Main theme: Metro Exodus rap by Jt Music, featuring Andrea Storm Kaden
Theme: Beyond Your Understanding by Segun Akinola

Records of a Hunter
Name: Alma Gorman
Profession: Huntsman
Team: GALE
Entry #401:

There's an old road leading from the coast of Vale into the inlands, towards a town called Sumire.

The road is called the Path of Heroes. It was made long before the First Great War, and was named as such just after it, when the king of Vale and his chosen champions were walking back through the kingdom along this path after their great victory.

And right now, the road is scattered with corpses.

Bullet marks and blood stains litter the dirt and stone road, with bodies scattered far and in between, either wanderers of refugees. Bodies of singular individuals to whole families, big and small, old and young. All of them with their throats slit, or their bodies blown to pieces, or their heads opened up, and covering the world around them in blood and guts and bone and gore.

The Path of Heroes? Please. This is the path where heroes go to die.

This is the path where we all go to die, and yet I am still walking it. I suppose its what I deserve. What I'm destined for. What we're all destined for.

No. No, not yet. Not now. I won't allow it. I'll die by my own accord, by my own choosing. I won't let these Grimm bastards decide how I leave this world.

In the distance, I can see farms and homesteads being burnt to the ground, smoke rising into the air as the world below is lit by an angry orange glare. Occasionally, I have to slip away from an overpassing Grimm ship, its searchlights scanning the ground for any living thing on the floor.

No, that's a lie. Not any living thing. They leave the animals well enough alone.

They're looking for humans. Humans and Faunus.

I'll get back to this in a moment.

Right now, I'm right in the middle of the town that had once been known as Sumire, all on my own. I'm writing this on my pocket scroll instead of my scroll-pad, which was broken beyond repair not too long ago. This thing is too small for me to see what I'm writing properly, so apologies for any spelling misatkes.

I'm on my own now, because of a stupid mistake. A stupid series of mistakes. When we had taken up this mission to scout out the lands of Vale, observing Grimm numbers and reporting back on them, we hadn't expected much. We had all thought that this whole Second Great War thing was just a Grimm resurgence that would be brief, and would fade away. We hadn't been there at the Initiation Massacre. We hadn't witnessed the horrors of what had happened in the Emerald Forest and the Valerian plains. We had only heard of what had happened through second hand accounts and tall tales in bars and taverns, we had thought them to be exaggerations and untruths. So, when Ozpin had messaged us, and asked our team of this mission, we had thought it to be easy money.

We were so very, very wrong.

Our team leader, Gale North, was the first to go. One instance, we had ventured to a town of Vertex, only to learn that we had been followed by a pack of Grimm. We had learnt of this and laughed, saying to the mayor that it was no problem for us, and that we'd make up for our mess.

We had been expecting a pack of Beowolves, not an entire company of these Grimm soldiers.

They'd gunned Gale down as we'd tried to fend them off. Just... Riddled her with bullet holes, and then dragged her corpse away and tore it to pieces. With our leader dead, we were scattered. We were trained to fight beasts, not an entire army, but we still fought on as best as we could.

If we had known that the Grimm had only sent that company up as a distraction, so that the rest of them could encircle the town and corral everyone in there, we would've stayed with them.

We were surrounded, we were scared, and to our great shame, we ran. We ran, and we left the town to die.

At least, I hope that they all died. I think now, considering what I've seen, maybe death is a mercy.

Ellis Nihil was the next to go. We were sleeping in a cave, out of the storm, and the Grimm had just... A few of them had slinked into the cave when we were sleeping and slit his throat. We were only able to escape because they had woken him up, and he had started screaming as they sliced his jugular open.

And then, there was Listless. Whilst we were walking, her power cells just ran out, and she dropped to the ground. We'd left all of our equipment in the cave with Ellis, so we didn't have anything to recharge her Techion shell with. She told me to leave her, to run as fast as I could, and whilst I didn't want to, a trio of Grimm ships was narrowing down on us, and I had to run and leave her behind. I don't know if she's dead, but from what I know, her organic remains should've failed now without her Techion body for life support, so there's no real doubt that she had long since come to pass.

And now, there's just me, sitting on the porch of some burnt out home in Sumire, looking at the blood splatters on the ground, and the carefully made graves that littered the side of the town.

Not my doing.

Here's where things go from surprising to horrifying, all the way down to just... Not right.

When I had come into Sumire, only to see the burnt out ruins of the settlement, and the desecrated remains of the Path of Heroes, I found a lone Grimm soldier. A single Grimm person.

With a shovel in it's hand... It was digging graves for all of the people that had died here.

I was shocked to say the least. The Grimm are supposed to hate humanity. They're supposed to despise every single aspect of us, and seek only our eradication. So why on Remnant would any of them- Even just the one- Ever feel the desire to dig graves for the people they had slain?

I never got the chance to find out. The Grimm soldier saw me and tried to kill me, and so I killed it in turn. A single shot to the head. Afterwards, I put 2 more bullets into its fading corpse, just to be safe.

I looked over the freshly made and finished graves (There's a pair for that old guy Edward Caspian, and his grandson August. I remember hearing about that announcement over the scroll), And then into the town, and then came to another realisation.

There were not enough graves for everyone in the town. Only a scant few.

And that was because there was nobody else in the town. No bodies, no nothing. Everyone else was just... Gone.

Had they evacuated first? Had these just been the unlucky ones to be left behind?

Then, I came to a horrifying realisation.

As said above, the Grimm were looking for all humans and Faunus that happened to be outside of the cities and major settlements, but they weren't killing them.

They were capturing them.

I remember passing by single home properties and farms, watching from the treelines as the Grimm invaded their homes and dragged them away, only ever killing them when they put up a fight.

The same thing had happened here. The Grimm had invaded Sumire, killed anyone who resisted, and taken away the rest, to... To god's know where.

The same thing must've happened in Vertex, and in every other minor or even major settlement and home and whatever else across Vale, and maybe even all of Remnant.

This wasn't a culling.

It was a harvesting.

I don't know why they're doing this. I don't know why they're kidnapping us instead of killing us, and I don't know why this Grimm was burying the dead. Maybe it's a standing order, maybe the people who died here did something so heroic that the Grimm decided to honour them, maybe it was just a quirk of this Grimm, I don't know.

But... I... I think I have a theory.

I think I know why. I think I have a good idea as to why all of this is happening.

I think this is all abou

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