Notes: I was going to wait until I had a bit more of a buffer before I actually started posting this story. But the way things are going right now, I feel like I have to.

Some of you may recognize this as a short I wrote up for the 100 Prompts challenge. Apparently it didn't want to stay a short. Though I'm aware that FFNet doesn't allow multiple submissions of the same story, expanding upon an existing short is admittedly a sort of gray area. So if this counts as a double-post, I'll excise the short once the plot of the longer story has caught up.

Warnings: Violence/gore, permanent injury, internalized ableism

It was a perfectly ordinary morning on a perfectly ordinary day.

Sigrun was leading her team on a hunt up among the fjords. They were pushing their boundaries that summer, one of their main goals to expand the safe zones outward to accommodate their ever-growing village. It was early in the season, the soldiers under her command still fresh and full of enthusiasm, and they moved on to every next location with a lot of good cheer and a spring in every step.

Perhaps they got a little too enthusiastic, a little too confident. Confidence was an asset in the field; carelessness wasn't. Then, she'd thought she was taking every reasonable precaution without being over-cautious, accepting the inevitable risks without needlessly risking lives. Later, she would wonder if the gods had decided to punish her for her arrogance.

(Even later, she'd tell Sonja that even the gods couldn't be responsible for everything, that sometimes unfortunate things happen even when you do everything right, and that there's no sin in confidence. That would be years down the line, though, and only well after she'd made her peace.)

At the time, all she knew was that they were flushing out yet another nest up in the fjords, and that things were going well. A bit too well, if you asked her: the sixth sense that every experienced Hunter developed was tingling, was telling her that something was off, something was wrong. Those who lived long enough to make Captain were the ones who'd learned not to ignore it. Sigrun held up a hand, and her chattering subordinates instantly fell silent.

"Stay here. I'm going in."

Thor fell into automatic step beside her without needing to be called, tail held high. Sigrun nodded in approval. Freyja, their oldest, was head of their feline squad, but Thor was a tom in his prime who needed as much field experience as he could get while he was still young. Freyja parked herself with the soldiers, grooming herself unconcernedly, as Sigrun and Thor stepped into the crag where the trolls had been nesting.

The beam from her electric torch fell over rocks still black and glistening with troll slime. It was disgusting, but it wasn't dangerous: not if you were immune and the area had been cleared. Oh, and if you made sure to watch your step. Sigrun set her feet down carefully, testing to make sure her boots wouldn't slip before trusting her weight to any part of the floor, feeling no small amount of envy for Thor's easy grace as he leaped from rock to rock.

The crag went back deeper than it looked, widening out so that she might even call it a proper cave. Sigrun wouldn't want to engage even a single troll in here, not if it was of any size. More than one and it would be a death trap. Better to back out, mark it down, come back with proper supplies and torch the place, just to be sure.

"Thor," she called, keeping her voice low so as not to start up any echoes. "We're leav—"

The only warning she got was the cat puffing up to twice his normal size, ginger fur standing on end and lips pulled back in a snarl. Immediately Sigrun had her dagger in hand, eyebrows drawing down into a snarl of her own as she faced down the thing coming at her.

It was a long troll with a sinuous body, propelling itself up from the depths with amazing speed as it gripped the walls with many arms. A wide open mouth revealed snarling, jagged teeth, and then it was on top of her.

Her first strike missed the brain that she'd been aiming for, knocked away at the last second by a flailing arm and instead leaving an open gash along the side of its face that only enraged it further. Cursing (mentally; she couldn't spare the breath to shout), she let herself drop and stabbed upward instead, making a deep slice in the thing's belly that she hoped would distract it long enough for her to get out from under it.

It didn't. Its mad thrashing only pinned her up against the rocks, teeth glistened close to her face, and she was lashing out with her dagger expecting to see the Valkyries any second when a streak of ginger fur flashed between her and the troll, and the cat's angry clawing proved enough of a distraction for her to slip out from underneath it.

"Thanks Thor!" The two seconds he bought her was all that she needed to get back on her feet, and Sigrun charged forward with a Viking war cry. She needed to get out before more of them woke up, but there was no way she'd be able to outrun the troll that was attacking her, not with the way it moved; she needed to kill this thing, and fast. Then she could run.

Even as its teeth closed in on her she was thrusting her dagger into the roof of its mouth; hot blood spilled down her arms, the troll convulsed once, and then it collapsed in a limp heap of deadweight—right on top of Sigrun.

This was apparently not going to be her day.

Now came the part where she called for help, had a few of her subordinates work together to heft this thing off her, and informed her team they'd back off and leave it, send someone else back to torch the place. Before she could even think about that, however, her mind was still locked in combat mode: Thor was still on alert, still hissing, tail puffed up until it was almost as big around as he was.

"Stay back!" she shouted to the shadows in the entrance of the cave, who looked like they'd been about to come in and rescue her. None too soon, either: the body on top of her twitched (she hated it when they turned out to have a second head) before violently thrashing back to life.

When it had been attacking her earlier, she hadn't gotten a good enough look at the thing to get a guess of where the second head might be hiding. From the way it was moving, though, it had to be somewhere on the lower body—which was still right on top of her lower body. Frantically, Sigrun worked to wiggle out from under it under her own power, pushing against it with her feet in her efforts to get it off.

She'd almost managed to free herself when, instead of dead flesh, her foot plunged into something warm, wet, and full of razor-sharp teeth.

Even as she was fighting to pull free the troll was biting down on her limb; her leg wasn't even halfway out of its mouth when its fangs sank into her skin. Its jaws clamped down on exactly the wrong place, and Sigrun felt her kneecap crack.

Sometimes, even in the most heated of battles, there are moments when time seems to stand still. Even years later, Sigrun would never be able to piece together exactly what had happened in that moment, or in what order. She only had a few glimpses: a spitting ball of ginger fur, latching onto the troll's face. The troll, slackening its grip for a split second, only to bite down again with renewed vigor when she tried to pull free. Wicked claws sinking deep into Thor's body, ginger fur stained red with blood. The dull snap of her shinbone breaking, her own blood spurting onto the troll's face.

Through all of this, Sigrun had maintained the presence of mind to keep hold of her dagger, and to shift her grip on the handle (though she had no memory of actually doing it). Even as the troll savaged her leg, she pushed herself up with her free hand, launched her upper body forward, and buried her weapon hilt-deep in its face. The body gave one last shuddering jerk before collapsing on top of her once more.

The next thing she remembered (she had no memory of the passage of time, even though they could not possibly have gotten to her that fast) was the weight of the troll being lifted from her, and two pairs of hands gripping her upper arms and hauling her out from under it. To the side, she caught a glimpse of Freyja standing guard at the interior of the cavern, right beside poor Thor's unmoving body.

Dimly she became aware of Ragna, her first lieutenant, kneeling by her feet, eyes going wide at the sight of her blood-soaked limb—was all of that really hers? Then, Ragna was turning back toward the entrance of the crag, bellowing "MEDIC! We need a medic in here NOW!"

The last thing Sigrun was aware of was Ragna tying a makeshift tourniquet around her thigh. The cloth was soaked red within seconds.

The next thing she was aware of was the smell of antiseptic.

Field hospital. This was hardly Sigrun's first time in one, and once you were introduced to that smell you never, ever forgot it. The prick in the crook of her arm was another all-too-familiar sensation, indicating the presence of a needle feeding blood back into her veins. She had lost quite a bit of it, if her fuzzy recollections served. Dimly, she realized that someone was holding each of her hands.

That was new. Sure, she'd been hurt before, but the Norwegian army didn't make a practice of coddling its soldiers. Even after she'd gotten her first real injury back at fifteen when a troll had opened her up from ribcage to hip, her then-Captain had only briefly stopped by (once she was conscious) to congratulate her on a battle well-fought, and her father had slapped her on the back when she pulled up her shirt to show him and declared it an excellent scar, especially for a first.

Something was seriously wrong.

That thought alone was enough to motivate Sigrun to force open her eyes, and after a few seconds of blinking the vague blurs above her resolved themselves into the faces of her parents. Her father sat with his lips pressed together, the usual cheerful twinkle gone from his eyes; her mother looked at her tenderly but her posture was straight-backed and rigid, with an expression that Sigrun hadn't seen on her since Trond's funeral three years ago.

"Mom? Dad?" If a couple of well-meaning but naïve privates had thought their commanding officer could use some comfort, that would've been one thing—but her parents were generals. They couldn't be spared to drop everything and rush to her side just because she'd been wounded—not unless her injuries were far worse than the usual. Her heart beat faster. "'r you doing here?"

Instead of answering, her father squeezed her hand. "How are you feeling?"

"Like crap." The lingering sensation of wrongness was getting worse by the minute; her Hunter's sixth sense was now screaming at her that something was terribly, horribly off. "Now what is going on?"

Her parents exchanged a glance with each other across her hospital bed, and still didn't answer. Impatiently, a sense of cold dread flooding her gut, Sigrun yanked her hand out of her mother's grip, and grabbed hold of the blankets that covered her up to her chest.

"Sweetie, you might not want to—"

Any further protests her mother might have made died on her lips as Sigrun threw off the covers and saw that, where her leg had been that morning, there was now only a bandaged stump.

A/N: Please note that this was written by an able-bodied civilian with no medical expertise. Not to mention an American who's never been to Scandinavia. While I've tried to do the research whenever and wherever I can, I don't always know where to look, so if anyone who knows more about such matters than I spots any glaring errors, please, tell me! This is a pretty well-informed fandom, so I'd like as much quality feedback as I can get.