The sounds of the Whistling Sands were getting into his mind, that was something Hassan hadn't accounted for. Most assassins, though, ignored the song of the dunes as they were high out of their minds. The tent's curtains suddenly flapped open as a man entered, the song of the Whistling Sands infiltrating the tent until the flaps closed behind him.

"Ah, Grandmaster Ragnar, we were waiting for you!" Nugar announced enthusiastically.

"Nugar, my friend!" The Loyatan met his fellow Grandmaster in an embrace. The massive man had a joyful expression. "You truly have gathered quite the army here. This cannot be called a gathering of shadows no more, but a darkness!"

Both men laughed at the wordplay heartily enough for Hassan to think he had lost some joke in translation, after all, the two were speaking in Loyatan.

"Such is the result of our new brother, Shadow Hassan." Nugar pointed at him.

"A Shadow did all of this?" Ragnar's eyes opened like plates.

"I was a prince before this," Hassan added. "And there's not much difference between our might."

"A cocky one, aren't you?" The newcomer Grandmaster responded in Ydazi.

"His words aren't without any backing," Nugar said. "You've heard about how we are teaching our assassins the magic of the imperials, right?" Ragnar nodded. "He is the one teaching all of them, and he has discovered many synergies between our magics, or vital arts as he calls them. Even if he is a Shadow and not an especially powerful cultivator, he is at the level of a Grandmaster."

"Wait, really?" Ragnar's smug collapsed after his friend confirmed Hassan's statement.

"Indeed," Hassan interjected. "I would have loved to have more time to discover the intricacies of the conjoined vital arts, but alas, we had to strike swiftly, otherwise we would have lost the prime opportunity of a disorganized enemy army."

"I wanted to ask about that, why gather all of us?" Ragnar questioned. "Is this Aaliyah as powerful as they say?"

"Even more so," the cultivator snickered. "Follow me."

Hassan removed himself from the tent and the assassins followed suit. He directed to a nearby cave where some assassins were working on a task he had handed them. Even when they had been provided many gags, more than a few inhuman screams reverberated across the cave.

"What are those wails?" Ragnar asked without portraying much worry.

The cultivator-assassin smiled and snapped his fingers, flames erupting from his hand with the gesture. A combination of assassin pyrokinesis and a simple fire-emitting technique from the flowing stance. Both could only produce sparks with his humble Nurture and Enlightenment, but when combined with one another, they turned into… something more practical.

A ball of fire spawned on top of him, illuminating the dark cave for everyone.

"Is this one of the synergies you mentioned?" The Grandmaster tried his best to not leave his mouth gaping open.

"With Nurture I can constantly burn my vitality, but those flames can only come out of my body. Thanks to Enlightenment I can, more or less, spawn them away from my main body after establishing an anchor point connected to my mind. The fire isn't very expansive, but it is certainly hot. This is the first instance of ranged attack of any of the vital arts that we have seen."

"I can see that…" Ragnar muttered with his eyes glued to the ball of fire. "If you can create more forms of non-melee ways of combat, then 'revolutionizing' Enlightenment will be a term that falls short."

All vital arts were born from the body, so no technique or skill from any of them had a way to harm from a safe distance. But once they were brought together… the squishy assassins no longer had to worry about being in harm's way.

"I can see my fire cantrips have bewildered you, but there is something you should be paying attention to." Hassan referred to Ragnar and pointed at one part of the cave.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Gods' unbent!" He cursed in Loyatan. "What are those?"

Before them lay a swarm of humanoid monsters, captured, pinned, and gagged. Assassins and common soldiers kept guard so they couldn't escape.

"Djinns," Hassan explained. "They are a type of Ydazi monster. They can mimic human speech, but they do not seem to fully understand it. The mythology around them is that they trick travelers into granting them wishes to kill them, but their preferred hunting tactics are either outright charge at travelers with their colossal legs or slowly drug them with the pheromones they have for sweat."

"Are they not human?" Ragnar asked with a hint of skepticism. "They certainly… look like it." His eyes focused on a female djinn with an exposed chest, like all other djinns. The specimen in question had long black hair and a pair of disturbingly big breasts.

More repulsive than attractive.

"They are not." The sultanzade stoically answered. "And those are the pheromones talking. Your eyes are focusing on a female one, that is why it looks human to you. Remove the tobacco from your system and look at a male one."

Ragnar did as Hassan suggested, it wasn't a problem for a Grandmaster to decide to be unaffected by the drugs they consumed, and he gasped.

"Their skins are red!"

"Any type of vital art that boosts the senses makes one more affected by the djinn's pheromones. Tobacco empathy for Enlightenment and sense stance for Nurture. It is quite easy to avoid if you are an assassin not high on tobacco or a cultivator wielding another stance, but common people are easily affected by them."

"So what are you doing with these djinns?" Ragnar questioned him.

"Beyond gathering pheromones as they can be used as either drugs for assassins or weaponry against soldiers without experience of the vital arts, there is a factor that interests me more about them," Hassan said. "Can you see their tails? Those are called stingers, and they pack quite a potent poison. Enough to down a 'jotunn' of yours."

Until he saw them in person, Hassan considered them legends. That was the problem with monsters, they were so shrouded in mysticism that it was hard to tell the truth apart from the fable.

"What creatures are there in these lands for these djinns to need such potent poison?"

"None, actually. They seldom use their poison for this reason, it makes 'hunting' too easy for them." The cultivator shrugged. "But that does not mean we cannot use it for ourselves."

Ragnar's eyes focused on a pile of barrels at the corner of the cave, and how an assassin that had recently 'milked' a djinn dropped the poison into an open barrel.

"Why do you need that much poison?" The Grandmaster questioned. "This should be more than enough to poison the whole Ydazi army."

"The army, he says." Hassan laughed and Nugar followed.

"Am I missing something?" It would seem Ragnar didn't enjoy being laughed at. "Where else would you use it?"

"To weaken a goddess, of course." The sultanzade stated as a matter of fact.

"This Aaliyah of yours?" Hassan nodded, and then Ragnar frowned in realization. "Wait, weaken? Not kill?"

"We could make her drink tence those barrels and we would only cause her a stomachache," Hassan replied. "It is not an exaggeration why people pray to her like a goddess. Unlike the pagan gods you have on Loyata, she is very much a god roaming on earth."

"Is this god…ess of yours this powerful?" Ragnar made an unnatural pause on the word that Hassan recognized as a problem of translation. Loyatan, or at least the dialect they were using didn't distinguish between gods and goddesses, they just had a neutral term that could be classified as 'divinities'.

"Even more so," the sultanzade calmly added. "We will be using every tool at our disposal. Venom, poison, pheromones, blades, lives, Shadows, Masters, Grandmasters… we will throw everything at her, and even then, I am not sure of the outcome."

Ragnar's joyful expression was substituted by one of complete seriousness. "Grandmasters are powers that can move nations."

"And Aaliyah-al-Ydaz is a power that can move the world." Those weren't words of praise, but a horrifying statement of truth. "She needs to die for this world to change, she is a paragon of stagnation and preservation of an old world."

The newcomer Grandmaster didn't elaborate on that.

Before they could continue their conversation, an assassin appeared before them in a puff of shadows.

"Grandmaster Nugar, Shadow Hassan!" She announced with a knee on the ground. Hassan recognized her as one of the reconnaissance units he had trained on the stealth and sense stances. "I bring important news!"

"Speak, assassin," Nugar said in an uncommon display of might and superiority deserving of his rank.

"Our hidden agents have heard that the leading sisters of Sadina have discovered your affiliation with the order." She informed calmly.

"What are you going to do with this information, cultivator?" Nugar asked him.

"Hmm…" Hassan rubbed his chin. "Personally? Nothing. It was just a matter of time before they found out, I did not exactly hide my trail. But they have discovered it at the perfect moment," he smiled. "That was not your whole report, was it?"

"No," the recon assassin bowed. "They have sent a sultanzade to inform the Sultanah herself about your betrayal. They expect that by informing her of how you are teaching us Nurture, Aaliyah-al-Ydaz will join the fight and will reach their encampment in a handful of days."

Nugar and Ragnar gasped at the news, especially Nugar who lost a bit of color as he was more aware of what the presence of the Heavenly Descendant implied. Hassan, on the other hand…

"Perfect," he smiled. "Now all the pieces are set on the board."