I am the star-shot panther.
I was hunting the other night. The prey was a young woman of the nearby village, the kind of which I had taken many. The door to the house was unbarred and I went in and attacked her, but it was not a clean kill (as happens to any huntress from time to time), and she made enough noise that more humans showed up and made much more noise and brandished several weapons. Convinced that my meal for the night would no longer be easy as I liked, I left.
I did not learn until later that one if the other humans who came to help was a huntswoman of some actual skill, unlike most of the novices who have tried themselves against me. She had come from far away to slay me, as she had slain several maneaters before. A reputation is a poor thing to have with one's prey.
That night she and I both listened to the death-noises of the woman they had fought me off of. She lasted until morning. It upset me that I did not get to eat her, even though I had killed her, but that is sometimes the way of things.
I instead ate a bird that day, and slept.
The next night the forest was filled by the bleating of goats. Two of them kept calling out uselessly to each other. I approached, cautiously, to find each was tied to a tree on one edge of a clearing. I did not understand why they were making such noise when they could not even run. I took one and carried it off and left the bones and the horns and the hooves behind. I heard rustling in a tree on the other side of the clearing.
I slept in cover through the day.
The next night, I found where the huntswoman had hidden. She was up a tree, with a sight line to where the remaining goat had once again been tied up. That thing still bleated incessantly, even without a companion. I wondered why.
The human had surrounded the bole of her tree with dense boughs of compacted thorny brush. I could not climb it. I tried to pull down the palisade of hooked thorns. I did this from the opposite side of the branch the human was sitting in, as her perch had looked very precarious and I doubted she could turn easily. It was to no avail, the brush was attached too securely. I heard her rustle around on that branch though. I hope I scared her.
I decided to settle for the other goat tonight. There was more rustling in the tree as I left it. As I pounced for the goat there was a tremendous noise, almost like the crashing of a tree to the ground but without the preceding breaking of branches. The noise was accompanied by a flash of light and a sting of shattered ice in my flank. In shock I flipped around from the goat. I fled. The goat bleated after me, gloating despite its own wounds.
After a while I sat under some brush and licked my wound. Just scrapes, I had taken worse in duels.
After some time of that, I heard the distinctive cacophony of human beaters making their way through the forest. Light from their handheld fires made its way through the brush.
I wanted to ignore them, but they came towards my resting spot, their lights were very bright, they were very angry, and I was upset myself at having been wounded. I sprang up over a bank and let loose a scream which I knew humans found marrow-curdling. All of the torch-bearers fled, and dropped their flames, but the huntress who was at the front of their column held her ground. I, shadow and death in aspect, renowned and reviled in my killing, charged her.
I saw a star unlike any I had ever seen in the sky. It ate my eyes. It split into two. Scintillating echoes ran from nose to claw within me. Tides of sound flooded and ebbed. I knew there was no other creature in this forest to match my wealth of scathing rancor, though the huntswoman believed otherwise. My jaw shivered. A curved wall existed, cutting all things.
I awoke in an ocean of rotten blood.