I backed into the dark alley as the three of them advanced on me, swords drawn. They were all grim, but their leader in front had a particularly nasty look in her eye. There was no possible way I was going to survive this. My final moments would be of flashing steel, repeated slices of agony.

I had nothing at all to lose aside from my worthless hide. I raised my sword, but in my off hand was the one thing that offered hope… a vial of potion of luck, or so it was popularly called. That wasn’t what it truly did; it merely revealed to you in a flash what courses of action might best lead to some desired result. Sometimes that was enough.

I didn’t even have time to drink it, much less let it take effect. I crushed the vial in my bare hand and grimaced as the glass shards pierced my skin and the potion mingled directly with my blood.

As the dark shapes with gleaming blades closed in, I felt the flash of the vision—

I saw myself gauging the stride of the leader and sidestepping her blade, seizing her arm and using it to catch the swinging blade of her left-hand follower. The edge bit deep into her flesh and I kept moving as she howled, striking with my own sword at the belly of the right one, feeling it bite. I kept my momentum going, ducked under a frantic swing and saw my chance. I leaped for freedom, and screamed as I felt another blade catch my leg. I fell face first into the muck as they surrounded me, and the bright steel lanced down again and again—

Well, that was horrid. What else was possible?

I ducked and rolled forward at her legs, she dodged to the side and swung at me, but completing one somersault I thrust out with my legs and brought my sword up to parry. Sparks illuminated the alley as I got the side wall behind me; if I could just get past my third foe I would be in the clear.
But the leader made a swift stab at my face and number three ducked low and thrust as I reeled back, and then the nightmare began, a slow agonizing death under steel rain.

I was running out of time. I tried to see another path, wound up on my hands and knees with my guts pouring from a belly wound; another with a sliced windpipe as I drowned in my own blood. No triumphant cry as I escaped from the reeking alley, only one vile hell after another.

They were closing in now, I had no further time. But I had glimpsed it at last, the luckiest option I had left to me.

As the leader approached, I sidestepped her blade as I’d foreseen at first and slapped her on the cheek with my off hand, cutting her flesh and smearing her bleeding wounds with the potion of luck.

She snarled at me, but then I saw her eyes widen with understanding.

Then she smiled and struck past my instinctive attempt to parry, her blade straight and accurate as it slipped through my rib cage and pierced my heart immediately.