“OK, so you just cheated, which I expected. We are now playing a different game.” Steely said as he was messing with the gun. “If you manage to get to me under a minute and thirty, you win!”

That sounded more fun to me but I still needed to deal with his glue balls. I don’t remember writing it somewhere before, so I’ll just say that his glue is made to become stickier with heat. He designed it to be able to attach scraps together and to stay attached when it was on top of an engine or something. So, in another words, I can’t just burn it off if they hit me.

“Can we not do this, and I can just apologize for not listening to you?” I didn’t want my clothes to be pinned by those balls.

“Sorry, I’m not falling for that trick for the...” I could see he was counting with his finger. “Nevermind, your countdown starts NOW!”

He started shooting, and it was SUPER MEGA FAST. I just kept running from left to right and right to left so he couldn’t hit but I needed to move forward, too, otherwise he’d just force me to run out the clock. So I thought rolling was a good option; it was unexpected. Though I couldn’t just roll the whole 15 to 20 meter distance between us and I’d be limited to moving in one direction. Then I noticed that my hands were still flamed and I wasn’t doing anything with them. But what could I possibly be able to do with them? Then I thought: “What if I boost my movement with it?”

So I tried it, jumping and blasting the ground with my flames. The result was impressive; I covered a pretty massive distance.

“Whoa! Seems like you’re getting the hang of it,” Steely shouted, “but you still have a lesson to learn!” He changed the barrel, technically reloading his gun, and started shooting again. I was just having fun with my new discovery, jumping around from here to there, till suddenly one of the balls hit me!

It wasn’t so hard, but it hit my leg and was just hanging there. That threw me off the trail, then he managed to shoot a couple of others at me which gave me some extra weigh to deal with.

Also Steely got used to my trick and just pinned me to the ground in mid-air. I was stuck.

“Gotcha!” He kept shooting more now that he immobilized me. It was just balls all around me. I tried to get up but the glue was keeping me down. I tried to stand again and again, but it wasn’t working.

“Just to let you know, you have 30 seconds to reach me, but I don’t think you’re in a position to continue the game, are you?”

I couldn’t give up, I was just at it. I was so close. I can’t stop and I can’t back down. Not while I’m only a few meters away from him. “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!” I tried to stand, with all my force, all my power, with everything that I had in me, with my full limit! Then all of a sudden, all the balls got blasted away, I was standing. It was then that I realized that I’d ponied up!

Author's Note

Make sure to check out other chapters too!

Special thanks to my editor Daniel Drazen.