The pine needles rustled as Annie’s wind swept across the mountain top. It came like some single-idea decorator, outlining and highlighting everything with a dusting of ice. The snow intensified as she continued her subtle battle movements, shimmying out of the way of thrown projectiles and rushing directly toward the largest of the puppets, the figure with the large cleaver.

From the shadow of the pine trees, a hatchet whipped toward Annie’s back. She paused, pirouetting elegantly and dispersing her momentum completely as the attack whizzed only a hair away from her, and leveled her bow at the perpetrator. She pulled the string back an extra inch, upgrading the shot from a casual shot to a deadly one.

A clear twang precipitated the release of the ivory bolt. It streaked through the intervening distance, crashing into the puppet’s pelvis and forcefully ripping its way through. Bolts tumbled out and twine snapped, leaving the puppet unmoored at the waist, flopping around on the powder-covered ground. But Annie had already turned to face the next challenger.

They rushed at her in twos and threes through the whirling flurries, the puppet maestro striking at her blindspots while she engaged with the replaceable parts. But Annie was the chilling wind in deadly motion, pivoting, firing, and advancing.

Her attackers moved with enough speed that she only fired a few arrows before she had to let her bow disperse and enthusiastically engage them in melee combat. Or, to be frank, Annie purposefully kept her arrows on a delayed timing so she didn’t completely demoralize this man before he let her have her fun.

Let me shred them a bit.

Without her bow, Annie grasped at the snow-laden wind that swirled around them and pulled two daggers of ice from nothing. The puppet thrust a stiletto at her, but the tip was lost in the billowing folds of her fur cloak as she leaned back. Her left arm snapped up, sheering through the construction of its arms and leaving the puppet weaponless. Then her right arm sliced down, cutting through the puppet’s thigh and leaving it to bury its face in the snow.

Two more puppets lashed out, but Annie swam between their inelegant attacks, her weapons carving their limbs and leaving them also squirming on the ground. With raw physical Stats, it was easy to overwhelm them without even breaking a sweat.

In front of her, the largest puppet with its cleaver took a stance. Again, the smallest image seeped out of its cloak, hinting that this puppeteer might have the capacity to develop into someone truly powerful someday.

However, today was not that day. Today was a silent night, with everything buried beneath the relentless snow.

Annie feinted a dash forward and the cleaver wielder took a step back as he tried to keep up. While its cloak was still swaying, Annie drew up short, one of her ice daggers becoming a crossbow and the other morphing into a bolt. She fired into the puppet’s face before it could react. The bolt exploded in a sphere of ice large enough that it encased its entire torso. The ice lollipop fell to the ground, unable to move. Its cleaver clattered to the ground, snow steadily burying it.

Six more puppets rushed at Annie’s back. She spun and her bow fell back into her hands. She simply allowed her instincts to guide the movements. All six had arrows through their joints in a single moment, a testament to the true speed that Annie could achieve when she went all out. However, she had tried of playing slowly with this medallion wearer.

Annie faced him and grimaced. “Not to be that girl… but really? So quickly, you’re finished?”

“I always knew this would be difficult,” The medallion user’s voice was placid. He gestured broadly, as though he wasn’t suddenly facing Annie alone. “This? I can always make more puppets. But we now have the proof that we need; if we manage to fell you, cracks will begin to appear in the faith people still maintain in the Ghosthound. So now-”

The ground in front of Annie exploded, a puppet with long claws aiming to rake the soft flesh of her face. Sighing, she sidestepped and brought a hand whipping around, an ice dagger condensing just in time for the strike to rip across the puppet's throat.

Clink.

Annie’s eyes flashed. Oh? This one is a bit sturdier-

It whipped around and lashed out at her, but Annie neatly stepped again, moving past it in a gleaming flash of her dagger. Then it collapse into a heap of shattered porcelain and darksteel. The primal viciousness of her image could rip even darksteel to shreds.

In the meantime, Annie detected four more threats arriving from her periphery and whirled around to face them. But her eyes widened, more at her instincts than at anything else. Three young children, two girls and a boy, walked toward her, shepherded by a puppet with a short weapon in its hand. Her eyes burned as she whipped around to glare at the medallion man, but he had vanished.

Her lips twitched as her hunter senses sought him out and found him pressed against a nearby pine tree. Snow drifted down and accumulated next to his feet. If nothing else, he has quite a few Skills related to fleeing.

Meanwhile, she turned to regard the three children with a soft smile on her face. The snow intensified, following the thunderous emotional reverberations that she felt. “What’s all this then?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

But she could already sense the situation, through that strange new awareness that the Ghosthound had instilled in all of them. Delilah might have received the strongest slice of the pie that Annie had ever seen, but Annie had discovered new things about herself and the surroundings with this gift as well. As she looked at the three children with their sunken and desperate eyes, she could sense the strangeness of their image. It dug into the foundation of their beings, seeping out of them and releasing ugly particles that skittered through the air.

Just looking at them, it was easy to see why they would consider this a virus.

Annie opened her mouth and the puppet shepherding the children waved a blade coyly behind the children’s backs. It’s message was clear; do nothing or it would slaughter the kids.

Annie’s eyes bulged, first in genuine rage and then secondly because this fool believed she would put herself in danger to protect the lives of strange children. But she forced an easy expression onto her face and looked toward the spot where the medallion wearer was hiding. “Did you raise them like this on purpose? Were they conditioned? To have them so deeply believe that they were weak and worthless that it would influence others and spread the ideology?”

The medallion wearer didn’t reply, but Annie felt him slink further up the slope to avoid her gaze. Yet by now, the entire mountain was covered in her chilling snow; he would not be able to escape.

She snorted and turned back to the children. The first, the girl, wore only a tattered shirt. Her fingers and face were dirty, as though her principal way of spending her time was rubbing mud onto her cheeks. She looked straight at Annie, tears beginning to form in the corners of her eyes. She stumbled forward and choked back a sob.

The puppet gestured again: touch the girl.

Annie flicked a wrist. The puppet exploded in a nova of frost, sending the threatened boy tripping forward. That kid didn’t even really react, he simply fell over and curled up, a premature flinch before the next blow fell.

Despite the strange uncomfortable aura around the girl, Annie crouched down next to her and offered her a smile. “Well, well, well. Let me take a look at you. What’s your name?”

The girl threw herself into Annie’s arms but didn’t answer. Tremors ran constantly through the little girl’s body, a mixture of adrenaline and panic fraying the ends of her nerves. Nearby, the other kid tottered closer, seeming more morose but also more functional than the others. He paused and went back to pick up his fallen companion, tugging the other boy onto his feet.

Meanwhile, Annie closely examined their aura. Because honestly-

When those baleful mites of weakness neared her, they flailed helplessly and couldn’t find purchase. Then a sweeping wave would wash through, annihilating the foreign aura. Not by her image, but by the pure connections that she had made, the flowing rivers of meaning that she shared with those individuals she had encountered on Expira, primarily among them Randidly Ghosthound.

Annie nodded slowly to herself. This isn’t actually an image of weakness. It’s a rot of people’s Nether foundation. Of course, an average person who hadn’t strengthened their connections and place in the world would suddenly feel weaker when exposed. It’s dumping water on a dirt lot; everything quickly becomes muddy. But if you actually have a foundation built-

“Hey, don’t worry.” Annie patted the back of the girl’s head. Using that strange new muscle gifted to the world by the Ghosthound a month prior, she reached out and connected herself to the girl. The action took a little doing and she felt clumsy while doing it, but soon Annie felt it click into place. Some of her firm foundation flowed through of the newly formed thread, almost too powerful for the girl to bear. If anything, the trembling of her small body grew worse. Yet Annie thoroughly cleansed her aura of that degenerative weakness and self-hatred.

Obviously, it would take longer for the mental wounds to heal. But at least, Annie could cleanse her significance.

“Now, stay here a bit. I need to settle a score with a skulking rat,” Annie said in a sing-song voice. She used her thumb and some of the girl’s leaking tears to wipe dirt from her face and gently kissed her forehead. For that brief moment, the connection of Nether pulsed strangely. From a single thread, it became two.

Then Annie stood she took a few steps away and drew her bow. She raised her head and spoke to the swirling winds of the mountain. The sky above was heavy and grey. “You know, this was extremely short-sighted of you. Because now that I’ve caught your scent, I will hunt you and this so-called Order Patricide to the ends of Expira. You cannot escape me.”

There was a moment of silence, but then the familiar booming voice came out from between a group of snow-covered trees. “You’ve been exposed to the image virus. Now, it’s only a matter of time before you-”

His voice cut off in a guzzling sputter. After swaying in place, the medallion wearer collapsed, revealing Annie suddenly standing behind him with a dagger. She pursed her lips and tossed aside the blood-covered weapon. Then she knelt next to the man and pulled back the hood; a realistic humanoid puppet stared back at her, some reddish substance leaking from its throat.

“What a hassle,” Annie clicked her tongue in dissatisfaction. Then she stood and sucked in a breath. Snow heavy winds continued to swirl above, more and more precipitation coming down to cloak the entire mountaintop in ice.

Her eyes burned white and baleful as she pivoted and looked around. Her White Hunter’s Knack caught the traces of the puppet controller due to his Skill usage here. A smile stretched across her face as she followed that trail out to a weird puppet intermediary and then another some distance further away, stretching South from the Nordawn Mountain Range in a long chain that eventually led to the Wildlands South of Zone 1. Smoke began to rise from the corners of her gaze; driven by a frightful cruelty, Annie pushed herself further and further.

A low growl escaped her throat. Something feral crept into her joints, sharpening her hunger until she seemed to feel a physical need gnawing at the inside of her ribs.

Her eyes and that need eventually led her to the target. Across the world, hidden in an underground training facility, a brown-haired man shivered and twisted around from a basin of water sitting on the desk. Oblivious to distance, their eyes met. His pupils dilated in sudden horror and understanding.

Annie chuckled. She knocked an arrow and pulled back the string, bending the wooden bow. Snow swirled around her, alighting upon the arrow until it was completely encrusted. Still, Annie drew back on her weapon, aiming the arrow up in the very specific angle, to cover the incredible distance.

She kept pulling, the bow folding itself into a sharp V, the arrow no longer braced against anything. It was only her sure grip that kept the arrow straight. As a professional, Annie looked again with her burning white eyes, finding the young man scrambling out of the underground area to seek help.

Then she released the string, confident that her arrow would find its target. That need in her stomach licked its chops, ready to indulge in the prey’s carcass.