“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t slaughter you right now,” she hisses menacingly, twirling her bloodstained dagger in her hand “you took away my life, you killed all the people I ever cared about. And now… here you are, defenseless, vulnerable, alone.”

He flinches at the words, not the weapon. “Actually, I do have an extremely good reason you shouldn’t rid me of this world.”

She stops circling him and instead narrows her eyes. “And what might that be?”

He shrugs, trying to buy time. “I hold a valuable secret that no one else except the person with the secret knows.”

She taps her fingers against her thigh, tightening her grip on the dagger. “Okay… so tell me what this so-called secret is.”

He twists his face into an unreadable expression. “I’m afraid I cannot currently provide you that classified information, Darla.”

She flinches at the name but lets it go and snorts instead. “Classified? Pssh. Since you cannot even give me one reason why you are worthy of living I will kill you now.”

He laughs giddily. “Alright, Darla, I will enjoy watching you attempt to.”

She lunges forward, the dagger poised outward, her face contorting into a poisonous grin. But just as the dagger is about to impale his chest, it deflects inwards instead towards her chest. She gasps and drops the dagger, which skitters across the floor a few inches to his feet.

“Ah, how convenient,” he says, straining against the ropes bounding him to the stiff chair the tiniest bit to reach the dagger. He picks it up and slices the bounds, standing up and stretching in victory. “I presume you have more weaponry concealed under your cape?”

She blankly nods, reaching into her cape to reveal a gleaming black pistol, her gaze still trained on the dagger in his hand.

He steps toward her, cleaning the dried blood off the dagger with his shirt. “Okay, you’re going to do exactly this. Tell. Me. How. To. Get. Out. Of. This. Place!” He exclaims, punctuating each word with another step.

She whimpers, backing away from him. After a moment she nods and drops her pistol. She motions toward the opposite side of the cavern with a shaky hand.

He narrows his eyes, but bounds to where her finger is aimed. He pounds against the hard rock wall, but it doesn’t budge. He turns back around to ask for her to elaborate, but he instead sees that she isn’t there, nor is the pistol. He smiles. His plan is working just as he thought it would. Silly little gullible girl.

Meanwhile, she is well on her way out of the cavern after performing her fake-terrified act. The cavern, which is accessed by taking a maze of twists and turns through dark alleyways, was simply an inaccessible room to all of those who didn’t know where it was located.

He knows exactly where it was located, though, despite his fake demands to make her tell him where to find the exit. He knows how to get out. He just doesn’t want to get caught in the crossfire.

She is almost at the top of all the confusing tunnels when she is stopped by a gun aiming right at her small skull. She freezes and turns her head so she’s looking straight into the barrel of the gun. Then she hears a gunshot and her world goes black.

He hears the gunshot and claps his hands in success. Seeing into the future about an hour or two has proved useful many times before, but it proved most useful when he finally killed the leader of the gang of villains that killed his family…