[WP] A monster hunter came to your village to deal with a threat nobody knew about until his arrival. Shortly afterward, people started disappearing. You suspect that the monster and the hunter are two sides of the same coin.
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He came with the cold; with the first signs that winter was at our doorstep.
And in retrospect, this might have been a symbol of what the next few weeks were going to be like. But then he came like most travellers had come, and save his strange walk of life, there was nothing else that was off about him.
He claimed to be a monster hunter. I didn't assume that the job paid, and he didn't ask for any monetary compensation for his work. He just said he had detected a threat in the village and he had come to eradicate it.
I'd lived in this village all my life, and I didn't hear anything about any monsters. I didn't particularly believe that they existed exactly, and our village wasn't experiencing crimes all the time. Yes, there were some odd disappearances without explanation ever so rarely, but we attributed it all to runaways and the like.
Letting Ken, as his name was called, into our village to do what he had come for was most likely an attempt to humor him. To act as though we valued his concern for our village. Nothing more.
Again, hindsight clears a lot, and in retrospect, we could definitely have been wiser than to allow a total stranger into the village on account of a monster threat which had not been noticed before.
But he stayed, and we went about our daily lives, until Sakura disappeared.
Sakura was an only daughter. Her father died fighting during the Warring States period, and her mother sold some beautiful kimonos at the market, so they got by pretty well.
Sakura had been with her friends Kasumi and Megumi most of that day. It was sundown when they escorted her to the common path and saw her off. The moon had just come out when Jong the fisherman exchanged greetings with her just 200 metres away from her house.
Sakura never reached home.
Her mother Kaoru had been brought back from a party by her friend, halfway between tipsy and drunk. It was simply beyond her capacity to check if her daughter was in, but even if she wasn't, it was still 7:01pm, and Sakura's curfew was by 8.
There was nothing wrong with her being out that late.
Sakura's disappearance wasn't discovered until the next morning when Kaoru went to wake up her daughter who had somehow overslept and failed to prepare hot water for their baths, only for her to see an empty made bed where Kaoru was suppose to be.
The sheets were cold, and the ground clean, so the room hadn't been slept in.
This wasn't a sign that something had gone wrong yet. She could have slept over at any of her friends houses. Ayame and Azumi had been her friends since they were toddlers, so sleepovers weren't unusual, although permission had to be taken.
Kaoru just made a mental note to scold her daughter when she came back.
But when her friends came around thirty minutes, asking to see Sakura to conclude their discussions from the previous day, Kaoru knew something had happened. She screamed. I was appeasing by, and I heard the scream.
So did the monster hunter.
We both dashed in and in a short while, we were up to speed with the story with the aid of a sobbing Kaoru and Sakura's scared friends.
Son there was a little crowd of women calming Kaoru and getting the details of the story, and men I was mobilising to form a search party.
"This is the handwork of the monster I told, no, warned you all about. I should have hunted it down instead of allowing it to bare its gangs like this!"
Kaoru broke into more loud wails, while I looked at the man, annoyed. It wasn't helping anyone to say things like that, especially in this situation. But he wasn't my biggest worry yet , so I spoke to Kaoru instead.
"Your daughter's very beautiful. I'm sure she must have had a few suitors and the like..."
"If that's what you're insinuating..." Kaoru said, her eyes taking on a look resembling live coals. "Then you are getting it completely wrong. Suitors have come around, and some of them are really close to Sakura. Still, there's no way she'd have slept there or eloped. Without any mention of it to me, without any word. We're too close, there's just no way!"
I forgot how close their mother-daughter relationship was. A silly mistake on my part.
"Then..."
I was interrupted by a teenage boy who burst in, holding a torn price of cloth which seemed to be bloodstained on one end.
As he came closer, I knew what it was already, and I bent my had as Kaoru screamed and fainted.
It was the beginning of weeks of torment for me.
*****
New Series 🚨
I've decided to make a series out of this prompt, and I'm interested in its reception by you all. Like and Comment please thanks!
thats scary