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The Headless Swordsman is a ghost adversary of Swords of Legends and one of the five encounters that made up the 2026 Offline Playtest build. It sits early in the run, immediately after the tutorial, and it is the fight where the hero first takes a summoned ally into battle rather than fighting alone.
A Blade in Every Hand
The character is a decapitated swordsman that has kept fighting, and the design turns the missing head into an extra weapon rather than a wound. Both hands carry a sword, and the severed head floats free in the air carrying a third, so the hero is reading three blades at once from three separate positions. Players described the swordplay as eerie and unusually graceful rather than brutish, and warned that inattention costs two hits rather than one, because a strike can arrive from an angle a two-armed opponent could not cover.
Official store screenshots published in August 2026 show the encounter directly. The hero, sword drawn, faces the ghost in a dense stand of bamboo; the ghost holds a blade in each hand and its own severed head hangs in the air at the tip of one of them.
Where the Fight Sits
In the hands-on build the Headless Swordsman follows the opening tutorial against Ox-Head, and it is the encounter that puts the newly recruited companion to work. Ox-Head fights alongside the hero here, drawing attacks and absorbing a share of the damage, which makes this the first fight in the build where the Spirit Companion System is doing something rather than being explained. Clearing it opened the run out, and players could then pick between the three remaining encounters.
A Class of Being, Not a One-Off
The headless war-ghost is not an invention for this one fight. The game's own Chinese store copy names headless ghosts as one of the kinds of being the hero meets over the course of the story, listed alongside flower-spirits and the beauties with painted skin, so the encounter is a representative of a whole category of adversary rather than a single named character. That places it with the rest of the bestiary described under World and Setting, which draws its creatures from classical Chinese strange-tale literature.
No name beyond the description has been published for this particular swordsman, and the studio has not said whether the fight recurs later in the finished game. The other encounters shown so far are collected under Bosses.