I'm not a fighter.

I started carefully towards the direction I'd sensed the wrongness in, flexing my hands in a nervous tick. I wasn't a warrior, and I wasn't a hero, I was nothing like that. But I didn't have a choice; I needed to learn how to fight, how to harness my powers, if I ever wanted full control over my life.

Otherwise, I'd just be driven constantly away.

My long coat fluttered in the wind as I walked, and I felt a flash of annoyance with the long garment. It was nice enough, and it kept me warm and dry, but it wasn't suited to a hunter. I stripped it off, leaving it on a nearby branch, and continued on my way. I already felt the thrumming of untrained instincts, that surging power in my blood that had taken control. I could feel the pulse of power in my veins, and I could feel the lurking patience of it; a moment of weakness and it would take me again. And, more than that, I was almost excited for it; those moments when I'd given myself to my instincts were probably the most alive I'd ever felt.

As the vestigial daylight faded and I passed fully from day to night, I came to understand something. I couldn't fully blame the demonic instincts in me for my crime. More than that, or in addition to it, there was a part of me that burned with injustice and thirsted for ****. There was a part of me that desired power, an absolute strength, such as I would never suffer the same fate as my father.

He'd been murdered some two years back by a mercenary in his shop. He'd procured a rare item for the bastard, with the price already agreed upon; the sell-sword had reneged on the deal and tried to take the item for one-tenth of the agreed-upon sum. It happened, the man had been hung. It still hurt. It didn't feel like enough.

And then all this shit happened.

I heard something shuffle behind me, and I felt a chill run through my body. I turned around and drew my knife wardingly. I didn't know what the sound was, or even if I was just imagining it. I tried to calm my beating heart, but I couldn't. I was still just a merchant boy, regardless of my change in circumstances.

And that needed to change.

A flower of pain blossomed suddenly at the back of my head, and I found myself pitching forward with the **** of a blow. I tumbled to the ground, scraping my arms against the roughness. I looked over my shoulder, catching sight of the creature that had struck me.

It looked just like a man, but wrong. His face was blood-less and his eyes were unseeing. His chest lay still and unmoving, and he wore an old gambeson under a breastplate. He was unarmed, but his hands were meaty and strong. This creature was surely like me, not human.

Or maybe, like me, it was once human.

I stood as the creature lumbered forward. I was confused, and my head was aching; how had it snuck up on me?

As if to answer my question, the creature crouched low and leapt a dozen feet into the air and came down like the hammer of a god. I rolled away from it just before the impact, and came up lunging at the creature. My knife sank about an inch into the flesh, stopped largely by the cloth of the gambeson.

I barely got my arms between my face and his arm, the impact of the block sending me flying a dozen meters back. My arms numbed almost instantly and the dagger slipped from my twitching fingers. It clattered to the dirt, and a drop of blood flowed; my lips were bleeding from either my teeth or my arms.

I looked up just in time to see the creature leap again.