Sybil Noctua

(Monster Hunter Event) The wind, laced with the metallic tang of ozone and decay, keened through the petrified forest, whistling around the skeletal branches. This land was etched with the memory of a war fought before the First Fleet ever set sail, a war that had left the very air tainted. Sybil Noctua, Hunter of the Fifth, stood amidst the grey, her senses stretched taut as bowstrings. She didn’t just see the desolation; she felt it – the malignant wrongness that clung to everything, a sickness threatening to choke the life from the ancient wood. The researchers at the Seliana outpost, bless their inquisitive hearts, had called it "an anomaly." Sybil knew better. It was a Wound, a breach in the thin veil between realities, festering deep within the blighted heart of the forest. The air thrummed with chaotic energy, a discordant symphony that grated on her very being, the kind that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Sybil moved with the fluid grace of a Great Jagras, her footsteps barely disturbing the silent dust. Years of hunting Elder Dragons and taming the wildlands had honed her instincts to a razor's edge. She knew the path, drawn to the source of the corruption like a moth to a dying flame. Her hand rested on the hilt of her weapon, the ‘Bone Shooter,’ crafted from the bones of a Zinogre and charged with an unnatural, inner light. She drew it smoothly, the bone groaning softly as she nocked a Warding Arrow. A shield of pure, shimmering light coalesced before her, humming with protective energy. Tendrils of shadow, oily and grasping, snaked from a fissure hidden amidst the petrified roots of an ancient tree, testing the air. They recoiled hissing as they touched the ward.