The Rising of the Scythe Hero

I already knew what I was looking for — and where. There was only one thought in my head. It had sunk in deep, lodged itself so firmly it wouldn't let go, filling every corner of my mind.

I have to end this.

I was never a fan of these drawn-out "missions." I preferred good old-fashioned, mindless monster-slaughter. Monsters don't think, don't scheme, don't play games. They don't have motives, or backstories, or layers of meaning. There's just a monster — and your job is to kill it and get the EXP. That's it.

But now, digging through this pile of rot, I kept stumbling over lives ruined by someone's greed and selfishness. I could feel something inside me... draining out — washed away by a flood of emotions that only kept growing. Emotions the Scythe fed on like gasoline to an already raging fire.

Somewhere near the start of this whole story, one of my emotions stepped out of line — and like a single rotten card, started to bring the whole house down.

Stepping off the last stair and opening the door ahead of me, I was instantly hit with a stench so vile it defied description. A smell so revolting, it felt like it contained everything disgusting in this world.

"Night."

"Yes, Master?"

"Go back upstairs. Make sure the Bartender doesn't do anything stupid."

She hesitated. For the first time ever, she didn't respond immediately, without pause. Part of me was glad to see that kind of change — but not now. Not here.

"Please."

"...Alright." — After one more glance in my direction, Night finally obeyed and headed back up.

The room I found myself in was massive. From one side — the right side — came the sounds of laughter, pleasure, and bliss. Bodies colliding. Clinking glasses. Liquor sloshing onto the floor...

And on the other side — like a twisted reflection — came screams of pain, suffering, desperate pleas for mercy... and the flickering of dying life sources. Just a few voices, meanwhile, were expressing something close to pleasure.

[Skill level up]

[Qi Control (Lv. 3)]

All my senses sharpened at once, only making those vile sounds and smells hit harder, drilling straight into my skull.

Qi — it's life, and everything that comes from it. Smell, touch, hearing, sight — all of it. With every new level of the skill, my senses evolved along with it. Which, in this moment, really worked against me.

I headed right first. I was a little surprised I hadn't run into anyone who even vaguely resembled a guard. Along the way, I only came across naked women lying on the floor — their eyes glazed over in a haze of pleasure.

Stepping over their bodies, I reached the main room — the one radiating the strongest life signals. And with them... that same weird undertone I'd felt before. The same one I didn't feel from Orb.

Yeah. It all made sense now.

I opened the door — and what I saw made my stomach churn. A massive hall, packed wall to wall with men and women. It looked like a landfill made of human, demi-human, and beastkin bodies.

The stench of sweat and every kind of bodily fluid imaginable. A stagnant, barely visible mist in the air with a sickly purple hue.

This wasn't the base of a major crime syndicate. This was a kingdom of lust and depravity.

I'd made the right call sending Night back upstairs.

"Haa? Don't think I've seen you before. Some kind of intruder?"

One of the men — currently being ridden without a care by a beastkin woman — gave me a blurry-eyed look. And from him, I felt the brightest life force in the whole place.

He'd probably undergone a class upgrade. There was a... quality to his life energy that even Night didn't quite match.

But that didn't matter.

Shhk

A crescent tore loose from my scythe, slicing through everything — and everyone — in its path.

Everyone except the original target...

"Oh-ho. You're strong, huh? And pretty good-looking, too. Heh." — the man chuckled, having jumped back abruptly. He licked blood off his hand — the blood that had splattered from the beastkin woman I'd just sliced apart.

Meanwhile, everyone else didn't even react to the spreading pool of blood on the floor — too locked into whatever they were doing to notice. Disgusting.

"I could have some fun with you."

"I'm not in the mood for games. By the source of power, I command: decipher the laws of the world and coat everything in ice — Ice Field."

A wave of frost swept across the entire hall, freezing most of those present to death. I poured 30% of my mana and 20% of my qi into that spell. For the average thugs — which most of these people were — that was more than enough for a guaranteed kill. Especially in their current, helpless state.

"Whoa! That's serious." — The man still looked amused. That kind of attack, of course, wasn't enough to kill him instantly. "You're really— oh..."

The last thing he ever saw was the sight of his own body falling away from him. A moment later, his head landed on the frozen floor, painting the ice red.

My level had already broken past the seventieth mark, so even someone with a class upgrade wasn't much of a threat. Mopping up the few survivors was barely an effort.

They were all already dead before I even walked in. The air was so thick with drugs and poison, none of them ever stood a chance.

I had zero interest in staying in that place even a second longer, so I immediately made my way to the other part of the hideout. The one I least wanted to enter. But I had no choice.

Room after room, I passed by more of the same. And with each one, the "life" I sensed grew more twisted, the sounds of screaming and slapping more distinct. Eventually, I stepped into a wide corridor — a large hall opened up in the middle, and at the very end stood something like a throne.

To the left of the hall were cages. Slaves, apparently. Their condition... wasn't good. Broken, exhausted, barely clinging to life — eyes completely empty. Only one cell stood out: a girl, a demi-human with dog ears. Curled into the corner, her whole body trembling, she stared in horror at what was happening on the throne.

"Come on! Come on, you filthy whore! Make me cum, you disgusting bitch!"

"P-please! AGH! Please, stop!"

There, like a rabid animal, a man with deathly pale skin and sunken eyes was raping a girl — couldn't have been more than twenty — all while carving into her with a knife in his hand.

With a detached gaze, I glanced over the lifeless bodies piled at the base of the throne. Some of them looked even younger than Night.

The girl let out a particularly sharp scream — and the man, growling in frustration, suddenly slashed her throat in one clean motion and dumped her down onto the heap of corpses.

"Useless. All of it is useless... That damn orb... Lukas, you bastard! This is all your fault!" — in a fit of rage, he kicked the stone throne with full force... shattering it completely. "Huh?" — his wild eyes locked onto me. "And who the hell are you?"

I silently switched from the Battle Scythe to the Reaper Scythe. For some reason, I didn't want to be mistaken for anyone else in this moment.

Besides, the thing in front of me... barely resembled a person anymore.

His aura was closer to that of a transformed Grey. The process wasn't finished yet, but there was no way to call him human anymore — not in any meaningful sense.

The system made that clear enough: a faint gray nameplate hovered above his head — the kind that only appeared over monsters. It was blurred, unreadable, like even the system wasn't sure what he really was. But I didn't have any doubts. Not this time. It was obvious — the thing in front of me was a monster.

And monsters are meant to be killed.

"A scythe? Wait, are you that Scythe Hero or whatever? Ha... Hahaha! Perfect! At least you won't break right away. These useless toys snap too fast." — Reaching behind the remains of the throne, he pulled out a one-handed axe. "Come on, Hero — entertain me."

The stone floor beneath his feet cracked with a web of fractures as he charged at me. But he wasn't even close to the Leper Undead. And I'd gained quite a few levels since that fight.

"Huh?" — the stupid sound of surprise left his mouth the moment his lunge ended with him getting slammed into the floor.

"Before this ends, I've got a few questions." — My foot pressed down on his solar plexus... and then dropped lower. A sharp crack rang out.

"AGHH! Bastard! I'll kill you, kill you, kill you! Hahaha! I'll slaughter every last one of you — and that little useless bitch, I'll make sure she gets special treatment! Hahaha!" — The girl with the dog ears flinched hard at those words, curling even tighter into the corner of her cage.

His skin went even paler, the blood vessels in his eyes burst, and violet veins began creeping down his limbs.

"Ha! Grrr... But there's... something good in this!"

He was slipping. Any second now and I wouldn't be able to get a single word out of him. But I had no idea how to stop it.

"Talk. Speak, you freak." — But he just kept laughing, violently convulsing no matter how much pressure I applied, no matter how many bones I broke.

And then... my eyes itched again. But this time, it was sharp — like a razor across my vision.

"Sp...eak."

[Skill activated: Life Absorption]

[New skill acquired: Death's Whisper]

The body under my foot suddenly went still. No more spasms. No more laughter. Just wide, glazed-over eyes. It looked a lot like that nun from the church... after my eyes burned that time.

[Death's Whisper — a soft breath of Death itself, light as a breeze, tempting lost souls to let go of their burdens and slip into stillness. A dreamlike trance, fogging the mind and pulling it into the bottomless waters of oblivion.]

That's how the skill was described. Up to now, every skill description I'd seen had been blunt and direct. Mechanical. Clear-cut.

No poetic metaphors. No abstraction. No lyrical prose.

But this...

Goosebumps crawled across my skin.

"Your... name," I managed to get out.

"...Alfred," he replied, completely emotionless.

I hadn't recognized him because he wasn't wearing any clothes — and, honestly, he barely resembled anything human anymore.

"Tell me about your plan. How you got the core. About Grey. And everything that's happened these last few days."

"I heard a rumor..." — he began, speaking in a flat, monotone voice.

In the end, it all came down to one thing — Alfred wasn't the one at the top. There was someone above him. Someone from the Melromarc nobility, by the name of Lukas.

Alfred himself had heard a rumor about a dragon that had been living in the mountains near the village for some time. There was an old belief among the locals that dragons were obsessed with hoarding all kinds of treasures — which, of course, caught the interest of bandits. And soon after, he learned that a Hero just so happened to be passing through the area.

Didn't take long for Alfred to come up with a plan: use the Hero to kill the dragon, and then claim the hoard for himself. With some basic manipulation and a few well-bribed villagers, he managed to point the Hero toward the dragon.

The job was done. The dragon was slain. And the naive Hero didn't even take anything for himself — instead, he left the materials behind for the villagers, so they could "rebuild" the town they had supposedly destroyed to frame the dragon. But in the dragon's lair, instead of gold and relics, they found only a single girl. Aside from a few basic items and crude furniture, just enough to sustain life for a person — or, in this case, a demi-human.

Frustrated and furious, Alfred decided to take what little he had found. He figured a child raised by a dragon couldn't possibly be ordinary. So he made her a slave, intending to sell her for as much as possible. That was the only reason she was still alive and intact — he wanted to learn everything he could about her first to raise her price.

He got so fixated on her, he completely forgot about the dragon's core. Only Lukas — that same noble — kept insisting it be delivered to him for reasons Alfred himself didn't understand.

But by the time they got back to it, the core had already begun to fester, soaked in the dragon's lingering death energy.

Alfred wasn't about to risk his own skin — and sending his own men to die for it made no sense either, not when he was their leader. That's when he remembered a certain simple-minded peasant — or so he thought — who had been hanging around the gang, hoping to be accepted.

From there, the picture basically assembled itself. Grey, offered the chance to join a major organization, went out to retrieve the specified item without complaint. Maybe he had doubts — maybe not — but the fact remained: Alfred wanted to be sure the core wasn't dangerous. So, for a while, Grey kept it on him, slowly soaking up its death energy. The effect didn't show immediately — it changed its victim little by little. Alfred would come to experience that firsthand later.

Once infected, Grey completed the mission — and, obviously, was no longer of any use. So they simply got rid of him. I don't know how he ended up near his home village. Maybe even as a monster, something inside him still tried to return to his wife — fragments of a past self pushing him homeward. But in the end, he became a new source of contamination — and that's what doomed the village.

"Now it all really starts to make sense..." — I muttered as the scythe's blade pierced the head of the living corpse.

After that, I walked along the row of cages where the surviving slaves were kept. Though for many of them, "surviving" wouldn't last much longer.

Eventually, I stopped in front of the cage with the girl — the one with dog ears and a tail.

She was still trembling, eyes full of tears, her face frozen in fear.

"And what's your name, little one raised by a dragon?" — I said, crouching down in front of the cage.

"...W-Wyndia..."