They had returned safe and sound, greeted with a couple other members that woke up from the sudden sound. One of the hunters from the earlier hunt was amongst the awoken.

"You…" he hissed at the Sneasel, "you woke us up, didn't you?"

"Look, it's all right, she said she was just sharpening her claws," assured one of the Weavile patrol trio, "whatever made that sound is probably gone anyway."

The Sneasel made herself a spot on the ground next to the freezing Sawsbuck carcass and got comfortable to finally get some rest. The cruel hunter still snarled at her, figuring that she was the culprit. He didn't have the will to argue with anything right now, so he gave a rude "bah!" with a whisk of his claw and went back to sleep.

As the rest of the Sharp Claw Pokémon was going back to sleep, the jumpy Weavile started to grow increasingly uncomfortable. This incident reminded him of a terrible thing long ago that made him so paranoid today. How could he be sure that everything was okay? Was she telling the truth? Why did he have to be the only one that made it? The newly surfaced feeling of distress and uncertainty gnawed at him. He had to get it off his chest to confirm it.

Right as the Sneasel runt took her position, she was approached by the paranoid Weavile with a gloomy look on his face. His breathing also kicked up as he twiddled his claws.

"Are you okay?' she asked the fellow member of her pack.

"Well, it's just that I hope you're telling the truth about what just happened…"

She laughed.

"Hmph, why wouldn't I?"

He appeared apprehensive.

"It's just that…well, you were the one that made those sounds," he muttered before shook his head to spit it out, "and not those…taller beings from before."

The Sneasel sat up out of curiosity. She never heard such as thing being brought up by the others before.

"What do you mean? Some other Pokémon?"

The paranoid Weavile sighed and took a stressed breath before sitting down with her.

"They weren't Pokémon. They… ugh, can I just explain what happened from the top?"

The Sneasel nodded, and the Weavile immediately felt relief at given an opportunity to speak out his problems.

"Okay, here is how I remember it," he spoke to recall the haunting event.

"It all started last winter; you were probably too young to remember it. Anyway, I evolved and became eligible to participate in group hunts. I felt so anxious to start making contributions, thinking that I was untouchable and would be the best there was. We had settled down in a spot towards the east, I think. It gave us plenty of shelter, but we were the only Pokémon in that area, so we had to travel farther than normal to bring back food."

"And you could probably run into something really nasty?" asked the Sneasel.

"We did. I and four others banded together to go out and try to bring back food for the rest of us. We covered a surprisingly amount of ground, so much that we thought that we would lose our way back. So away we went with eyes and ears open for anything of interest. I don't know how long it took, but eventually, we head into a clearing with a big wooden structure in the middle of it."

The Sneasel was now very absorbed into the story. She was dying to know the cause of his plight.

"We never saw anything like it," he continued. "The pack and I decided to investigate it. It was a lot bigger up close than far away, and behind it was a lot more open space. If only I knew what was beyond it…"

"Did you find anything there?"

"Indeed. I saw about seven butchered Pokémon strung up on a bunch of thick sticks in the ground. They were split open and flattened out with bloodied snow under them. There were no organs that I could see and most were missing their skin, so their muscles were exposed. It stunned us that there was Pokémon or some other monster probably living in that wooden cube that flawlessly removed the skin from whatever it caught. Our bellies were rumbling, and we started to help ourselves by peeling off chunks of the meat to feed ourselves. The meat was so tempting that we went from delicately peeling off muscle to just carelessly ripping it off and shoving it in our mouths. And that's…when it happened…" quivered the Weavile who was slowing down his speech.

"What happened? Tell me!" insisted the Sneasel.

The Weavile had paused before he looked her coldly in the eyes.

"We got startled from a sudden, sharp metallic click. We looked at the source of the sound, and there was that…tall being pointing its weapon at us."

The Sneasel froze.

"It was much taller than us, about seven feet. Its face…it was pink and you could see the features of his skull lined with white hair. The monster's body was a scrambled mess of black and white with brown straps in various locations. Its face was pink and partially obscured by a snow-white tuft of hair, and the entire body looked chubby. And its weapon… the sound and what it did…"

The Weavile had to pause to regain its breath.

"The weapon it carried was an elongated, metal tube. The monster jerked its hand underneath the tube about a foot, then pulled it forward again, which was what caught our attention. It…yelled something, like "Get off here!" and then… and then… oh Arceus…"

"What happened then?"

The Weavile took another deep breath and looked down as if he gave a serious apology. She knew it was something terrible when one of her fellow pack mates, known carrying thick skin, shuddered at mentioning it.

"One second later, there was this blinding flash of light and a deafening blast of sound that stunned us. When I regained my senses and looked around… one of our hunting members was torn apart and on the ground, dead. I… never thought things could get so ugly and traumatizing seeing your friend just… die that horribly so fast… body parts scattered everywhere…"

The Sneasel was taken aghast by what she had just heard. You could kill something that easily and that horribly?

"I just couldn't believe what happened. But it didn't end it. I heard two more metallic clicks; "cli-CLACK." There were wispy trails of smoke emanating from that pipe, and from behind popped out a little object thing that gave off more trails of smoke until it was buried under the snow. One of the other hunters screeched and lunged towards the monster, and… oh Arceus, she was right in front of the pipe and got…it worse… ohhh Arceus…"

"That one had it even worse?"

The Weavile was clenching is fist and subconsciously was digging his claws into his palm out of stress.

"It was much worse. And it happened much quicker than the other one. I still remember getting a splash of blood on me after the second explosion of light and sound to muddle my senses. Then came more words, I think it said "Get out! Get. Get! Get running now!" while it waved around its weapon. At that point I didn't care what happened, I just wanted out as fast as possible. So I turned around and ran as fast as I could in the direction we came from. In the distance I heard that "cli-CLACK" again behind me."

The Sneasel was shaking a little out of terror. A great Pokémon with a pipe that deafened and blindly those nearby as one other was killed outright? Was such a thing even real?

"What about the others?"

"I don't know what happened to them. I did hear a third deafening sound, but I didn't care what was going on. I just ran out of horror. If that is not something to be afraid, then tell me, what is? Does that not make you twitch at the slightest snapping or metallic sound off in the distance knowing that something could be after you at any moment?"

They both paused to catch their breath for a moment before the Weavile wrapped up the story with how nobody believed him when he had finally returned to the others. They all thought he had gone insane from eating some strange berry from how shaken up he was and how incomprehensible his speech was.

She, too, found his story hard to believe. But seeing how accurately he retold the events and how uneasy he became the further he told the story, she had finally believed him. She snapped a glance over her shoulder out of paranoia as well.

"And the ones that fell to that monster," she asked, "do you think they were my parents?"

The stressed Weavile looked at her with a bewildered expression.

"W-What makes you say that?"

"They went off one day and didn't come back. I didn't spend much time with the, but they were the only ones that loved me, and I loved them back."

Her voiced grew hostile.

"Tell me!"

The Weavile remained silent and stared at the snow for a full minute as he raced the awful events through his mind again. In retrospect, the ones that he saw get obliterated did look a little bigger than the others, which would match the Sneasel's size.

"I… think so, but…"

He didn't finish speaking as the Sneasel was frightened. Her parents, the only ones in her pack that liked and protected her, getting killed far away from some tall monster with a totally out of this world method of killing.

She turned around and fell into a fetal position with faint whimpers and crystalline tears skidding down her face with eyes wide with horrification realization. Of all explanations, that had to be the icebreaker? It was way too much information to process, particularly at a time like this.

The paranoid Weavile gave a regretful, saddened sigh as he walked away back to his sleeping spot to leave the Sneasel alone to deal with what she just learned.

The story told by the surviving Weavile has a partly different perspective from the tall being making sure that no more Pokémon would intrude on his property. Closer towards human civilization stood a quiet, lonely cabin amidst the snow-blanketed landscape. That cabin was under the ownership of a veteran hunter called Wilson Hotchkiss. He was a tall, older, burly man standing at 6' 8" and about 250 pounds with brown eyes. Wilson had a very thick wavy, but short, white beard, like someone dragged a rake through a patch of snow. His beard completely hid his chin and obscured his jawline, crawling up the sides of his face and connecting with his scalp. He had a short, bushier mustache on his upper lip matching the same color as his beard. A few rows of wrinkles were notched into his forehead from age, contrasting from the relatively smooth skin of his face. Wilson had a full head of cotton-white hair on his head with few signs of balding, usually obscured by his hunting cap he usually wore. Wilson's usual attire for being out in the field was a thick full-body uniform in arctic camo. All sorts of white, black, and many gray splotches adorned the uniform, though his outfit was closer to the lighter spectrum in general.

He had bought and maintained that cabin and the surrounding property for decades, treating it as his secondary home from his official one in Icirrus City. Wilson was considered the ultimate outdoorsman; whenever he had a chance to escape to his cabin in the north to be at one with nature's cold side, he would immediately do so, and found himself staying there longer with each visit. Wilson loved being isolated from the rest of humanity to connect with nature and hunt some of the hearty Pokémon that also made the cold their home. But living far out into the snowy countryside presented its own set of problems.

One windy, frosty afternoon, Wilson Hotchkiss was holed up in his cabin preparing lunch for himself by grilling up some venison. It wasn't from the meat he shot the other day, nor was that hunt an easy one. He was forced to go on a several-hour track on the Stantler he wounded in the gut with a poorly aimed shot. Trudging through knee-high snow in thirty degrees below freezing for a couple of hours to retrieve a hearty Stantler, and making an even harder return trip was certainly worth getting frustrated at. In the end he did manage to recover it and string it up on the processing station, but further processing was for another day. The next day, he prepared himself on a long day of butchering the Stantler. As he was cooking himself some breakfast chops from a previous Stantler, he helped himself to every outdoorsman's favorite medicine: whiskey.

There was always a tall, chilled, amber bottle of old-fashioned whiskey in the cabin to help the hunter cope with tough times. He knew that guns and alcohol don't mix, and he only drank when he was sure he wasn't going to do any more shooting. But the false warmth it temporarily provided helped him take the edge off being a mountain man. Wilson did not mind it anyway because he only had one or two shots of it, usually. This time was different. Wilson easily downed about half the bottle of whiskey to help bear with what the laborious day he had. Anybody would start getting scary with that much alcohol in their system, let alone one with a gun. He swigged down the booze just as the venison was finished cooking. Wilson looked out the window right as he was about to serve himself the chops.

He had to take a double check out of disbelief of what he just saw: five Weavile that just left the tree line and approaching the Stantler he nearly broke his back to get.

Wilson had to battle with the native Sharp Claw Pokémon ever since the beginning of his cabin days. The first-hand accounts, stories, and warnings were all backed up by what a pack of Sneasel or Weavile could do if it was oversized and expanding closer towards humans. At first, Wilson tried to not intervene with the Sharp Claw Pokémon too much. Most of the time it was one or two strays that got lost or outcast from the others and went about their own business peacefully. But as time passed, Pokémon populations expanded. The sightings near his property became more frequent and severe things were starting to become common.

Freshly retrieved carcasses attracted the wild scavengers, which began to come in droves at random, to steal Wilson's meat and tear up the surroundings. His income and land were being bled dry from damage done by the Weavile and Sneasel that now started to associate his cottage with an effortless source of food.

Wilson had brainstormed ways in the past to scare off the packs of Weavile and Sneasel that were tormenting his property, but he was getting outsmarted almost as soon as he tried implementing them. Repelling and masking chemicals and fences failed to bring any satisfactory results. He was getting outsmarted at nearly every turn at his attempts to keep them away. Months of culminated bitterness from repeated failures, costly infrastructure repairs, untold amounts of meat lost, and the darkened figures of the Sharp Claw Pokémon finally got to Wilson's head. Something inside him snapped and broke him off from his old connections with nature and Pokémon. Violent thoughts were bubbling in his head at an alarming rate.

"Oh, that does it! Not this time! Nope, not gonna happen!" Wilson Hotchkiss screamed to himself upon seeing a hunting party of Weavile come out of the woodwork to ransack the efforts of his most recent labor. Wilson made a mad dash to throw on his hunting coat and to get his weapon of choice: an old-fashioned, rugged shotgun that earned the nickname of "Trench Sweeper" back in the day. It had served him without issue for many years, and it certainly wouldn't fail him here. Wilson snagged a fistful of his favorite and exotic shells out of its box and loaded his weapon before barging out the door in frustration.

And there they were, stripping of chunks of the Stantler he labored within mockery of his efforts. He clenched his teeth and racked in a shell to be fired, complete with the crisp and distinct cli-CLACK of the action. That certainly got the attention of the Weavile.

"You fucking pests!" he roared at the surprised Weavile as he took aim at one that just ripped off a piece of meat about the size of his fist. The iron sights were lined up dead-center with the thieving Pokémon's chest them came the pull of the trigger.

*BOOOOOM*

His target fell instantly as the rest flinched from the sound and muzzle flash. A metallic tinnitus hung in the air from the gunshot to stun the Weavile. They recuperated and took a look at their obliterated partner. What was one of their comrades was a bloody body with a hole about the size of a fist in its chest. They were mortified at the bloody scene; they were violent themselves, but not like this.

"You like that!?" he roared as he kept his finger firmly on the trigger of his hunting shotgun while holding the pump back to eject the empty shell, ready to deliver a second nasty surprise to the Pokémon.

The Weavile stared in shock at their shot and killed comrade through their shared tinnitus. There was a cavity roughly the size of one of their fists in the upper-center portion of the unfortunate Weavile's torso. With a closer glimpse done in under a fraction of a second, there appeared to be six tiny, separate paths of tunneling spread out from the central cavity. Thoughts of terror surged through the brain of every Pokémon present from seeing what a human and his firearm can do to their kind.

"[What—Wh-What is this!?]"

One of the Weavile shrieked and lunged directly at Wilson, who was still firmly holding down the trigger and pulling the pump back. If Wilson were armed with any other sporting shotgun, he would've index his finger and pushed the pump to ready a second shot. Instead, he and was going to show the Weavile what his favorite gun can really do.

The Weavile came roughly a few feet from physical contact as Wilson continued to hold down the trigger, take aim, and rushed the pump forward.

*Klack-BOOM*

The second Weavile was thrown back and dead before it even hit the ground as a point blank blast tore through it. Wilson held down the trigger and pushed the slide forward to eject a second empty shell with extra wisps of smoke. The surviving Weavile had enough ran as fast as their legs allowed them to sprint back to the woods they came from.

"Fuck off!" roared Wilson as he slam fired the rest of the ammo. A thundering encore of *klickklackBOOM-klickklackBOOM* reverberated in the cold air to make sure that there will be no more visits from the Sharp Claw Pokémon. "Don't come back! There's plenty'a more where that came from if you do! You motherfucker you!"

Once the Weavile were out of sight and his gun went dry, he looked at the mess he just made.

He never felt so violent before, nor did he feel so self-righteous about turning two Weavile into such a bloody mess with such close-quarter power. From that moment on, Wilson never again looked at himself as the cool outdoorsman that prided on being one with nature. He held a terrible grudge against any Sneasel or Weavile that came into his sight, and it felt so satisfying to carry it out exactly like the killers he despised.

Overkilling something up close like that tapped into his inner feelings of disdain. The hunter, in truth, felt somewhat hollow and bitter after killing those two Pokémon. The world was now viewed with an extra shade of disgust and skepticism through his eyes. A more pessimistic personality had awakened to reflect the environment which he dwelled in.

Wilson disappeared back into the house to properly dispose of the carcasses, craving the last bit of whiskey in the bottle.