"I can handle it, Dad," Casey said a second time. "I don't need my hand held, alright?" She tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice, but it crept in regardless.
"I just don't want you to get in over your head. At least let me send Grant to help," her father replied over the phone.
"No, I don't need any help. I can do this on my own. I'll call you after I finish."
With that, Casey hung up the call and let out an exasperated sigh. She knew her father meant well, but she was eighteen now; she could handle a hunt on her own. This one wasn't even going to be dangerous. There had been some monster sightings in a town a few miles away, so Casey was here to check out a smaller abandoned mining town nearby to make sure this wasn't where the monsters were coming from.
It seemed unlikely, which is why she had even been given the job to begin with. Every attack had been on the north side of Portset, and the old mining town was far to the south; there was little chance any monster was going through that much effort to remain undetected. Still, her dad was overprotective as ever. the most annoying part of all of it was that he had never treated her older brother, Marcus, like this.
Casey had been joining the other hunters for years on jobs, ever since she was twelve, but now that she was eighteen, she wanted to start doing them on her own. She was confident she could handle anything that was thrown at her, but her father wasn't. If anything did happen, this would be her chance to prove him wrong and show all the hunters she could handle herself.
She parked the pickup and jumped out of it, grabbing her flashlight and pistol. It was dark out, and there was no light aside from the moon and the stars in the sky. The town looked even worse than she had expected. Once the mine had closed down, everyone had started to leave, and now every building was in disrepair. It did look like the sort of place that monsters would hide out.
It was utterly silent as she made her way down the main street, shining her flashlight through the broken windows of the storefronts. Casey would be lying if she said she wasn't scared at all. She would never admit it, though, certainly not to her father. Hunts were dangerous, and someone senior had always been with her.
The blonde teenager crept further into the town, keeping an ear out for any unusual sounds, but nothing stood out to her. She had been creeping herself out for nothing. There was no chance the monster had been coming from down here anyway; it was just an old empty town. She relaxed her stance as she went, her gun hanging down by her side.