As a short, black-haired figure dashed through the narrow alleys, he quickly glanced back, making sure his pursuers were gone.
Damn, how could this happen? he thought while evading the workers returning from their jobs. He had barely managed to escape earlier by infusing the last remnants of his mana into his muscles for a quick burst of speed.
His last hope was to get out of the city and wait out his former lackeys before trying to survive on the streets. Going back would mean death.
"He's over here!" shouted a young child about his age from the other side of a narrow alley. He was the leader of this crusade against their former tyrant. He had brown hair and matching brown eyes, he was skinny, even more so than the bloody and bruised figure.
The boy, Axel, abandoned any attempt at stealth as he bolted at full speed—bloody and bruised—towards the towering city walls. However, just as he was about to reach his ticket to freedom, he was body-slammed by a lanky kid he had once used to steal bread from bakeries in his childhood crime 'syndicate'.
He stumbled a few steps before falling and rolling through the muddy ground. The crowd of kids around him continued to grow, while the guards at the front gate stood watching, amusement shining in their dark eyes.
Mike, the new leader, began speaking. "This is the end of the road for you, scumbag."
Axel, his eyes shining like polished jade, slowly got up, resentment burning in his gaze. "What did I even do to you?" he asked, shifting his eyes to the rest. "To all of you?"
"You treated us like dogs. None of us wanted to steal or mug, yet you forced us to," Mike said, his gaze filled with disdain. "We just wanted to live our childhoods in peace, even though that damned orphanage never gave us enough."
"I gave you a chance—a chance to learn how to live in this wretched place, not just survive. Yet you turned against me," Axel replied with rage—not just at their betrayal, but at the humiliation of being beaten by mundane humans.
"We only listened to you because you could use magic. Even if we all fought you at once, you could have beaten us," said the lanky kid—John—who had body-slammed him earlier, he had black eyes with blonde hair.
"But now that you've received your oath, we just had to ambush you," added another boy Axel recognized, a prideful smirk plastered across his face.
"How did you even know?" Axel asked the group.
"It's because your habits changed—from physically beating us when we didn't comply to asking someone else to do it. I got suspicious, so I intentionally made a mistake on the next task you gave me," said Mike. "And when you found out, you raised your hand to hit me but quickly lowered it, saying you didn't even have time to deal with me. That's when I confirmed it—your oath is that you can't even hit people, isn't it?" His voice was thick with ridicule and scorn, matched by the expressions of the others.
Axel had only been stalling to buy time to recover his mana before making another escape, but his eyes widened in disbelief at the cliché unfolding before him.
"Well, it's time I left. However, this isn't the end," he said, standing up. He gathered all the mana he had recovered and condensed it into his legs before leaping toward the nearest tree in the forest surrounding the colossal city walls.
He started jumping through the tall oak trees, uncaring of the small cuts gathering on his body from the sharp branches as the distant sound of curses started to grow even quieter.
"How could those dogs bite the hand that fed them" He thought to himself.