Chapter 24: Real Power 2
...The two assassins who had held back, ready to follow their leader, watched as he ran towards Adam. They saw he was unbelievably fast, just a dark blur driven by anger. He moved like a super-tight spring let loose, planning to kill Adam (Eric) right away with the two glowing knives he held, magic shimmering around the blades.
They saw him lift one knife high, aiming to stab Adam in the neck to silence him forever. He was only a few feet from Adam now, the knife raised high, ready for the final blow.
But at that exact moment, when the charging assassin was right in the middle of his attack, raising his knife to kill, his head suddenly, terribly, and impossibly came off his body. It wasn’t a slow cut you could see from a sword. It happened so fast that the two watching assassins couldn’t even see what did it.
One second their leader was a man running, raising a knife, and the next second his head wasn’t on his shoulders anymore. There was no sound of metal cutting flesh, just... his head gone.
The world for the dying assassin became a confusing mess of colors as his eyes lost focus. In his last moments, through the blurry spin, he briefly saw his body keep running forward for a split second, heading towards Adam, while he himself was falling.
Then, everything went black. His head tumbled through the air with a wet, gross sound before hitting the floor with a dull thud.
The two assassins watching were completely frozen, stiff with shocked horror and total confusion. They saw their friend charge, they saw him lift his knife, and then, without seeing anything hit him, his head just fell off, and his body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. They had no idea what had cut him or how it happened so fast and without anything visible.
His neck looked cut perfectly clean, a smooth slice, but they didn’t see the weapon or the attack that did it. It was like his head had just... come off by itself.
The headless assassin’s body finally fell completely onto the fancy rug in front of Adam. It lay there still for just a second, then dark, thick blood quickly started spreading from the cut neck, staining the rich carpet.
The assassin’s head, its dark mask having fallen off as it moved without the body, rolled a little further across the floor before stopping near the bed. Its face, now pale and without the mask, stared blankly at the expensive ceiling, a look of final shock stuck on it. Seeing this horrible sight – the body without a head, the head lying separately, the fast-spreading blood – the two remaining assassins looked from the dead body and head back to Adam.
He was still standing perfectly still inside Eric’s body, which wasn’t hurt at all. Their eyes, you could see them over their masks, were wide with a terrifying mix of pure fear and complete, total disbelief.