A fireplace crackled as a thug fell dead with a smoking hole in his chest, his back landing on an expensive carpet, his fingers twitching one last time before they stilled. Standing over him was a bearded man, wearing a gold-trimmed red coat and a monocle over his left eye. “You idiots!” he bellowed, waving a pistol in the faces of his remaining subordinates around the office. They shrunk back as the barrel passed by them. “You went inside the fucking Theater!”
A lady secretary spoke up. “M-my lord, I believe we have nothing to worry about. We have an army and” —
“An army isn’t enough, Justine!” Lord Lastifer nearly waved the pistol at her face — he wouldn’t ever! He quickly drew back the pistol, putting it in its holster, and he lowered his tone. “We’re all fucking dead.”
One of the younger subordinates summoned his courage. “M-my lord! If I may speak” —
“You may not.” Lastifer’s holster was still unclipped, and he made sure to tilt his body just enough to show it. The subordinate shut himself up rather fast. “Prepare the men,” Lastifer said. “We will make our last stand here.”
His mansion was a sprawling estate, with vines overrunning the gardens, slaves being led barefoot on dirt paths, and tall wooden frames hanging up curtains which encircled the entire property, keeping away the prying eyes of bystanders who knew full well what was going on behind the estate’s iron fences and gates.
Lastifer’s subordinates left the room, and now it was just him and Justine. He just stared out the window, into the night, watching the patrols below make their rounds with flickering torches.
“Surely, we can negotiate with the Theater?” Justine asked.
“Once upon a time, my dear, but that time has long passed. This era is the era of Alyssa Rainsworth.”
Justine walked up to him. “That makes no sense. I had spoken to her once, and she seemed decent.”
“Imagine,” Lastifer said, “being adopted by a family, and then watching that family be slaughtered right in front of you.” He chuckled. How ironic that he was the one speaking of it like it was a tragedy that touched his heart — as if he hadn’t commissioned such kinds of slaughter himself. “But you see, my dear, that family just happened to teach her how to kill a man at any conceivable distance. It wouldn’t surprise me if” —
The glass broke into a spiderweb, but it did not shatter. It was just suspended there, but with a hole. He didn’t even see a muzzle flash anywhere, and there wasn’t even a peep of the rifle that fired! Lastifer ducked down. “Shit!” he shouted. He looked back to Justine. “Get down!” —
He looked back and beheld her dead figure on the floor, a smoking hole over her heart.
“No — no! No! No! No!” He coursed magic into a metallic pad under the window sill, activating the window’s defensive shutters, closing out the outside world with slabs of steel. He skittered to Justine, holding her.
He had done many things to deserve this. All he could do now was scream against the reaper coming for him.
***
Name: Jon Fuze
Level: 2
Kills: 8 → 9
Kills to Next Level: 3 / 10 → 4 / 10
Skill Proofs: 1
***
Alyssa’s face was rather close to Jon’s. Between them was the oculus of a bulky brass scope, attached to the top of a long rifle. The rifle was standing on a monopod, and Jon was aiming it just behind the railing of a bell tower.
“You missed,” Alyssa remarked in a whisper. She brought a monocular to her eye and checked the target once more. She’d originally just wanted to see how good Jon really was at his job. She’d heard all about it back then, but wow, actually seeing it was something else. She chuckled. “Close, though. Four inches’ drift at a mile is astounding for someone without a single Skill.”
Jon thought he was a decent marksman, but a full-blown sniper? He was never the best. “That woman. She wasn’t a civilian?”
“Oh, no, no. She poisoned Lord Lastifer’s wife and a lot of other ladies to get to where she was. I suppose writing her off the earliest is the best path, actually. Breathing gasses which erode one’s lungs simply isn’t comfortable, after all.”
They watched a slab of steel slide into place to block Lastifer’s window. His men were already moving in defense. “As expected,” Alyssa said. She pocketed her monocular and dispelled the Watersound Skill that hid the rifle’s flash and muffled its report. “Make your way through their escape tunnels while I siege their wilting gardens.”
Jon nodded. He packed up the rifle, handing it off to Alyssa while he picked up a carbine, slinging it across his back. They made their way to the base of the tower. From there, they split up, with Alyssa heading straight for the Lastifer estate, and Jon, to a dilapidated cathedral.
Its own bell tower was gone, moss overtook its original colors, but it withstood time like an ancient tree. Revered as it was, it was guarded.
When Jon got there, he was confronted by a knight at the back door, one who wore an all-white surcoat, and on it, the heraldry of a life-giving tree. Alyssa had told Jon to expect these people...and that they were expecting him, too.
The knight grimaced upon seeing Jon, but he stepped aside.
Jon took a step forward when the knight blocked his way with the scabbard of his longsword. “Make no mistake, reaper of Ravena. We of the light do not mingle with your kind.”
Jon stared him in the eyes. They narrowed their eyes on each other. “Got it,” Jon said. The knight moved his scabbard away and watched Jon as he went inside.
What he’d entered was not the cathedral-proper — that would’ve been blasphemy — but a network of tunnels beneath the city. The Theater’s catacombs weren’t a part of it, but the cathedral’s was.
Once built as a method of resisting invasion, the forces of the light, dark, and gray now vied for control over its many passages.
Ultimately, however, it was the Theater who held a monopoly of information over it. Ancient maps, handed down by a heritage of ancestors, only required a few updates every few years. New tunnels sprung up every now and then, dug by black marketeers who couldn’t fathom just how easy it was to find their new tunnels. One just had to cup their ears against the tunnel walls and listen for the sound of picks and shovels striking earth, after all.
Jon traversed these tunnels, following a path he’d memorized from the maps the Theater had. Although the maps hadn’t been updated in almost a decade, it wasn’t hard to make an educated guess as to where someone from the Lastifer estate would dig and connect a new tunnel.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The tunnels were wide, enough for entire marching columns to move through. Starting from below the cathedral, it was still well-lit, but he began to encounter areas where the magic lamps had burnt out. He took out a magic torch of his own, one through which he channeled a miniscule amount of magic. It lit up the way in front of him with a wide beam. Just like a flashlight, he thought.
Halfway there, however, he encountered a platoon of white-surcoat knights, of the same heraldry as the guard from the cathedral. There were ten of them, guarding twenty or so rough men, all tied up and seated on the ground.
“Who goes there!” one of the knights shouted. He drew his sword, but also a magic torch, illuminating Jon’s face.
“Just passing through,” Jon said. He skirted around the group of knights, and though some of them went back to watching their catch, a good number of them continued to watch Jon, even as his back disappeared into the dark of the tunnel beyond.
“The new agent of Ravena,” one of the knights said. “The priestess wasn’t joking. Hey, any of you shit your pants? I can smell something awful.”
Jon trekked through the tunnels for another fifteen minutes, nearing the approximate entry area. The clashing of swords and gunfire glancing off walls and armor echoed. Given the acoustics, the fight must have been 200 meters from his position.
The tunnel branched along several points ahead of him. He followed the sound, backtracking at several points. The fighting was loud enough now that he could hear the pained cries of someone who’d been hit by a magic slug.
Peeking around the corner, he found a battle in progress between a small squad of white-surcoat knights and a whole lot more green-coated mercenaries. They were more poorly equipped than the knights, little more than padded armor and shields compared to the knights’ chainmail and proper helmets, but they also had guns.
Their barrage forced the knights to hide behind their shields. There were only five knights still standing, protecting a half dozen of their injured behind them. The injured were launching some sort of magic from their swords, causing the air to ripple and punch the mercenaries. Whether it was lethal or not, it didn’t matter. Their attacks just kept hitting the mercenaries’ shields, and though it succeeded at punting away closing attackers, it did little else.
Jon counted twenty-two mercenaries. At first glance, the mercenaries could charge against the knights at any moment, but the knights must have been much more powerful than they seemed if the mercenaries hesitated to do so.
On the other hand, the mercenaries were protecting some kind of narrow tunnel exit — or were they breaking out from it? The piles of debris around it suggested that it was dug relatively recently and in a hurry.
In any case, there was barely any cover between Jon and the mercenaries, not to count the knights. That didn’t matter. He’d take them out from right here.
He unslung the carbine from his back. He pressed on a latch and broke it open, loading a paper cartridge — one among many sticking out from between his fingers — through the rear of the barrel.
Taking aim, he lined up the pin sights with the head of a mercenary. He pushed magic through his index finger, which entered a conductor inside the weapon’s grip, feeding energy up into the barrel, into the paper cartridge, into the powdered fire stone (flare-sand) within. Each bit of magic that entered the powder grains caused them to combust, but also to release magic of their own, which then entered other grains — exponentiating the reaction into a magical explosion.
The projectile that left the barrel was a small ball of flare-sand, wrapped with and baked in a thin layer of a clay and flare-sand mixture, called fuze-clay. The clay acted to put distance between individual flare-sand grains, slowing the reaction. With enough force to crack the fuze-clay shell, the flare-sand within would disperse, come into contact with the burning fuze-clay, and ultimately detonate.
He fired one shot, nailing the mercenary in the head (21/22). Only a few of the knights noticed this, and they looked behind them to regard the new threat.
Jon broke open the carbine, flicked a new cartridge into it with some force, and closed it. In just the cycle of a second, he was ready to fire again — and he did, nailing another mercenary in the shoulder. The shot burned away his padded cloth armor, some bits of flare-sand burning straight through his exposed skin and gracing his internals, making him scream in pain.
In the heat of battle, the mercenaries couldn’t tell where exactly the shots were coming from, but they were content to know that it was “somewhere that way,” and many of them raised their bucklers — thick ones meant to withstand gunfire, even if they could only protect their face and upper torso with the pint-sized shields.
“Aid comes from the rear!” one of the knights shouted. The others hurrah’ed in affirmation, thinking it to be more of their forces, but it was not. One of the injured knights watched Jon tactically scoot closer, his feet gliding over the cobbled grounds of the tunnel, his back hunched over as he fired, reloaded, fired, reloaded — with such discipline that it inspired envy in a soldier. (18/22)
However, fear soon gripped the injured knight, as he saw the man’s name and title in his vision:
[Jon Fuze. Theater d’Ravena.]
“Reaper!” he warned his comrades with a weakening breath. “Reaper of Ravena!”
The knights’ magic counter-fire faltered for a moment. They watched Jon pass by their shield wall, toss forward a smoking fire stone, toss away his carbine, scoop up a fallen knight’s shield, and charge forwards with a pistol drawn — from among a hidden belt holding half a dozen other pistols.
The fire stone, wrapped in burning fuze-clay, stopped between the mercenaries’ feet. A flash of light and deafening blast threw off both the mercenaries and the knights. Jon set his sights on the most dangerous enemy, shooting a mercenary with a yellow armband. He bashed another in the head with the edge of his shield, and went to whip the closest ones with the weighted handle of his pistol.
By the time the mercenaries came to, five more of their number were already dead on the ground, and a sixth was falling over, blood spurting from his jaw as Jon recovered from throwing his shield, replacing it with one of the bucklers the mercenaries used. (12/22)
The mercenaries were in disarray. The knights were still firing off force magic at them, collapsing their frontline, while there was an assassin amidst them. Their leader with the yellow armband was dead.
Still, those at the rear leveled their sights at Jon, but he dodged their firing lines, forcing their aim to weave between each other. A courageous few fired at him, most hitting the walls, one hitting Jon’s buckler, but one poor guy tasted friendly fire from behind (11/22). One mercenary discarded his pistol, drew and raised his sword, and hacked downwards, only for his attack to glance off Jon’s buckler. He fired a pistol up the man’s neck (10/22), dropping the pistol and stealing the dead man’s own from his belt before he keeled over.
He deflected another two shots at him with the buckler, shooting one of them in the leg, causing him to fall and bleed out of consciousness within a few seconds (9/22). He threw his half-melted shield at the other gunman just to swoop up a new one, withstanding another two searing gunshots from the other mercenaries.
He drew a pistol and shot the gunman he’d thrown a shield at (8/22), then dodged low as a sword came slashing sideways. He jumped up and tackled the man, getting into a scuffle on the ground.
Meanwhile, the five knights forming the shield wall saw the mercenaries’ dwindling forces as their chance. They screamed and charged, putting fear in the mercenaries desperately holding down the frontline.
(7/22).
(6/22).
Jon’s opponent was on top of him, struggling to drive a knife into his neck. He managed to gain leverage and toss the mercenary aside, and now the positions were reversed. The mercenary squirmed. The knife was an inch away from his neck.
Jon brought his fist up and hammered the handle of the knife, driving it into his enemy. He hammered it twice for good measure. (5/22)
He got up, finding the battle over. The other mercenaries had surrendered while they were still alive, more willing to face the Order’s justice than any agent of Ravena’s.
The knights regarded Jon with some fear, flinching even at the tiniest and most ordinary movements, such as him picking up the weapons he’d thrown around.
They watched him leave, disappearing into the tunnel that led up to the Lastifer estate. Thank Lumina they weren’t on the receiving end of that.
***
[+1 Skill Proof acquired.]
Name: Jon Fuze
Level: 2 → 3
Kills: 9 → 25
Kills to Next Level: 4 / 10 → 10 / 15
Skill Proofs: 1 → 2
***