“Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.”- Albert Einstein
It’s funny how that can be true, when you were a child, and you were alone for a while, you would feel like you weren’t needed. Especially when your friends are all gone, all eaten and ripped into shreds by manticores and forest demons, it’s very painful, but once you get used to it, you will feel like it’s actually easier to be without friends, since you wouldn’t need to protect that many people anymore. I still have one person left to protect though, my big brother, Sean.  He wants to protect me, but I don’t want to even think about what life was going to be like, without him, if he gets killed because of me. So, I learned how to be better at fighting with swords and other kinds of weapons.
“Hey, Akane! Wake up, or I’m going to leave without you!” Sean yelled at me, trying to wake me up. I got up, packed up the few things we needed then chased after him, who was already walking 5 feet ahead of me. I caught up to him, handed him half of my bread and walked alongside him. Good thing we were walking on the road instead of the forest, or we would have been surrounded by those forest demons already.
There are three types of monsters: the Forest Demons, the Manticores, and the Shadow Creatures. The Forest demons were the ones that hid in the forest and waited for people to go into the forest and then kill you. Ran fast but weren’t really smart; they fell for really easy tricks, but got out of them really fast. Manticores had a face of a man, body of a lion, with a scorpion tail, and great leather wings, which made it really dangerous. Lastly, the Shadow Creatures, they weren’t one of those evil ones, in fact, they were the helpful ones, I had a Shadow Creature that is wolf too, and he was named Mist. Sean on the other hand had a lion, named Flame.
We walked toward the nearby fallen screen of Kue. I heard that there were a lot of monsters there, and we had decided to “visit” and have some fun killing off a few of the monsters. We soon arrived and as soon as we arrived, we saw that everywhere was chaos, shadow creatures running and flying everywhere, manticores flying around, we even saw a few brave forest demons running around breaking things. Sean and I nodded at each other and ran toward a manticore that was around 2 feet away from us. It looked down and saw us running toward it, then flapped its great wings and flew toward us. Sean distracted the manticore on his side, while I jumped into the air, trying to find its weakness, usually, its right wing. Many myths said that they were afraid of their reflection, but trust me, I’ve seen people get killed believing that, so you wouldn’t want to follow their ways and get killed. My friend Angelica, died like that.
I jumped up and ran up the manticore’s foot using my twin swords to keep my balance, digging into the manticore’s flesh as I hurriedly hiked up. Sean ran around the manticore’s feet as I landed right on the top of the manticore, just my luck, because as soon as it felt me on its back, it flapped its wings, trying to get me off. I took that chance to dig one sword into its shoulder and use my other sword to try and cut the right wing. Apparently, Sean saw that I needed a little help so he shot a bullet and made a hole enough for me to easily cut the wing off. As soon as I reached the middle bone of the wing, it fell and disintegrated.
I walked up to Sean and said to him, “Ready to have some more fun?”
He replied, “More ready than you.”
I punched his shoulder and he clutched his shoulder, saying, “I swear, you hit harder than William, and he hits really hard.”

We ran toward a few more and took them down trying to set a new record. After reaching 20, we stopped and headed into the forests to take down a few forest demons. Usually, you can kill the forest demons by cutting off their root-like legs. Forest demons were actually really simple to get rid of.  As soon as we went in the forest around 10 feet, we heard the sounds of a group of forest demons smiling demonically. Sean looked at me, and then tilted his head toward the left, indicating that he was going to kill the ones on the left while I kill the ones on the right. I smiled and my face darkened. I grinned at the demons and charged towards them, soon all you could hear were the sounds of swords cutting the feet of the demons and the occasional thump as a forest demon tilted forward as their feet got cut off. I stood in the middle of the circle of fallen demons as Sean stood next to me. I’m guessing that we took down around 30 forest demons today.

We called it a day, and went to the nearby hotel and reserved a room. I got to our room and collapsed on the bed, it always felt good when you killed a few monsters and lay on a bed that was really comfy. I felt someone’s eyes on me and when I looked toward Sean, it seemed like he had fallen asleep already, hm, that’s weird. I took out a little of the manticore remains I had kept in a container and put them in front of Mist and Flame. They immediately came towards me and ate it all. I pat them all, made food for Sean and fell asleep with Mist and Flame with me.

The next morning, I woke up and found a note on the desk in the hotel room. It said,
To Akane and Sean,
We would like you to meet us in front of the café that is next to your hotel at 2pm.
~ GKIM (Group of Killing and Investigating Monsters)

Sean and I both agreed to meet them, we heard about what they did, and it seemed pretty cool to me that they made a camp where they fought the monsters together. At 2pm, we went out of the hotel, and went to the café to meet with them. We sat down at an empty table, waiting for them to come. Soon after 5 minutes of waiting, they arrived. They talked about what they did and they asked us to join them. We agreed and promised to meet in front of the hotel by 4pm. With one hour to pack up, we hurried up trying to pack up and headed out. They took us to their camp and taught us how to use their gear and other types of things.

Though, after a month, nobody could have guessed what could have happened.