"NO! PLEASE! DON'T KILL ME!"
Inside a decaying apartment, an entire family huddled together in panic.
Sweat, tears, and the pungent stench of fear mixed with the sour reek of urine spreading across the floor.
Within the golden eyes of the man holding the axe, the husband's trembling face was reflected clearly.
The husband noticed a momentary pause from the executioner.
And lunged.
A freezing hex erupted instantly, attempting to paralyze Ron's body long enough for his wife and son to flee toward the door.
Ron watched the desperate struggle without emotion.
Then calmly stepped forward.
"Why beg for mercy," he asked quietly, "when none of you are innocent?"
The axe descended.
Fast.
Efficient.
Merciful only in how little suffering it allowed.
"You really do make me feel like some third-rate villain," Ron murmured.
A severed head hung loosely in one hand.
The cut was so brutal it resembled butchered livestock more than a human corpse.
Fresh blood dripped from the axe in his other hand.
Then suddenly, Ron realized something.
The world around him had changed.
Everything had become white.
Not bright.
Not holy.
Just pure, suffocating white.
"Did you create a space to escape?" Ron muttered.
"Or a cage to imprison me?"
Before him stretched a massive labyrinth.
The ground rolled like waves despite appearing perfectly flat. Maze walls twisted like tangled serpents, warping one's sense of space itself.
It looked endless.
A nightmare designed so hunter and prey could eternally chase one another without ever meeting.
At the edges of the maze drifted strange clouds.
They should have looked soft.
Instead, they resembled rigid pixelated blocks frozen in place.
Ron lowered the severed head onto the ground.
He removed his black coat, wrapped the head inside it, then drove the axe directly into the bundle.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Like a butcher tenderizing meat.
Blood soaked through the fabric before Ron finally tied the coat shut and hurled it upward into the white sky.
Immediately, layers of the labyrinth shifted.
Walls rose.
Pathways folded inward.
The maze itself seemed to react to the flying head.
But before the bundle could fall back down, Ron hurled the axe after it, striking the wrapped head midair and sending it even farther away.
As the head traveled through space, the warped floor beneath Ron gradually flattened into a normal plane.
Interesting.
Behind the trajectory of the head, the labyrinth remained stable.
But its sides began curling inward.
The structure resembled a rectangular sheet with both ends rolling toward the center like a scroll, while one edge stayed fixed and the opposite side expanded continuously.
I understand.
The longer Ron observed the maze, the more convinced he became of his theory.
A spell should naturally collapse once its mana source is interrupted.
In a closed vacuum, mana flow would eventually sever itself.
And if the spell depended on its caster, then killing the caster should have dissolved the entire construct instantly.
Yet this place remained intact.
"How strange," Ron muttered.
"I killed you, yet the space persists."
He paused.
"So either this is an innate ability..."
"Or the mana source was never you to begin with."
Ron placed the axe down and walked roughly fifty meters backward from the head's trajectory.
Then he climbed onto one of the maze walls and stared toward the horizon.
"Just as I thought."
When he originally threw the head, he estimated its initial distance at roughly fourteen meters before the axe strike launched it another thirty or so.
Difficult to measure precisely due to the spatial distortion.
Yet despite walking fifty meters himself, the surrounding environment remained stable.
No warping.
No expansion.
Ron returned to the original point.
This time, carrying the axe, he walked sideways relative to the thrown head.
Immediately, the maze distorted again.
Walls manifested around him in dense spirals, attempting to swallow him whole.
And at that moment, Ron noticed something crucial.
The labyrinth was branching.
Sections previously hidden behind the rigid clouds gradually revealed themselves depending on his position.
"The branching..."
Ron established three reference points.
The severed head.
The bloodstains from the entrance point.
And the axe in his hand.
The structure resembled an inverted internal Koch Fractal.
Or more precisely:
A variation of a Fractal Maze.
One could still perceive physical boundaries within this realm, but the space itself appeared to require a form of "loading."
Like a game world rendering new areas only when a player approached them.
The difference was that the trigger for loading these sections seemed to be the corpse itself.
More specifically:
The victim's body parts.
Ron also calculated that the direction indicated by the axe aligned closely with one edge of the labyrinth.
Despite being nearly equidistant from both the entrance and the thrown head, the spatial distortion behaved differently depending on direction.
Two conclusions emerged immediately.
First:
The exit likely existed either at the center or the outer edge.
Second:
The true solution lay in destroying the mana transmission core sustaining this realm.
Ron calmly picked up the axe again.
This would require preparation.
Fortunately, he was patient.
The mangled remains of the head would serve as experimental markers while he mapped the labyrinth piece by piece.
Originally, Ron intended to test whether this place possessed resurrection properties or autonomous consciousness.
Now he deemed that unnecessary.
What mattered was using the victim's blood as anchor points to navigate back toward the center.
It might take several days.
But perhaps time itself functioned differently here.
Because even now, the blood from the severed head still refused to clot.
Good.