RIP To Assassin’s Creed’s Best NPC, A Real One

In gargantuan games full of quests and characters, it’s hard for a single moment to really stand out. Ubisoft has made a career out of it, with landscapes dotted with activities that rock you in a sort of dreamy adventure mist; when you come you know that Something happened, but you would be hard pressed to choose details. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla contains at least one exception: a guy with an ax in his head.

Guy with an ax in his head, who the game pragmatically calls “Axehead,” is an early-game side quest NPC who spawns in the Grantebridgescire area of ​​England. When I met him he was sitting on a stump. There was an ax in his head. If you saw a person sitting on a stump with an ax sticking out of their head, you would talk to them. So I spoke to him.

“Excuse me, I have a slight pain. Did you notice anything on my head? It’s an itch or a cut that just won’t go away, ”he says.

Eivor, still nimble, danced around the elephant in the room. “It appears to be… a battle scar,” she replied.

“Ah, as I suspected. It must be from my most recent battle. You should see the other man. He’s had the worst, ”Axehead, who to be clear had an ax in his head, replied without a hint of irony in his voice.

That’s when I knew this guy and I were going to be best friends – for how many minutes or seconds he had left.

Finally, I told Axehead that there was an ax in his head. He hasn’t even beat an eyelash, because he’s the truest motherfucker to ever walk on this Earth.

“Ah, Valhalla, that’s right,” he said when I told him I would pull the ax, but it would definitely kill him. “I appreciate your frank response. Now I am preparing for the sights and sounds of the cadaver room.

A prompt appeared next to him. “Pull out the ax,” he said. But he continued to chat in his pleasant and resigned cadence. He told me there was a meadhall nearby, and that we could go there and blow up and tell stories from our glory days. We didn’t go to a mead hall – we haven’t moved from that place – but it got into a story nonetheless. As he spoke, his speech and his thoughts seemed to fragment.

“That windy battle day, I was inside a shield wall… and my wife walked into the shield wall… naked… and started singing,” he said. . “O… we were so young… so very nimble in our minds and in our ways.

Strange story! And maybe not something that actually happened either? But it was a perfect fit for Axehead, an incredibly normal dude who briefly became a person of extreme interest because he took an ax to his head, to get out. Most of us will probably either say, “Wha—[sound of getting crushed by a car/boulder/piano]Or something deeply embarrassing before you die. Axehead, real as he comes to the end, did the latter and managed to throw in an unexpected depth for good measure.

He and I both knew, at the time, that it wasn’t going to get any better than this. I pulled the ax from his head.

“All your enemies have been killed,” said Eivor. “Now rejoice.”

For a split second, Axehead, who no longer had an ax in his head, stared at the ax that had, for the time that I knew him, formed his entire identity – and a significant part of his head. Then he collapsed.

And that was it. Thus concluded the Axehead saga. Its story has not been one for ages. It was quite refreshing, the story of someone like me dying if I was suddenly immersed in an era of Vikings and wolves attacking you on sight for no reason. The parallel quest was an example of efficiency Assassin’s Creed simplified his approach to adventure – how if you see a little green colored dot on your compass you can be sure you’re up for something at least slightly interesting – but Axehead was just a guy, extraordinary in its ordinary. Unlike every other guy that I have met in these games, I will remember him. It will remain in my memory, like an ax lodged in gray matter. RIP to a real one.

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