Trust was a fickle thing. “It’s just up ahead,” the first knight said. The woman behind him smiled politely. She was holding the hand of her child, a boy not more than six years old. He nearly stumbled on the rough footpath between dwellings, too narrow and out-of-the-way for the city to maintain. “Whoa, there,” the second knight said with a hearty chuckle, watching the kid regain his balance.
The knight’s laid-back attitude somewhat set the woman at ease — but only somewhat. “Still, I can’t believe you would make a base in a place like this,” she said.
“That’s how we work,” the first knight replied. “What’s a better place to build a little fort, if not right in the heart of where the criminals are?”
“I suppose that makes sense,” the woman replied. It made sense, so why did she feel uneasy?
The first knight rounded the next corner, and when the woman followed, her fears were realized: a dead end.
Her child yelped as the second knight tore him away from her hand. She made a mistake turning around to try and get her child back, as the first knight wrapped his arm around her neck. “You better shut up or the kid gets it!”
She stifled a scream, reaching out to her child who was shrinking, getting farther and farther away from her.
Jon was watching just a few meters away, just around the corner.
The knight dragging the child had his back facing Jon. The knights wore helmets that protected the back of the neck and the side of the face, and it was difficult to rip those helmets away because of the leather neck strap, so if he wanted to take him out, it should be in one go: a dagger up the chin or so.
The problem was the knight who had his back against the wall. He would have enough time to threaten to kill the woman and act on it. Jon could shoot him, but it was going to be a close call.
Solution: don’t commit to opening with a kill.
The knight with the child only saw a spinning shadow at the edge of his vision before Jon’s shoe heel met the back of the man’s helmet, knocking him forwards and disorienting him. With a pistol in hand, Jon quickly acquired the other knight in his sights and fired.
The explosive-by-default nature of this world’s ammunition meant that the knight’s face completely exploded, but also that the side of the woman’s own face was wounded in collateral proximity.
Jon was about to shoot the knight on the ground, but the man brought his hand up, and magic coursed through the air.
A force wave hit Jon square in the chest, sending him flying a short distance before his back hit the alley’s wall. Good thing it was just a short distance, so he wasn’t accelerated too much before being stopped.
Still, the Force Skill changed things. Jon didn’t know that was what it was called, but he had certainly seen it in a clash between knights and Lastifer’s mercenaries below his estate. Its primary weakness was its limited range, but in a melee in close quarters like this, that didn’t matter.
Jon dropped to the ground. Getting up on all fours, a force wave hit him again, plastering him against the wall once more. The knight steadily got up, hitting Jon with Force each and every time he looked like he was about to regain his stance.
The knight was finally on two feet. He pulled out a dagger and, hitting Jon with one last force wave, drove the dagger into Jon’s chest, erroneously believing that the man was unarmored.
The blow hurt like hell, but only a few millimeters of dagger even made it past the titanium mesh. The knight realized it was some kind of concealed armor — most likely chainmail — but he wasn’t able to pull back his dagger in time. Jon pulled the man by the arm and stepped in, twisting his arm all the while, and now their positions were reversed: the knight’s face and helmet were grinding up against the wall, while Jon was behind him, pinning him against it.
The knight’s other hand was free, however, and he fired a force wave backwards, punting Jon into the dead end alley.
That, however, was a mistake. Jon tumbled across the rough ground, but he managed to control his tumble into a roll, and the moment his feet found the ground, he pushed himself up and pulled out a pistol in the same motion, shooting and hitting the knight in the chest, blasting out a portion of his armor.
It only blasted out the armor, but the searing heat still got to the knight. With a pained scream, he fired off another force wave at Jon, knocking him against the dead end wall and he slid down off of it, ending in a slumped posture. He pulled out another pistol, but the knight was quick, firing off a sustained force wave and pinning Jon’s pistol hand against the wall.
The knight approached while drawing his sword. He hurried the last few steps and hacked down at Jon’s head.
With [Summon Scribetool], a fountain pen blipped into Jon’s free hand, and with the precision of [Perfect Motion] and a small part of his life sacrificed for magic, he caught the sword perfectly between the tines of the fountain pen, killing the sword’s momentum and breaking it into pieces with magic.
The suddenness threw the knight off balance, sending him barreling into Jon. He took the knight into a chokehold, placed the pistol up through the gap below his helmet, and fired.
***
[I think that man’s name was “Kevin.” Well, anyway, he only has one Skill.]
Name: Jon Fuze
Level: 5
Kills: 72 → 74
Kills to Next Level: 22 / 25 → 24 / 25
Skill Proofs: 2
| Skill Claims |
> Hastened Sight (Unlocks Lvl. 10)
> Aerial Lockbox (Unlocks Lvl. 15)
> Force (Unlocks Lvl. 10)
| Skills |
> Summon Scribetool (Tier 1)
> Perfect Motion (Tier 1)
***
In front of him, the woman took her crying child into her arms. He got up and dusted himself off, before taking out a messenger letter and writing out a short report of what had just happened.
There were traitors within the Order. He folded the letter into a paper plane, threw it into the air, and watched it soar into the sky, beyond the roofline of the alley, to seek out the priestess.
While waiting, he exchanged looks with the woman, who was holding her child tight. The left side of her face had been burned by Jon’s bullet, but her eyes held no resentment for it.
Soon, the priestess’s reply came:Dear four white-hooded assassins, faces disguised by wooden masks. They dropped down from the surrounding roofs.
Thinking they were here to “clean up,” Jon was almost ready to fight to the death. Although he stood tall to seemingly pose no threat on the off-chance that he was misunderstanding things, his right foot was already behind him, and his subconscious was already making tactical calculations.
Instead, the assassin he faced produced a letter from their sleeve. When he took it, he noticed a blade inside the sleeve. The assassin discreetly rotated their wrist to hide it.
As soon as Jon took the letter, the assassin hurried away. He opened it.
***
Dear Mr. Fuze,
I was afraid that was the case. We must keep this between us so as not to alert the remaining traitors. If at all possible, I implore you to find them and bring them to justice, dead or alive.
I will increase the reward. I am truly sorry to trouble you.
***
Instead of being something he needed to do "if possible," it was something he had to do. He'd already decided to kill off the city's last slave ring, and the fact that double-faced members of the Order turned out to be part of it only meant that he had to kill them, too.
"Reaper," an assassin called out to him. He looked up from the letter, seeing a note sandwiched between the assassin's fingers. "It was on the body."
… ↑→↑★
Next he looked up, the assassins were gone, along with the woman and child, and the bodies of the two knights.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
With only the note to go on, Jon left the dead end and went deeper into the alleys — into the slums. The old houses and tenement housing soon turned into shacks and sheds, arranged in meandering footpaths that could be scarcely called streets.
There weren’t any junctions for a long time. As he headed straight, he could feel eyes on him — people wondering what an outsider was doing in a place like this. They were on guard, while others pitied Jon for straying into this kind of place. This was a place filled with dangerous men who would sooner shank him than ask for his belongings nicely.
But dangerous men knew dangerous men, and no one showed their faces to him. Well, it could just be the gun in his hand.
He found his first junction, then turned right. The next junction came sooner, so he turned left.
As he walked past dwellings, he kept his eyes open for anything that could serve as a signal — something that essentially shouted “this is the place.”
He found it in the form of a dirty rag hanging from the top of a closed door, whose frame was flush against the footpath. The rag had a little star marked on it with charcoal. Wasn’t it a little too obvious? From the outside, the place was nothing more than a shed. He didn’t think it would be magically far larger inside, though he didn’t dismiss the possibility.
Standing aside, he knocked twice on the door, pointing his pistol straight at where the door would open and where someone might peek through. “It’s Ernie,” he announced. There wasn’t any answer. He stood in front of the door and kicked it in, rushing inside.
There was no one home. The inside was really just a shed, after all, apart from the human-sized cage.
Still, the collector was supposed to be coming around today. After stealing whatever documents he could, he left the shed. He made sure to close the door and hang the rag.
Now, he just needed a place to hide and wait for the collector.
“Psst. Hey,” someone called out to him. He snapped his head towards the neighboring billet, its door slightly ajar. A dirty face peeked through, and the man who owned that face gestured for Jon to come closer. “You’ze hunting ‘em down, right? That uncle’s near by now! You can wait here!”
Though Jon was a little wary of the man, he had heard that the Order had been getting by on tips from the locals to hunt down the slave rings. They must have operated with shameless impunity to earn this much enmity from them.
Jon squeezed his way through the billet’s narrow door. Inside was two hammocks, one on either side, and a little fire burning under a pot against a stubby wall of bricks saddled up against the “far” wall.
One hammock was empty. The other had a little child, dressed with nothing more than an oversized shirt.
“That’s m’sister’s kid,” the man said. Jon took a good look at him. He must’ve not had a bath in months. “I haven’t seen m’sister in months, y’see.”
Jon realized what he meant, and why he was doing what he was doing.
“Liddy, be real quiet for a minute, okay?” the man told his niece. Once he got a nod from the kid, he turned to Jon. “Uncle comes around’s the same one, every few days. Black vest, brown pants, fugly as hell, bit o’ hair left over his ears” —
He went quiet, then there were footsteps outside the door. The footsteps stopped. The man pointed at the door and mouthed, that’s ‘im.
The man outside the door scratched his head as he spotted the rag hanging from the safehouse door. “The hell, they ain’t back? Geh, ain’t my ass getting handed to me.”
After he muttered, his footsteps disappeared from Jon’s hearing. The man with him held up two hands, counting down from 8 fingers. Once he hit zero, he opened the door. “He went right — he always goes right! Hunt ‘im down, mister.”
Jon nodded, peeked around the door frame, then set off with light feet.
The man he ended up following was exactly as the poor man had described. He ended up tailing him all the way to the main base.
For an elusive organization, their counter-intelligence was virtually non-existent — or so he thought to himself. What he didn’t know was that they did have lookouts all along their collectors’ routes, elite ones at that. They each had the Identify skill, which showed them someone’s name and affiliation.
No one in their right mind in the underworld messed with the Theater. With self-preservation in their minds, they abandoned their posts and never looked back.
Jon followed the collector, stopping behind the last corner before the back door of their supposed base. Peeking around the corner, he spotted the collector speaking to another man, one donning a gray gambeson and butting a spear against the ground. He noted that the guard's colors were of the city guard's, but he couldn't spot any identifying heraldry.
The collector went inside. A heavy wooden door blocked off the path behind him. The base was encircled by a tall cobblestone wall, much taller than the slums they kept out.
The wind blew in Jon's direction, and it smelled of horse manure. This was probably the back door.
His problem now was that it was a narrow stretch between him and the guard. There was too much distance for him to just charge, and gunfire would alert the base's occupants.
The guard leaned on the wall beside the door, rather bored. Jon decided to risk charging at the guard and taking him out that way; gunfire was just too much of a risk. When he peeked again, however, the guard was hanging by a rope, his legs flailing around, weakening … stopping.
A familiar white-hooded assassin dropped down from the adjacent roof. He was just the right height to be the same man as the one who'd handed him the note.
They met eyes. He knew Jon was there.
Jon came out, strolling up to the base's back door, meeting the assassin before it.
"Rest assured, reaper," the assassin said, "this is just a coincidence."
Jon looked him up and down. "Right."
"It very much is. We have been tasked to root out corruption in the city, and this was where our path took us, crossing yours."
Jon found it a little redundant for the Order to have their own assassins. He had the impression that they were the types who played by the book. Well, that, or…
He eyed the assassin. "Everyone in there a valid target?" he asked, pulling a pistol.
"Barring the ones in cages," the assassin replied. (A/N: Pun intended.) He turned around, but then turned back. "It would do us a favor if you caused a ruckus here. My comrades will slip between the chaos and deal a critical blow to their defenses."
With that, the assassin ran up against the wall, running up the entire height of its face and finally disappearing over the top.
There wasn't much to be said anymore. Jon, with a pistol in each hand, kept his guns close to his chest as he cautiously pushed the heavy door, cracking it open by the right edge.
He spotted two guards playing cards 10 meters away. From what he could see, the door opened to a back alley behind a larger building — the stables, by the smell of it. The assassin from earlier must have jumped to its roof from the top of the wall.
He could only see the right side. The problem now was that he couldn't see if there weren't any guards to the left once he busted in.
He holstered one pistol, switching it out for a grenade.
Putting magic into the grenade, it began to smoke, and after two seconds, he cracked the door open and tossed it at the guards playing cards. The blast completely obliterated the two, liberating them from their lower torsos.
Jon busted in, checking left and shooting the bewildered guard who was still frozen from the sight of two of his comrades turning into smoking giblets.
The horses in the stable were panicking, kicking at their enclosures. Guards woke up and got to their feet as a tin bell started clanging, alerting the entire base.
Once more, Jon threw a grenade down the alley, but he ran the other way. The shouts behind him were cut off by the following explosion.
The corner of the stable was coming up, so he slowed down and distanced himself from the corner. He already saw the shadow of the person coming up, so he took the initiative and rushed around the corner, shooting the guard who'd come rushing in with a rifle.
There was a second guard with him, however, one who was hugging the wall of the stable, and so Jon never saw his shadow. He took aim at Jon, firing his rifle, but missing the shot as Jon rolled and kicked the muzzle of the rifle upwards. He drew his knife and cut at the man's throat in one stroke.
He drew a pistol and, sure enough, there was a guard, 15 meters away, already coming to a stop and taking aim. Jon fired first, getting the man in the shoulder, throwing off his aim and his own shot hit the wall over Jon's head.
With 15 meters between them, it became a contest of reloading speed. Jon flicked open his pistol, plugged in a cartridge, and aimed at the man, who had just unbuttoned the cartridge bag strapped to his waist.
Jon shot him and moved on, rushing forwards. He took his last grenade, expecting a rifle platoon lined up and waiting to meet him.
He cautiously peeked around the corner. Running through the middle of the base was a single road. On either side of the road was the stable he was peeking from, and on the opposite was some sort of barracks.
Although there wasn't a rifle platoon in the middle of the road, Jon still pulled his head back, and just in time. The corner he was peeking from exploded in a shower of splinters and flames. Riflemen took aim at him from the windows of the barracks 20 meters across the road.
With this, Jon couldn't think of a way to confront them. He ran back to whence he came, but when he rounded the corner, he was surprised to find a rifle squad beside the back door, taking aim at him.
He slid and scrambled back to cover. Bullets exploded the ground around him and the wall behind him. There weren't any windows to climb through here. He was stuck.
Just then, the alarm bell went silent. Jon rushed back to the corner opening to the barracks, and, ever so cautiously — just to confirm something — he took a peek.
He saw a flash of white through one of the windows of the barracks. There were gurgles and sparse gunshots.
He primed his last grenade and threw it behind him. He left the corner, rushing to the wall of the barracks while a shout and a blast shook the air behind him.
He climbed in through a window, checking the room and stepping on the ankle of the dead body in the room, making sure the guard was dead. He made his way past the cots and exited to the hallway, finding no one. He went up the stairs where he guessed the officers' quarters would be.
There were three opened doors in the hallway ahead. As he advanced, he checked through each door, finding only streaks of blood painting the walls around dead guards in the first two rooms.
In the third room, he found two assassins around a table. One of them was flipping through a book's page.
Jon went inside, diligently checking his corners and checking inside the closet. The room was too gaudy, he finally noticed. The closet was filled with expensive clothes, and the carpet under the table in the middle of the room didn't have any of the local patterns on it. The table itself was carved too nicely, and the bedposts under the window were the same.
He realized he didn't know who these two assassins were. The man he was familiar with must have been sent away on a different mission.
"Reaper," one of the assassins called, looking up from the book. "We may need your assistance once more."
***
Name: Jon Fuze
Level: 5 → 6
Kills: 74 → 88
Kills to Next Level: 24 / 25 → 13 / 30
Skill Proofs: 2 → 3
| Skill Claims |
> Hastened Sight (Unlocks Lvl. 10)
> Aerial Lockbox (Unlocks Lvl. 15)
> Force (Unlocks Lvl. 10)
| Skills |
> Summon Scribetool (Tier 1)
> Perfect Motion (Tier 1)
***