It was a mountain. The trees grew so thick they formed a forest, and the grass shining in the bright sunlight blended with the woods to create a scene of quiet beauty.
One might have thought it was simply a place where woodcutters were resting after their work, judging by the axes strewn across the ground and the felled trees lying here and there.
That is, if there had not been swords and bloodstains everywhere.
It wasn’t just axes scattered on the ground. There were swords, bloodstains, and bodies that seemed to be the owners of that blood.
Fifty-two. That was the number of corpses. It was by no means a small number, and every one of them had deep wounds.
There were only two living people.
One was a man collapsed on the ground, his face frozen in terror.
The other was also a man, but unlike the first, he stood there with a calm expression.
“...Let me ask again.”
The man holding a long guandao in one hand spoke. The blood on the blade made it clear that this disaster was his doing.
The handsome man had jet-black hair that seemed to swallow the colors around him, and in contrast, his eyes shone with brilliant gold.
“Have you ever seen a monster?”
The man who looked nothing like the mastermind behind this massacre finished speaking in a flat voice.
The bandit chief, Isao Heijo, was on the verge of losing his mind.
“A monster...? You lunatic, what monster? You’re the monster!!”
Isao Heijo had originally been the leader of a bandit group operating in Mt. Oodake.
They lived by extorting tolls from travelers and ambushing merchants—your standard bandit business.
At least, until they were beaten by a boy wearing a boar mask.
The group had suffered heavy losses at the hands of that young boar boy.
“So we ran to a nearby mountain with no owner...”
The gang had fled from Mt. Oodake to a mountain that was neither too close nor too far from their original base.
Its dense trees made it easy to hide their hideout, and there was a road connecting nearby villages, so there was a fair amount of foot traffic as well.
Since no one claimed the place, it naturally became the bandits’ new base.
Today, just like always, they had been about to leave the hideout to go plundering. But that plan had been stopped almost immediately.
A man had been wandering around nearby. Judging by his refined appearance, they had assumed he was some young master who had gotten lost.
He also carried a long staff wrapped in cloth at the tip, but they hadn’t thought much of that.
“Hey, young master from somewhere. What brings you here?”
“He’s obviously lost. Bad luck... Hey! Of all places, he had to get lost and end up here?”
“Now that he’s seen this place, a toll won’t be enough. Too bad, but we’ll have to take his life instead, heh heh.”
The bandits shouted from all around. There wasn’t a trace of seriousness in their eyes. Only amusement. Nothing else.
Of course. There was no reason for dozens of armed men to fear a single person.
“My name is Tsunokake Tatsuo.”
The man, Tsunokake Tatsuo, spoke.
“Are you the bandits who’ve suddenly become famous lately? I have only one question. Have you seen a monster around here recently?”
“...”
After a brief silence—
“Puhahahahaha!”
“Kya-hahahahaha!”
The bandits burst into laughter like madmen.
Asking whether they had seen a monster out of nowhere—was he really a lunatic?
“Boys. Looks like some crazy bastard showed up. Waste of time talking to him. Finish him off.”
“““Yes, sir!”””
For a moment, at their chief Heijo’s words, the bandits answered and began fiddling with their weapons.
What terrible luck. Heijo turned his back, thinking as much.
Normally, bandits rarely went as far as taking a life. Killing someone would draw attention in all sorts of ways, and if things went badly, they could be wiped out by the local authorities.
But if someone had seen their hideout, that was a different matter. They couldn’t be left alive.
“Gyaaaah!!”
Then, a death scream rang out behind him.
“Hm?”
Heijo turned around again.
What met his eyes was one of his men collapsing in a spray of blood.
It had been the man who introduced himself as Tsunokake Tatsuo. The cloth wrapped around the long staff had already come loose and was rolling on the ground.
As the cloth unraveled, a pure white blade was revealed.
The thing the man had been holding was a guandao.
“What the...?!"
“What the hell!”
“He’s alone anyway!! Kill him!!”
The bandits were thrown off by the unexpected strike, but once they realized they outnumbered him, they rushed in at once.
But for some reason, all that piled up were the bandits’ corpses.
By the time more than ten of them had died, the bandits could no longer get close. Fear had taken over their bodies.
“Since you attacked first, I suppose this counts as self-defense. Well... I was planning to leave only one of you alive from the start anyway.”
With the blood-red blade raised toward the sky, Tatsuo spoke calmly, his face serene in stark contrast to the murderous scene around him.
At the same time, his figure vanished.
“““Kuhk!!”””
Before anyone knew it, Tatsuo had appeared among the bandits. With a single swing of his weapon, three bandits lost their lives with dying screams.
The remaining bandits reacted in different ways.
Some charged at him, vowing to kill him. Some took defensive stances, determined not to be struck. Some were so overwhelmed by fear they couldn’t move at all, while others turned and ran.
But their ends were the same. Those who attacked were beheaded before they could even swing their swords, and those who defended were cut cleanly in half by Tatsuo, who appeared behind them before they knew it.
Those who froze and those who fled alike could not escape the blade.
“Is that thing really human?”
Heijo screamed inwardly.
Normally, a guandao is a heavy weapon. That meant that while its power was tremendous, the user’s speed would usually suffer.
But that madman swung the heavy-looking weapon as if it were a pair of chopsticks, and he was so fast that it was hard to follow his movements with the eye.
It didn’t take long for every bandit except Heijo to die.
“Did you not hear the question? Monst—”
“You keep saying monster, monster, monster! The monster is you, you son of a bi—”
Whether it was Heijo deciding to go all out, or a desperate scream cutting off Tatsuo’s words, the shout ended before it could finish.
“...My body?”
The last thing he saw was his own body without a head.
“I see.”
And Tatsuo’s face, wearing a disappointed expression.
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