Corpses littered the ground of Mud End Alley. The youth's house was located at the very end of it, and the neighboring houses were eerily silent. Just moments ago, the village had been full of life and vitality, but this place was the first to be struck by the invading bandits. The lone raider killed by the youth named Rain had stayed behind simply to scavenge for extra loot while his comrades pillaged elsewhere.
Walking out of the now-bloody house, Rain paused to observe the narrow alleyway. There was blood and scattered flesh everywhere. It seemed as though hell itself had descended upon his home.
Dreadful.
He wasn't overly attached to the village's inhabitants, save for a select few. Still, he felt a heavy, hollow ache watching this grotesque mockery of human life. He had been raised here. This was his home, and those people—good or bad—were the ones he had grown up alongside.
His grandfather and he had always been treated as outsiders in this remote settlement. Because of this, their relationship with the other villagers was far from harmonious. Rain had endured plenty of bitter bullying growing up, and his grandfather had suffered constant mistreatment. The simple villagers could be exceedingly cruel, convinced that Rain's grandfather was cursed—how else could his unnatural, accelerated aging be explained?
At one point, Rain had resented them heavily. But one day, his grandfather had told him this:
"They aren't bad folks, Rain, just a bit uneducated and ignorant. Don't forget, they accepted strangers into their midst and gave us a roof over our heads. Although the adults don't speak kindly and the kids are bullies, we should still be grateful."
Those words echoed clearly through his mind, and Rain broke into a sudden run. To save any surviving villagers, he needed to move quickly; the bandits were reaping lives left and right.
Grandpa would want me to save them. If I can, he nodded grimly to himself.
Soon, Rain reached the entrance of the alley, from where he could see a section of the main road. A woman was running barefoot, clutching a little girl tightly in her arms. Panic was painted across her pale face while the child wept uncontrollably.
Rain paused, looking past the fleeing woman. A burly man with an obscene smile and a massive machete was casually following behind. It took Rain only a second to understand the situation: this muscular brute was toying with the woman, fully capable of catching up to them whenever he pleased.
Rain's grip on the axe tightened, and he instantly forced his breathing to steady. His eyes narrowed as he slipped deeper into the shadows of the wall. In his head, he began to count the pacing. At 7, the woman flashed past the alley entrance. At 12, without even looking back, Rain exploded from the alley. He spun on his heel and delivered a precisely timed, heavy chop toward the burly man's neck.
One could tell at a glance that Rain had never received formal martial training. Even so, there was a stark stability to his form—a stability forged entirely through years of repetitive labor. The burly man, by contrast, was an experienced martial artist. Normally, dodging or blocking the axe would have been effortless. Yet, somehow, he was caught completely off guard; the timing of the strike was absolute perfection.
To any distant observer, it would have looked as though the burly man had intentionally thrown his neck directly into the blade. Following the rules of momentum, his head was neatly severed and sent soaring into the air. Yielding to gravity, it described a graceful arc before landing heavily right in front of the running woman.
It would have been almost comical, were it not for the sheer gruesomeness of the scene. The woman stopped dead in her tracks after watching a bloody blur soar over her head and drop at her feet. Her mouth hung open in a frozen mask of shock and horror as she recognized the vacant face of her tormentor.
She hesitantly glanced backward, only to catch the back of a lone youth disappearing into the distance. She stood paralyzed for a moment before the sharp cries of her child snapped her back to reality. Wasting no time, she sprinted toward the west gate of the village.
While running, Rain's thoughts drifted back to his past.
The Chief was right. Timing is everything while on a hunt.
A memory flashed to the forefront of his mind. He had been very young then—only eight years old. Before he became a woodcutter, Rain had worked as a servant boy for the village's Chief Hunter. Perhaps because he was sensible, or perhaps because he was diligent, the hunter had allowed him to tag along on a real hunt one day.
If he had to sum up that entire process in two words, Rain would call it: wait and kill. Rain had never been good at much, but he was exceptionally good at waiting. After all, the first few weeks of his life had been spent doing nothing else.
Aside from his natural patience, the greatest lesson from that hunt was timing. Being able to wait was a virtue; being able to grasp the precise moment to strike was everything. Although that had been the first and last time he ever went hunting, the lesson had been permanently carved into his brain.
Who could have guessed that a hunter's lesson would come in handy against a different kind of beast—bandits?
An hour later,
Rain stood rigidly in front of a corpse, his mind blank, breathing heavily. This was the seventh bandit he had put down. By this point, his body was covered in wounds, both deep and shallow. A vicious knife slash tore across his thigh, his left arm was broken and hanging uselessly, and a jagged gash on his forehead bled profusely into his eyes.
In the span of a single hour, he had successfully assassinated seven armed men. Such a combat record was nothing short of miraculous for an untrained, 14-year-old villager. It had not come easily; every single kill depended entirely on his mastery of timing and positioning.
He was bone-tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep for three days straight, but he couldn't. He had made a vow. He refused to rest until every last bandit was dead. According to a child he had rescued earlier and his own careful observations, there had originally been twelve bandits in total. Because of his relentless rampage, only five remained.
Step.
Instantly, Rain's pupils constricted, and he dropped into a low duck. Lifting his eyes slightly over the top of an empty wooden crate, he spotted a man walking with a grim, hyper-alert expression. The man had short-cropped hair and a massive, ugly scar stretching from the corner of his lip all the way to his left ear.
A bandit.
The scarred man raised two fingers to his mouth and produced a sharp, shrill whistle. He then paused, standing completely still to listen. After a few seconds, his face darkened. Rain instantly recognized the action—it was identical to the calls hunters used in the forest to communicate positions to one another.
As the realization clicked, Rain's heart skipped a beat.
He knows something is wrong.
Almost simultaneously, the scarred bandit muttered aloud into the empty lane: "Something is wrong."
The veteran's hand instinctively drifted toward the hilt of the broadsword strapped across his back. His eyes darted sharply from left to right, scanning the blood-splattered alleyway with professional suspicion. The eerie silence hanging over this section of Roken Village was no longer peaceful; it felt heavy, suffocating, and charged with lethal intent.
Hunched behind the weathered wooden crate, Rain forced his lungs to expand and contract in slow, silent rhythms. Every muscle in his battered body screamed in protest. His broken left arm hung limply at his side, a dull, throbbing ache radiating deep into his shoulder, while warm blood continued to seep from the jagged gash on his forehead, blurring his vision with crimson droplets.
Five bandits left, he reminded himself, suppressing a wince. This one makes eight.
The scarred man took two cautious steps forward, his heavy boots crunching loudly over the debris scattered across the lane. He stopped just a few paces from Rain's hiding spot, pulling a small metal whistle from his belt. If he sounded it, the remaining four bandits would converge on this location instantly, transforming a series of calculated assassinations into an overwhelming, open brawl—a fight Rain knew he could not survive in his current, physically depleted state.
Now.
Trusting his instincts, Rain didn't wait for the perfect moment; he forced it into existence.
Exploding from behind the crate with a sudden, ferocious burst of adrenaline, Rain closed the distance before the scarred veteran could react. He abandoned any pretense of complex footwork, channeling every ounce of his remaining strength into a desperate, horizontal sweep with his bloodied axe.
The veteran's combat reflexes were terrifyingly fast. Hearing the rush of displaced air, he whipped around, abandoning the horn and throwing his heavy broadsword upward to block.
Clang!
The violent impact sent a bone-jarring shockwave straight up Rain's arms. The force of the counter-shock threatened to rip the handle right out of his palms, especially with his left arm compromised. Staggering backward from the recoil, Rain coughed up a speck of blood as the scarred bandit grinned maliciously, revealing yellowed teeth.
"Found you, you little rat!" the bandit snarled, steadying his stance and bringing his blade down in a vicious, overhead arc designed to cleave the youth in two.
Trapped in the open with no room to dodge, Rain didn't try to parry. Instead, remembering the fundamental lesson of the hunt, he let momentum do the work. He dropped his weight, sliding forward into the bandit's blind spot just as the heavy sword carved empty air where his torso had been a fraction of a second before.
Before the veteran could yank his weapon back up, Rain brought the heel of his good hand upward, driving the blunt head of his wood-chopping axe straight into the man's exposed ribs with a sickening crunch.
The bandit gasped, the wind knocked completely out of his lungs. Seizing that microsecond of vulnerability, Rain twisted his body, putting his entire hip and leg into one final, frantic pull, burying the sharp edge of the blade deep into the side of the man's neck.
The scarred bandit froze. His eyes bulged in shock as warm blood spurted over Rain's face. Slowly, the veteran's grip on his broadsword loosened, the heavy steel clattering uselessly against the stone pavement before his massive frame collapsed heavily into the dirt.
Panting heavily, Rain fell to one knee, using his axe handle as a crutch to keep from pitching forward. His vision swam dangerously. Eight down. Four remaining.
"Who's there?!"
A gruff voice shouted from down the lane, followed by the hurried thud of approaching footsteps. The sound of the struggle had finally drawn attention.
Rain clenched his jaw, ignoring the searing pain tearing through his limbs, and forced himself back to his feet. Dragging his heavy, blood-soaked axe behind him, the 14-year-old youth stepped out from the shadows to meet the final phase of his vengeance. The village burned around them, but deep within his chest, a cold, unyielding fire burned even brighter.