Chapter 37 Last Time.

“Have I ever told you that I hate long distance running?” Isaac asked Lenna. They had only been running for fifteen minutes.

“Every time I made you run laps.” Lenna replied. Her aura flared again as she shrugged off the incoming scrying attempt.

“Just making sure.” Isaac said casually. He was on high alert. He could feel the drow assassins up ahead. He had informed Lenna of their presence a while ago.

“If you ran more, you would hate it less.” Lenna replied.

“Like eating vegetables?” Isaac asked with a chuckle.

Lenna frowned. “I thought you liked vegetables?”

“That’s not the-” Isaac cut his own voice off as he teleported behind the first assassin that started to move. Two crossbow bolts punched through the space that he had just been. Lenna barely managed to tilt her head to the side in time to prevent another bolt from hitting her in the eye. It skipped off her faceplate and shattered on the stone ceiling. Lenna’s sword was out and aflame just in time to cut two throwing spikes out of the air. She felt a tingle on the back of her neck and ducked while sweeping her sword in a wide arc behind her. She knew that there were invisible assassins mixed in with the visible ones. This was going to be a hard fight, even for her and Isaac.

Isaac swung with his sword at the back of the assassin’s neck. The assassin ducked and spun just in time to avoid losing his head. A few strands of his dark gray hair were sheared off. He threw a knife at Isaac. Isaac hadn’t even seen where the blade had come from. He knocked it out of the air with his sword and covered himself completely in his shadowcloak. The assassin’s eyes went wide as he jumped back and threw another knife at where Isaac had been. The knife clanged uselessly against the stone wall. He heard a cry from behind him and turned to see one of the other archers collapse to the ground.

Lenna had no delusions that she wasn’t the main target. In fact, their plan relied on it. She swept the area around her with her cone of flames and blanketed everything within a dozen feet in her aura. Two assassins were revealed as they were momentarily caught in her flames. The one tore off his cloak and then vanished again. She heard ethereal whispers coming from across the small cavern they were in and she felt some of her strength slip away and her knees momentarily feel wobbly. The cavern was not beneficial to the duo. It was the lair of some burrowing monster at some point so there were a dozen side tunnels leading out of the egg shaped space. Chunks of stone had fallen from the ceiling over the years and they had all just been pushed out of the way so the wagons could still take the path that cut through it.

Lenna would have just fireballed the cavern if Isaac had been sure that she could catch more than two of the assassins but they were using every corner, every side tunnel, and every pile of stones as cover. A dagger coated in lightning scraped across her back and her muscles threatened to seize up. She swung at the revealed assassin that she had been focusing on but he stepped into her attack. He vanished as his teleport took him to the other side of her and he went for her neck with his stiletto. The knife was designed to slip through small gaps in armor. One of the assassins whistled and clicked. A moment later the entire cavern was filled with fog.

“What I seek is thunder.” A voice came from her side. Lightning punched into her. Her right elbow was fried as all the blood vessels exploded from the vaporized blood. The rest of the lighting bolt impacted her side and she felt a burning pain spread from around her right kidney. She could hear assassins dropping one after another as Isaac ignored the fog and their invisibility. He drifted through their ranks like a vengeful spirit. Lenna found the assassin she had been tangling with again and started pressuring him again. Her right arm hung limply at her side but her left arm worked perfectly well. She was right handed but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been trained to fight without it.

Her target caught her sword swing with a shard of reality as he ducked inside of her guard. She brought her knee up with flame and aura enhanced strength. He hadn’t realized the trap until it was too late. Her knee broke his left arm as he tried to block it and her pommel came down hard on his spine. He ignored the pain and drove his knife towards her armpit. She clamped down her arm and caught his blade. He released it and pulled another out of seemingly thin air. His second blade was driving up towards the gap under her chin between her helmet and breastplate. Lenna tilted her head to the side at the last second and felt the blade slice her cheek open as it slipped between her jaw and the inside of her helmet. She let go of her sword and grabbed the side of his head. “Let my flames consume all before me.” She said with mild annoyance and disdain in her voice. She hadn’t been properly hit in the face for a long time. Sure her faceplate took plenty of damage but that was very different from taking a blade to the cheek.

The man in her grasp tried to shove off of her as his skin melted. She ignored the pain from her palm burning as she made sure to put the assassin out of commission. She was about to let go when a lightning covered dagger slipped down the side of her helmet and got caught between the helmet and collar. Lightning continued arcing through her armor as her entire body tensed. Her hand clamped down on the assassin in her grasp so hard her thumb slipped off his nose and punched through his liquified eye. Lenna knew that if she moved too much the dagger bearing down at the side of her neck would slip through and that would be the end of her. At least it would be if Isaac didn’t finish up quickly enough.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Lenna felt the dagger get yanked away and she heard the man that was behind her get tossed to the ground while gurgling his own blood. The fog was starting to settle as she felt death flames pour into her. She looked around while dropping the assassin in her grasp to the ground. Three of them still stood. One had a pair of curved swords and looked like a coiled snake. One had a limp arm and held a dagger in his other arm and the last had a nocked arrow. All three of them had their backs against a wall and were waiting for Isaac to make a move.

“I know when to call it a draw.” The twinswordsman said. “Even if we could finish you off Lady V’Nova, I know that we won’t make it out of here.” He kept glancing around as if looking for shadows in the dark.

Lenna flexed her arm and winced at the pain. She reached up and removed the knife from its place wedged between her helmet and cheek. She felt the wound close up almost instantly. Her aura flared as she rebuffed another scrying attempt. “My uncle sent you, correct?” She questioned.

“Do we have a deal?” He asked. “All five of us can walk away from here.”

“I thought so.” Lenna continued. “Which band are you?”

“Drider’s Sons.” The assassin replied.

“Oh.” Lenna said with some surprise and amusement in her voice. She felt the scrying land on her again. She let it stay this time. “Sorceress, tell my uncle this verbatim: If I had known that you were this good at making expensive mistakes, I would have killed you instead of slitting your throat.” She wasn’t just egging him on. She was being honest. If she had known how little he cared for the budget then she would have killed him just to make the cleric burn a hundred thousand gold worth of resources to revive him. Now that she actually thought about it she realized that she couldn’t have killed him anyway. He had an item that prevented a lethal attack once a day. She was surprised that the stab to the neck hadn’t triggered it. Then again, a stab to the neck wasn’t going to kill him. He was a maximum level paladin. Nothing short of cleanly removing his head would kill him in a reasonable amount of time. Lenna was slowly approaching that level of power but she felt like she still had a long way to go.

Lenna flexed her aura and shrugged off the scrying so she could focus back on the topic at hand. The assassins had all grouped up close to one of the exits. “Good fight, Lady V’Nova, we’ll take our leave now.” The lead assassin said.

The feeling of staring down the Reaper’s scythe intensified and Lenna felt the inflow of power from Isaac disappear. Isaac appeared as he walked out of his shadowcloak. The shadows dissipated behind him. “But I haven’t gotten a good fight yet.” Isaac complained and grinned like a devil getting asked to make a deal. “If you can survive against me for one minute I won’t hunt you down.” Isaac offered the assassins.

Isaac’s features were obscured by the death flames rolling off of his skin. He looked like a death flame elemental as the area around him seemed to get less dark simply from the lack of dark mana. He was burning it up at the same rate that he fought the Ori-Masa with. “Thirty seconds?” The assassin offered.

Isaac launched at them at full speed. The stone he had pushed off of was tossed away as if it were an empty wooden box. “No.” Isaac replied with a dark chuckle. The stone was the size of his torso. It shouldn’t have gone flying like a child’s kickball. Isaac went for the weakest link first. The archer was thrown into the wall with enough force that his ribs turned him into a pincushion. Isaac’s flying kick had threatened to send his boot through the man’s chest cavity.

The swordsman moved to cut off Isaac’s leg but Isaac was gone already. He danced away and then launched off of another large rock towards the one armed assassin. Isaac had specifically left those three for last. He had done so for a few reasons. One reason was that none of them were casters. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t cast any extremely low level spells but Isaac could tell that they didn’t have the mana capacity to cast a teleportation spell. The second reason was that all three of them had managed to not get killed in one hit while Isaac was completely undetectable. Their instincts were so sharp that even the smallest shadow of Isaac’s presence or killing intent was noticeable to them. He wondered how well they would be able to keep up when he was going all out. The archer had disappointed him. The third reason was the swordsman was the highest leveled assassin of the group. That didn’t necessarily mean that he was the leader but the odds were that that was the case. Isaac wasn’t sure if they would get any information out of him but it was worth a shot. Now that Lenna was done talking to him, Isaac could get a good fight.

The one armed assassin dove behind the swordsman as the swordsman tried to meet Isaac’s attack with his blades. Isaac twisted in midair as he parried one of the blades with his own that appeared in his hand. The second blade shaved a small piece of leather off of Isaac’s shin guard and elbow pad as he passed. Isaac’s boots shoved off the wall again and he rolled into a spinning ax kick without any obvious target. He teleported mid attack and drove his heel down towards the swordsman’s head. Two swords tried to meet the kick. One blade wasn’t properly aligned and the other was completely flat against Isaac’s attack. The first blade cut almost completely through Isaac’s calf before his heel hit the assassin’s collarbone. The assassin’s entire body was launched into the ground as Isaac was sent into a backflip from the counterforce. Isaac landed squarely on both feet as if he hadn’t just almost lost one of them to a magically enhanced curved sword.

Isaac threw six throwing spikes at the one armed assassin faster than the man could properly react. He deflected one of them but the rest went straight through his magically enhanced leather armor and embedded themselves in his back. He looked down at the five holes in chest and his knees gave out. Isaac strode over to the leader. “Any last words?” Isaac questioned. There was no answer. He shrugged and stood over the man. Shadows covered his blade and he swung down at the assassin’s neck. At the last moment the assassin twisted and cleanly sliced through Isaac’s ankle. Isaac’s blade still met flesh however and the assassin’s life was ended. Isaac’s vision blurred from losing a limb again. His enhanced faculties allowed him to keep himself from moving at all after being hit. He just froze there for the second it took for his ankle to knit itself back together.

Isaac started to wind down his boosting skill a moment later. “Ow.” He said and reached down to rub his ankle. “He shouldn’t have been able to move after that kick.”

“He was a sixteenth level assassin.” Lenna replied.

“Still.” Isaac grumbled. “Doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

Lenna shook her head. “Just be glad you can heal.” She told him and rebuffed another scrying attempt.

“How much mana are they wasting?” Isaac questioned.

“She has to be using the array.” Lenna explained and braced for another scrying attempt that didn’t come.

“The array?” Isaac questioned.

“It is a room full of wards and magic items for observing a battlefield and giving commands at a distance.” Lenna explained. “Wizard stuff.”

“Fair enough.” Isaac replied. Wizard stuff was pretty self explanatory. He stretched. “Well, now that that’s… you have got to be joking.” Isaac grumbled.

Lenna turned to see his face. The dread and weariness told her everything she needed to know. “Just don’t get eaten this time.” She told him.

“Hey,” Isaac shot back. “I only almost got eaten last time.”