Geneva didn’t care much for her current assignments.

It might be arrogant of her, and she believed that she had earned the right to be arrogant if she wanted, but she considered herself an artist. Above mundane atrocities like a small plague and a few murders. They were even outside of her area of interest. Slitting someone’s throat in the middle of the night was so banal compared to what she could do.

But this wasn’t the time for artistry. This was the time for her to follow orders like a good pet. It was a crucial time for her summoner.

The succubus regretted her heavy-handed approach to the death of Lou’s father. It was a proper response at the time, but she didn’t predict that the hunters would doom themselves by challenging Lou directly. It was obviously a losing strategy, but there was no accounting for the irrationality of the stupid.

If Geneva had more influence within the guilds, she’d have been able to anticipate their actions, but her focus and her forces had been centered in the capital. Despite the problems they were causing, they had little relevance to the big picture. Quest was a center of trade, but it was nothing that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else with minimal effort.

It was unfortunate, but she wasn’t omnipotent. There would be opportunities that slipped through her grasp and, even more rarely, she would make mistakes.

Still, her position wasn’t bad. Lou rising above her anger would make her harder to manipulate in some ways, but this war would push their morals closer, making her easier to convince in other matters. And it wasn’t as if the situation didn’t have its perks.

She had been longing for a proper base of operations. Lou’s sympathy for her race had restricted her movements in the capital but she was sure Quest would be put under her management, if only for the short time to handle the March. Opportunities abounded.

That thought livened her actions as she roamed the city. As night fell, she found herself moving through the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It was a simple matter to find someone with an illness to work as the base for her small plague.

Harvest’s medical practices were substandard. They had enough practice with the physical affinity that their magical healers could combat all manner of injury, from cuts, breaks, and missing limbs. However, their inquiry into the mundane methods of combating ails was lacking. Herbs and salves were far less powerful, but their abundance was their own strength.

A healer’s attention was incredibly expensive, especially for serious injuries. Life was very different for the people of the kingdom depending on their coin purse. For the specialized laborers, store owners, and more successful hunters, they didn’t have to worry about their health as any hurt could be magicked away in moments. But for those without crowns to spare, they could only rely on their bodies’ natural defenses, aided by whatever few folk remedies had been passed down through the generations.

She had to ignore the first target she found, as it was a child whose mother was still alert, looking over the coughing boy sharing her bed with sharp concern. Geneva could come and go without her being any the wiser, but she didn’t want to waste the small amount of mana it would cost to control the woman’s perceptions and Lou frowned on unnecessary death.

She waited until her fourth target before acting. A man on his own, his mind muddled by the fever he was fighting. What she could feel of his thoughts was indistinct, speaking of an addled mind. His heartbeat didn’t so much as spike as she broke the knob of his front door and slipped inside his home.

The front room being divided by a cloth partition said that the man had housemates, a sign that she should be quick. Not that she had any intentions of dallying. She entered the man’s bedroom, another shifting shadow that went unnoticed as he curled in on himself with a powerful cough. The man startled as she crouched over him, but her hand grabbed his neck before he could utter a sound.

The scene of someone dying was something she’d seen thousands of times before. She’d never cared for it and after so many years, it’d lost any gravitas. It was no different from a leaf falling from a tree in her eyes. But there was something mildly interesting about what followed.

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All living creatures had spirits. She didn’t know about any religious meanings intellectual races attributed to the word. All she cared about was that the spirit was the source of mana. When one died, that spirit left them and their core quickly emptied of mana. So fast, she couldn’t even feed upon it. In a blink, there wasn’t as much as a drop within the man. A waste if he’d had any kind of talent or training. As it was, he wasn’t worth the half an hour it would take to drain him.

The reason she killed them was because an inanimate husk was a lot easier to manipulate than a living man. It took barely five units of mana, as humans measured it, to direct the excess mucus in the man’s body into an empty vial. An action that would have taken closer to thirty if she had to overcome his natural defenses. When she was finished, she left the body as it was. Given the state of the city, they hardly had to worry about someone investigating the death of a common man. The city guard, who would be responsible for such, were too scared to show their faces let alone wield any authority.

No one noticed her as she casually walked the streets, crossing into a market district. Past the square where vendors would set up their stalls in the morning to the storefronts and workshops with attached living spaces. Five for each executed Star. Ten victims. She had been told to make it hurt…and she wasn’t given any restrictions.

The hardest deaths to accept would be those of community idols. Take out a leader and they were made aimless. Take out an artist and they felt bereft. Take out a military leader and they felt unsafe. Unfortunately, there was only one true idol of the city and that was Dunwayne.

After idols, children were the next best targets. Most intellectual creatures spouted nonsense about the young being innocents and sources of infinite potential, but that was nonsense. The young could be just as the evil as the old and youth didn’t guarantee potential. One thing drove creatures to protect their offspring. Survival.

It didn’t matter how extraordinary a creature was if its species ended with them. The same instinct that made one fight in the face of death made them fight for their children. To rob a being of their child was to rob them of their future. It was no different from killing them.

There was another factor that contributed to the horror of slaying children. The same instinct that told creatures the worth of their own offspring allowed them to recognize the same of another’s species’. It was inherently an evil act. Ones capable of committing it were too be feared because it suggested there was no morals they would abide, no boundaries they wouldn’t cross. There was no enemy to be feared more.

Geneva had no intention of going after the children. As effective as it would be, Lou wouldn’t approve and she couldn’t afford displeasing her summoner anymore.

That left the succubus with her third option. Mothers. The heart of the family. The ones who cared for the weary soldiers and gave them a reason to fight. The first comfort a child recognized.

It would hurt…too much. Lou never talked about her mother but her crippling need to surround herself with women, preferably older, that adored and doted on her was telling. If too many mothers died, Lou would be upset.

Which is why Geneva had to mix in a few of her fourth option. Honored elders. The old masters. The wise and the experienced. The keepers of traditions and stories. More than anyone else, they were a community’s identity. Without an elder to show them the way, the young and rebellious strayed from their roots. Also, it would work to undermine their sense of safety. When one reached a certain age, they thought themselves beyond dying a violent death. It would shock the hunters to their core.

First, she poured her magic into her vial of sickness, channeling her power to hasten and change the vectors of illness she’d collected. She made them hardier, a touch more problematic, and encouraged them to multiply.

While her spell did its work, she crept into different homes and performed her grim duty. Throats were slit, heads were removed, hearts were placed on bloody chests, and worse. Anything she could manage within a few minutes with a minimum of noise. She made a special exception and killed a young man as well as his wife when she noticed they had held a large dinner that night, marking them as social leaders, people who would be missed. Her victims only had one thing in common; they had a connection to a hunter or the guilds.

Once she finished, she spread the contents of her vial. She was much less picky about who she chose to be vectors and she roamed all over the city. Vendor owners, children, city guards, hunters, merchants, bums, even healers. They all had a dab of the magicked mucus dabbed on the inside of their nose or the inside of the mouth. When they woke up, they’d have a cough. By tomorrow night, they’d struggle to get out of bed unless they had impressive physical strength. In three days, they’d be back to a little cough and a sore throat.

Despite her prolific maneuvers, the moon was still high when she finished but she didn’t return to the estate. Instead, she continued investigating. What for, she didn’t know. There had to be something that had prompted the hunters to their illogical actions. Something beyond gold and manabeast corpses. The guilds had secrets. Once Lou laid waste to them, those secrets would belong to her. She’d be very annoyed if the hunters tried to sneak her rightfully deserved loot out of the city when they realized they were doomed.