The bullet punctured into the face, causing the flesh of it to bleed. For a moment, the woman felt as if everything was frozen as her breath exhaled from her lips like how smoke exited the barrel of her gun. The faces on the centipede began to grimace and wail as the blood continued to flow from that one bullet. “You ruined one of my pretty faces! How could you?”
The wailing was louder than the gunshot, keeping the faceless beings close as they continued beg for their faces back. The centipede then began to crawl rapidly towards the girl. The years of combat experience slipped out of her mind. The years of seeing the horrors of violence slipped her mind. The years of her life slipped her mind. All of it slipped when the titanic centipede began to slither towards her. It made her freeze.
This was what happens when mankind comes face to face with the world of monsters and gods. It follows the cruel laws of food chains, where humanity finds itself at the bottom of it all. Man is prey in this world of gods and monsters. They are the victims of nature. They are the victims of tragedy. They are the victims of everything which weighs them down like a planet placed on the back of man.
The woman realized this as she found herself helpless, frozen, and afraid as the centipede hungered for her face. Her gun, something she once thought was invincible, was just a mere toy in the face of this being. She closed her eyes like a child, hoping that the monster would disappear if she imagined hard enough. The soldier had been diminished to a little girl in the face of this titan.
Then she opened her eyes. Within less than a blink, she watched a new figure flash in front of her. In that one moment, dozens of faceless fell dead as countless faces bled with different scratches. Standing between the woman and the centipede was a tall and muscular warrior who reeked from the smell of blood. His armor, like his weapon, was heavy and strong. There was only one name she could recognize him from. “The Demon Warrior.”
The centipede cried even harder only for the Demon Warrior to slash into the tough armor. The armor cracked like a rock crushing a sea shell. Under it was dark weak flesh. Within less than a moment, the Demon Warrior let down a devastating strike, slicing the hunk of meat in two and dismembering the centipede. “Pain! There is pain!” the monster screeched.
The woman watched in awe as the centipede exuded genuine fear in the face of the Demon Warrior. It was a strange sense and feeling, like watching hope for the first time in a long time. This was a man who could stand against the monsters and beasts worthy of gods. This was the envoy of humanity.
“Hey are you okay?” a strange fox girl asked. She had her nine tails fluffing about as she comforted the soldier. “You don’t look hurt, is everything alright?” The woman looked at the fox girl with a sense of confusion. This was yet another mythical being, a huli jing. Was she dreaming? “Yeah… I’m fine…” she huffed.
The Demon Warrior continued to slash and hack away at both the faceless and the centipede as faces peeled off of the being. “Please don’t! Please don’t take my faces!” But the warrior continued to tear away at the faces, his face smiling as if he, himself, were a demon. “Yeah, that’s Xiaojun alright,” the fox girl said. “Oh, by the way, I’m Hua! What’s your name?”
The soldier was taken aback by the stranger’s friendliness. “I-I’m Rina,” she responded. Her eyes were focused and mesmerized at the art that was Xiaojun’s fighting. He fought like how a wild animal would fight against a gang of hunters. It was a small and inconceivable being winning against titanic and powerful forces.
“Stop! Stop this!” the last face of the centipede begged. Xiaojun said nothing. He ripped off that face and, just like the faceless, the centipede went utterly silent. “Welp,” Hua said, “guess now’s the time when he actually ends the fight.” They watched as Xiaojun raised his guandao and let loose his strength with one downward slash. That one slash caused a cut which traveled throughout the body like a chain reaction. All that was left of this body of the centipede was sliced in half.
Xiaojun was covered in blood as he hobbled himself to Hua. Some of the blood was his, but most of it belonged to the monster. “Blood time?” Hua asked. She handed him a knife. Taking it, he took a gentle cut into her arm and sucked from hit. Rina watched as the wounds healed on their own with each sip of blood. In the end, Xiaojun was healed and Hua had a new bandage.
“Xiaojun, this is Rina,” Hua greeted. “I think she stumbled here and would’ve gotten her face taken if it weren’t for you.” Immediately, Rina went to her knees and bowed. “Thank you! You saved my life!” Xiaojun looked down as he had little to no emotion on his face. He grabbed her bag and sifted a paper from it. “The Demon Warrior,” it read, “500,000 pieces of silver.”
Hua placed her hand over her mouth as she saw it. “Good heavens!” she cried, “they’re calling you the Demon Warrior?” Xiaojun sighed as he had to explain the real significance of the paper. “You’re here to try and collect the bounty on my head?” Rina kept her head low as she closed her eyes. Surely this would be the moment that she would die. But when she looked up, she didn’t see the eyes of death. Instead, she saw a hand presented to her. “You should get out of here. With the world as it is, bounty hunting isn’t a safe profession, even if you have a gun.”
Xiaojun turned to leave, but Rina reached at him. “Wait!” she cried, “how did you get this strong?” He stopped and said one quick answer. “Chance.” With that, he began to make his leave. “Please let me join you!” Rina begged. “I’ll do anything! I’ll carry your things! I’ll scavenge food! I’ll do whatever keeps me in your party!”
The warrior paused in his footsteps as Hua whispered into his ear. “Come on, she looks good for it. I know you might judge her because she froze earlier, but everyone freezes when they see a giant face-eating centipede monster,” she said. “Won’t you at least give her a chance?”
Xiaojun said nothing as a specific memory hit his mind. The memory of being a plain bully in Dajing. In another world, he’d surely be still robbing people of their goods and unable to see his potential. But it took one person to stop that dreadful world from coming to fruition. “It takes a bad day to turn a king into a peasant,” Jin had said, “but it takes one good man to turn a peasant into a king.”
Xiaojun turned himself around and faced the soldier in front of him. He couldn’t help but see his past self in the woman, in how he had the chance to either upgrade or degrade the potential future for her. “This must’ve been how Jin felt,” he thought to himself. With a light motion, he extended her hand. “Make sure you can reload fast with that gun of yours,” he said.
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“Thank you! I—” But he was already returning to his journey, as if Rina wasn’t in the middle of speaking. “Yeah,” Hua sighed, “he does that a lot.” The sun began to rise in the distance as Rina kept her gun slung on her back. It was now a new day, and a new life for her. One where she wouldn’t be fighting for a hunk of silver, but one where she would find something more.
“So,” Hua chirped to Rina, “you ever see a huli jing before?” The soldier shook her head. “Not until now. I did hear tales about them as a child, primarily how they would imitate a caring mother before transforming into a fox and eating children alive.” Hua nervously laughed as she rubbed on her neck. “Well, it’s partially true… but I swear I’ve gone human-free! Just make sure you don’t tempt me by resting your neck on my shoulder.”
Hua began to giggle as Rina adjusted her shirt to cover any exposed flesh. “Got it…” she said. Hua then looked at Rina’s gun, cooing like a child. “Oh, that looks cool! It has so many dragons! Looks shiny too!” She then looked at the end of the barrel where she found the bayonet. “Woah, did you make that yourself?”
Rina smiled a little as she looked at her work. Usually people saw it right before she skewered them with it. “I made it when I was growing up. This weapon is actually my father’s gun that he bought when he traded with the people of Vesterland.” Hua cooed at this vial of information. “Wow, that’s a far away place! They have weapons like that everywhere?”
Xiaojun was the one to answer this. “They do.” Memories played in his mind as the group continued to move. “Cannons. Guns. All sorts of weapons that the Jiaguonese have yet to fully embrace. I’m sure the emperor is still convinced that all is well in the world, even as monsters and beasts tear through his kingdom. But that is fine. I shall be the one who will worry about them instead.”
Both Rina and Hua were taken by surprise by his sudden response. “Have you been to Vesterland?” Rina asked. Xiaojun nodded. “Well,” Rina added, “I wanted to go ever since I was a child. I ended up visiting the battlefields instead.” Xiaojun had a strange sense of empathy when he heard this. “Who did you fight for?”
“All sorts of different lords and generals,” she responded. “As you know, Jiaguo has fractured as the emperor’s become nothing but a figurehead in a palace. Different regions and different lords have created their own usurpations and their own realms. Though they aren’t foolish enough to challenge his majesty, they are more than comfortable to fight each other instead.”
Xiaojun huffed in a light laughter when he heard this. It sounded a lot like the War of Sin where a once peaceful kingdom devolved into senseless factionalism and fighting. It seems that history repeats itself as long as humanity repeats itself. “As long as man has war, man will have sin.” Then they stumbled upon something that only solidified his point: an abandoned war camp.
“What happened here?” Hua wondered. Tents were empty and torn about as if the army ran away as fast as they could. Not far in the distance, Xiaojun could discern the city of Guancheng. “This was a siege camp. You can tell because the fortifications and siege equipment is still here.” Put in a line were trebuchets, catapults, and a handful of cannons.
“Ew…” Hua gagged. “The city smells like demons.” Rina furrowed her eyes in confusion. “But we’re far away. How could you smell it from here?” Xiaojun gave a simple answer. “The city has become cursed. Just like that forest. Just like Lord Luo, and just like the Fog of the Depths.” He held his weapon as he scoffed. “It seems that wherever I go, evil seems to follow me.”
Rina whispered into Hua’s ear. “What happened with Lord Luo?” she asked. “Oh,” Hua answered, “the lord got possessed by a demon who would impregnate women to create demon children, so Xiaojun came over and killed him.” She said it in such a casual way, that Rina could tell that this horrific lifestyle was now normalized.
“Xiaojun!” Hua asked, “we can just go around the city and head to the mountains. That way, you can get the super weapon that Jin was talking about without dealing with this.” But Xiaojun had that look on his face that he always has whenever driven like this. “No. We are going to enter the city.”
“Xiaojun, don’t be an idiot,” Hua yawned. “You always do stuff like this, and we end up almost dying.” But Xiaojun remained resolute as he stood there like the warrior he was. “We are going in. If the monsters and demons there are enough to frighten an entire army in running, then it’s something significant.”
“And what if it’s one of the Four Beasts?” Hua then asked. “Jin literally said that you can’t stop them unless you have a heavenly weapon, or something like that. If we try fighting one right now, we might just end up dying instead.” But Xiaojun was already walking off towards the city. There was no arguing with a warrior who had his mind set.
Rina had her weapon loaded and ready as they walked towards the city. The grass and ground looked even more dreadful than usual, as it looked to be black and devoid of even flakes of dead grass. It was just nothing. The city, like a god, stood over them in size and strength. It was a feeling of dread akin to seeing the titanic centipede, even though there wasn’t an inherent danger.
“How do you stay so calm?” she asked the warrior. “You’ve probably fought through armies of both humans and monsters, and yet you still seem completely calm. How is that even possible?” Rina asked.
Xiaojun sighed as he continued to walk. “Every warrior and soldier must have a source. They must have a reason why they fight. Without this reason, you freeze or flee from the battlefield. Once you have a source of strength, you must intertwine with it. Become one with it.”
“What is your reason then?” Rina added. Xiaojun closed his eyes as he took a deep breath. From under his eyelids, thousands of visions and memories flowed within his brain. “I need to free Nina Wagner from the clutches of the Beast of Corruption. Until then, I shall slaughter each and every beast that comes into my way.”
Then he continued to walk, as if nothing happened. “You know,” Hua said to Rina, “I met him because I was trying to trick him and eat him. He responded by tying a rope around my neck and tossing me down a mountain to interrogate me. Only survived because I had the hand strength to prevent the rope from snapping my neck and, really, because he let me live.”
Rina’s eyes widened as she looked at the warrior walk on. This was someone who transcended the sanity and strength of an ordinary human. A part of her wondered if this man was secretly a demon hiding in human flesh. There was no wonder he was titled as The Demon Warrior.
The walls of Guancheng were mighty rammed earth structures which stood strong even with cannonballs and shrapnel impaled into different parts of it. The old city looked mighty and powerful enough to just stand up like a titan. “How do we get inside?” Hua asked. Xiaojun had the answer. “We go in through the front door.”
They approached the large iron door. But with a slight nudge, Xiaojun pushed it open. “It’s unlocked,” he remarked. Rina tsked as she held her weapon ready. “When someone leaves treasure unattended, it means that he wants someone to try and take it.” The answer was simple: the city was a complete trap. “We should go,” Hua said. “I really don’t like the feeling of this, and the smell of demons is worse here.”
But Xiaojun pushed forward. The other two followed him as Rina scanned around with her weapon. As they entered the streets, they noticed a veil of darkness surrounded them like a fog. It was strange, as if their vision went only a few meters in front of them. “I really don’t like this!” Hua squealed. Then, with a creak, the doors shut them inside. The city had eaten them and trapped them inside.
With a light motion, Xiaojun held his weapon ready. He continued to walk forward, as if he were simply invited to come here. “Let’s go to the keep of the city,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to leave a city unattended.” The Envoy and his followers moved forward as they awaited the sins of man to attack them.