The Hunter on the Snowy Mountain

"Cho-", if only Chopper would let up with his punches, he'd have seen that I was back in the now, "Chopper-san!"

It took a couple times more for me to try to stop him before he calmed down.

""I'm-", a fit of cough overtook me just then and lasted long enough that I must have lost about a pint of blood.

Chopper rubbed my back, perhaps thinking it was his fault that I was bleeding. Not that I could completely deny it.

"Hurry, Seraph, this isn't the time, goddamnit!"

As if that would make me cough faster and be done with it. In any case, despite what he said, Chopper stayed beside me until all the bloody coughing was done.

"Chopper-san! What...what's goin' on?", I found it hard to breathe.

"Oi oi oi oi oi! Before that, you! Don't go dying on me now!"

I must have looked real terrible for him to get concerned.

"No, I...uhh...anyways, tell me what...?", before I could finish saying what I wanted to say, my eyes wandered off to the distant sky.

"That...", I was a little lost, "That...is Lubbock, isn't it?"

Chopper didn't turn back to affirm what I was looking at. He just looked down and said nothing, with his hand on my shoulder, tightening its grip.

"Chopper-san..."

I just watched the sky agape. I don't know if it was the human part of Lubbock that was fighting so hard or the machine, but it seemed like it was too big for its container. Lubbock's small body was punctured all over. He was showered in his own blood, and his mind had already gone berserk.

This was the monster that destroyed the whole of Agartha in a single night.

"Where...where's Deli?", I said, barely finding the strength to speak.

"Somewhere", Chopper answered.

"We couldn't save everything...could we?", I said in a low voice.

The red sky, redder than ever before, looked like our failure painted overhead. Deli too, I was sure, must be going berserk, as desperate as we were.

"Yeah...we couldn't", Chopper hung his head low.

His dragonized form felt like it was simmering with his blood. I couldn't see Sight around, so I assumed we were a little far from where we started.

The meteors were closer than ever, even more in number and didn't seem to be letting up any time soon.

"Can you still go on?", he asked me.

"I will."

He looked up, finally, and stared right into my eyes with a firm, tragic desperation.

Then he got up and went ahead of me. I took a moment to catch my breath. I felt that if I awakened Nasty II again, it might be the last. I wasn't strong enough to yield his full potential yet.

Still, I pulled myself up and once again was covered by the black armor.

"Old friend, lets see this through to the end", I said to Nasty, who felt warmer than before.

I was really able to keep my head about me. It seemed everytime I summoned him, the more acquainted I got to him, the longer I was able to stay in my own mind.

I looked up. Chopper was soaring the skies as a dragon, completely transformed. He truly was magnificent. For whatever awaited around the corner, I too joined my comrades.

**************

The piercing cold wounded her feet. Her boots were drenched in the snow and not having any idea of where she was headed, only made it harder to keep on going.

The smell of gunpowder that had disappeared long ago, or the smoke that was no longer visible in the sky, as well as the forest of log trees where a trail of her blood must have invited some predators. She didn't miss any of them. She walked on as if there was no past.

The desperate look on her comrade's faces, the captain that fell beside her, the people he couldn't drag back to his side and the brother that was eternally waiting, she wanted it all erased from her mind.

"Just one more step", she imagined, "Just one more step would be enough to erase it."

But even the thousandth step wasn't enough. And then she fell, thinking that she'll never have to get up again. That would be fine too. If she would never have to face anything or anyone again.

Buried on a snowy mountain, a fitting end for someone like her.

But against all her will, she woke up again. In a warm place, a cave perhaps. Some heavily dressed figure in a heavy fur coat and face covered in such layers that no inch of skin was visible on him, sat by her.

Noticing her eyes were beginning to part open, he leaned in and checked on her. After determining that she really was waking up, he hurried over to the fire and brought back some water for her to drink.

He held her head up, assisting her in drinking. Her eyes wandered around her but none of it was familiar.

In one corner of the shallow cave, she saw a hunter's crossbow and some luggage. Seeing as how well the place was furnished for a cave, she concluded that this hunter must have been dwelling here for quite a while.

But she went back to sleep quickly after having affirmed the situation. She had judged there to be no danger and thus she was able to relax.

It was a week before she was moving around and helping around the place. The hunter didn't say much. But he told her she'd been asleep for a long while and he was beginning to think she won't recover.

"Since I'm no doctor. Your wound could have become infected and I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have looked, either", he spoke in a grave, mature voice.

She just continued to drink the tea which was just boiled water, being the only thing you could afford in a place like this. Despite how he sounded, he had a soft, cotton of a heart, under all those layers. He couldn't stand wounds, infected or otherwise. Not on humans, at least. He hunted without problem though.

He didn't tell her to stay. She didn't ask to leave either. She was just there. She helped him hunt, cook, keep the fire alive, make paths in the snow and anything and everything he did.

The hunter was a man of little words, he never asked any questions. She didn't either. He would occasionally go down to fish and she tagged along, naturally. If they spotted a patrol, they would usually avoid it but even when they ran into someone, he would talk to the soldier in some foreign language and they never gave him any problem.

Still, from his accent, she could tell that the hunter wasn't a foreign. Perhaps living so close to the border, he had learned the language. Although, his lifestyle allowed for little interaction with humans. Perhaps, before this, he wasn't a hunter at all.

What his opinions were, about the soldiers, about the war, about all the parties involved, he didn't divulge into those matters. And if at all possible, she didn't want to talk of those things that she'd left behind. Still, since he brought her here and tended to her wounds, he must already have known, form all the scars on her body, that she was a soldier.

Eventually he started teaching her all about hunting. What goes on in the winter, what goes on in the summer, what fish are like, how they think and how to hunt. He knew about every bird, plant or animal they ever had the chance to encounter.

She never responded with any question or anything, but she was always invested in hearing his wisdom. Quite a sage, he was. Even steep climbs gave him no trouble. He wasn't exactly as old as his voice.

But she had no way of knowing how old he really was. She never saw his face. Never knew his name, or who he was, or why he was living in the middle of nowhere. Their long days were spent adventuring all over the mountains, in the forest or catching fish at the lake down below. The rest of the world mattered none to him, he never had any news. He neither had friends nor foe. The hunter existed all alone.