Jax encountered 2 worms on the way to the woods, one of which gave him a stone. As he arrived near the Dead Woods, the ground became sparser of grass, and very soon, they were lacking.
The decrepit landscape lasted for about 50 feet before the first of the many dead trees of the Dead Woods. The amount of people here was fewer than the grassland.
Jax quickly reminded himself of the monsters he could find here. The majority of them were lizards and slimes. There were also snakes and mushrooms, but they were rarer than the others.
As Jax closed in on the woods, a flash of light to the side caught his attention.
Jax turned toward the light to see a man leaning next to a tree, weak and tired. He breathed ever so slowly and just as slowly dragged his head up to look before him.
"Where… where am I?" the man asked, looking around. He seemed unaware of how he even got there.
Jax noticed the man's features at that moment. He was a little taller than him, wearing tattered clothes with holes everywhere. It wasn't just his clothes either; the entire man looked extremely worn out, with scars all across his body.
The main scars Jax could see at the moment were a large cut from his eyes down to his chin, a nearly blue bruise on his neck, and a spiral scar along the man's right arm.
Other than that, the man had many tiny cuts all over his body. All in all, it seemed as though this was a man that had been in many fights.
"Oh dear god, look at him, Jax. He looks so wounded. Where did he come from?"
"How did he get all these scars?" Jax asked. Had he perhaps made a mistake in coming to these woods all alone?
But then, what could cause such scars? Jax couldn't imagine. There were no beasts that made these scars, after all. It should have been the people who had tortured him.
"Sir, are you alright?" Jax asked, moving closer.
Jax quickly brought out a potion from his Inventory, one he bought for 3 stones. It had a somewhat healing power and would numb the man's pain enough to help him.
"Here, you should drink this potion. It's not that good, but—"
The man suddenly swung his arm at Jax. Jax barely reacted in time and pulled his head backward, but the man managed to knock the potion out of his hand.
The glass jar shattered on the ground next to him, spilling the green healing liquid inside. Watching 3 opal stones waste away on the ground made Jax rather angry.
"Damn you!" Jax shouted. "I was only trying to help you. Why the hell would you do that?"
The man stumbled a little, leaning against the tree. He stared right at Jax, a look of pure anger covering his face. "I…" the man said in a voice that was barely more than a breath. "I… will kill you… if it is the last thing I do."
Something appeared in his hand at that very moment. It was a large two-handed axe, the 3-foot-long handle made up of some sort of black crystalline material, nearly 3 inches wide at the widest spot.
The head of the axe was quite flat, but massive at the same time. It had a curved edge, coming at nearly a foot in length, and black tendrils covered all of its surface.
The intricate design on the axe was something that immediately caught Jax's attention.
The man held the axe with two hands and still nearly buckled forward. He gritted his teeth and held on strong, looking toward Jax with even more anger now.
"What the hell is wrong with you, man? What did I do?" he asked.
But the man didn't listen. He simply ran with a heavy weight to his steps and swung down on Jax.
Jax stepped back toward the open space and quickly wrapped the man's feet with some strings.
Three loops of strings appeared around the man's ankles, tying his legs together at that moment. The man tripped and immediately fell, the heavy axe falling before him withthe sharp side standing up.
The man fell face-first into his own axe, splitting his head into two.
"AAAHHH!!" Jax screamed at the sudden gore. He looked the other way, shocked by the unpredictable death.
"HOLY SHIT! What the fuck just happened?"
"That man… he just died." Even Gemma sounded panicked.
"I can see that, but…" Jax found it hard to speak out his thoughts. The suddenness of the entire event was a bit too much for him.
Not only did he not know where the old man had come from, he didn't know why he was so angry either. And then, the death had been so tragic too.
Jax slowly turned to look at the man again and felt his stomach churn at the sight.
"Are you going to throw up?" Gemma asked.
"No, no, I'm fine," Jax said, taking a deep breath. "Do you feel nothing?"
"I'm used to seeing worse," Gemma said matter-of-factly.
Jax shook his head and turned toward the man and grimaced.
"Do you feel bad for him?" she asked.
"Of course. Look at how wounded he was. I don't think he was in his right mind."
"But he tried to kill you."
Jax nodded half-heartedly. "He did, but he did so probably because he thought I was one of the people who he was tortured by or something."
"Maybe," Gemma said. "Anyway, you should get that axe."
"What? No. It has that man's brains scattered all over it. I'm not grabbing that."
"Even if I told you that the axe is probably worth more than the entire city?" she asked.
Jax's eyes widened suddenly. "R-really? More than…"
"I'm slightly exaggerating when I say that, but it's not that far off. It is a very expensive weapon because the materials it is made up of are very expensive and can only originate in the upper carriages."