Chapter 33: Hunting
By this time, there were only about twenty minutes left of the cat-and-mouse test. Several kilometers away from the starting area, Alexandre was sprinting as fast as he could move through the forest, darting between trees, leaping over boulders, ignoring thorny blackberry bushes that scraped harmlessly across his genetically super-hardened skin.
Rather than looking at his surroundings, Alexandre was staring intently at the tablet held tightly between his white-knuckled hands. It didn't have good news.
"Thirty thousand," he muttered furiously to himself as he ran. "Thirty damn grand. It seems like everyone on the island's coming for me!" Indeed, there were thirty Hunters within close enough distance that they showed up on the local scanner screen of the tablet, though most were pathetically useless. Only eight students had come within a hundred meters and might be any kind of real threat.
On one hand, Alexandre was very proud of his enhanced speed and agility. If they'd all been on a straight racetrack, Alexandre was confident that he could maintain the gap between himself and the others until the end of the test.
However, there were other factors at play. The students knew this island much better than he did, and there were other students a long distance directly ahead of him, so Alexandre might have to adjust his course any number of times if he wanted to evade everyone. Moreover, it was always possible that an obstacle might arise which would slow him down for a moment or two—and that's all it might take for his pursuers to get close enough that he'd be forced to fight.
As he ducked under a thick tree branch, Alexandre decided on a plan: He'd lure the group following him to come into contact with the group up ahead. Everyone wanted the bounty, so the two groups would likely come into conflict. Hopefully, they'd be tricked into a full-on brawl. So long as there was at least a little confusion, Alexandre could make more distance between himself and his attackers. Perhaps he could even cover his tracks and lose them.
The thought occurred that none of the students knew his face but were only tracking him on their tablets by his watch. He began considering how to use that fact against them—
He was pulled out of his thoughts by glimpsing three students coming toward him from the north. This was it! Time to put his plan into action.