Months passed, and soon enough, the white of winter faded away and was replaced by the green of spring.

In winter, her aura kept her warm, and for water, she simply ate the clean snow that dusted the topmost branches of most trees for water. Since her aura kept her temperature stable, she didn't get a sore throat if she ate the snow a little at a time.

However, there was no snow in the spring, and so she had no actual clean water close to the cave to drink. She could just drink the water from the lake, but she didn't trust the water in the lake. The Grimm had gone for a swim in it, and drinking Grimm bath water without boiling it would probably make her sick.

But making a fire was much more complicated than she realized. She knew that sparks made fires, but making sparks was hard. The spear and the gun were too important to risk damaging, and even when she risked it and tried smashing the blade of the spear and the gun, instead of sparks, all she'd gotten was a long hollow ringing noise as the spear shook in her hands. Striking the shaft revealed that it was soft and made of wood, which was probably why it was so light.

Even if she had a fire, she had nothing to boil the water in. She'd tried to carve out rock into a bowl with a piece of wood and had found that the rocks cracked very easily when she used the full extent of her aura-enhanced strength. Still, she kept at it and learned that it was easier and faster to shape rocks by breaking flakes off of them until they took the shape she wanted them to take. It was a clever discovery, but it was also useless since she already had all the tools that she needed in the form of her spear.

Not having a fire chipped away at her. More often than not, she felt more like an animal than a person, eating cold, raw meat and sleeping with one eye open. She felt alone.

Giving up on fire, she instead turned to the animals roaming the forest and discreetly followed a couple to see where they drank water from. Deeper into the woods, there were brooks and streams aplenty, and most animals drank from those. It was uncontaminated water, and so she decided to drink from it.

The animals were the only thing she liked about spring. Instead of only snow hares and squirrels and the lone fox, the forest was teeming with life.

Deer pranced through the forest while birds sang and swooped through the canopy. Wolves stalked the large animals while lone bears fished in the larger streams. It made her feel a little less lonely, and for that reason alone, she left most of the animals alone.

As the days went by, the young Beowolves roaming the forest became less and less of a problem as she grew better and better at fighting. But as she found out, when one of her problems got solved, another took its place.

Most of the animals usually fled when they saw her, but a few attacked her. Compared to the Grimm, they were nothing. The Grimm, while stupid, were also very fearless as a result of their stupidity. Most animals, however, were not as stupid as the Grimm. Bears never fought, instead running whenever she got close. Wolves, however, while shy at first, soon grew bold when they learned that she wouldn't attack them without provocation.

She didn't know what to do about the wolves. They scared her, with their sharp teeth and smart eyes. She tried to talk to them, and they simply snarled at her. She tried avoiding them, but that only seemed to make them bolder.

Over time, they got worse. They nipped at her heels and ran into her, and she grew even more afraid of them. What if they followed her to her cave and stopped her from sleeping? What if they joined up with the Grimm? She tried backing away from them, but they simply got even angrier when she tried moving away from them. She dreaded the day they'd attack her. Then it happened.

It had been a normal day like any other. She'd been stalking a small bird from the ground, eager to taste something other than rabbit or squirrel. She had a small pebble in her hands, and the idea was to throw the stone at the bird, knock it to the ground, and then kill it with her spear. It had been going fine until she saw the wolf behind her and tumbled to the ground after her foot had gotten caught on a tree root. She'd tumbled to the ground, and a pack of wolves had burst through the trees.

They'd bitten her repeatedly in the face and the neck, and if not for her aura, she'd have died. Her aura seemed to confuse the wolves, and the moment they'd let up, she'd run away from them scaled a tree, and been forced to stay up there until they gave up. It had taken them half a day to quit.

Even though they were aggressive, she didn't want to kill them. But after that one time, the attacks increased in frequency, either out of a need to test her or simply because she was in their territory and was hunting things there. She'd fight back, and they'd run as soon as she wounded one of them. It was easy to kill the Grimm because they were unfeeling monsters, but the wolves were different. They whined and begged when they were hurt, and she was trespassing on their territory. She felt bad for them, but they kept trying to hurt her.

She'd thought that once she'd hurt them enough times, they'd learn. They didn't. Maybe they didn't like sharing their food sources with her, but it wasn't her fault that their territory had the most rabbit warrens.

They snarled and gnashed their teeth, and whenever she turned her back, they'd pounce and try to bite into her neck and drag her off. She tried to back away when they threatened her, and instead of backing off in return, that just seemed to make them even angrier. If she got angry at them, the Grimm would be drawn to her, and the wolves used this to their advantage, trying to get the Grimm to do their dirty work for them.

After a while of putting up with this, her patience had run thin. She'd injured one of them out of sheer spite and chased the pack until she'd cornered two of them against a line of trees.

That was the moment she'd learned about how animals communicated with each other. Before they'd attacked her, the wolves had looked her in the eyes and had barred their teeth. Now, the two she'd cornered refused to look her in the eyes, and when she got close, they averted their eyes and flattened their ears to their skulls. She snarled at them, and they yelped and cringed back.

While she could have killed those two wolves, she left them alive in the name of peace. It wasn't their fault she didn't know how to talk with them.

Over the next few months, she learned how to talk with the wolves to avoid any future incidents. When they challenged her, she didn't back away. Backing away was the equivalent of telling them that she was weaker than them and was afraid of them. Instead, she snarled back, growled, and wiggled her mandibles, and they backed away after she showed them that she would fight back. To ensure that they didn't feel too bad about letting her hunt in their territory, she left them tribute in the form of limbless rabbit corpses.

Those few months were the most peaceful and productive months of her time in the forest. She even managed to make a sizable hole in front of her cave using half of an old log. The plan to build a wall using stalagmites and reeds was a bust since the reeds weren't strong enough to lash together so many heavy things without snapping, but even when failed, she learned something. In those few peaceful months, she learned about how to turn the reeds into rope, how to tie a good knot, and how to carve away at stone without breaking it. For those few months, she had peace.

That peace wouldn't last long.

As more and more time went by, the Grimm that had migrated to the farm in search of prey began to lose interest in the ruins and roamed the forest seeking prey. As a result, her life got even harder as more and more Grimm began roaming the woods. Young Beowolves were easy to deal with, but that was because they were the weakest among the Grimm. Now, as the more dangerous and rarer kinds roamed the forest in large numbers, she rarely had any moments where she was safe.

She learned about more and more about the Grimm the more she fought, but every time she encountered a new type, she had to learn how to combat them. The only reason she was still alive was because of the fact that she knew enough about the Grimm to know how to kill them as efficiently as possible. She knew that the best places to strike a Grimm were its unarmoured parts, and those unarmoured parts were always pure black, free of markings and designs.

Still, with every new type she encountered, she was pushed further and further, and every time, she won. But as the Grimm grew bolder and more dangerous, the margins by which she won her fights became razor-thin. Against three Beowolves, she would win. Against three Beowolves, an Ursa, and a Boarbatusk, she wasn't so certain.

"Crap!"

She darted to the side of a charging Boarbatusk and spun in a tight circle before kicking the thing's front leg out from under it. It squealed, and she rammed into the thing with her shoulder and winced as her shoulder made contact and it tipped over.

She thrust her spear into the thing's unarmoured belly as the single surviving Beowolf rushed forward. With a snarl, it leaped forward. She abandoned her spear, ducking to avoid its first swipe and then standing to her full height and slamming the top of her head into its lower jaw. The Grimm stepped back, and it gave her the time to pull her spear out of the Boarbatusk and thrust it through the Beowolf's heart, the spear going from light to very heavy as soon as it moved. The Ursa chose that moment to charge at her, and she kicked the corpse of the Beowolf off her spear and turned to face it.

Something screeched, and she turned her head upward to find a small flying Grimm smash into her face just as the Usra's massive paw blasted her shoulder. She went flying into the air, unable to control her trajectory as she slammed into a tree.

Her aura protected her from taking damage from both blows, but it shattered when she hit the tree with enough force to half uproot it.

She gasped at the pain she felt as she tried to move her right arm. Like an idiot, she had held out her arm to blunt the blow, and now her right wrist was broken, her hand bending at a strange angle. She gasped as it brushed against her spear, feeling like her wrist was on fire. She called for her aura and almost began to cry as she felt nothing.

It was as if someone had stolen her very soul in her sleep, and now she was left dealing with the aftermath, gasping for air while she felt like her soul wasn't there anymore.

The Grimm were relentless, and they gave her no time to compose herself. The flying one that looked like a cat with wings on its back flew at her, and she screamed, her voice cracking as her left hand pried her spear from the limp fingers of her right. It clawed at her face, and she ducked to the side on instinct, letting the claws rake her cheek and then get stuck on the tree behind her. The shallow cut wept blood, but she had better things to worry about than the line of fire on her face.

She grabbed her spear close to the middle and swung the blunt end towards the Grimm. It hit the ground with a thud and didn't move after.

The reed she'd been using to keep her hair out of her eyes snapped, and a curtain of dirty, matted hair fell over her face.

The Ursa roared and she snarled back with bravado she didn't feel. Her breath was ragged and her legs were shaking, and no matter what she did to distract herself from the pain, her wrist screamed at her. The Ursa charged, and stood her ground, ready to meet it.

The bear-Grimm's giant form loomed over her, and she looked up at it. She clumsily held her spear with her left, and as the Ursa finally stopped charging and stood on its hind legs, she planted the butt of her spear into the ground and angled it at the bear-Grim just as it lunged forward during its swipe.

The spear bit into the Grimm, and its weight pushed the spear deeper into the ground. She ducked under the Ursa's first swipe and ducked back as the Grimm tried to pull itself through the spear to get to her.

The spear bent under the force Ursa was putting on it, and she desperately pulled out her pistol and shot it in the head before it could break her spear. The spent round of her last bullet clattered to the ground, and the Ursa stopped moving. Her legs gave out under her and she collapsed.

The soil felt cool on her cheek as she lay there, panting and trying to get up. Her fingers searched the forest floor, and she found the casing of the bullet that had saved her life. After what seemed like an eternity, she got up, her body feeling like one giant bruise.

She forced herself to think of Sky and Mom and to think of the monster who killed them as she curled her fingers over the bullet casing. If she died here, then she'd be letting them down. With a cry of pain, she forced herself forward. She retrieved her spear, and slowly made her way back to the cave.

The moat she'd dug in the front of the cave was deep enough and large enough that it was impossible for anything to jump over it, and the only way she was able to get across was by using a log as a bridge. She pulled the log over the hole, walked into the cave, and pulled the log inside with her. When she left, she'd leave it outside again.

She pulled her pistol out of her back pocket despite not remembering putting it back there. She half-crawled,half-walked over to her Mom's broken bow, and placed the pistol next to it. While she didn't want to call it a shrine, she had dug a little alcove in the back wall for her mother's bow to lie in, and she had lined it with the mangled pieces of fur she'd gotten from skinning rabbits to keep it safe. She placed her brother's pistol inside the alcove and mourned the loss of her last security blanket.

She stumbled over to the rock stump that had become her bed, sat on it, and leaned back against the cave wall. For the first time in many months, she slept with both eyes closed.

The next morning, she struggled to move even when her eyes were open. She tried to goad herself to move by remembering the Grimm and the monster that killed Sky, but nothing worked. In the end, she had to fall off her stump and lie on the ground until she felt strong enough to move.

She called for her aura, and she nearly cried tears of joy as it readily surged to protect her. She could already feel it helping her body heal. The cut had unfortunately already been scabbed over, but she wasn't vain enough to care about the damage to her face.

She retrieved a strong stick from her foraging pile and tied it to her broken wrist, hoping to keep it steady so it didn't hurt her as much. That done, she grabbed her spear and then winced as she fell over after her legs gave out from under her.

She crawled to the entrance of the cave and propped herself up with her spear. She fought back her pain and sluggishness. She wanted to sleep some more, but the dull burning in her stomach and the dryness of her throat was her body's way of telling her that she needed food and water. Her body had used up her reserves of both to heal and she needed to ensure that her body's needs were met if she wanted her wrist to heal.

She needed to survive, and surviving meant going out there for food and water. She repeated the phrase over and over in her head until it gave her the strength to stand.

She needed to survive.

She pulled her bridge log to the exit, placed it over the gap, and walked out into the woods again. For once, she had hoped that she would get to her snares without any problems, but the Grimm had other ideas.

Fighting with only one hand was hard.

It was a stupid thought to have when facing down four Beowolves and an Alpha Beowolf, but it still was true. The adrenaline from the fight was waking her up, and it was helping her think better as well. When both of her hands worked, she was grateful for the length of her weapon, as it allowed her to twirl and strike at enemies at range while keeping her out of danger.

However, the extra length made it unwieldy when she had only one hand. Her aura granted her enough strength to wield it one-handed, but strength wasn't the only thing someone needed to wield a weapon. She also needed finesse, which came from having absolute control of the weapon at all times. And because the spear was so long, balancing and controlling it with one hand was extraordinarily difficult. This was especially true when she thrust the spear and then pulled it back.

Despite being unnatural creatures that dissolved into black ash after death, the Grimm still had black flesh and blood inside them. This meant that when she thrust her spear into them, it had a tendency to get stuck inside them. When she was able to use both of her hands, she had enough leverage to pull the spear out quickly. Now, with only one hand, she was limited to slashes unless she wanted to waste time pulling her spear out while a pack of Grimm surrounded her.

The length made it harder for her to reset into her combat stance. The long length of her spear was an advantage, yes-it allowed her to strike at targets at a distance while being a safe distance away from them. But it was also a detriment against the Grimm. The Grimm specialized in swarming tactics, and the long spear took more time to pull back with one hand, which left her open.

Still, despite it being annoying to be able to fight with only one arm, she wasn't frustrated or angry. Her aura was helping her heal after than normal, and she expected her wrist to be fully fixed within a week.

Fighting with one hand was proving to be a learning experience. Being forced to adapt was helping her come up with new tricks and ideas. Still, the length of her spear and her constant over-correction meant that she felt like she was a beginner again.

She stepped back as one of the Beowolves swung at her, and then swung at it, taking a chunk of its head off. The one behind her chose that moment to pounce, and she pulled her spear back from its swing and ducked under the charging Beowolf's form before grasping the end of her spear and cracking it like a whip at the Beowolf's neck.

Two more rushed at her, and she swung her spear in a wide arc, catching them both in the swing. Both the Grimm collapsed to the ground, and she braced her spear on her shoulder, readying it for another strike.

Until this point, the Alpha had stayed still, content to watch the fight between her and its brethren. Even at first glance, she knew it was different. It had more bone plates than the other Beowolves, and tiny spires of bone jutted out of its shoulders. Its ribcage was outside of its chest, and its claws were longer and sharper. But the one feature that worried her more than anything was its eyes. They shone with intelligence. Suddenly struck by fear, she couldn't take her eyes off the weird Grimm.

That was when the other Beowolf she'd forgotten about chose to strike.

Her eyes caught it as it moved to strike her from behind, and she stabbed while bracing her spear on her left shoulder. It pierced the Grimm through the left eye and got stuck.

The Alpha chose that moment to move forward, and her eyes widened as it moved. It was fast. Very fast. Within seconds, it was so close that she could reach out and lay a hand on its chest.

Hissing, she danced back and plucked her spear off her right shoulder as the thing swiped at her. Then, as if to prove that it was different from the rest of its stupid brethren, it pressed its attack, stepping forward and swiping at her with its left as soon as its first attack hit only air. She ducked while keeping a hand on her still-stuck spear, and the wasteful movement allowed the Alpha to close the distance between them even further like she was rooted in place.

The Grimm her spear was on finally disintegrated, and she swung it in a low arc, straight at the Alpha's neck. It ducked.

She wanted to go on the offensive, but the smart Grimm was now stuck close to her so she couldn't use the bladed end of her spear on it. She growled in frustration as she tried to bat away the Alpha with the sides of her spear.

This was another problem with her spear. It was excellent at long range, but once her opponent got too close, she found it impossible to do anything but retreat. If she had a sword, then she would slash at anything that got too close, but the main disadvantage of a spear was once your opponent got too close, the spear wasn't any different from a stick. The blade was on the end, after all.

She jumped back, knees bent and body close to the ground for quick movement.

The Alpha moved with an unnatural fluidity as it closed the distance between them again. It swiped at her feet this time, and she jumped into the air. As soon as her feet left the ground, she recognized her mistake and desperately swung her spear at the Alpha as it lunged forward, its mouth wide open to chomp her head off.

The Grimm shifted its massive head at the last second, and the shaft of her spear slammed into the thing's open mouth. The Grimm bit down and jerked back, and she suddenly found herself weaponless.

She hissed as the Grimm and bit down on her weapon, and then, with a loud crack, her spear broke. The rough treatment the Ursa gave it yesterday must have damaged it. Still in the throes of an adrenaline rush, she didn't register her weapon breaking, and instead of running as she should have, she started to think of all the ways she would salvage the situation.

The Alpha lunged at her, and she kicked up a cod of dirt into its face and dove to the side as it shook the dirt off its eyes. It twisted its body and lept, poised to pluck her out of the air and brutalize her, but she twisted in the air and let the thing's teeth catch the bottom of her jacket. At the speed she was going, her jacket tore, and the Grimm spat out a scrap of fabric as she picked up the broken half of her spear with the blade in her working hand.

It felt right in her hand, somehow. It no longer quivered or felt heavy, and the range was half of what it used to be. It was long enough for her to strike at a distance but short enough for close combat. She gave it an experimental twirl and found that the spear's strange property of getting heavier when swung still worked.

The Alpha locked eyes with her, and they circled each other, each waiting for the other to move first. That's when it dawned on her. All this time, she had been reactive, always waiting for the enemy to make the first move and then moving away or dodging before attacking. That meant that in almost all of her fights, she had allowed her opponents to set the pace. With the Grimm, this meant the tempo of the fight went from slow to blisteringly fast, which meant that she had more opportunities to make mistakes while she was forced to adapt.

If she wanted to win this fight, she needed to be aggressive.

The Alpha ran towards her, and she dashed forward to meet it. As the Alpha swung its paw at her, she jumped. She smashed into the thing's chest, sending them both tumbling to the ground. However, since she was the one who initiated contact, she was on top of the Grimm, and she quickly slid off the thing's chest and held it down with her injured hand.

She twirled her spear so the blade pointed downward, and then held it like a dagger. Before the Alpha realized that it was heavier than her and that it could just shake her off, she stabbed it through the eye socket, her spear growing heavier and lending force to her strike. The light in its eyes faded, and she twirled her half-spear before standing up on shaking legs.

As the Alpha faded away, she couldn't help but feel triumphant. She'd been shown a new way to fight, and she was determined to make it hers.

Time passed. Her wrist healed, and she started to use her right hand to wield the half-spear instead of her left. Apart from making her more deft with her weapon, it didn't change much. Aura made her stronger, and that meant that the difference in strength between her left and right didn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.

Her one-handed fighting style worked very well when she had a broken arm, but now that she had two working ones, her weaponless left hand felt like dead weight when she fought.

She fought more mixed groups of Grimm, and she refined her fighting style even further. She focused on speed and agility, allowing offense to become her defense.

The Grimm were weak, but their true strength lay in their numbers. They died easily, but the sheer number of Grimm she encountered meant that if she faltered for even a second, they would capitalize on it. And while her half-spear was good, it still left her vulnerable as she recovered from a thrust. The time she was left open was much smaller than when she was wielding a two-handed spear, but she was still leaving herself open, and that was a weakness she needed to somehow shore up.

She was getting unnaturally fast and agile, but that was no solution.

In the following weeks, she learned how to channel aura through her weapon, after she accepted that it was hers. When she finally saw it as an extension of herself, her aura pooled into it, keeping the blade sharp and keeping it from breaking. But it still didn't help her fix her problem.

Despite winning all of her fights and learning so much, she felt...frustrated. Complacency was what led to her being injured in the first place. Fighting against only young Beowolves had caused her to stagnate, and when she had to face stronger opponents, she had been lacking. Now, the same thing was happening. She wasn't shoring up her weakness. She still wasn't ready for another migration yet.

It was when she was carving out a hook for one of her snares that she got the idea to use two spears instead of one. Because of her injury, her left hand had a week's worth of experience fighting drilled into it, and her aura made sure that she could lift and fight with two spears easily enough.

It makes sense. One spear would defend, and another would attack. When one spear was recovering from a thrust, the other would cover for her until she had freed it. One spear would focus on offense and the other would focus on defense, fixing her problem.

She quickly took off into the forest and scanned the trees to find the thickest tree branch she could. Once she found it, she scaled the tree and hacked the branch off the tree with her spear. It fell to the ground, and she grinned as she dragged it back to her cave.

In the safety of her cave, she painstakingly whittled down the branch into a pole. After that was done, she placed her half-spear next to it and then began to shave the wood off the pole until it was identical in both height and width to her half-spear, making sure to carve a little bar on top to tie the blade to.

Once that was done, she began to work on the blade. She chipped a piece of stone into the right shape and then began to sand it down with a rock until her fingers bled. The end result was a smooth piece of triangular stone with sharp edges and a blunt tip.

She made two grooves in the smooth stone blade and lashed it to the pole.

Compared to the original spear, this one looked terrible, as if it was going to fall apart at any second. She gave it an experimental swing, and it held together.

She grabbed a half-spear in each hand and twirled them in a circle, flowing them in opposite directions. It felt right.

Using two weapons at the same time felt unnatural to her, and more often than not she found herself using only one hand while the other remained limp, or having both hands mirror each other, acting like she wielding two halves of the same weapon and not two separate weapons. Her brain craved symmetry, but symmetry was useless to her.

She needed time to perfect this weird style she was making up. And time was the one thing she had an abundance of.

Her days were monotonous. She would wake, then walk to her snares and forage, fight, eat, fight again, drink from a stream, walk back to the cave, and then sleep.

She began to refine her fighting style, and since she didn't have anything else to distract her, she devoted herself to learning with a feverish devotion. She drilled basic movements into both her left and right so she could react faster and move her arms independently without taxing herself. Her left became a shield and dagger, redirecting blows and harrying her opponents, while her right became a cleaver, using overwhelming force to shear through her opponents.

The days cascaded into one another, and those days became months, and those months became years. And as the years went by, her mind began to slip. She was lonely, and living the way she did wasn't doing her mind any favors. As she grew older, her mind grew more pessimistic and anguished, and it began to prod her with questions her child brain had been too scared to confront.

She couldn't live in the forest forever. As the years went by, her clothes grew smaller and smaller, and she'd been forced to make tears in the fabric to make her clothes fit her. Tree sap and rabbit skins had been enough to cover up the gaps she'd made, but it wasn't her clothes becoming too small wasn't the thing that scared her. No, what scared her was the hopelessness of her existence.

She didn't know what to do. When she'd been a kid, fantasies of revenge and a desperate need to survive had pushed her forward. Now, as she began to lose some of that childish naivety and foolishness, she saw just how hopeless her life was. She was surviving, yes, but to what end? She couldn't get revenge on the people who killed her family when she was in the middle of nowhere, and she didn't know how to reach civilization. She knew the name of the kingdom closest to them from half-remembred childhood lessons, but to her, Vale was a name, not a set of directions.

She could keep walking in a direction until she saw something, but that was idiotic. Her woods had water and plentiful game. She couldn't be sure of that in any other places she went.

She was going to waste away in these woods, as forgotten as she would have been if she had just keeled over and died.

It was a harsh thing to come to terms with, and she found out that she couldn't come to terms with it. Ever since her promise to herself that she would survive, even the vague ideas she had of killing herself to stop her suffering had been seen as blasphemous. Now that she was older, she was warming up to the idea more and more. After all, what reason did she have to live?

All the arguments she could come up with to support her continued existence had been half-hearted. She owed it to Sky and Mom and the rest of her family to continue living, but she could barely even remember them. They were a collection of blurred faces in even hazier memories. She needed to take her revenge on the bandits who killed them, but she didn't know anything about them, much less where to find them.

In the end, the only thing that kept her sane were the Grimm. They provided ample distraction from her dilemma and the rush of combat. When she fought, everything faded away in the rush, and the only things she focused on were her opponents. The rest of the world slipped away, leaving only the next move, the next parry, and the next victory. There was also a measure of honesty in it, the primal need to survive and win coursing through her blood and telling her that no matter what her mind said about the matter, she really didn't want to die.

She also secretly hoped that one day, she would fight a much stronger Grimm than her and that it would take her life, allowing her to die without breaking her promise. But that was a foolish hope because she was running out of Grimm.

The numbers of the Grimm in the woods began to thin, and she learned how to call them to her by forcing herself to relieve her worst memories. It was sick and twisted, yes, but she needed the distraction of fighting Grimm the same way she needed food and water. The constant fighting was the only thing that was distracting her from the ever-growing pool of despair and hopelessness in her heart. It was the only thing that was convincing her that she really didn't want to die.

They came, they attacked her, and then they were killed. The distraction they provided her became more and more fleeting as she got better and better.

A Beowolf died with only one move-a simple thrust. An Ursa died in six moves-thurst, block, parry, then three strikes with her right. But instead of delighting her, her prowess frustrated her. It was useless to her. What use was her skill if it benefitted no one but herself and did nothing but prolong her suffering?

Her will to live ebbed away, bit by bit. She slowly lost the will to get up in the morning and ate and drank the bare minimum she could. Then, just as she was almost done hoping and praying for death, the universe decided to save her by almost granting her wish by pitting her against four huntsmen students.

Needless to say, her first meeting with team CFVY was very memorable.