Charlotte's heart hurt. With every step she took, the pit in her stomach grew larger, and more and more tears streamed down her face. Something kept scraping at her heart. She wasn't physically hurt, but it still felt like something had gotten twisted around somewhere in her body.

She wanted to stop and just give up, but she forced herself to move forward, even when it felt like shards of broken glass were swimming around in her chest. Sky had told her to wait by the forest lake, and she blindly followed his last instructions, not knowing what else to do.

She was grateful for the cold now because it gave her something else to focus on apart from the anger and the fear she felt. The snow covering the path crunched under her boots as she made her way to the lake, one step at a time.

That's when she heard the howling.

It started out as a single long, baleful howl, and then it was joined by several other howls. She pulled out Sky's gun and held it with numb fingers while scanning the treeline.

It looked so much more menacing than the ones she'd seen prowling outside the fence. It looked like a wolf, but it was standing on its hind legs, and its red eyes were unwavering as it tracked her. The bone mask it wore was painted with lines of red, and the lines were the only thing she could focus on as the thing lowered itself to pounce.

Blood pounded in her ears to the frantic hammering of her heart. Her limbs felt like they were on fire, and her mind yelled at her to either charge at the thing or run away from it. Time seemed to freeze as she brimmed with manic energy.

The Beowolf lunged forward, and she tried to run away. She took all but two steps before she slipped and fell flat on her face. She quickly turned towards the monster, and its giant claw was inches away from her face. She closed her eyes to brace for the hit and called for her aura, and the grey glow took a hit as the thing's claws scraped against it. The blow stung, but it didn't break her skin.

She panicked, and her aura faded away as she lost focus. Her grip tightened on her brother's pistol, and she pointed it at the thing's chest and clenched her hand.

There's a loud bang as her finger clenches around the trigger, and there's a gaping hole in the thing's chest. It staggered forward, and she pulled the trigger again, this time using only one finger. There's another hole, and it finally collapses, and then it fades away into black ash, and that ash floats away as she watches.

She lay in the snow for a bit, the fire in her limbs fading away, leaving behind a bone-deep tiredness. The snow numbed her pain, but she still felt hot and feverish while feeling cold at the same time.

The sound of growling forced her to prop herself up and survey her surroundings with her multiple eyes. Two more Beowolves sauntered out of the forest.

Her hands were shaking, but she felt more calmer now that she'd killed one of them. Her eyes moved frantically back and forth, tracking their every move as they ran at her.

She expected them to circle around her like the bandits did with Mom and Sky. Instead of doing that, they simply lunged at her together, nearly crashing into each other when she took a step back.

She frantically pulled at the trigger, and the gun let out a staccato burst of fire as she pulled the trigger over and over again. Three of her shots hit one of the Beowolves, while the other gets a chunk taken out of its eyes. The one-eyed Beowolf is still moving, and it turns towards her.

She wanted to pull the trigger again, but she knew that she only had a limited number of shots, so she waited. The one-eyed Beowulf stands on his hind legs and swipes at her while leaning forward. She couldn't move back, so she moved forward and ducked at the last second, avoiding the Beowolf's swipe. She still couldn't keep her eyes open as the limb got closer to her, and she instinctively closed them out of sheer terror.

It finishes its swipe before trying to bite her. She rolled away from it pointed the pistol at its other eye, and fired. The Grimm lunged forward again, and she frantically tried to pull her aura out to protect her, but she couldn't focus on maintaining it with the Beowolf this close to her. Her mind went blank as the thing crashed into her.

The Grimm slumped on top of her, and her breath hitched in her throat. She waited for the Grimm to tear her throat out, but it didn't move, instead staying motionless on top of her. After a tense couple of minutes, it faded away, and she let herself breathe.

She picked herself back up and tensed as she heard more howls from deeper in the forest. Unbidden, Mom's lessons about the Grimm came to mind.

The Grimm are attracted to negative emotions, like fear or sadness. The more negative emotions you feel, the more attracted to you they are.

She tried to calm herself down, but whenever she got close to being calm, she remembered Aunt Brook's screams or Sky's headless corpse, and the fear came back again. When wrestling down the fear didn't work, she tried to distract herself.

Sky was always someone who went with the flow, while she was always someone who preferred being told what to do. So, to give herself some structure, she tried to come up with a plan, and mechanically eliminating all of the options she had from a mental list calmed her down immensely.

She couldn't go back to the farm, since it was crawling with bandits. She could go to the lake, but there was nothing there for her, so it was useless for her to go there. Maybe she could go back to the place where the bandits had first attacked them. Mom might still be alive, and she could probably help her.

It was a stupid plan, but it was all she had. Driven onward by the faint hope that she could get an adult to help her make sense of everything and maybe comfort her, she trudged through the snow to the snare where they'd left Mom behind.

She saw Grimm prowling the forest, but most of them were headed toward the farm or toward where she was going. Thankfully, she was able to see them before they saw her, which helped her to avoid most of them. Her eyes frantically scanned every inch of the surroundings, and for once, she was thankful for her eyes and how they let her see behind her.

She saw more and more Grimm the closer she got to the scene of the fight. Knowing that she couldn't slip past all of them, she decided to climb a tree and make her way towards Mom through the treetops.

It was winter, and most trees had shed a lot of their dead weight. Most of the trees that were good for climbing only had a few branches that would support her weight, and the rest had shed almost everything. However, she'd always been good at climbing things, and she decided to risk it.

She placed her foot on a tree knot and then launched herself upward using her powerful legs. She then grabbed onto another knot before gravity resumed her hold on her. Her right hand stuck to the knot, and she followed that up by hauling herself higher with her left hand and letting her legs find purchase on the two knots her hands had occupied.

Within minutes, she was on one of the topmost branches of the tree, weight evenly distributed on four points of contact. She slowly moved forward, tensed, and then jumped to the strongest branch of the next tree.

She slowly made her way to where they'd left Mom behind, noting the sheer number of Grimm prowling the forest beneath her. She was far enough up that she didn't worry about any of them seeing her, but she didn't know how Grimm 'saw' negative emotions. For all she knew, they could smell her by her fear, even if they couldn't see her.

Despite her fears, while the Grimm could see her, they couldn't get her this high up. She kept getting closer and closer to the snare, the tedious journey keeping her mind off the harrowing events of the day. She had almost forgotten about the horrors she'd seen, but Mom's final resting place brought those memories to the forefront of her mind again.

"Mom..."

The Grimm beneath her yapped and howled at her as she saw her Mom's corpse in the middle of four other bandit corpses. Mom was slumped against a broken tree, a hand on her abdomen. There was dried blood on her chin, and her bow lay to her side, the string broken. Mom's eyes were vacant, like she looking at something that wasn't there.

As she saw her mother's corpse, what little hope she'd held onto of things going back to normal snapped, and the reality of the situation hit her. Everyone she loved was dead.

She looked down at the Beowolves circling the tree, and for a brief moment, she considered jumping down and letting them have their way with her. She was an eleven-year-old without a home or any parents to take care of her in the middle of the woods in winter. If she didn't die to the Grimm, she would either starve or freeze to death. At least dying to the Grimm would be quick.

The image of the man who killed Sky came to mind, with his grey eyes and wild hair. She imaged him walking through the forest with his friends, and coming across her mangled corpse. What would they think? His friends would probably cheer and clap, and they'd all feel amazing because the girl who'd gotten away had killed herself, and that meant they didn't need to hunt her down. They wouldn't lose any sleep about her, because they would know that they'd done a thorough job. A good job.

Caustic, venomous anger suffuses her, and the Grimm underneath her went into a frenzy. They snapped at each other and howled, and one of them even smashed head-first into the tree she was on, shaking it. She didn't care about them.

Her rage built and built and built until she felt like she was going to dissolve from the inside. More Grimm crashed into the tree, and it tilted.

She wouldn't die. She couldn't die. She wouldn't give them the satisfaction. She'd survive, and then she'd hunt every last one of those dogs down, and kill them the same way they'd killed her family.

She called on her aura and focused on maintaining it while she let everything else fade away.

All she had in terms of weapons was Sky's pistol. She needed another weapon if she was to defend herself. She saw a spear next to one of the fallen bandits, the one closest to Mom. It was a crude thing, and instead of a single blade at the end, it had two serrated blades that were welded together, sharp sides outward. It would do.

As the tree began to trip over, she flicked the pistol's safety on and stuffed it in the back of her pants. Just before the tree smashed into the ground, she jumped away from it and sailed over the heads of the Grimm surrounding the tree. One of them lunged at her, and she slammed both of her feet into its face.

She was a blur as she ran past the Grimm, both thanks to the strength from her aura and the momentum she'd gotten off kicking off the Grimm. Her feet kicked up snow as she ran toward the spear. She knew that she should be afraid, but all of her focus was on maintaining her aura and retrieving the spear.

She moved with purpose, all four pairs of eyes moving manically, seeing Grimm move towards her while she danced around them, feeling like she was playing tag with Sky and Tyr, not running into a horde of Grimm.

She kicked up a cloud of snow as she slowed down to pluck the spear from the ground. It should have been heavy, but it felt light. Almost as an afterthought, she picked up Mom's broken bow before fleeing.

She ran while the Grimm snapped at her heels. She made her was towards the north, the Grimm horde slowly but surely gaining on her. She pulled the pistol out, thumbed the safety off after a couple of tries, and then began to shoot behind her whenever one of the Grimm got too close to comfort.

Soon enough, the forest gave way to the lake, and she dropped down and lay on her back as soon as her feet hit the frozen surface of the lake.

Her momentum carried her forward and she made it halfway across the lake before she stopped. While she'd made it that far, she turned back to see the horde of Grimm struggling to move forward on the ice.

She'd always doubted her Mom when she'd told Sky about how the Grimm were dumb as rocks, but what she saw proved it. The Grimm simply didn't understand that they didn't have any traction on the ice and simply kept trying to scramble forward, even while their claws scraped and slipped off the fragile surface of the lake. If they'd stayed still, they'd have kept moving forward, but because they hadn't stopped moving, they'd spun out.

One of them snarled and tried to lunge forward, but instead of jumping forward, it slammed face-first into the ice.

There was a silent boom, which turned into sounds of cracking as the ice fractured where the Grimm hit it with its face. The cracking sound grew louder as the crack itself grew wider, and then the ice broke into chucks under the Grimm, unable to bear all their weight anymore. The Grimm tried to get back onto the surface of the lake, but they couldn't climb up because the edges they grabbed onto to pull themselves upward kept breaking when they tried to haul their considerable bulk onto the surface.

Now that her pursuers were dealt with, Charlotte scrambled away on all fours and inched her way onto the bank of the lake, where she picked herself up and made her way deeper into the forest.

She had been seven when she'd seen her first Grimm. It had been a Beowolf that had split off from its pack, and it had gotten close to the fence of the farm before Mom could kill it.

She wasn't scared of it, but the fact there were thousands of monsters outside the fence like that nightmare wolf left her feeling very shaken. Mom had taken all but two seconds to kill the very young Grimm, but if thousands of them chose to attack the farm at the same time, could Mom even protect them?

After that revelation, she'd had trouble sleeping, and she'd had constant nightmares. Dad and Mom didn't know what to do to help her, and it was Mr. Brook who came up with the idea of letting her go outside into the woods so she could see the numbers of the Grimm for herself. Dad had agreed, and that was how their hunting trips had started.

Whenever he had free time to do so, she and Dad would roam the woods for hours, tracking animals to hunt. Mom and Sky would accompany them for safety, and she soon felt at ease because they rarely saw any Grimm at all in the woods near their home, mostly because Mom did regular sweeps there to thin their numbers. The Grimm roaming the woods today must have come from deeper in the woods. She knew she should be concerned, but she simply acknowledged the fact before moving on to more pressing matters.

Hunting was very different from fighting. She didn't like fighting very much, but hunting was far easier and far less violent than fighting. Hunting was all about knowing the terrain like it was the back of your hand and then using that information to know what paths animals took in order to track them. She knew which animal inhabited which tree hollow, burrow, or crevice, and she kept track of them using an ever-changing map in her head.

In a way, hunting had become her thing, just like farming was her Dad's. When he told her that she was far better at him when he was her age, and she had preened at the praise.

Right now, she was thankful for Dad's lessons as she headed towards a now-empty cave for warmth and shelter, guided by both natural landmarks and the ones Dad had made for her. She was tired and hungry and had freeze burn, but she still limped her way to the cave, the promise of rest enough to keep her moving.

She wanted to check on Dad's snares in this part of the woods for food, but the threat of encountering one of the bandits was too high, so she would simply wait until tomorrow to actually eat something.

When she crossed the cave threshold, she wanted to drop her aura and finally get some rest, but the reasonable part of her mind reminded her that without her aura, she'd probably freeze to death in the damp cave, and she couldn't keep her aura up subconsciously yet. Besides, her hyper-focusing on keeping her aura up was allowing her to ignore her other emotions, which was probably why the Grimm hadn't tracked her down yet.

She walked deeper and deeper into the cave until she came upon a collection of stalagmites and stalactites at the very back of the cave. The only exit was the one she'd walked in from, and the cave was surprisingly short. She knew she should be concerned that she had no escape route if the Grimm or bandits found her, but it was actually comforting that there were no other entrances. She was glad that no one could sneak up on her.

She propped up her spear and the bow on one of the stalagmites, then broke one of the larger ones using her aura-enhanced strength and used the stump as a seat. She leaned back on the wall, watching as the rays of sunlight that were entering the cave through the cave mouth became longer and dimmer until sunlight dimmed completely and was replaced by beams of moonlight.

Her stomach grumbled, but she gave it no mind, and she simply continued to focus on maintaining her aura while the moonbeams became longer and longer.

Her eyelids began to grow heavy, but she didn't give in, especially since she knew that sleeping left her open to an ambush by the Grimm.

As she grew more and more sleepy, her thoughts wandered while she still feverishly focused on her aura. To her delirious mind, maintaining her aura was the most important thing in the world, and the thought persisted even as she slipped into sleep and then jolted awake at regular intervals.

Her head would dip down and she'd sleep for all but five minutes before she pulled herself out of her slumber and snapped her head back up. Then her head would start to dip down and the cycle would begin again.

When the sunlight finally cut through the darkness at the mouth of the cave and the sky lit up white, she felt like she hadn't slept at all. When she tried to move, her body refused to, and she had to physically push herself off the stump of the stalagmite with a strained grunt so her body knew it was time to move again.

She was in no state to move, much less protect herself. But she needed food, water, and several other things that were essential to her survival, all those things were out there in the woods.

She grabbed her spear and got up.

She hobbled her way to the cave's exit, dropped her aura, and let the sheer cold wake her up. Once she felt like she was ready, she strode off into the woods, spear in hand.

One week later

The Beowolf danced back and she thrust the spear forward, right through the thing's heart. The spear went from feather light to extremely heavy as she thrust it forward, and it bit into the Grimm. The Grimm collapsed, but her spear was still stuck in the monster's chest as it collapsed forward. Lacking the leverage to pull her spear out of the thing's chest, she left her spear and drew her pistol as another Beowolf pounced out at her back.

The eyes on her neck caught the monster's charge, and she pivoted on her heel and slammed the butt of her pistol into the thing, which caused it to stagger. The other two Beowolves in the pack saw this and moved to attack her from two sides at once.

She ducked under the first one's strike and winced as she realized that she couldn't avoid the other one's wild charge. The monster's claws scraped across her chest, and while her eyes twitched, she managed to keep them open, even she the monster's claws nearly cut into her eyes.

The Beowolf who'd hit her attempted to push her to the ground, and she growled and pressed the barrel of her gun to its chest and fired before throwing its body at the other Beowolf that was closest to her.

Two shots left.

She fought some Grimm in the weeks that followed the attack, and all of them were fought like feral animals, but the one strategy that even the Beowolves seemed to love was to attempt to pin her under them, and then when she was on the ground, they'd try to brutalize her with those giant claws of theirs while she couldn't move.

Thankfully, the only Grimm she'd encountered in large numbers were Beowolves, and while they were dangerous, the danger they posed came from numbers and not from sheer strength. Sky's pistol meant that she always had a way to kill them no matter the range, and it had saved her life more times than she could count.

The Grimm that her spear was stuck in finally faded, and she danced around the Beowolf that was running toward her and picked it up.

The Beowolf she'd avoided lunged, and she tensed, ready to stab her spear through the thing's neck.

Even if she killed this one, there was still one left. If her spear got stuck in this thing, she'd be weaponless again. What other way could she attack? She could shoot the thing, but she didn't want to waste her limited ammo. Then it clicked.

Slash, not stab.

She shifted her grip on her spear and swung it at the Beowolf. The spear grew heavy once more as she swung it forward, and the blade sheared the thing's head off. Not wanting to waste all that momentum, she twirled and threw her spear with all the force of the previous swing, and the spear bit into the bone mask of the last Beowolf and then kept going through it.

As the corpses of her opponents faded, she picked up her spear from where it had embedded itself into the ground. It was light again. She gave the weapon an experimental swing at half strength, and it grew slightly heavier when she swung it, and then light when she stopped.

"You're pretty deceptive."

The spear didn't reply, and she sighed.

She shook her head and headed towards her snare.

When the Grimm who were chasing her had fallen into the lake, she'd expected them to drown. Instead, they had somehow gotten out of the lake and were actively prowling the forest. Thankfully, most of them had left after a couple of days, leaving for the place where Mom's last stand happened, or moving towards the farm. She didn't know why they did that, but she had theories. Maybe the Grimm smelt sadness like animals could smell droppings or sweat. Maybe there was a lingering scent of fear in those areas, and maybe the Grimm, stupid as they were, thought there was prey there?

Whatever the case, she was glad for it, since the small number of Beowolves left in the area were good practice. She had already learned a lot of things about how to fight, and the experience she got fighting them combined with half-remembered memories of seeing Sky train meant that she had a basic framework on how to fight. And the more Beowolves she fought, the more little things she learned. Given that she didn't have a notebook or anything to write on, she'd taken to mentally reciting the things she'd learned instead.

Keep light on your feet. Keep moving, but don't move when you don't need to. Most things have vital areas, and those vital areas are usually where the heart and the brain are. Losing limbs doesn't put Grimm out of the fight, but losing large chunks of themselves kills them. Twisting and twirling allowed a person to put the entire weight of their body behind a strike, which is why Sky did it a lot. Close-range shots with the gun did way more damage than shots at range. Stabbing something usually puts it out of the fight, but it also means that the spear will get stuck in the thing's body. When a slash will kill something, slash. When a slash won't kill something, stab. When a stab won't kill something, shoot.

Her routine consisted of a lot of walking, so her adding to and modifying her little combat list kept her occupied while she walked.

It had been a week since the attack, and she'd cobbled up a basic routine for herself. She would walk to all the snares still in the area, she see if they'd caught anything, and if they had caught something, she'd quickly kill the animal in the trap. Then she'd eat it. Sometimes, like today, she'd encounter Grimm when she walked to the traps.

She quickly arrived at the snares and checked each of them. Two were empty. One, however, held a struggling snow hare in the noose. She quickly took it down, snapped its neck, and began to butcher and eat it.

She knew it was bad to eat uncooked stuff, but the first day she'd seen something in a snare, she'd been so hungry that her hands had started to shake violently as soon as she removed the snow hare from the little noose it was stuck in. She'd just been so hungry, and her mandibles had speared into the thing as soon as she had killed it with a swift blow to the head with the spear.

Not knowing how to butcher the thing(that had been Dad's job), she'd had to resort to chopping the rabbit's leg off and then slowly nibbling at the appendage. It tasted like dirt and felt like wet string, but the burning in her stomach lessened the more she ate, so she pushed down her distaste and continued to eat until she was full.

She'd caught a few more rabbits since then, and she was learning how to actually eat them. The main body of the rabbit was still inedible to her, but she was getting better and getting the most she could out of the arms and legs. She learned that she could pull off the things's fur if she used enough force. She learned that even if she took off the skin, she needed to shave off the fat underneath the skin if she wanted it to taste a little bit better. Finally, she'd learned how to cleanly remove the limbs from the body without making a bloody mess.

The first time she'd tried to eat a rabbit, it had taken her thirty minutes before she'd gotten full, and those thirty minutes were torture that consisted of spitting out fur and bits of hard fat and trying not to vomit.

Today, it had taken her fifteen minutes, and she'd only had to spit out a single strand of fur. She was getting better at this.

After she finished eating, she reset the snare, and then she covered up the blood with snow and dirt and buried the limbless corpse of the rabbit a couple of miles away from the trap so that the carrion feeders didn't disturb the snare and cause it to go off.

After that, she headed to the lake, keeping her eyes peeled for Grimm. She didn't encounter any, and she sighed in relief when she reached the southern bank without incident.

The southern bank was beautiful, with the cold wind pushing the white reeds growing on the bank to the ground before it blew over the now-refrozen lake.

Once there, she began to harvest the reeds, cutting them with the spear before stuffing them down the back of her shirt. Once she'd gotten enough, she walked back to her cave, checking the snares she'd made along the way. She used the reeds instead of actual wire to make her snares, and her snares were terrible at keeping the animals they caught captive.

Today, just like most other days, her snares were empty, and all of them were damaged. Sighing, she repaired them and made her way back to the cave.

The cave was slowly beginning to look like home. Mom's bow was now beside her sleeping stump, and a pile of reeds from her trips to the west and north banks of the lake were on another rock stump.

She had plans for the cave. She wanted to make a large dry moat in the front of the cave to keep the Grimm out. She wanted to make a door for the cave with broken stalagmites and reeds.

Seeing all the work in front of her, she almost wanted to give up. But she looked at Mom's bow and remembered her promise to herself.

She would survive, no matter how much she had to suffer for it.