, more skillfully and with more accuracy.

“We have to help them,” Krystal says right beside Kai.

“What? We’ll blow our cover…” Kai argues, but Krystal doesn’t listen and gets up from behind the brick covering. “There!” she points.

Kai looks and sees a hunter scramble behind one of their cars closest to the brick building. The hunter has a bullet wound on his leg and is speaking into an old-fashioned walkie-talkie. “…OUTNUMBERED. STILL UNDER AMBUSH. SEND COMBAT BACKUP NOW!”

Without warning, Krystal positions her submachine gun and fires. Five roaring shots eject from the gun with force, and Krystal instantly loses control, falling back. The gun becomes loose in her hands and the last shot finds its way in the ceiling of the brick building. None of the bullets hits their target. The hunter in Krystal’s range looks up in alarm, but before he has time to react, Taemin shoots him down with his pistol.

Kai helps Krystal up and takes the machine gun from her. She is shaken up and doesn’t protest. Kai pushes her behind him and looks at Taemin.

“Most of them are too far away from us,” Taemin says.

A loud whirring noise distracts them and all three turn their heads to see two vehicles racing toward the fighting zone. The vehicles are bigger and bulkier than the hunters’ usual cars, and to Kai’s dismay, have machine guns the size of couches attached to their roofs. Pilots in black ride with their upper torsos sticking out from the car tops. They begin firing as soon as they see the weapons pointing out from the second story windows.

Taemin shakes Kai’s arm and points to the dead man with the walkie-talkie. The car is the closest thing they can take cover behind from the building. Some of the hunters are still firing from just beyond the car. Kai bites his lip and turns to Krystal.

“Do you have your pistol?” He asks. Krystal nods and reaches for her smaller gun. Kai looks into her eyes and holds his gaze. “Stay hidden,” he says, and nods to Taemin. The two of them duck out of the building and head for the hunter car, heads lowered.

Taemin kicks the walkie-talkie man out of the way. They lean forward against the car and stare right into the backs of four black-clad hunters. Taemin fires his single pistol shot first, and Kai reacts by releasing a series of rounds with his submachine gun.

The torque of the submachine gun is much harder to control than the semi-automatic pistol, Kai thinks with a grimace. His arm muscles scream but he holds his ground as flashing bullets dig themselves into the backs of black uniforms. He looks at Taemin, who gestures with his neck and takes off from behind the car.

Kai fights the urge to look back where Krystal is. He follows Taemin. The newly arrived, larger vehicles tear apart anything short of solid brick buildings, and the non-hunter group is thrown into chaos.

Kai and Taemin look out from behind a large dumpster of sorts. Without warning, Taemin crawls away from the dumpster and out into the open fire zone. “Taemin…” Kai mumbles under his breath. But his friend starts running sideways from Kai’s view, cocking his pistol. Kai watches Taemin release fire, hitting the first man behind the monster machine gun, and then, the second. Occupants inside the car whip their heads and raise their guns toward Taemin. Hoping to distract them, Kai fires his machine gun from behind the dumpster. His range is barely close enough, and he keeps firing until Taemin disappears behind a tall building.

The people inside the other buildings take the opportunity to get back on their feet and in front of their guns. Gun shots screech from all around Kai, and the fight is over with the last vehicle driver slinking forward into the wheel.

Kai lets out a sigh and lowers his gun. Taemin steps out from behind the building and squints up toward the upper windows. “Are you time travelers?” Kai hears his friend ask.

A few men and women in tattered clothes begin filing out from inside the buildings. They approach Taemin unarmed, and Kai takes that as his cue. He turns on his heels and runs back to the brick building by the beach. He finds Krystal inside and offers her a hand.  

When Kai and Krystal join Taemin and the strangers, he hears a rough woman’s voice snap back at Taemin’s question. “Well who else would we be? Normal people?”

-

Hello!

I was a little behind on writing yesterday, so I didn't get to update... ^^;

But as always, thank you so much for reading, I really appreciate it a lot. I would also, though, appreciate a few thoughts in the form of comments from time to time, if it's not too much to ask~ :3

And I thought I'd share this precious gem here, because he really is precious♥

Until next time~!