The Dead Old Man

Jax didn't care about the gore or the death when he realized just how expensive the axe was. Even if Gemma was lying by making it appear ten times as expensive as it was, that was still an incredible amount that Jax could never imagine.

He gently lifted the old man aside, placing him away. He felt his spine shiver a little when he saw the sort of damage the axe had dealt to the man for simply falling on top of it.

His entire skull had been cut in half.

"Just how sharp is this thing?" Jax wondered and tried to lift it. As he did, he found himself barely able to make it stand, let alone lift it.

"God, how heavy is this thing?" he asked, unable to understand just why the axe would be that heavy. That made him wonder how the man could ever hold it up at all.

"He must've been a damn warrior or something," Jax said and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes, trying to tap into the Navi in his navel area, and pulled it out into his palm.

As it appeared on his palm, he slowly spread it just around his arm. It was a little difficult to do it as soon as he thought about it, but he got the hang of it soon enough. With his arm empowered by Navi, he tried to lift it up.

He had barely lifted it a few inches off the ground when his knees buckled under the sheer weight. He nearly displaced his spine trying to lift the thing. Even with just that, he was out of breath.

"Dammit!" Jax cried out. "I can't lift it."

"You'll need a much stronger body to be able to lift this thing," Gemma said. "A warrior in the 5-Star Opal stage might be able to handle the axe somewhat. As a warrior, you will need a strong skill to be able to make that happen so early on."

Jax frowned a little but didn't think much else of it.

"So, I can't use it right now, huh?" he asked.

"I'm afraid not," Gemma said.

Jax sighed and placed the item into his Inventory. "I'll use it when I can."

"Just keep doing what you're doing. You'll surely learn a skill through it," Gemma said.

Jax nodded.

Skills were something that could be learned from other people or all by themselves. While warriors had Navi all over their bodies, strengthening them without doing anything, to a Warrior, that was a skill they would have to learn.

And that took concentration, unlike a Warrior. So while a Sorcerer could do what a Warrior could do, they couldn't do it just as easily.

Of course, the same was true of Warriors as well. They could learn the same skills that a Sorcerer did, but with their Navi spread all around their bodies naturally, their quality was much worse, and thus the spells ended up being worse than a Sorcerer of the same Navi stage.

"One of these days, I will learn a good skill," Jax said with a sigh. He was ready to leave for the forest, but the old man's corpse bothered him a little. While the man had tried to kill him, he could tell that the malice the man had shown him was meant for someone else.

"How did he come here?" Jax asked. "So weird."

"Weird indeed," Gemma accepted.

"Did he come from the forest? I thought I saw a light."

"There was a light," Gemma said. "I was watching. He definitely wasn't there before he arrived out of nowhere."

"I thought so too," Jax said, leaning down toward the old man. "How come an old man like him has such an expensive axe? Was he killed for that axe perhaps?"

"Mhm. Maybe he was running away from his enemies and decided to come to this carriage," Gemma theorized.

"Right, people can come back to earlier carriages," Jax said. As he thought that, another thought came to him. "Do you think he might have any other impressive items with him? Can we loot him?"

"When people die, you get random items from their inventory, but you have to be the one to kill them," Gemma said. "Unfortunately, that man killed himself."

"But it was my threads that made it happen," Jax said.

"But it was his axe that killed him."

Jax tried to argue, but he had nothing he could argue with. He accepted Gemma's words and looked at the old man's scars once again. There were so many of them, some of which hadn't even been healed yet.

There were even more scars underneath his clothes, all of which seemed quite severe. Jax pitied the old man.

"May you find peace in death, old man."

Jax closed the man's open eyes and got up. "Anything I can do to his body to give a semblance of a funeral? Can I bury him perhaps?"

"As soon as you leave the area, his field will devour him. It's best to just leave him be and continue on with your day."

Jax sighed. "A man died before me, and it barely affects me at all. I wonder what sort of man I was before this. I hope I am not a bloodthirsty killer."

"You came here to wish to save someone. I don't believe bloodthirsty killers would ever do that," Gemma said.

That made Jax a little happy. "Alright, let's go kill some more beasts. Hopefully, I'll earn a decent amount of stones today."

Jax left the corpse of the old man right there and walked away. After he was far away, the ground opened up beneath the old man, swallowing him, removing him from this world.

Jax watched him get swallowed and turned around, going deeper into the Dead Woods for what he had come to do.

Not a single person other than him would ever know that this pitiful death was the end to one of the greatest warriors to ever live in the Celestial Express.