Mystery story setup chapter (part 3)

She had no time to shoot now, he tried to stab her in the chest but only managed to make a cut in her upper right arm, her reflexes again had not failed her and the dodge attempt had saved her life, but the cut made her scream in pain and drop one of her guns. The man landed awkwardly in the staircase and went down again, head first into the lower steps when Jane shot him in the back -Five and four- She thought before grabbing her second gun and sprinting up the staircase back to the thirteenth level.

When the adrenaline of the moment died off, Jane found herself walking again across the fourteenth floor, her left hand over her wounded arm, and wondering how could she have been such a fool and missed an obvious detail like that; then she heard the sound again -Why?...how could he survive that? What is that sound and why the hell did it stop before? – she felt her eyes welling up, her arm heavy with pain and her whole body still shaking uncontrollably, she also started to get dizzy.

“I need to keep moving, if I reach the twentieth I’ll be fine” – Saying it out loud made it sound more convincing, but deep down she was not so sure, she began to walk faster but then the dizziness got worst -The wound­- she told herself, all the stress and blood loss from the injury was surely causing it and it would get her killed if she did not make haste; but when she raised her left hand to check the wound there was no blood, not in her hand, no on her arm.

“What the…” – a closer look at her arm showed just a scar, the pain was still fresh and sharp, but the wound looked like it had been there for weeks, not a drop of blood, just a pink streak from her elbow to her shoulder, she stared at the scar in disbelief for a moment before resuming her walk, after the first two footsteps she had convinced herself to stop thinking about it, after the third and fourth she had already moved her focus to her next goal -Reach eighteenth- on the fifth footstep the shining knife went flying past her, breaking the window of the store closer to the next group of stairs.

Jane turned around in panic and saw the man at the end of the corridor, with a knife in his left hand and getting ready to throw it, she raised both weapons but the motion sent a jolt of pain on her right arm that made her drop one gun again, she shot the other as the second knife came at her slicing through the air with the man in blue running immediately behind it -Five and three- She tried a dodge that came off as an awkward sidestep and both the knife and the bullet missed their targets, she breathed heavily in frustration while the man drew another knife, illuminating briefly the room with the flashing steel, they were now about thirty feet from each other and he was closing in fast -I can’t let him throw another- she figured that the next knife would most likely go between her eyes or square in her chest instead of inside the store like the others, she could not afford to gamble her life on how good an aim the blue man had at that distance, so she moved as fast as her body allowed her, towards him.