As Glyph and Cipher looked upon the husk of the town, they began to see the state in which it was left for what it was: A massacre and a den of vile atrocity. It was not the most pleasant of thoughts, that was for certain, but it was one that Glyph has wrestled with many times over her years as a hunter and experience had both prepared her for and desensitised her towards the inevitable corpses of children that she would come across. Some of the new blood she’d spotted travelling towards the town would perhaps not be so experienced and wise. It had been a shock to her, the first time she’d seen a town ravaged by a horde, and she remembered the charred air and the scent of a metallic tang in the air to this day. It gave her no comfort to think that it had happened to another small town.

The first step was to stake out the town. She recognised a couple of key buildings by shape alone, and though she did not have a map, she could work out the most likely paths between them from her vantage point a good distance away from the town. She would likely have her scent picked up by the smaller ravagers prowling the outskirts of the town, but they were easy to kill. They moved predictably towards their prey unless they were older and wiser, and those that came with the hordes tended to be new blood. Fitting, she thought, that new blood from both sides met at this soon-to-be hellhole.  It took a matter of twenty seconds of observation for a ravager to slink its way towards Glyph and Cipher, and though the woman atop the horse was intently gazing at the town for information, her right hand withdrew her crossbow and a single bolt of pure energy was released just as the demon began its leap, piercing it squarely through the head and killing it instantly. Cipher whinnied in response to the kill, and with her other hand Glyph gently stroked his mane. They knew there would be plenty more demons to kill soon enough.

The tower where the crystal was kept was of standard design. It was usually the first place that demons congregated at and was one of the few certainties within a small town like this one had been. Its location was slightly off-centre, and the buildings seemed to part at the correct angle to take advantage of this slight anomaly – it kept her view from the rest of the demons, at least, though the more primal newbloods tended to act based on scent over any of their other senses. She did not get a good look, but an ominous shadow of greater size than the other demons passed through her limited scope of vision, and she heard the slight graze of metal dragging across the ground. It was unlikely to be a hunter – few were simple enough to use melee weapons, and those that did kept them sheathed – and the size was roughly equivalent to that of one of the larger demons. A Juggernaut? A  Punisher? Too small to be one of the Devastators. She would typically err on the side of caution and assume a Punisher, but something told her that a Punisher appearing this quickly and this closely to a ghost town was unlikely. They were not unintelligent creatures, and enough hunters could bring them down. They would fight on their own terrain if possible.

Though Glyph made no more direct movements, she kept herself ready. If newbloods were coming, better that they made stupid mistakes first. Culling demons and weak hunters was just a part of the hunt, after all.