Chapter 25: The flow state
"Hundred meters to go!" The guard jogging beside Damien yelled, his expression too bored for someone exerting himself.
"And it's been thirty minutes since we started running. If you want to keep up with the hourly requirement, I'd advise you to speed up," he added, not in the least looking drained from the running.
Damien let out a loud, exhausted breath. His panting noises were growing louder with each kilometer they covered. Just as Clement had warned him, he was beginning to feel his muscles stiffen the more he forced them to move. It was as though they were turning into lead. He couldn't even flinch without a ripple of soreness spreading all over his body.
However, seeing the five-kilometer mark in the distance—two guards dressed in black and holding what looked like white flags—he forced himself to sprint. The moon was almost within his reach now.
'Five more kilometers, then I'm done.'
Fired by determination, he took off like a fired shot, covering the hundred-meter distance as if it were nothing, his legs slapping on the ground loudly.
The wind whooshed coldly past his sweaty face, and he closed his eyes for a moment, accepting its soothing embrace. Thanks to the trees lining the track, he hadn't felt the heat from the sun in a while, which made running in the forest much more bearable.
However, even with the conditions favoring him like this, his body decided to play the ultimate traitor. When he reached the two guards standing by the five-kilometer mark, Damien's legs began to quiver like leaves in a hurricane, their subtle shake a dead giveaway that he was losing strength.
"Ugh!" He groaned, stopping to support himself on a tree.
"Should I carry you back to the palace, young sir?" One of the guards standing next to the tree asked him, tapping his shoulder as if to draw his attention.
Damien didn't know which grated more on his nerves: the guards' low expectations of him or his guide's effortless jog while he clung to a tree, wheezing like a deflated balloon. However, one thing was crystal clear: his current predicament boiled down to one major issue...