Willbur Longsword was sitting on the fire and feeling rather grumpy. After his last heroic quest he abandoned his old comrades. Not that they were old in the actual sense of the word, they were just some people he happened to know for a bit longer. He saved some region from abysmal terror with them. Or maybe it was two or three regions and a village. He found that he didn’t care anymore.

And that was exactly the reason he was sitting alone at the fire. He himself was old in the literal sense of the word. At least if it came to heroes. When he had started his journey he was around 13 or maybe 16 years old. It was pointless to remember, but when he started he also had comrades. It was a shame they were all dead now and he was the only one left. All of them died in one heroic missions or another, most of them made their last breath in his arms and he already avenged all of them that could be avenged.

The new comrades he had were never people he actually grew attached to. When members of his team had been exchanged the first several times, he had wholeheartedly welcomed them to their little hero-group. He was the leader after all. The problem was that it kept happening. Again and again and again. When everybody in his group had been replaced the second time he didn’t even really wanted to know their tragic backstories anymore. When the last member of even that group hat died he stopped remembering their names after they died.

That of course made them expandable if you believed in karmic foreboding and that made them die even faster and he cared even less. At some point he had realized it was a vicious cycle but by then he had stopped to care. In the late part of his career he had at some point found out he had gained another new nickname. >Death sentence.

But it didn’t matter, there were always young ones, who hoped to be the fated protagonist themselves and learn a thing or two from him. Some of them even survived. He was fairly sure that even if someone put his bad attitude and lack of enthusiasm against him he would have still saved a lot more people than most average heroes. There was even some kind of legend building around him.

So why had he left his group in the middle of the night without as much as saying goodbye?

Because he was tired of it all. Hadn’t he done his part? Wasn’t it enough? He had given his whole life to the people. He had saved so many lives from demonlords, necromancers, crazy bureaucrats and even giant rat infestations that he sometimes though this whole country had to be devoid of life if not for him. He had served the king, bathed in the glory of being a war hero. He had looted and given back countless artefacts of immeasurable worth. He had broken out of mind control and possession and found imposters in his team, he had made hard decisions and had saved that one life instead of the village when given an impossible choice. And afterwards more often than not he had still saved the village.

He had gotten golden keys to cities, he had reigned for short times as a lord or sometimes just as a warlord when there was no formal legitimation. He had done so much shit that he just couldn’t count it anymore.

But he wanted out. And he knew it was futile.

He had tried to hide. He had told his team that they needed to hide from an evil mastermind and just bunkered down for weeks in the most boring location he could find. After 3 weeks one of his group members turned out to be an ancient vampire that had joined their group for fun and it had never been a problem because they all had bathed in blood almost every day anyway. During the fight every living soul in that beautiful boring village was extinguished. He had never found the heart to risk the life of normal people in another beautiful boring village again.

He had tried to just solve everything. That were the times when he reigned and tried to stop all arising problems before they actually became some. At some point the workload became too much and he had to delegate to trusted officers. Naturally some of them formed some kind of religious conspiracy, with a fancy name and red robes and tried to kill him in his sleep. He had not given up after that but after the conspiracy it was a plot to get the second-born son of the king to his rightful but honestly not so rightful throne. It was really a whole lot of work to kill everybody involved and STILL be on speaking terms to the king but he managed.

After that though, a plague broke out, that indiscriminately made people lose their mind in the specific way that they tried to kill everybody who gave them an order. It was a bloodbath. He lost half his court during that event and god knows how many civilians. At that point he secretly ordered one of his last true friends to count the people that died during his reign and compared it to the 20 years before his reign. He still came out on top even though it had been less than a year. That was the moment he knew his attempt was doomed.

He tried leaving and telling people he wanted to stop. It were amicable moments of long forgotten empathy when his group told him that he really had earned it and said goodbye. One blissfully boring month later the last survivor of his group fell through his door, bleeding on the floor and pursued by an army of bloodthirsty demi-humans that wanted to kill every existing hero. So he took his sword and killed all of them and when they were all dead his helpers and supports had turned to a battle-hardened group of… heroes. Who of course helped him with his next quest that had started right afterwards. He had cried that night for two long hours and everybody had not asked questions and just took it for granted that it was for the fallen and slain.

After that he just went with the flow. If fate so willed that he had a never-ending line of quests that needed to be solved so be it, maybe fate would lead him to the right path where he could finally retire. But that had lasted years and now he was just sick of it.

He couldn’t stomach all the happy jabbering of people he commanded when he knew that most of them would be dead within the year. So he just left.

A loud howl put him out of his thoughts, but he just adjusted his hand a little bit so that it lay on his trusted Hellfire. Ironically Hellfire was a one-handed sword that had lasted him longer than every long-sword he ever possessed and made his name famous. With Hellfire he had just half the power he had with a Zweihänder but that seemed better than searching for a new sword every month.

He knew his moment of calm wouldn’t last forever. Fate would find a way to involve him again. He could cry and struggle and protest, but it would still happen. A second howl, this one much nearer than the first emerged from the woods. Willbur stood up and went in that direction. Maybe he could sleep if he settled the problem early on.

It didn’t take long for him to arrive at a small clearing, where a pack of wolves seemed surprised by his arrival. They likely weren’t used to their prey coming willingly to them. Of course it were no normal wolves, normal wolves were sensible beast and would never dare to attack him even with a strong pack. It was some kind of mutation, that made their fur all black and all of them had some kind of festering tumours everywhere on their body. The eyes weren’t red though, so it likely weren’t undead. That meant maybe he could get some sleep tonight without having to kill some upstarting necromancer beforehand.

Willbur strolled forward, his sword in hand, but not taking any kind of stance. The mutant-wolves growled and some of them took a step back. Willbur liked to think that they were actually afraid of him, but he knew that was not the case, simply because these beasts were not capable of fear. But they made it so that they were standing around him in a half-circle. Willbur stopped and fixated the largest one, most likely the pack-leader with his eyes.

“Come on you got me surrounded. I’m easy prey. Let’s get it over with.” He taunted.

As if they could understand him two of the eight wolves dashed forward. The pack-leader from the front and one of them where he could barely see him to his left side behind him. Willbur took a causal left step back, ducked and made a lightning fast slash down at the wolf that had attacked him from behind. The beast had too much momentum to stop and crashed in his sword. The pack leader had jumped on the last meter, but because of Willburs low stance it couldn’t reach him anymore and flew right over him. Willbur had sliced the head of the first beast clean in two and in one fluent motion used his momentum to rotate around his axis and hold his sword up. The belly of the pack-leader was sliced open wide and not only was half his intestines coming out when he landed, he had also started to burn. The beast with the sliced head also started burning, both a sideeffect of his Hellfire sword. The other wolves didn’t hesitate anymore and started attacking him all at once, but Willbur has already moved out of the semi-circle, so the beast got in each other’s way when they charged at him. Willbur decapitated two beast with quick slashes and another wolf that had been striped by his slashes catched fire and started burning bright with a fierce “WOOSH.”

“Now that’s a howling I like better.” Willbur laughed as he stuck his blade in the fourth enemy. Just like that only two mutant-wolves were left. The circled around him but Willbur had lost interest. He took out two knifes and threw them in quick succession. Before they had landed in the eyes of the remaining enemies Willbur hat already charged at one of them and killed it with a mighty swing. The last mutant-wolf lay on the ground dying with a knife in its eye and tried to crawl away. Willbur walked after it lazily and cut up his spine just above the head.

Eight dead burning mutant-wolf carcasses were distributed at the clearing and Willbur sighed deeply. Just when he wanted to go back to his makeshift bonfire he was once again disturbed.

“That… was… AWESOME!!!”