New Quest Acquired! Filing Paperwork

Requirements:

* Register yourself at the closest Accountant Office

Wait. Are you kidding? Akemi frowned. You ask me to kill a guy, then go to the IRS?

This skill tree couldn’t be serious.

After that first thriller of a quest, she was really expecting something more. Not… bureaucracy.

Closing out the notification, she felt a sudden shift in the floor beneath her feet. She stumbled, the stone tiles wobbling from side to side, as if the entire structure underpinning them had been shaken by a giant’s fist. Moments later, a noise like a detonating bomb echoed out from inside the building. Glass shattered, and a body rocketed out of a first-story window.

Startled, Akemi leaned over the wall to get a better look. She saw a man – Achilles, the egotistical hunter from the bounty ceremony – laying flat on his back in the fields, covered in blood. His skin and clothes had been doused in black, as if a paint bucket of ink had been spilled on him. He gurgled and groaned in the grass, heroes quickly scattering from the banquet hall to come to his aid.

“Can’t believe someone beat me to it,” Akemi remarked. “Lucky them.”

She had really been hoping she’d have the chance to come back and knife finger that ego-head.

But wasn’t he supposed to be ultra-powerful? She thought, recalling Volo’s mutterings. I’d love to meet the person who whooped his ass that hard. They deserve a high five at the very least.

But all that could be pondered later. For now, in this very moment in time, she had but one objective—to find a way out of this circus.

Craning her head from one side of the wall to the other, she noticed an external staircase just off the side of the widow’s walk. It descended all the way down to the field below. It was clearly a staircase built for workers and construction crew, not faculty, leaving it effectively abandoned.

Perfect.

She jumped the hurdle over the stone wall and onto the staircase. The infrastructure creaked and whined, and for a moment, she thought it might topple over; but it didn’t. Wasting no time, she made a beeline down the spiraling steps. She ducked under windowsills, student’s heads plastered to the glass as they looked down on the massacre from their dormitory windows. On the last floor, Akemi tripped, and she briefly saw her own reflection in the window glass; her onesie was covered in bloodstains. The bunny ears stapled to her hood had gone from cotton candy pink to bloodbath red.

She clenched her jaw. That’s not a good look.

Luckily, if anyone saw her, they didn’t make it evident. She jumped from the last staircase onto the fields, her cotton-covered feet sinking into the wet ground. Her not-quite-shoes made ugly, sticky slopping sounds as she trudged through the mud.

She paused when she made it about fifteen feet from the site of Achilles’ fall. She could barely see through the dense crowd which had surrounded him; all matters of hero, from the mages to the archers to the clerics, had grown around him in a mass of morbid curiosity.

Akemi studied the scene of the crime. It seemed that he got blasted straight out of the bounty room, judging by the location of the giant hole in the building.

Must have been one of the captured villains.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Despite knowing better, her morbid curiosity kept her feet pinned to the muddy ground. She wanted to know what kind of monster did that sort of damage to the man. And more importantly, she wanted that monster’s autograph.

Ducking behind one of the trees in the garden, she listened to the whispers emerging from the huddle of bodies nearby.

“He’s still got a pulse,” one of the recruits in long, wizardly robes whispered to his classmate. “But he’s covered in death. It’s reeking off of him. Has to be some kind of necro magic.”

“Did you see what matter of villain did this to him? Was it one of the bounties?” the classmate replied, trembling. “Those gashes in his torso… This wasn’t an attack, this was torture.”

“No idea. No one but him has come out of the building yet.”

“Wait, who is that?”

One of the students had turned towards Akemi, his eyes wide and pupils dilated. He had spotted her, and was pointing a shaking finger in her direction. Oh no. Just as Akemi turned to run, a loud, terrifying, animalistic screech came from within the hall.

She turned back around, only to be met by a rampaging storm of recruits headed in her direction. They were screaming bloody murder, kicking up dirt and grass, violently tearing across the field away from the hall. Whatever had made that sound invoked a level of terror only comparable to a rogue gunner at a shopping mall — it generated complete, utter bedlam.

Akemi hugged the tree and stood in place, cursing to herself as she tried not to get run over.

In the distance, swooping out of the hall like a pure black missile, was a creature of imprecise boundaries, a phantom that glittered like night itself. It carried a body in its massive talons—a woman in chainmail and cloth, who Akemi could only assume was the High Cleric from the ceremony. Her head lolled to the side, unconscious.

“Oh my,” Akemi said, entranced.

The creature fluttered above Achilles’ body, then transformed, its winged, amorphous shape condensing into that of a human. Its talons turned to sharp fingernails, its beak to a hooded visage. The figure was tall, dark-skinned, wearing a set of all-black robes that mirrored the night sky. He dropped the cleric to the ground by Achilles, drove his heel into her neck until it snapped, then looked upwards.

And made direct eye contact with Akemi, who laughed nervously.

Oh no. Oh no no no no.

Before she could do something stupid, like talk or walk or run, the figure disappeared out of sight. She thought he was gone, but he reappeared just as quickly before her, like a blinking shadow. His hand picked up her chin, and a dagger was already being pressed to her nape. The dagger wasn’t a proper hilted blade, but an extension of the man’s hand, growing out of his palm like a shark fin.

“Huh. Is that an upgraded version of [Knife Fingers]?” she said, whispering nervously.

This, for whatever reason, gave him pause. All Akemi could see were his eyes, but they were deep and expressive, colored gray like a molted bird.

“You. You were a bounty. Strung up like an animal, same as I…” he said. His voice was as deep as Akemi expected, low and impossibly gritty. “To think such a low level villain escaped its chains before I did. I’m not sure what word expresses it best: shame, or embarrassment.”

Under normal conditions, Akemi wouldn’t have taken that kind of slight. But given the fact this man had just ran the entire guildhall into the woods like a flock of bleating sheep, she kept herself uncharacteristically polite.

“Beginner’s luck,” is the response she settled on. “I’m new around here, actually. Haven’t really done this whole shebang before—the getting captured by heroes, assassinating one or two, escaping without a sound thing. But you seem very experienced in the subject. I’m kind of a fan, actually. The stuff with Achilles, the whole mangling of the cleric… I really like your work.”

He scoffed, and increased the pressure on her neck. “I don’t have fans.”

“You do now,” she said, trying not to sound too choked.

Seemingly exhausted by her, he let her go, removing the blade.

“I won’t waste my time killing you. You’re too low a level. I’d get more experience from filleting a fish,” he said, backing away from her. He seemed to get a notification from his System, perhaps an identification screen, because his eyes went hazy for a moment. “I see. You haven’t even proven yourself capable enough to unlock the true name of your class yet.”

“My…wait, what?” she stuttered, looking at him dumbly.

He shook his head, then grunted.

“You’ve made my point for me.”

Just as she was about to press him for more information, a screen flickered in front of Akemi’s eyes. The System had finally detected the man’s presence. It was the most delayed identification screen it had given her so far.

Nocturne | Level ??? Accountant

Her jaw dropped. He’s an Accountant too?

Adrenaline coursed through her, her mind coming alive with the endless possibilities of what that revelation could mean; she frantically reached out her hand, trying to stop him from leaving. She had so many questions.

“Wait, don’t go! What did you mean by true name?”

By the time she closed out the notification, he had already vanished.