Duck ran down the crowded pedestrian-only street in the heart of Alice City. His scraped brown boots, dyed dark by the rain, thudded against the wet pavement. His hair, the flamboyant colour of high-vis construction vests, was an orange beacon in the sea of black umbrellas. He wore old combat fatigues; a faded jungle camouflage shirt with frayed sleeves under an equally exhausted, many-pocketed vest. His pants were oversized, salvaged from a desert mission in another life; a homage to a distant past where there had been more weight to this man. They were held up by a futuristic-looking utility belt, as though he had stolen it from a bat-themed superhero.

He screamed as he ran, a high-pitched wailing that was more befitting on a tantruming five year old child. He collected puzzled and alarmed stares from the other pedestrians like an angora rabbit collecting burrs in a ragweed field. Those that stared at him would turn to look at what he was running from after he had passed. They would see nothing, draw their conclusions about the crazy man, and go back to their day.

Duck may have been crying as he screamed, but the tears were lost in the rain. He was terrified and nothing was going to plan. He had to get away from the shadows that he had stirred up from the dumpster behind Starfield Hotel, but now that they had caught his scent, it was not going to be easy.

One shadow he could handle. He could flush it with power, transform it into a tangible creature, and then kill it.

Two shadows... he could also likely deal with. He didn't like to, but he'd done it before.

Three shadows, and Duck ran.

Four shadows, and Duck ran fast.

He was running very fast, but the shadows were faster. They leapt from building to building, from person to person. They slithered and oozed and flickered and glided, always reaching out for Duck like hungry leeches after rain. The man knew that he had to get away from the city, away from the people, because eventually the shadows would catch him. He was a man and he would tire. Shadows never tired. They would come at him, and he would have to choose whether to flush them or to let them consume him, which was not really a choice at all. And if he flushed them, if they all came at him at once, he was going to have to fight them. That wasn't really an option either.

Back-up! Call for back-up! The thought slapped him like an scorned woman. He choked his screams back to muted sobs and forced himself to run faster as his hands fumbled at one of the pockets of his vest. He reached in and his fingers touched cold metal. So focused was his attention on getting out his phone that he did not realize he had reached the end of the walking strip, and had run straight onto actual road with actual cars.

A man grabbed his arm and dragged him back out of the way of an oncoming car that abused Duck with its horn. As luck would have it, the man had grabbed Duck's left hand, and the force of it had sent his phone flying forward on to the road as he himself had been pulled back.

"Are you crazy?" his saviour, a fit man in jogging attire, was shouting. "Watch where you're going!"

Duck barely registered his words. His eyes scrambled for the phone, and found it on the road. He shook the man off his arm, and stepped out onto the road just as -

Crunch.

In a second the phone was rendered into scrap. Another moment later, as the hind wheels of the car that had run over it with its front wheels passed, the phone was no more than a collection of broken shards.

Duck let out a scream of frustration. It was an angry, tortured sound that drove the good Samaritan away. Duck forced himself to look behind himself down the way he had come, and he was just in time to see a flicker of darkness in one of the building windows terribly close to him. It was his only warning before the shadow launched itself at him. He didn't see it, but he could feel it before him like a rippling wall of despair.

He said a really bad word that rhymed with his callsign, Duck. This was it. Caught between a busy road and a crowded street, this is where he would be force to make a stand. Duck called on the deep pool of verve within him, and a tendril of power came forth. It was hot, and bright, and the sensation was familiar and comforting to Duck. He forced the power into his right hand, packing it into his pointer finger. It was a manoeuvre he had much practice in, so it took but a moment.

Any longer and the fight would have been over before it began.

He felt the shadow upon him now. He thrust his finger out at it, at the same time forcing the power he had gathered at its tip into the shadow. There was a bright flash the colour of orange tinged with black in which the shadow and its choking despair disappeared. Duck had flushed it by freely giving the shadow the verve that the shadow had been trying to take for itself.

There was only one problem with flushing shadows, and the problem was also the only solution. For shadows were incorporeal, and could not be slain, but verve, given freely, could transform it into something tangible. Something destroyable.

The one problem was that a corporeal shadow was known as something else entirely. It was called a demon, and a demon was what Duck now faced. As the light faded, he could make out the demon's features. It towered over him, one and a half times taller than a man, with a spider's swollen abdomen, and a human head bulging with black, beady eyes. It had eight arachnid legs that ended in human feet and hands. It was the colour of molten orange and dappled with black. Orange and black were the colours that manifested with Duck's verve. Anyone who was in the business of hunting shadows would know the hunter who flushed the demon from the colours that the demon took on. It marked the demon as Duck's prey, or his mistake.

Duck let out a whimper. If it had been up to him, he would not have flushed this one. This was above his pay grade. Unlike the shadows, the crowd could see the demon, and the sight was terrifying. The people turned into a fleeing horde as if Duck and the demon stood at the top of a steep hill, and everyone else were bouncy balls that just realized that gravity was in effect.

The demon's eyes were all for Duck. It wanted to devour him; to suck the rest of that tasty verve from his being. There was no going back now. Duck stumbled onto the road, just as the monster lunged. The sound of screeching tyres rose above the sound of Duck's screams. He rolled across the road into another lane of traffic. The demon was not so fast. Unholy flesh and carapace met with steel, and lost.

The driver of the garbage truck had a look of horror on his face; whether the horror was at the sight of the demon, or the act of hitting the demon and splattering it across the front side of his truck, no one would ever know.

Duck rolled to his feet. He had no time to celebrate. He felt the presence of a shadow snaking towards him on the ground under the truck, as another shadow grew up and over the truck, casting unnatural darkness across the vehicle's carriage. Duck flapped his hands, not caring how ridiculous he looked as it was the fastest way he could draw verve to his fingers. He ran towards the garbage truck, which had come to a halt. Just before he reached the truck, he dropped into a forward roll, and sent a small blast of energy from his fingertip into the ground. Using the momentum from his roll, he sprung up and leapt at the truck, tapping the darkening green paint of the vehicle with his other hand. Twin flares of light erupted as Duck kicked up and off the truck, diving as far as he could away from the two newly minted demons. He landed on the roof of a speedy blue hatchback whose driver had somehow missed the carnage, or ordained to drive through it anyway.

Duck peered over the roof and through the windscreen at the driver. Upon seeing who she was, Duck let out a happy roar. There was no time to get in. The two demons, one serpentine and one that looked equally like a rat as it did an alien, were clamouring to get at the man whose power had awoken an insatiable hunger in them. The driver hit the accelerator so fast that the wheels of the car slid on the wet road, sending back a shower of water and the black smoke of burning rubber, before speeding off down the street with Duck clinging on for dear life.