A lone girl walks aimlessly down a dirt road, surrounded by trees and vegetation. Birds watch her movement in silence from the safety of the branches.

Wearing a tattered robe that extends down to her knees, punctured and torn apart, both the sleeves already completely ripped out. It's supposedly white, but you wouldn't be able to tell with all the filth covering it.

She walks barefoot, calluses visible on the skin, and a small pebble had lodged itself on the sole of her right foot. The girl paid it no mind, however.

She looks extremely poor in health. Malnourished, exhausted, her body full of bruises and cuts. Dried blood covers parts of her body, including the entire right half of her face, and she keeps her right eye shut, her left eye only halfway open, staring blankly at the ground.

Wherever she came from, anywhere is better, even nowhere.

Her movement is slow, but steady. Despite her tiredness, her steps are firm, she does not falter.

Sweat trickles down her face. The day was growing ever older, though the skies were still a clear blue. The sun loomed over, having monitored the girl’s every step.

Suddenly, her nose is met with a strong, foul odor. One she instantly recognizes. She reflexively puts her hand over her mouth, stumbling back. She raises her head and tries to remove some of the hair blocking her view.

It’s a hard picture to make anything out of initially, but she slowly makes sense of the objects obstructing her path. And the source of the smell.

An abandoned carriage, and a fancy one at that, probably pertaining to some kind of noble. Both of its doors are wide open, and none of the animals which would lead it are nearby.

Surrounding the carriage is a bloodbath. A pile of bodies, all of men around their 30s. It seems whatever transpired here happened some time ago, as the bodies begun decomposing.

Perhaps they got attacked by animals? Wild beasts they could not fend off?

The girl is hesitant to move any further. What if their attacker was still around? Was she even safe, standing there, only a few dozen feet away from the scene?

Should she run? But run where? Going back the way she came, she would probably die before she found anything. Going into the woods was completely out of the question as well; who knows how many beasts dwell in there, even the weakest among them would likely kill or fatally wound her.

She stands still, observing the surroundings for a solid minute.

In her situation, was it even a sight to be frightened of? If anything, there could be something that would help her, lying between the corpses.

The girl walks closer towards the carnage.

As she approaches the first body in the way, she steps on its right arm, and, as expected, it’s cold and stiff. The corpse lays face down, with a large laceration on its back, wearing a once white, now blood-red shirt. She notices a gleaming object protruding from the corpse’s pants, around the hips. She reaches out to it with her hand, and unsheathes the object, a blade.

A dagger of fine quality, without wear. It’s so well polished that it’s difficult for the girl to look at, as too much sunlight reflects directly into her eyes, the object practically glowed. Its utility as a weapon was negligible however; considering the girl’s own weakness, she could not defend herself against most threats. Still, it had its uses.

Fighting barehanded would also wield far worse results anyway, so she holds on to the dagger tightly, trusting it to protect herself with.

The girl approaches the carriage. She looks inside, but it’s vacant. The carriage is made of a beautiful dark wood, its insides adorned with gold. The seats looked more comfortable than any bed she had ever slept in.

She looks around at all the bodies surrounding her and finds that lying beside one is another dagger, however, of a different model, and of much lower quality.

She walks past the carriage and finds the coachman still in his seat, with one arrow in his throat and another in his right eye. Based on the presence of arrows, it's clear whatever attacked them probably wasn't some beast, but either bandits or a sapient creature.

Sat beside him is a large black robe with only trace amounts of blood. The girl takes the robe and inspects it; it’s much bigger than her, and wearing it should at least offer more than the scrap of cloth she currently had. Before she puts it on, though, she takes the dagger and cuts out the lower portion of the robe, making it smaller so she could walk around without it getting in the way.

Checking the remaining bodies more thoroughly, numbering ten in total, the girl finds that six of them also carried daggers or knives with them, and about half wore cloth in their head to obscure their faces. Among all of them, however, none looked like any sort of nobility, as they all wore cheap and heavily worn-out fabric.

Most of the men died by bleeding out because of lacerations and stabs, though a couple had died due to blunt force trauma, as evidenced by their broken bodies and the dent in their heads.

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The bloodshed didn’t phase the girl one bit. Not the blood, the broken bones, the torn-up skin, the lifeless eyes of the victims; she was used to seeing that kind of imagery.

Aside from blades, the girl also found something else with one of the bodies: a wooden canteen, still with some liquid in it. She picks it up and drops a small amount on her hand, confirming it’s clean water. She then takes the canteen to her mouth and carelessly drinks from it, letting water stream down from her mouth, not stopping until she’s completely emptied it of water. She exhales, taking a moment to regain her composure.

With nothing else of value to take, having the canteen in one hand and dagger in the other, she decides to keep moving, as the stench from the rotting corpses became more unbearable by the second.

As soon as she takes a step forward, she hears rustling coming from nearby bushes. The sound startles her, and she ends up dropping the canteen, which doesn’t make much noise on its own, however seeing as the area was nearly completely silent beforehand, it was quite disruptive.

She looks toward the source of the sound that startled her, and, for a second, nothing else happens.

Then, something emerges from behind the bushes. A small—about the size of the girl—green humanoid creature, with pointy ears, a long nose, close to no hair anywhere on its body, and an overall damn ugly appearance. A goblin. The cloth around its body is but an old rag and it brandishes a rubbish knife made from a sharpened rock. Despite its less than impressive standing, it has somewhat of a toned physique.

It looks at the girl with its large bulging eyes and bares its fangs. The girl takes on a stance, holding the dagger with both of her hands in front of her and standing her ground.

The goblin lets out a growl and leaps toward the girl with its knife in a reverse grip, it’s incredibly agile, and the girl just barely dodges the initial attack.

The goblin immediately follows up his attack, swinging his knife violently and wildly at the girl, though only tearing her new robes as she manages to avoid the attack, mostly due to luck as well as the goblin’s own incompetence.

Her luck soon runs out, though, as in its rampage, the goblin takes a swing that's sure to connect. The girl doesn’t have nearly enough agility to avoid the incoming attack, on top of already being exhausted, so she uses her dagger in an attempt to block it.

The knife clashes with the dagger, and almost sends it flying, as the girl is much weaker than the goblin and gets caught off-guard by the force of the impact, only holding on to the dagger with her right hand.

The result is that the girl is left wide open, having neither the ability to dodge nor to use her dagger to block any subsequent attacks.

The goblin goes for it. It raises its knife and brings it down upon the girl, aiming for her head.

Reflexively, the girl puts her left hand—now freed from the burden of holding the dagger—in the way. The stone knife impales straight through her palm, stopping only inches away from her face.

However, in the same motion, the girl takes her dagger directly into the goblin’s neck, the sharp blade effortlessly piercing the goblin’s flesh.

The goblin grinned, laughing at the girl for its “successful” attack, not immediately realizing what had happened.

The girl lets up the dagger, and the goblin lets up the knife. The goblin stumbles back, falling to the floor and writhing in agony. Desperately, it tries to dislodge the dagger from its throat, throwing it away. However, the result does not change, and the goblin quickly drowns in its own blood.

The girl stands tall above the still twitching body of the goblin, catching her breath.

As she stands there, looking down at the puddle of blood forming, light returns to her blue eyes, shining like gemstones.

Deep in her soul, something changed.

The girl knew violence. She’d seen her own blood and the blood of those around her. Blood was all there was in her small world. Mostly her own blood.

She was a doll. A toy to be played with and thrown away once it broke. That's the "her" she knew up until then.

She didn’t even know why she stood her ground right then and there. She had no recollection of ever doing so, but it was as if it wasn’t the first time she’d fought; it wasn’t even the first time she’d killed something. It just felt natural.

The adrenaline of battle, the feeling of having power, of prevailing. She enjoyed it. If she could only become strong, no one could hurt her. It was logical. The girl hadn’t even considered it a possibility, but now, fighting seemed like the natural conclusion to reach. It was as if all she could see before was a blur, and now, she had a lens to see the world through.

She tries to reach out for her blood-soaked dagger, but as she does, she’s stopped by a sharp pain in her left hand, still with a knife lodged in it. She could bear the pain initially because of the adrenaline, but as it wore off, the pain became too much to ignore. She was also bleeding from the wound, and needed some way to stop or at least reduce the blood loss.

She takes the knife by the handle and tries to pull it out. It’s not easy, and she spends about a minute in excruciating pain trying to remove the knife. Eventually, it slowly starts sliding out of her hand and finally, she pulls it out. As soon as it does, though, even more blood gushes out from her hand.

She thinks to use the piece of cloth she cut out from the robe to cover her hand with. Still with the goblin’s knife, she walks over to the coachman’s seat where she left the cloth, and cuts out a thinner strip she can properly wrap her hand with. She also takes the rest of the cloth and wraps it around her hips, intending to use it later.

The pain from her wounded hand is not something she can bear. But in her view, she doesn’t have any choice but to ignore the pain; not doing so would just lead to wasting more time and energy, and she would die.

She heads back over to the body of the goblin; inspecting it for anything interesting she might find, and finds a small pouch tied around the goblin’s torso with a string. She uses the knife to cut the string and picks up the pouch. Looking inside, she finds quite a few berries. She knows that many of the fruits found in the wild are likely to be poisonous to most creatures, including humans, but figures that since the goblin was picking them, they were more likely to be safe. That, and the fact that by this point she was too exhausted to worry about it. So, she decides to eat them.

She takes one. As she bites down on the soft berry, extremely sweet juice seeps out into her mouth. After all that’s happened to her, she finds solace in the sweet berry, and smiles, for the first time in who knows how long.

The berry gives her the strength to keep going. She’s tired and needs rest, but she can’t do it in the middle of the road around a bunch of dead, decaying bodies, so she has to continue walking until she finds a better place.

She drops the goblin’s knife by its body, and picks up the dagger, which she sheathes in the cloth wrapped around her hip. She takes the string that the goblin was using to carry the pouch, and ties it around herself in a similar manner, to more easily carry the canteen. Then, she takes the berry pouch and eats the berries as she continues walking towards wherever.

She still doesn’t know where the road leads, or which way she should go, but after the encounter with the goblin, the destination was clearer.