Children love this one

There was once a Huntress who met her match.

She, some would tell you, was not exactly well liked, nor seen as a celebrity, such terms would only belittle her reputation. She was a legend in the flesh, spoken of like the tragic heroes of myths long past on the worst of days, like a goddess descended on the best.

From birth she had been raised by her parents to be a machine in human skin rather than a little girl. She killed her first rabbit at three, hunted her first elk at seven, and survived her first wolf pack at ten. The day her mother died, she halted her archery practice for ten minutes to grief, before continuing until the string of her bow had shaved off the tips of her finger; the day her father disappeared, it is said she laid down the gigantic boar she was carrying over her shoulder for a single sip of rum, before continuing her merry way.

The War came, the War went. With a third of the country blasted and a forth a hole, terrified beasts fled in all directions, and so her fame grew. From her village to the capital of her nation, from the capital to foreign lands across the seas, from foreign lands to mystical realms spoken only in fairy tales, an arrow always between her fingers and her name whispered by every mouth.

And how could it not? It was said she could track a mouse in a forest through noise alone, that she could hide for weeks on a bare floor of marble tiles, that she could nail an ant on the head from twenty leagues away, and she would even let you pick which eye she got! Her arrows flew faster than bullets, her knife was a gale of silver and black, her cloak the raven wings of reapers.

There was nothing she couldn't hunt. Bears? She hunted with her bare fists. Lions? Just her mouth. Sharks, great whites and grandiose blacks both? She would shoot one of each from shore and wait for their bodies to float her way. Unspeakable things then, mystical things, dreadful things, manufactured things, monsters of all sizes became her quarry, the work of squads then armies falling on the shoulders of a single woman, who despite everything, always emerged victorious.

She was called the Brown-Capped Huntress. Then, she became the Eastern Fang-Taker. Then, the Lightning Arrow.

And finally, she was the Bowwoman. What else would you need? As if there was a soul who couldn't tell who you were speaking about.

One day, crossing a misty valley, she decided to stop for a rest.

She wasn't on an official job, yet, but she was travelling to discuss one. Some figure of white fur the size of a young oak with claws like sickles had taken to kidnapping children from an important trade hub down South, and leaving just their poorly picked bones behind, though arranged with such a mastery on anatomy that it defied typical animal cunning. As she tended to do, she journeyed alone and on foot, so after crossing over half a nation in a day, she decided to slow down.

She heard footsteps coming from behind. A shepherd, small and shy, carefully approached her, recognizing her clothes and figure from statues and news articles. He was having trouble with his flock lately, something from the hills West had been killing a single sheep every week for close to half a year. He feared becoming destitute, but the few hunters who had the guts to chase the creature after seeing its meals never found it.

A little bored, she decided there was no harm in a little training and agreed to give it a look.

What she saw, rotting away in a poorly wrapped sheet inside the shepherd's tool shed, might not have been the weirdest cadaver she had ever seen, but sure would make it to the top three.

The sheep had been bisected, horizontally, and from the shape of the wounds in one bite, which considering the state of the rest of the body should have been impossible. It was too neat: most of its legs , its chest and most of its ribs, its lower jaw and even tongue, all unharmed, just barely bloodied from the killing blow, but everything else was gone.

Feeling her heart thunder, she promised she would be right back to take care of it, she just needed to do something real quick. She ran, and some say she didn't break stride even to take her payment from the southern town, she just plopped a mountain of matted hair and muscle before its gates before yelling where the money should go to as she went back.

Every second after she returned she spent above the shepherd's roof, camouflaged with a sheet of clay tiles. She had time and schedule for when it would come, but knowing beasts to be unpredictable, she would not miss a single second of action from the shepherd's pastures.

Six days passed in which she blinked one eye at a time and slept in increments of thirty seconds every two minutes. Once or twice, a fox or a jackal would approach the flock with curiosity, before the shepherd's mastiff send then scurrying off with prejudice, but nothing else.

That night, the sheep had been safely tucked away inside their half enclosed shelter. She watched everything carefully. She blinked one eye, the other got heavy. She slept for twelve seconds, before a commotion woke her up.

Too late. All that was left was a corpse plopped on its stomach some two or three meters away from the barn. She heard grass rustling, knocked an arrow so fast even she didn't realize what she was doing, and released.

And she hit! The wind, the weeds, the damp soil, and not a thing else.

The next morning was when her chase began in earnest. The body was much as she expected, but the footprints the creature had left behind were a surprise: thin claw tipped toes, narrow ankles or a thick back digit, possibly bipedal from the space between steps, each roughly the size of her open hand, all in all almost like one of those flightless predator birds she had hunted overseas, but what could one be doing around these parts? Why did it kill this way?

The shepherd had been right, the trail led her to the hills, but it died under a rock. Scouting the area, she found many possible locations for secluded dens or at least hiding spots. What she hoped to catch, but didn't however, was the stank of carrion from its previous bounties, as surely something that size couldn't eat all that meat and bones in just a couple hours, right?

She searched high and low, near and far, to no avail. She found beasts beneath stones, beneath trees, beneath houses abandoned or not, and though she found carnivores big and small, never her prey.

The week passed, the day came. She hooked herself to the ceiling of the barn, covering uncommon but possible anglea of approach, and this time she made sure to be well rested. Bow and arrow tightly held, she waited.

She guessed it happened at around three hours past midnight. The sheep were sleeping soundly, the breeze had quietened, and the moon was nearing full. Suddenly, just the slightest knock on a wooden beam, a meter or so away from her head, and her arrow flew through the air, disappearing into the night.

Her body realized the deceit before her mind did. Dropping among panicked baying, she ran west, barely sidestepping the grizzly corpse left behind, following the noise of rustling and-

Nothing?

No panting breath, no plodding of softened dirt, no whines or growls. But it was so close now! So close she could see-

She couldn't see it at all. She had been chasing her own shadow all along.

She returned to the concerned shepherd with empty hands.

The next three months went much the same.

She came so close, so damn close every single time it was torture how it slipped through her fingers. Worst was how it teased her, growing bolder and bolder with every success.

One day, after a night in the drizzle trying to find any traces of the squat silhouette that had left the last victim to bath in a puddle, she caught a glimpse of it in the morrow. It was so brief she could barely believe her own eyes, but it was there, passing her by as if she wouldn't gouge its pelt off its cold body, short and the color of moss, something like an enormous eye just barely acknowledging her. By the time she turned, the rising sun shone over thick fog and the slanted peak of a mountain in a most gorgeous manner, but nothing else of note.

The next week over, idly patrolling around a narrow gorge between two hillocks before dusk, she found the fox she had seen all those days ago, back split open all the way to its fangs, half of its skull and most of its internal organs neatly plucked off. She crouched to examine it, and for an instant it was there, above her, a phallic and ribbed shade against the reddening sky, splitting in half to-

She never got to know, her head snapping so fast in its direction she should by all means have seen it tuck its tail between its legs and flee, but the only thing in its place was a small plant, sparse of branches but lush with leaves. Though she found nothing suspicious with the plant itself, there was a trail of footprints starting beneath its roots, a looping track she followed until the stars were her only companions, then went back to camp.

Some time later, it attacked in the middle of the day. She had been having a conversation over a campfire when the shepherd came screaming, crying that one of his sheep had been thrown right through his window. She arrived at the chaos of that scene searching as if the world depended on it, but this time she saw nothing, only heard a pausing, shrill gurgle, almost like a little girl's choked sobbing, coming from all sides yet found at none.

Now, you might notice the Bowwoman was no longer alone, and that was because while she could seclude herself from humanity, humanity refused to seclude itself from her.

Every day she did not work was another farmer eaten piece by piece by marshland vipers, another housewife quartered in front of her children by skinless maws extending from the gutter, another mayor very bothered by flat critters with many legs ruining his best portrait with their corrosive slobber.

Letters and couriers came, one after the other, searching for the world's lost savior and always receiving the same answer: "I'm busy." At first, they accepted it at face value, such a magnificent and magnanimous person ought to always be doing something important, right?

But after the first month, people began to notice she was stuck in one place, never saying anything about her prey, becoming more and more disheveled by the meeting, wild eyes flickering from side to side indoors and outdoors both. Lack of information gave birth to speculation, speculation gave birth to rumors, rumors gave birth to curiosity.

And suddenly, the world knew that the Bowwoman had, for the first time, ran into a beast she couldn't kill.

From a one floor shack of stone and clay a kilometer something away from the nearest village, the shepherd's home became one of the hottest tourist spots on the continent. It would be easier to list the reasons people hadn't come: there were those who wanted to laugh at an idol brought low, those who wished to prove themselves by catching the beast, those who wanted to prove themselves to her in specific by catching the beast, those who were curious, those who saw a lucrative opportunity, those who had nothing better to do, those who were just following the trend, and so many more.

The camp grew, became a community in itself, rife with romance, friendship, adventures, crime, famine, plague, systematic conflicts, but none of that mattered to the Bowwoman. Every new person was a pair of eyes glued to her back, judging her, combing her actions for excuses to put her down, to shove her to her place. It was a matter of time, she knew: she either found the fucking thing, or her entire life's work would be worth nothing soon.

And so, at the three month mark of her hunt, the Bowwoman snapped: seeing something green, roughly the size of a man, shuffling along the banks of the nearby river, she started a pursuit she would never end.

Day in, day out, she was out there, be it raining or be it sunny, be it cold or be it colder, running at top speeds with an expression that would put some of the most dreadful of her abominable quarries to shame, the thrumming of bowstrings a constant beat inside the valley. She stomped rocks and flowers, because what if it could change its shape? She punched the air and shot at the wind, because what if it could turn invisible? She surreptitiously contacted seers and necromancers among the crowd, because what if it was an actual ghost? she-

She started hoping she had gone mad, that decades trudging the worst places in the world after the worst monsters in the world or out of it had finally taken their tow.

But no, even that succor was denied her. the other hunters at the melting pot saw it too. Not only the footprints, but the creature itself, a figure at the corner of the eyes who would appear to five people in a circle at once and yet elude all of them, evade sword and spear and crossbow and 10mm semi-automatic, who would dance over traps as if they had never been placed, yet still killing sheep, always killing sheep now, every other day, finding the most absurd distraction and blindspots to take advantage of, sometimes in front of hundreds of people.

Some people ran in fear. Some people became indignant. Some people became obstinate at that stupid beast's audacity.

All of them grew their hopes she would catch it.

One day, overlooking the misty valley, she discovered she didn't know what to do anymore.

The thought came to her around three past midnight. Her spirits had been finally worn down and she hadn't slept since the last time she collapsed, a couple days ago. She was dirty, sore, and mentally completely check-out. She had lost weight, muscle, but gained more than enough hair to make for both. If she looked at herself in a mirror right now, would she recognize the Bowwoman anymore?

This was ridiculous. Enough was enough. She was going home.

She sighed, feeling the strength leave her body. How long ago had it been the last time a hunt had messed her up this bad? She had to have been a young teen. but even then she persevered, fought till her nails tore off her fingers, and survived. Was this really the first time she had given up? It felt...

Frankly, worse than death.

Hungry and exhausted, she couldn't move anymore, so she sat there above a mound of dirt, waiting to be found.

And found she was. Something gripped her shoulder, gentle yet promising untold strength if she struggled. She was quietly pushed to the ground, her arms spread wide and her legs stretched straight.

At first, she had to admit she was afraid. Then, through touch alone she identified who exactly was behind her, the gentle caress of a lover nicking its way down her spine as it cut her clothes and skin, and smiled fondly.

It was as she had always dreamed it would be.

More than an icon, the Bowwoman was an inspiration to millions, her fame and feats single-handedly reviving the monster hunting and bestiary making businesses, some say, and her name was the strength that kept humanity's back straight, some say. Needless to say, when the news of her demise, and the way she had died for that matter, broke out there was not one heart left unbroken. Cities were flooded with tears, governments panicked, doomsayers took the omen for what it was and predicted the fall of their kind.

Of course, humanity didn't die off. People grieved, people moved on, and with time, new Bowwomen came to the forefront, perhaps never quite as good as the first, but heroes nonetheless.

As for the Bowwoman's body, it was brought to her hometown for burial. The plan had been to turn her birth house as an entire memorial, but nobody knew quite right where it stood, so they just found a pretty hill with a good view of the forest to bury her coffin and drop a big statue on top. Some say that if you confess to your love beneath her bow, you will be guaranteed a happy marriage.

As for the camp, most ran away. With her gone, things became "too real" as official military reports explain. The shepherd, afraid for his life, tore down the fence keeping his sheep in, gave away his dog, and became a monk, dying of an unrelated illness eight years later.

As for the creature, some would say it was no longer a mere beast, nor seen as a monster, such term would only belittle its reputation. It was spoken like a harbinger of the end times on the best of days, an antagonist to the divine on the worst.

Yet, outside of a few sightings quickly proven false and attempts at copy-cat killings meant to draw attention to the nearby settlements, it was never truly spotted again, and to this day no animals around the shepherd's old house were ever devoured in such a gruesome manner anymore.

Moral: Never stand in the way of a cool monster, you can't handle that.