Hunter's Path

by SwordTune

Kelpie

"So, master Monster Hunter, what brings the likes of you 'round here?" The fisher pony tied his boat to a wood peg that erected from the ground. His village was a mile south and fishing trips further north were all familiar ground.

It was an odd place, this far north of the Far Coast. Already Fiora could feel the shift in the air's magic. Different monsters, many of them new to the world.

"Hope you don't mind m'say-so, but you're a little funny lookin', more so than other mutants I've seen." The sea brought in cold air, and with its winds followed snow from northern mountains and glaciers. The fisher pony grabbed his tent making kit and started setting up while he talked.

"But, never met a mutant who didn't like ebontail tuna, and I bet you will too," he said. "Even if you got wings and a horn."

Fiora, like most mutants who became monster hunters, had aged well with the times. Just over three hundred years old, she was used to drawing attention from locals, but not so used to that attention being friendly in any sense.

"You must've met mutant monster hunters then," she remarked. "It's the combination of our mutations, and the slow alterations of strong hunter potions, that harden our digestive tract. It's the reason why we don't taste, or care about, the bitter toxin in ebontail fins."

"Of course," muttered the pony. "The fact that it's meat is completely irrelevant."

"Normal ponies can't stand meat, but here you are, a fisher nonetheless," Fiora replied, but focusing on feeling the magic for the kelpie that plagued the villagers.

"Aye," he answered, "so our dogs can eat and our traps have bait for bears. We can't hire a hunter t'get rid of every creature wandering 'round."

In fifteen minutes wood was on the fire and Fiora had boiled a pot of water with a mixture of herbs and other ingredients. The fisher pony looked inside, trying to guess at what it held, but he couldn't point out the common leaves, let alone the various monster glands.

Mandrake sink tissues that stored sugar and nutrients for the plant-like monster, dried adrenal glands of lesser demons, and a drained venom sac from a manticore, boiled and mixed with alfalfa leaves she had brought from a plantation on the southern end of the Far Coast. Meanwhile the fisher pony covered his nose and tried to eat his baked potatoes quietly.

"Look, 'fore you go off running after some water devil, I just wanted t'say I don't begrudge the village payin' your rate, high as it is." He tossed a gnarled log onto the fire to let it eat the wood and grow, slowly. "Folks're afeared o' mutants, but I've always said you can't blame some pony for being born some way."

Fiora furrowed her brow. "You talk as if it's something I should regret. Being me isn't something bad, something that I don't have to be responsible for."

"But, don't you miss bein' like other folk?" he asked, not quite understanding her meaning.

Fiora drained the infusion into a flask and tied it to her saddlebag, letting it steep. Even with the monster glands, which brewed faster, it would still take an hour before it became effective. She got up and headed out to where she suspected the kelpie to be.

"The kelpie will be up soon," she explained, as if it meant anything to the fisher pony who knew nothing of monsters. She marched down a short beaten path before trudging through a thin grassy valley covered in snow.

The grass up north was resilient, but winter had begun and soon even the soft shoots absorbing the snowflakes now would perish under a meter of snow.

"Water kelpie can't suffer the cold without hunting," Fiora scanned the grassland, edging closer to the thinly frozen over lake. Kelpies, she remembered from her studies as a foal, were considered water omens by many locals.

Small tribes, some of which remained unconquered by the Far Coast, revered the power of kelpies and thought them to be spirits of water who were neither evil nor good.

More superstitious villages blamed anything from drowned pets to bad rain to disease on kelpies. But with war torn lands all along the border between the Far Coast kings and High Mountain Kingdom, both governments have given little thought to the paranoia of their ponies.

Fiora rubbed her shoulder, remembering the last time she hunted a kelpie. It was old, a spirit in appearance but entirely flesh underneath its magic guise, and had drowned dozens from a small fishing village. Kelpies lived in lakes and ponds, she remembered, edging along the shoreline of the frozen lake.

The last one was an easier hunt, in the spring with no ice; kelpies could be completely invisible when floating still in their natural habitats. They were ambush hunters, and only moved when they woke at dawn. The frozen horizon blackened with snow clouds from the north, but Fiora could still see the faint grey of the rising sun.

If it were like last time, she only had to wait and watch for the kelpie's movements. All she needed to do was catch it stirring and strike before it gathered its senses. But with ice covering the entire lake, it was impossible to spot the faint distortions in the water below.

The same must not have been true for the kelpie, however, who spotted Fiora immediately. The monster cracked through the sheet of ice the moment Fiora placed her hoof in its range.

Though a shapeshifter, the monster kept its usual form of a large, spindly pony. Its legs were stretched, so thinly it looked ready to snap at any moment if it wasn't for the creature's powerful magic, and its blackish-blue body was surrounded by an arcane mist--violet and light blue in colour.

It lashed forward like an alligator, floating in its magic mist and snapping at Fiora's hooves while the bony legs wrapped around her, yanking her into the freezing water. Fiora's wing drew her sword instinctively and the monster immediately repulsed from its strength.

Infused with night silver and her own aura, the weapon's metal repelled magic stronger than any typical blade of steel and night silver, cutting deeper the monster than even the sharpest of hunter blades could.

Fiora jumped back and fired a shockwave of magic energy at the kelpie, pushing it out of the water onto the rest of the icy lake. Extremely light for its size, the thin ice only cracked slightly.

The monster rushed forward again, enhancing its speed with magic, and pummeled Fiora into the ground before sinking its teeth onto her armor. Her coat of plate bent, its hardened steel sections and Ichneumon leather absorbing the pressure. But the kelpie changed its shape, shortening its snout and growing sharp, serrated teeth.

Its head was more like a shark's, though the body stayed the same, and it ripped her coat until the steel underneath was exposed. Fiora didn't push back. Instead, she grabbed her blade with her other wing and guided its point into the monster's shoulder, angling and cutting through the trapezius muscle on its back.

It screeched, losing focus and reversing its head back to that of a pony. Fiora cut repeatedly, severing muscles on its chest and neck until the monster collapsed, unable to hold up its own weight. Even so, it was no defenceless.

The kelpie lashed its tongue out, wrapping around Fiora's neck to strangle her, pulling her into the water in the process. She shot bolts of fire spells at the kelpie, but it was wise to her magic and throttled her around and no spell could hit its mark. Fiora's heart beat harder and pushed what little breath she had to her body while she reached for a vial in her saddlebag and swallowed its contents.

Water flooded Fiora's lungs, cold and icy until her insides felt numb and solid like a glacier. But she could breathe. The potion she drank worked immediately, its viscous fluid clinging to her throat and turning water in her lungs into air with the magic of its ingredients.

The kelpie was dumbstruck by its prey's lack of drowning, a moment of weakness most water monsters had when facing a prepared monster hunter. It took just one shockwave of magic, its force carried strongly by the water, for Fiora to blast them both out of the water.

The blast flung her to the shore and the kelpie even farther, to a small gathering of tree stumps where a team of loggers had apparently passed. On land and with weakened magic, the monster struggled to move. Fiora galloped, sword raised in one wing and blasting searing arcs of flames at the flailing kelpie.

It rolled on the dirt and snow, desperate for an escape, but stopped short as Fiora's blade made two halves of its spine. Its blood, still charged with relatively high amounts of magic, sizzled against the night silver in the sword until it burst with energy, throwing blood across the snow.

"Not worth two hundred," Fiora muttered to herself, shivering as she severed the head as proof of the kill. A potion could heal her wounds or let her breath in water, but oddly enough the trivial action of warming up was still left to a campfire.

She slung the monster's head over her saddlebag, attaching its eye socket to a hook on her saddle, and headed back for the fisher pony's campfire.

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"You already agreed to the amount before I took the contract," Fiora snarled with a low tone that hinted at her rising frustration, but the town elder seemed steadfast. All the others, including the burliest of stallions, shied away from the angry monster hunter, but not him.

"Wood Hedge, maybe we should just let the Monster Hunter take the gold," suggested a whimpering blacksmith, who had seen first hoof Fiora's sword as she sharpened it the day before.

"Quiet, Iron Cast!" barked the old pony. "This mutant let my youngest daughter die before offering to help, and still demanded we pay her more. We've paid with dozens of lives already, freak! We shan't pay any more."

"You should have spoken before I took the contract," Fiora stomped her hoof. "I can't work for free, but I might have been willing to give a discount."

It wouldn't have been likely, though. She could feel her coin pouch, a little satchel that hung off the right of her saddle, next to her sword scabbard; she could feel the lack of any weight. There was once a time where she could charge little to nothing for a monster, falling back on her orchard for coin. But tough, when in times of war.

"How are we to pay for the rest of our expenses?" the town elder argued. "We've few sons to fish and fell trees now, and our most skilled seamstress is in that monster's belly. No pony will take pity and deal with a town with nothing to trade."

Fiora wanted to snap and snatch the coin from the stallion's hooves. She needed the money. Instead, she stepped closer and whispered to the elder.

"A mutant monster hunter with wings and a horn tends to catch ponies' attention. What would ponies think of a village that can't even pay to save its own? Will you get a lot of trade then?"

The elder's eyes widened and glared at the threat. "You dare?"

"I do," she nodded, hoof extended to accept the coin.

"May Cerberus hunt you in Tartarus," cursed the stallion, throwing the sack of coins at her hooves. She laughed inwardly at the old stallion's perception of an eternal tormentor. She knew the real one.

She picked up the sack and stuffed it next to her potion ingredients in her bag. "Pleasure doing business."

"I don't want to see you here ever again," the old stallion said through clenched teeth. Fiora nodded in agreement and left the village by the south road, eager to find work in a warmer village where professional skill took precedence over prejudice.

Comments

[EverfreePony]

Wow, first chapter through and I'm hooked!
I really like the amount of fine details and logic you put into this story. The backgrounds are interesting and the characters act in believable way. Also, it greatly reminds me of The Witcher series!

I haven't read the original trilogy, so I just hope that won't be an issue later into the story.