Horizon of Darkness

Nycta has been a huntress her entire life. 
It seems she learned to hold a knife before she learned to walk and talk. She learned the patter of rats, the rustle of snake scales, and the heavy tread of cave bears before the words "Mom" and "Dad". The red scent of fresh blood was closer and dearer to her than the smell of mother's milk.
Her people had lived underground for so long that even the most ancient elders remembered nothing of the world beyond the endless labyrinths of caves. But it was not always so — the old shamaness who taught the children prayers, animal habits, language, and counting, said that once the word "red" denoted not a smell, and the word "bright" characterized not positive qualities, but something perceived by the eyes. Nycta knew that for her distant ancestors this was a very important organ, but in the darkness of the caves hearing, smell, and touch proved inexpressibly more useful, and functioning eyes became a rare quirk that brought their owners more trouble than benefit.
However, Nycta had little time to philosophize about the quirks of evolution. Her main task, after all, was procuring food for the entire village. If she considered hunting rats an easy daily warm-up, then for a battle with a cave bear she had to gather a company of friends, equally agile and skilled hunters, and to hedge her bets — pray to the Lord of the Dungeon to look favorably upon them. By the age of sixteen, Nycta had clashed with these monsters more than once, and one day the great honor of delivering the fatal blow to the beast belonged to her.
Nycta does not remember how she left the caves. It seems she chased after particularly attractive prey, and suddenly... The wind became too strong, the ground too uneven and soft, and the cozy vaults disappeared somewhere, and no matter how hard Nycta tried, she could not detect anything. But the most terrifying thing was the feeling of something warm on her skin — like from a campfire, but much stronger, bigger, and from all sides.
Later, Nycta learned that this warm thing is called the sun and hangs somewhere high and far in the sky, which is higher than the highest cave vaults. On that terrible day, after futile attempts to find the way home (how could she get lost? She was one of the best trackers in the village!), she finally found shelter among strange living stalagmites overgrown with something rustling and juicy.
There was surprisingly plenty of fuel for a campfire here.
And the rats were excellent. Big, tasty. Somehow with long legs and ears.
Later she learned that this is called a "Rabbit". It became one of her first words in a new language in her new home.
The inhabitants of that forest village turned out to be quite nice. They allowed Nycta to stay, gave her a roof over her head — not at all the familiar vaults of the caves, her new dwelling was made of those strange stalagmites — "trees" — but better than the terrifying emptiness of the "sky". At first they pitied her, considered her a poor sick invalid, almost assigned her a guide... Until Nycta demonstrated that catching rabbits was just as easy for her as catching rats.
After a couple of years, she became one of her own in the upper world, learned to distinguish day from night, got used to new sounds, smells, textures, and objects, learned how wood, brick, and metal reflect sound. Yes, she looked as if she were very ill with something. Yes, she could not stay under the open sky for long and under any pretext tried to run indoors. Yes, she dressed tastelessly. Yes, she could not read and had to ask someone to read aloud to her; she somehow learned to trace her name purely on muscle memory. But she was still one of the best huntresses in the village; the meat and hides of the animals she killed were in every home. Nycta gained a friend — Sagali, a young girl from a large and close-knit family. The friends spent a lot of time together; Sagali read interesting stories aloud to Nycta or picked out beautiful fabrics for clothes, while she brought her friend the fattest hares and fluffiest foxes.
...Returning from a successful hunt, Nycta heard from afar the crackling of a giant bonfire from the village, unfamiliar voices, and screams. Heat wafted onto her thin skin. The smell of smoke touched her nostrils — and the red scent of human blood. Freezing, hiding among the bushes, Nycta listened in horror to the screams of her fellow villagers and the coarse, unfamiliar laughter that sounded so wrong against the backdrop of smoke and blood.
The decision did not take long to ripen. The last straw was Sagali's shriek, muffled by the crackle of tearing fabric.
Those bastards who attacked her home were no different from wild beasts.
Hunters kill wild beasts.
And Nycta had been a huntress her entire life.
She caught the bandits by surprise. She did not see them, but from the movements of the air and the reflection of sounds she perfectly understood from which side danger threatened. Not a single attacker escaped death at her hands, and Nycta herself did not have a scratch.
Her parents and friends could have been proud of her. This is much harder than taking down a cave bear.
The surviving handful of villagers, of course, were also proud of her, but staying in the ruined village was stupid and dangerous — no one knew if the bandits had friends, and no one wanted to find out. It was decided to reach the nearest large city and start a new life there.
Nycta's new life began with a huge bounty on the heads of the bandits she had killed.
After honestly dividing the fee among all her tribesmen, Nycta pondered. In a big city, you are unlikely to earn much by hunting animals.
But hunting people...
After all, once dead, they cannot burn villages and kill innocents.
She had to train more often with daggers and swap her spear for a rapier. Get used to city life with its noise and bustle. Adapt to working on contracts — where other mercenaries had enough of a description of appearance, Nycta had to conduct a real investigation, deduce the voice, the smell, the peculiarities of gait, because height and weight are too little for identification, and hardly any wanted thug would let you touch his face, even if asked very politely. Periodically, people tried to cheat Nycta, taking advantage of her blindness, but she soon learned to flawlessly stop such tricks by the ring of coins and the weight of the purse, and the slightest changes in the timbre of the voice and the heartbeat of her interlocutor screamed lies at her better than a direct confession. She earned more than she could spend, and gave most of her earnings to charity, but the remainder was quite enough for bread and butter, and even caviar on holidays. Sometimes she traveled to visit Sagali — she had settled in the city, married successfully, her new family traded in dresses, and her eldest son often played with the spear that Nycta had left to her friend as a keepsake. He will grow up to be a good hunter...
Nycta is now approaching thirty, and she is considered one of the best bounty hunters in the region. Clients who come to her very rarely expect to see a tiny, blind girl of sickly appearance. Some never decide to to use her services. Others she refuses herself — when she feels that a contract on the client himself would interest her more than one on the victim. But those who took the risk and believed that a harmless invalid could actually do the job were satisfied. The fact is that many victims also did not consider Nycta to be any kind of threat. And often that was their last mistake.
After all, Nycta had been a huntress her entire life.
And you cannot tell the best hunter apart from the prey until it is too late.