The assassins began looting the cargo hold of viable weapons, co-opting anything from swords, chef's knives, and even chains.
Whereas the slaves' holding area was at the fore, the sole ramp to get in and out of the cargo hold was to the aft. A pair of guards came marching down to check on the slaves, but the moment they stepped off the ramp, a pair of chains shot out from either side and wrapped around their necks.
The sheer force of three people yanking on a chain and reeling in their prey was enough to snap the guards' necks from the sheer whiplash of hitting the floor, spared no opportunity to brace themselves. Still, the assassins didn't stop there, dragging their bodies into the shadows and cutting their throats.
Jiraya smirked. His men hadn't lost their touch, even while their bodies were like this, shriveled up like sun-dried raisins. Even without their usual physical strength, they displayed good teamwork; at one-third of their usual strength, then it went without saying that they should work in teams of three.
"After you," Jiraya gestured. Jon found this a strange thing to do in the heart of enemy territory, but Jiraya wouldn't be the first strange man he'd encountered. Some were much stranger.
"By the way," Jiraya said just as Jon took his first step on the ramp, "I'd heard the guards gossiping about a special weapon in the captain's quarters."
Jon narrowed his eyes on the man. Was he trying to misdirect him? Was it a real gesture of appreciation? Did he have a personal grudge he wanted to settle without Jon's interference? Whichever way, as long as it didn't get in the way of the mission… "You'll do more work," he said.
Jiraya chuckled for a fleeting moment. "We're used to it. I'm sure someone like you can use that weapon better than me."
Jon wordlessly turned around and climbed the ramp with light steps.
The deck above was filled with swaying hammocks and sleeping men amidst nets, bundles of rope, and wooden barrels of what could either be flare-sand or beer. It was slightly brighter here, with little lamps dotting the aisles, but most of them were covered to let the crew sleep. The cannons — breechloading things mounted on thick wooden carriages — had been pulled back, and the gun ports closed to keep the salt from rusting them.
From here, there were two ramps to the upper deck: one right on top of the one they just used, and another to the fore. Beyond the fore ramp were doors to the officers' quarters, and more than likely, also the captain's.
"Don't do magic around the blue ones," Jiraya whispered beside him, referring to the barrels near the cannons. Neither fire nor a hammer's blow would ignite the flare-sand stored within, and so just leaving them around like this was mostly okay, but a stupid mage activating a spell in here? It was like smoking right beside a propane tank.
It wouldn't explode, necessarily — that's what the special barrels were meant to prevent, shielding the flare-sand from stray mana — but if you had a smidgen of a sense of responsibility, you still wouldn't do it.
Jiraya's assassins rushed forward like veiled death, slitting throats and turning snores into choking and gurgles.
It was discomforting for Jon. It wasn't the type of style he was familiar with, but, well, this was how assassins originally were supposed to be. He was just loud compared to most, and he preferred the moral surety of knowing that his opponent was truly out to get him — not that moral uncertainty was enough to stop him from pulling the trigger when it counted.
He walked past the bodies. They were still swinging in their hammocks, rocked by the boat itself, but blood dripped on the floor below them. Ahead of him, the assassins continued their deadly work.
He was unsure whether they could keep up this pace. It was clear the assassins were highly trained and used to wetwork, but they were skin and bones; their physical stamina couldn't possibly keep up much longer. They might just be subsisting on sheer willpower alone.
As if to stub him in his mind's toe, someone slipped up at that exact moment, knocking over a lamp from the top of a barrel — just when they were halfway through the deck!
Some of the nearby men stirred, but after a few bated breaths, it ended up that they ignored it in favor of getting more sleep.
…Things getting knocked over in a rocking boat was something that happened all the time. If soldiers on the frontlines of a modern war could sleep through an artillery barrage, then something like this was well within reality.
Unfortunately, not everyone on the deck had been asleep. A particular trio had been playing cards further down, and they weren't so lethargic on this boring night that the sound of a metal lamp hitting the floor, the cover over its light stone swinging open and closed — causing the lamp to flash like a strobe — wouldn't get their attention.
The lamp's cover ended up staying open once it settled down — revealing the chicken legs of a slave, whose feet left bloody footprints behind him.
All at once, the other assassins sprung into action. Chains were thrown, and one of them found their mark, wrapping around the neck of a sailor. While he was pulled and dragged into the darkness, sliding slick over the blood of his comrades, another two assassins grappled with another sailor, gagging and shaking him.
The two hapless crew bought only enough time for the third to unsheathe a saber, but that was all. A hand went around his mouth, then a red saber erupted from his chest, red from his own blood.
Props to the malnourished assassins for trying to maintain their stealth in this sort of situation. Unfortunately, the whole commotion made too much noise: from the rattling of the chains, the muffled screams of panic and pain of the sailors, the incessant thwacking of shivs in and out of flesh, and a whole host of things being knocked onto the floor.
Another sailor stirred, getting up to complain. "Hey! Keep it down — " He stopped speaking, his eyes wide, waking up to find four blood-drenched killers surrounding his hammock and staring into his soul in the middle of the night.
All he could do was scream and die as they killed him like they did everyone else. His scream, however, lasted just long enough to alert everyone else nearby.
In a fit of damage control, the assassins scampered to kill more people faster. They got sloppier as the seconds passed, and they couldn't stop the crew from screaming as they died anymore, becoming a viral progression of a sailor’s stifled scream waking up more of his crewmates two hammocks over.
Eventually, the crew's feet started to touch the floor right before they died; a moment later, the crew started to unsheathe their swords right before they died; the moment after, the crew started to fight back, swinging their swords and fists a few times...right before they died.
Alas, too many of the crew stirred awake too fast, and the assassins found themselves in the midst of a bloody scuffle. An assassin would stab someone, but then a sailor would surprise them from behind, holding them by the arms to let their fellow crew slug the assassin in the face, only for the man winding up for a right hook to himself get shanked in the neck by a nearby assassin.
It should be noted that catkin were superior fighters in the dark. They took every opportunity to cut off whatever light sources there were, sending the plainly human crew’s fear of the dark skyrocketing amidst the bloodied gurgles and stifled cries of their mates.
Still, there were a lot of crew. In plain view of everyone, one assassin had been restrained and beaten to death. His comrades avenged him soon after, but he was very much dead. Had he been healthier, he would’ve been able to withstand weeks of torture.
Jon finally reached the edge of the fighting. The assassins had been so stealthy, so what happened? Screw-ups happened all the time, that much he knew, and it was all that he could do now to just kill anyone in the way.
It was too dark for him, however, so he picked up a fallen lamp and lit the way forwards for himself. Though this made him a target for the crew, and a liability for the catkin assassins, it allowed him to do one thing: terrify everyone.
Those assassins and crew at the peripheries of the chaos were able to see Jon beat a man with the lamp, gripping it and bashing it down like a rock. When a sailor landed a punch on Jon’s face, he smiled in elation — he’d landed a hit! ... But Jon’s head barely turned at such a weak punch, and he bashed that sailor’s head down, causing him to bend one way, then kicked up at his chin, making him bend the other. He was dead before he hit the floor.
Unlike the catkin, who moved dexterously and strived to go for the jugular — in both metaphorical and literal senses — Jon was someone who had mastered the art of tanking hits and dealing far more damage than he received. Before they could dismiss him as just another ruffian who pretended to be an assassin, three sailors surrounded him. In a blink and a flurry of movement, two of the sailors fell over grasping their own necks, and another flew face first against a nearby cannon.
When did he pull out a dagger! The assassins and crew adjusted their evaluation of him, though it was only the assassins who more accurately judged the real danger that Jon represented.
Just like this, Jon cut through the crew, killing four other men in straightforward manners: a kick, a cut, ... a shoulder throw over a cannon to break the man’s spine? Using a hammock to entangle and asphyxiate a man?
The sheer unrealism of how he dispatched his enemies finally made one of the sailors at the back snap out of it. He and his friends had been so engrossed by the fight, so convinced that they were surrounded, that they didn’t realize that there was a moonlit path of escape in the form of stairs right behind them. One sailor started running for the stairs, which Jon noticed.
He pulled out a gun. A sailor took the chance to strike with an iron pry bar. Jon changed targets, avoiding the man’s attack, then leveraging his arm, breaking it, then throwing him at another sailor, shooting them when their heads were side-by-side; the explosive round did the rest.
He looked back to the stairs. The retreating sailor was gone, and in his place were a pair of Kittari mercenaries making their way down the ramp.
They were bronze-colored scarves and baggy beige pants. Their sleeves reached until their wrists, loose and flappy, but they were mirror armor over their torsos, like wearing a buckler over one’s chest, and little steel squares everywhere else.
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One held a small square shield in one hand and a short, thick sword in the other. The other merc held some kind of thick push dagger.
The Kittari seemed to be fans of thick steel. It would’ve amused Jon, were it not for the fact that it meant he would destroy his weapons were he to try to brusquely clash with them.
He and the Kittari made eye contact, identifying each other as the most dangerous enemies. The Kittari spoke in a foreign language, shouting details and orders. The sailors seemed to understand them, getting out of the way as they made a beeline for Jon.
The sailor closest to Jon fearfully backed away, pushing himself against the hull of the ship as the Kittari charged. The one with the push dagger committed to a deep thrust, and the second one was primed to make a horizontal cut to catch Jon as he evaded the push dagger.
He’d expected that, which was why he dodged closer to the first Kittari warrior, grabbing his arm with one hand, while the other hand flicked forward with a pistol that caught the second warrior at the end of a muzzle.
The ensuing gunshot killed the second warrior, while the first warrior’s sensitive catkin ears bled from having been right beside it. The momentary disorientation gave generous maneuver time for Jon to whip the warrior with the spent pistol, striking him once, sending a thin streak of blood arcing through the air, and then twice, joggling the man’s brain enough to kill him.
More mercenaries flooded down the ramp: five, in all, and there were sure to be more very soon.
The situation was bleak. Even if right now, the assassins were holding their own against the remaining crew, the Kittari mercenaries who were rushing here weren’t on the same level. Just a while ago, the two mercs fought with practiced coordination. It might not have been complex coordination, but any amount of coordination was enough to make a world of difference in front of untrained or isolated opponents.
For now, Jon was neither, but his accomplices would all soon fall at this rate. It was all he could do to stand his ground and take down as many of the mercs as he could. If it ended up that he was the last man standing, he’d have no choice but to jump ship and live to see another day — failing his mission.
A flash of shadow passed beside him, impacting against the five newly arrived mercs. Three of them were already falling when Jon looked, spurts of their blood showering the man who had drawn a cutlass in their midst. The fourth mercenary was flying backward, his shield broken and his back crashing against the fifth.
Jiraya looked back at Jon. “Get the weapon in the captain’s quarters!”
Jon doubted him. Why was he placing so much hope in Jon acquiring that weapon? If he knew what it was, why not just tell him directly?
The short of it was: Ravena had a strange hobby. Even Jiraya was screaming in his heart, “Why can’t I just tell him what it is! Lady! Why!” It was at this moment that he understood the motivations of those who dared to directly oppose the Sisters.
“What are you just standing there for? Go!” Jiraya shouted again. His strikes were heavy against the blades and armor of the mercenaries, and more were descending from the ramp, joining the fray below.
Although Jon hesitated, he sprinted, making full use of the opening Jiraya gave him. He knew full well that without him there, the assassins would start taking casualties at an even faster rate — but even with him there, they would have started dying off one by one anyway, just slower.
Jon went past the ramp, coming upon three doors; the one in the middle had much more ornate carving.
He drowned out the sounds of men clashing and dying behind him with sheer focus and will. In a situation as desperate as this, he only had one thought:
— Get the weapon. Kill ‘em all.
There was a tinge of being pissed at the end there, but he pushed the emotion down — and kicked the door above the keyhole.
He only had angry eyes as he watched a thin chain come flying out towards him, wrapping around his neck. The first thing he felt was a profound sense of disappointment, then the sensation of flying, hitting the floor, and getting dragged across the floor.
He stopped sliding, coming face-to-face with the heel of an infuriated captain, who screamed “Die, rascal!” before his heel came down. Jon just barely managed to curl his body and move his head away, avoiding the stomp, earning more of the captain’s annoyance.
Jon thought he could do the same thing on the captain’s second stomp, but an invisible force pulled his neck down like a garrote. In the corner of his vision, the chain leading up to the captain’s hand, wrapped around his wrist, floated in an ethereal way.
Magic, he realized. Before the captain’s heel came down, Jon grabbed the chain hanging above him, coursed magic through it, then pulled hard. He only knew that magic interacted with magic, not how the interaction would play out. Still, it was either that, or the captain’s oddly sharp heel.
Luckily, the effect was to cancel out the chain’s magical properties. It had become an ordinary chain, and with Jon pulling hard, the captain was thrown off balance from an unexpected direction. The tension around Jon’s neck relaxed, allowing him to curl away from the captain’s panicked stomp before watching the man stagger away.
Jon got to his feet in an instant. There was still a bit of chain wrapped around his neck, and the other end was still wrapped around the captain’s wrist. They met each other’s eyes — and played a tug-of-war.
It was more dangerous for Jon, whose neck was on the line, but he proved to be physically superior. In a panic, the captain started coursing more mana through the chain, and it slowly tightened around Jon’s neck.
It had become a magical tug-of-war — and Jon was a man of sheer will and concentration, making him one of the most powerful mages on the planet, the only one capable of the concentration necessary to unleash a dragon-killing spell, even if it would instantly kill him. Though, the man himself didn’t realize any of this.
The moment he realized that control of the chain could be established just by exerting more magic on it, the chain tightened around the captain’s wrist — painfully so. Panic took over his eyes, and his concentration slipped, weakening his magic and his control of the chain along with it. He started to writhe, falling to a knee from the pain of the chain around his wrist; he gritted his teeth; bones broke; he screamed.
The captain lost every bit of concentration he had left, and the chain totally crushed his wrist like it was a water bottle. Jon willed the chain to come loose from his own neck, letting it find a new home around his arm.
The chain pulled the captain closer to Jon, who drew a knife and stabbed him once through the eye, succinctly, without letting the blade linger inside.
The captain slumped aside. Jon examined the chain; no doubt, this must be the weapon Jiraya was talking about. He experimented with it for a few seconds, confirming its capabilities and limits for himself: each link could be independently manipulated, though it would pull others along with it, so an intuition of chain physics would be needed for effective usage — no problem on that front.
He left the captain’s quarters, returning to the fray.
Outside, there was a receding trail of dead bodies moving further down the deck, until it stopped at an undulating brawl of Kittari ears. Jon could see glints of their steel some 20 meters away...which wasn’t even halfway to the other end of the ship.
Why weren’t they further away? Why did Jiraya see the need to stand their ground? It struck Jon that there were two points of entry from the top deck. The mercs must have come in from behind while he was gone.
The cries of his accomplices were becoming desperate. They weren’t cries of fear, but of pain; those men and women were real killers. They wouldn’t know fear even until their last moments.
The enemies all had their backs to Jon. They didn’t even know their captain was dead, and anyone who even knew that Jon existed was already dead, helpfully taken out by Jiraya to help create this exact scenario.
Jon kept the chain wrapped around one arm. He took out Lastifer’s dagger and willed the other end of the chain to wrap around its handle and hilt.
A dusty corner of his heart felt a little excited, but he didn’t know what that strange little emotion meant. No one could tell him this was what a normal boy felt when given cool new toys.
He walked forward, passing the ramp. Two mercenaries were climbing down at that same moment, surprised when they saw Jon’s outline move through the shadows, but only for a moment. Jon sent the chain-and-dagger towards them, and it whipped between them, the dagger slicing each of their necks in quick succession.
The thuds of the mercs’ falling bodies alerted a handful of the ones at the rear of the fight blob further down the deck. One of them charged at Jon, but Jon darted the chain-and-dagger at his eye, killing him instantly.
A second one attacked. The chain pulled the dagger out and, like a tentacle, darted towards the merc. Having witnessed the chain killing his comrade, he raised his shield in expectation, successfully fending off the initial attack — but the chain quickly snaked under his shield, driving the dagger up through his chin.
A third, fourth, and fifth attacked together with hope in their hearts that at least one of them would be able to reach Jon — mistakenly assuming that the chain-and-dagger was a single-target weapon, foolishly forming a straight line, and wholeheartedly underestimating Jon’s creative capacity.
Two sections of the chain twisted and coiled into loops, then the dagger-end of the chain shot forwards, hitting the man at the very back in the chest. Meanwhile, the two loops ensnared the two other mercs, the chain dropping over their shoulders, then all of a sudden snapping taut, constricting their necks. All the while, the merc at the rear managed to pull out the dagger, but now he was bleeding from his chest while wrestling with the end of a chain-and-dagger like it were a snake.
He lost strength, however, and the dagger sunk into his chest once more, dealing the final blow between his ribs, straight into his heart. At the same time, the two other mercs went limp, then there were pops from their necks.
For a moment, there was a glint of satisfaction from having mastered a new and difficult weapon — but he hurried to push the feeling down.
The last thing he needed was to feel satisfaction over killing people. He felt disgusted with himself just for having felt it for a fleeting moment.
He continued walking. They kept coming. He kept killing them...and he was just walking.
It was too easy. He never liked killing; now he never will.
Jon approached the last merc on this side, who continued to face the whittled-down group of assassins with a warrior’s spirit. However, his comrades further behind the assassins — the mercs’ second attack group, who had earlier helped to catch the assassins in a pincer — started to flee back to the end of the ship.
The last merc saw this, utterly confused, and when he turned around, he saw the reason. Jon was standing between dead bodies, and there was very little blood pooling around them, as if he’d simply sucked out their souls and killed them that way. Of course, this was just his efficiency, but to the merc, it was as if he was staring at a real reaper.
He was frozen, waiting for Jon to kill him. Jiraya’s blade did it, instead, a slash of incredible strength cutting into his skull and killing him instantly.
Only four of the assassins remained, including Jiraya. Their tribe was on the verge of going extinct right here. “We can’t thank you enough,” Jiraya said. He and his tribe would have rather died in Her Highness’s service than here. The punishment the king had handed them was a befitting torture for them, in that sense.
They weren’t out of the woods yet. There were shouts from outside, and then boots running around on the deck above them.
Something started clanging, and Jon’s eyes tracked the source to a pipe coming down from the top deck, affixed to a thick post, seemingly as some sort of voice pipe.
A spherical grenade popped out of the rather wide mouthpiece, smoking like a hot pan put under a stream of water.
Jon used the chain to grab it and push it back up out the other end of the voice pipe.
There were shouts, then an explosion. If that didn’t alert the mercs on the wharf, nothing would.
***
Name: Jon Fuze
Level: 6 → 7
Kills: 89 → 116
Kills to Next Level: 14 / 30 → 11 / 35
Skill Proofs: 3 → 4
| 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)
***