Chapter 8:
The remaining forty-nine bandits crashed toward him like a human avalanche.
Hexia inhaled slowly. Exhaled. His crimson eyes tracked every movement—every stride, every weapon raised, every face twisted with greed and bloodlust.
Then he moved.
The first bandit swung a rusty axe. Hexia ducked under it, his sword coming up in a rising slash that opened the man from groin to throat. Intestines spilled out, steaming in the cold air. The bandit looked down at his own guts unraveling before his legs gave out.
Two more came from the sides. Hexia spun, his blade tracing a horizontal arc at neck height. Both heads flew simultaneously, still wearing expressions of rage as their bodies crumpled.
A spear thrust at his back. He sidestepped without looking, grabbed the shaft, yanked the wielder forward, and drove his sword through the man's eye socket. The blade punched through skull and brain, emerging from the back of the head in a spray of gore. He kicked the corpse off his sword.
Four bandits tried to surround him. Hexia became a whirlwind. His sword never stopped moving—high slash taking one's arm off at the shoulder, low sweep severing another's leg at the knee, backhand strike crushing a third's windpipe, forward thrust impaling the fourth through the heart.
Blood painted the ground crimson.
A bandit with a mace charged. Hexia waited until the last moment, then stepped aside. The mace whistled past his ear. His sword found the gap between the man's ribs, sliding between bones to pierce lung and heart. The bandit coughed blood, eyes wide with shock. Hexia ripped the blade free.
The man collapsed, drowning in his own blood.
Three rushed him together, trying to overwhelm with numbers. Hexia didn't retreat. He advanced into them. His sword became a blur of steel death.
The first lost his hands, still gripping his weapon as they fell. The second took a thrust through the throat that severed his spine. The third's head rolled before he even registered the attack.
An archer loosed an arrow from twenty feet away. Hexia's hand shot out, caught the arrow mid-flight, and hurled it back. It punched through the archer's throat, the arrowhead emerging from the back of his neck. He fell backward, gurgling.
Two bandits attacked from above, leaping from overturned carts. Hexia's sword met them mid-air. One slash, perfect timing. Both bodies hit the ground in pieces—torsos separated from legs, blood pooling beneath the wreckage.
A massive brute with a battle-axe roared, bringing his weapon down in an overhead strike that could split a man in half. Hexia stepped forward into the attack, inside the axe's arc. His sword flashed. The brute's wrists separated from his arms. Hands still gripping the axe handle fell. Before the brute could scream, Hexia's blade opened his throat.
Blood fountained. The brute collapsed, clutching at his severed wrists with arms that ended in stumps.
The bandits were beginning to understand.
This wasn't a fight. This was an execution.
Five tried to run. Hexia's hand moved in a throwing motion. Five daggers flew—he'd pulled them from fallen bandits without conscious thought. Each found a spine, each severed a spinal cord. Five bodies dropped like puppets with cut strings.
A bandit thrust his sword at Hexia's chest. The blade never landed. Hexia's sword intercepted it, deflected it, and in the same motion came around in a return stroke that took the man's head off. The head spun through the air, still blinking, before landing ten feet away.
Three more charged screaming. War cries meant to bolster courage that had already fled. Hexia met them with silence. His sword sang three times. Three bodies fell in three pieces each—bisected at the waist, their torsos sliding off their legs in grotesque geometry.
Two bandits tried to attack simultaneously from opposite directions. Hexia jumped, spinning horizontally in mid-air. His sword traced a perfect circle. Both heads flew in opposite directions. He landed between their falling bodies.
The survivors—now fewer than twenty—were screaming. Not war cries. Terror.
"RETREAT! RETREAT!"
But Hexia had given them their chance. They'd made their choice.
He pursued.
His blade found the slowest runner first, taking both legs off at the knees. The man crashed forward, screaming, trying to crawl away on bloody stumps. Hexia didn't finish him. Not yet. Message.
The second runner lost his head mid-stride. It bounced across the ground like a dropped ball.
The third made it five more steps before Hexia's thrown dagger embedded in the base of his skull.
He pitched forward, dead before he hit the dirt.
Four bandits formed a desperate last stand, backs to a large oak tree. Weapons raised. Trembling.
"Please," one whimpered. "We'll leave. We'll never come back. Just let us—"
Hexia's sword removed his head before the sentence finished.
The other three broke, tried to scatter. Hexia caught the first with a horizontal slash that opened him from hip to opposite shoulder. Entrails unspooled. He fell in two sections.
The second got three steps before Hexia's blade took both legs. He collapsed screaming.
The third actually managed to run. Made it twenty feet. Thirty.
Hexia walked after him. Not running. Walking. Inevitable as death itself.
The bandit looked back, saw Hexia approaching with that empty expression, and his legs gave out. He fell, crawling backward, babbling.
"Monster! You're a monster! Devil! Demon!"
Hexia stood, his crimson eyes staring over him. "No. Just someone who warned you."
His sword came down.
Only the leader remained.
The scarred brute still sat on his makeshift throne, greatsword across his knees. His face had gone pale, eyes wide with comprehension of his mortality.
Forty-nine corpses. Forty-nine dead men scattered across his camp. Blood pooling. Heads rolled in the dirt. Bodies in pieces. The air thick with the copper stench of slaughter.
And one young man walking toward him, sword dripping, face expressionless. Empty. Like killing forty-nine people meant nothing more than morning exercises.
"What are you?" the leader breathed.
Hexia stopped ten feet away. "Someone tired of giving warnings."
The leader stood, hefting his greatsword with both hands. Six feet of steel. Heavy enough to split a man in half. "I won't die like them. Won't die crawling and begging."
"No," Hexia agreed. "You won't."
The leader charged, bringing his greatsword down in a devastating overhead strike. The kind of blow that could cleave through armor, through bone, through anything.
Hexia didn't dodge.
His sword came up in a perfect vertical block. Steel met steel with a sound like thunder. Sparks flew. The greatsword stopped dead.
The leader's eyes widened. Impossible. His strength, his weapon's weight, the momentum of his charge—all stopped by this boy's single blade.
Hexia's other hand shot out, grabbed the greatsword's blade, and yanked. The leader stumbled forward, off-balance. Hexia's sword flashed.
The leader's hands fell, still gripping his weapon's handle.
He stared at his stumps, blood jetting from severed wrists. Opened his mouth to scream.
Hexia's blade moved in a horizontal arc.
The leader's head separated from his shoulders. Clean. Perfect. The body stood for three heartbeats before collapsing.
The head rolled across the blood-soaked ground, coming to rest against one of the crates. Eyes still wide. Mouth still open in an unfinished scream.
Fifty bandits. Three dire wolves. Twelve goblins.
All dead in under five minutes.
Hexia cleaned his blade on the leader's cloak. Sheathed it. Looked at the carnage surrounding him—the bodies, the blood, the severed heads scattered like grotesque decorations.
Felt nothing.
He walked back toward Korn Village, leaving the road painted red behind him.
Three merchants had watched from hiding. They'd been captured by the bandits two days prior, their goods stolen, waiting for ransom that would never come.
They'd witnessed everything.
That night, they reached the town of Briarkeep. In the tavern called The Rusty Blade, they told their story. About the young man with black hair and crimson eyes. About fifty bandits dead in minutes. About heads rolling across the blood-soaked ground.
"He didn't even look angry," the first merchant said, his hands still shaking around his ale. "No rage. No battle fury. Just... empty. Like he was performing a chore."
"The way he took heads," the second merchant whispered. "Clean strikes. Perfect technique. They just... rolled. One after another. Like a guillotine made flesh."
"Did he say his name?" someone asked.
"No name. But he's from Korn Village. The protector there. Guards the roads."
A veteran adventurer spoke up from the corner. "I know who you mean. I've heard whispers. They're calling him the Swordsman of Rolling Heads. Some call that perfect horizontal strike of his the Guillotine. Say he can take a head so clean it keeps blinking for a few seconds after."
The third merchant nodded frantically. "I saw it! The leader's head rolled, and the eyes were still moving! Still aware!"
The tavern erupted in speculation.
"Is he guild-rank?"
"Has to be A-rank minimum. Maybe S-rank."
"Why isn't he registered?"
"Who cares? If he's killing bandits and monsters, that's guild work done for free."
The story spread from Briarkeep to other towns. Other villages. Each retelling adding details, embellishing, but the core remained true: a young swordsman with crimson eyes who killed without mercy, whose signature technique took heads so cleanly they rolled like severed fruit.
The Swordsman of Rolling Heads.
The Guillotine.
A legend born in blood and severed necks.
Hexia knew none of this.
He returned to Korn Village as the sun set, his clothes stained with blood that wasn't his. The villagers who'd gathered at the gate stared in a mixture of awe and fear.
"All of them?" one finally asked.
"Yes," Hexia confirmed. "The road is clear."
He walked past them toward his house. His father stood in the doorway, his mother beside him. Their faces showed relief mixed with something else. Something that looked like grief.
"Son," Jerkin said quietly. "You're hurt."
"I'm fine."
"Not your body. Your... " He struggled for words.
"Your soul."
Hexia stopped at the doorway. Looked at his father.
"I don't think I have one anymore."
He went inside, cleaned himself, changed clothes. Came down for dinner. They ate in silence.
Marie watched her son push food around his plate, his movements precise and empty.
"Hexia, sweetheart. Talk to us. Please."
"About what?"
"About what you're feeling. About—"
"I'm not feeling anything, Mom. That's the thing. I killed fifty people today. Fifty. And I feel exactly the same as I did this morning. Empty. Hollow." He looked at his hands. "These hands took fifty lives, and they're steady. No shaking. No guilt. Nothing."
He stood. "I'm tired. Goodnight."
After he left, Marie turned to Jerkin, tears in her eyes. "We're losing him."
"I know."
"What do we do?"
Jerkin looked at the stairs his son had climbed.
"Hope. Hope that somewhere in that emptiness, there's still a piece of our boy. And pray someone finds it before it's too late."
In the following weeks, the legend grew.
More merchants passed through, telling tales of cleared roads. Of bandit camps found empty, filled with headless corpses. Of a single set of footprints leading away from massacres.
Adventurers began asking about him at guild halls.
"This Swordsman of Rolling Heads—is he registered? What's his rank?"
"No registration. No rank. Just a villager protecting his home."
"A villager who kills like an S-rank assassin?"
The Adventurer's Guild in Briarkeep began documenting the incidents. Estimated body count. Witness testimonies. A pattern emerged: brutal efficiency, perfect technique, zero survivors among those who refused warnings.
And always, the heads. Severed so cleanly with that horizontal strike they called the Guillotine. Rolling across blood-soaked ground like a macabre signature.
Bandit groups learned to avoid the roads near Korn Village. Those who didn't learn provided object lessons—their heads decorating the roadside as warnings.
Some called him a hero. The protector who kept the innocent safe.
Others whispered he was something darker. An angel with a demon's heart. Beautiful face hiding something hollow and terrible.
Both were right.
One month after the fifty-bandit massacre, Hexia sat in his yard under the stars. Training had become his existence. Wake. Train. Eat. Train. Help villagers when needed—usually by killing bandits and monsters. Train more. Sleep. Repeat.
Living, but not alive.
He looked at his hands in the moonlight. Strong hands. Skilled hands. Hands that could end life with surgical precision.
"Is this all I am now?" he whispered. "A weapon? A tool for killing?"
The mark of the protection spell—invisible but always present—pulsed faintly on his wrist.
Reminding him he couldn't die. Couldn't escape. Couldn't choose the peace of oblivion.
Forced to exist. Forced to continue. Trapped in a life that felt more like death than his actual death had.
"At least when I jumped, I chose it," he said to the empty night. "Now I can't even choose to stop."
The wind offered no comfort. The stars no answers. Just silence and the weight of immortality he never wanted.
In the distance, a wolf howled. Natural. Alive. Free in ways Hexia would never be again.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember what feeling something—anything—was like.
The memory wouldn't come.
Two towns over, in a merchant's roadhouse, a silver-haired adventurer listened to tales of the Swordsman of Rolling Heads. Her blue eyes widened with each detail. The precision. The power. The emptiness witnesses described.
Her party member noticed her interest. "Sirenia? What's wrong?"
"This man they're describing. The one from Korn Village. We need to go there."
"Why? He sounds dangerous."
Sirenia stood, gathering her things. "Because someone that skilled, that powerful, who protects a village instead of joining a guild? Who kills without feeling?" She looked at her party member.
"That's not a hero. That's someone dying inside and using violence to prove they're still capable of something. Anything."
"And you want to meet him?"
"I want to understand him." She paused. "No. I want to help him. Before there's nothing left to save."
Her party exchanged glances. When Sirenia got that look in her eyes—that determined, stubborn, absolutely-not-backing-down look—there was no point arguing.
"Fine," her party member sighed. "We head to Korn Village tomorrow. But if this Swordsman tries to take our heads—"
"He won't. Not unless we threaten his village." Sirenia smiled slightly. "Besides. Something tells me we're meant to meet him. Call it instinct."
She didn't know why she felt such certainty. Didn't understand the pull toward this legend of rolling heads and empty eyes.
But she would. Soon.
The universe had plans neither of them could see yet. Threads pulling them together across distance and fate.
The empty swordsman and the woman who would make him feel again.
Their collision course was set.
THE REQUIEM OF THE SIXTH SECOND
Fifty souls came seeking gold,
Fifty stories left untold.
They charged into a silver gale,
To find a demon behind the veil.
But iron yields to surgical grace,
When death assumes a human face.
The air is thick with copper rain,
A field of red, a world of pain.
No fury burned within his eye,
No battle shout, no war-torn cry.
Just the horizontal truth of steel,
And the grinding of a hollow wheel.
One line across the throat of fate,
To close the heavy, iron gate.
The head descends, the body stands,
A harvest reaped by steady hands.
Six seconds left for them to see,
The math of their mortality.
He walks away through mist and bone,
A king upon a blood-stained throne.
But in the silence of his breast,
The monster seeks a final rest.
The Saint is near, the light is drawn,
To find the ghost before the dawn.
The Guillotine has claimed its due...
Now, the Saint comes seeking you.
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They came for gold. They're left in pieces.
The road to Korn Village was no longer a path; it was a graveyard of fifty mistakes.
And at the end of the road, the rolling heads finally stopped moving.
The Harvest is complete.
To be continued...