We each split up not long after, engaging our individual stealth Skills as we did so. This wasn’t a group mission, per se, despite our meeting up before starting.

We were all just acting in the same area for backup purposes. We each had our own objectives tonight.

Mine?

Well, I had something to retrieve.

Thorn Cloak may not have been intended for use within urban environments, but I’d notice that it did well enough. According to my companions, the effect was as if I was blending in slightly to the background, and they had to specifically focus on me in order to notice on my form.

Besides, I had more than just an active Skill to rely on these days. I had my Talent’s, and my own well-practiced abilities in stealth and infiltration.

More than enough to fool city guards and Loyalist foot soldiers.

I watched from the shadows as one of the designated Elderwyckian city guards patrolled past my hiding spot, not ten feet away from me. I was crouched behind a tall stack of wooden crates a distance inside of the administration portion of the harbor district. This was the area where most of the ledgers and accounts were taken care of. It was a surprisingly large and gaudy complex that I had heard more than one dockworker complain about. A common gripe was, why did a bunch of middle managers need bespoke mahogany desks and gold fittings review delivery manifests?

In particular, one Simon Smidt of Horizon Shipping from earlier in the day had a tendency to moan about them. That man had surprisingly loose lips, and was more than willing to bitch to anyone that would listen.

I’d gotten quite a bit of interesting info from the guy, over the last week.

The guard not far from me was well inside the distance I could strike from, but I stayed my hand. This wasn’t because I had any particular qualms anymore about eliminating enemy combatants, no. It was because the standing orders for Nocturne Agents operating inside Elderwyck were to stay your hand with the guards.

There had been a big meeting about it and everything.

Hook had told us the goal wasn’t to completely destabilize the city itself. Our mission was to cripple and bring down the Loyalist infrastructure from the inside, through acts of sabotage and even assassination. There was to be a clear delineation for our purposes between acceptable targets for discrete disposal. The city guards of Elderwyck were, by and large, recruited from the citizenry of the actual city. While they may have been placed under the command of the local Loyalist commander, we were deliberately not targeting them.

We didn’t want to turn the city itself against us by killing their sons and daughters.

But the Loyalist soldiers themselves…

Well.

Hook had outright told us to take any chance we could, as long as it didn’t compromise or place us in danger.

And by and large, my fellow Agents were following that order.

This hadn’t gone unnoticed, by either faction.

It was quite clear to see the different reactions between them. While most of the city guards I had seen over the last few days were wary, they weren’t particularly concerned about being dragged into a dark alley and murdered. They simply went about their business with wary, watchful eyes.

It’s funny, I had heard from another Agent that this had an unintended, if welcome side effect. In the rare cases that a lone guard came upon an Agent on a mission, they were deliberately turning away and acting as if they hadn’t seen us. The guard force had noticed how we weren’t targeting them and were responding accordingly. I got the feeling there wasn’t any love lost between the two factions from the almost tacit acceptance of our tactics.

However, the Loyalist soldiers were a different story.

Every single one of them ordered to supplement the guard force was downright paranoid. Their eyes darted about trying to plumb the depths of every shadow in the night, while sweat was visible on their foreheads, even in the freezing temperatures. They kept a tight grip on their weapons at all times, their bodies held in coiled positions ready to strike at any moment.

In fact, here came one right now. A lone Loyalist soldier was trailing not far behind the city guard that had passed my position, eyes darting about furtively and jumping at every shadow. Stupidly, he had strayed from the path and had started rooting around in an alleyway across from my position, as if he would find a saboteur among the garbage.

I eyed him coldly for a moment, contemplating.

In a split-second decision, I decided to go for it.

I raised one hand, pointed at him, and cast a skill that had seen a decent bit of use in the last week.

Shadow Thorn.

Unseen, unheard, the shadows in the alleyway across from me thickened behind the guard. From their inky black depths, a deadly spiked thorn rose upon a crimson red vine, swaying in a serpentine manner. Before the guard could even react, the thorn speared forward.

And tore through his throat from behind, severing his spine as it did so. His poorly made armor wasn’t able to stop the Skill from delivering the strike at all.

The only noise the Loyalist soldier was able to make a brief gurgle before he fell forever silent.

I canceled the skill, thorn rapidly retreating from the throat of the soldier and back into the pool of shadow before dissipating. The Loyalist corpse fell backward with a clang upon the cobblestones of the dockyard, the noise rattling up and out of the alleyway.

Ah.

I hadn’t intended for that noise.

It appeared to have alerted the city guard who had passed me not long ago. He turned around at the sound with curious eyes. I think he was expecting the guard he had to have known following him to greet his gaze. Maybe he thought the incautious soldier had fallen over or something.

Instead, the only thing that met his eyes was an empty street, wind whistling between its walls.

The guard visibly tensed for a moment, before I saw him deliberately turn around and keep walking. I noticed that his shoulders were held stiffer than they had been, however.

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Oh, he knew what had just happened.

I’d bet on it.

I shook it off and aimed another hand at a nearby rooftop, casting Thorn Grapple as I did so. As I flew through the air to land on the shingles of the roof, I spared a thought for possibly disposing of the corpse of the soldier I’d taken out.

I decided against it.

They’d find him in the morning, I’m sure. The snow would preserve his corpse.

………………………………..

This was the place, I was sure of it.

Below me were the offices of Horizon shipping, the merchant company I had been ordered to go and rob. According to Hook, Duke Olsen had a major controlling stake in this particular outfit. While they were far, far from being his only source of income from which he was helping bankroll the Loyalist cause, they were a major contributor. Horizon was one of the original three companies that Olsen had founded to claw his way up from the very bottom.

Which had been a bit of a shock to me.

Duke Quentin Olsen hadn’t been born a noble. Olsen was even his original name. No, instead, he had amassed such a ridiculous fortune that he had bought himself a noble title. Then, he had wooed the daughter of the previous Duke Olsen, married her, taken her name, and began ruling Elderwyck. You would think his lowly origins engendered a bit of sympathy for the plight of the common man in him.

You’d be dead wrong.

But I didn’t have time for such thoughts.

I needed to get inside this gaudy office. It was decently well guarded, from what I could see. I’d counted six guards so far, all of them from among the city forces. That meant I had to go in quiet, instead of taking them out one by one.

Normally I’d say this was a bit tricky, but, well…

The guards were slacking. The unexpected snowfall had seen most of them retreating to a small guardhouse to huddle around a fireplace. They had left only a pair of shivering, miserable guards to watch the front and back entrances of the office.

That just wasn’t enough.

However, I had no plans to go through either of those poor shivering saps. You see, I’d noticed something during my work as a Nocturne Agent.

People didn’t tend to think vertically. This led to them periodically forgetting to properly secure any potential entrances not on the ground floor. Not that this building had a proper door up here on the roof or something.

But it did have plenty of windows. And whaddya know, the lock was weak on one of them. I barely had to jimmy it a few times before the fragile piece of metal bent under my urging. Once it was open, I gripped the lip of the roof and swung myself inside silently, landing on plush carpet. Slowly easing the window closed, I allowed myself a brief smirk.

Well, that had been easy.

Infiltration complete.

Looking around, I saw that I was in some kind of medieval looking cubicle farm. There were partitioned scribe desks all around me, all of them thankfully bereft of their owners. Good. I’d hoped I wouldn’t run into any late-night workers. I didn’t have to worry about running into anyone else in here. None of the guards were even inside. I think they were forbidden from entering the premises after hours.

But I wasn’t where I needed to be. I might be on the right floor, but I wasn’t going to find any important documents in the desk of a scribe. No, it would be in the offices of more important Horizon employees. This floor did have its own closed-door rooms used by the higher-ups. Some were meeting rooms, as I found out peering through windows.

But the majority seemed to be personalized.

However, I wasn’t looking for the office of some overpaid, likely corrupt middle manager.

I needed to find the personal office of Karl Eisenhorn, the owner of Horizon Shipping. By far the most corrupt of them all.

Eisenhorn was a boyhood friend of the Duke, from before he had bought his noble title. To reward Karl’s loyalty as a leg breaker all those years, Quentin Olsen had elevated the man to the owner of one of his original shipping companies. However, there was a problem.

The man was a complete buffoon. He spread and flaunted his newfound wealth all over the place, caring little for either personal Statusial advancement or anything beyond his newfound hedonism. It made him careless.

Careless to the degree that he should be keeping incriminating documents in his own office, according to our intelligence.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find his office on this floor, even though I'd thought it was the top one. What I did find was a spiral staircase that seemed to lead upward to a detached floor above.

I frowned, annoyed with myself. Looks like I hadn’t scouted the place well enough that I couldn’t tell there was another level. I’d wasted precious time inside on a fruitless search when I didn’t have to.

I promised myself I’d do better, next time.

I climbed the stairs, to find an even more lavish waiting area in front of a gaudy set of double doors. Rich, plush red carpet filled the entire small floor from wall to wall. A small desk that looked like it could belong to a receptionist thankfully sat empty. I didn’t bother checking it, instead advancing on the double doors. Trying the handle, I found them locked. This one I couldn’t easily brute force, like I had the window.

Oh well, time to call the whole thing off.

Not.

I took out my lockpicking toolkit and kneeled down in front of the doors, getting to work.

You know, for such a wealthy man, it looked like Eisenhorn had skimped on his locks. I had it open in moments.

Getting to my feet, I carefully opened the doors. On the other side I found an office that was so flashy, so garish, and so uselessly ostentatious that I was momentarily reminded of Magnus’s mansion back in Addersfield. I shook it off, though, stalking inside and looking around.

Best place to start was probably the desk, I decided.

Approaching the unnecessarily large, nearly room-spanning desk, I started rifling through its draws. Unsurprisingly considering Eisenhorn’s reputation, I only found…

Bottles of booze, and what looked like packets of illicit drugs.

I helped myself to one of the bottles of high-quality booze, slipping it into my pouch.

Better me than you, fuckface.

Still, that left me with having to search the rest of the office. I didn’t want to return to the temporary Nocturne base inside the walls of Elderwyck with nothing to show for my mission. I just know Hook would give me one of those looks of his.

Wisp would probably make fun of me too. I'd spoken to the other Agent a few times over the past week, when our paths crossed.

We'd almost struck up an impromptu friendship.

Standing in the middle of the office, I slowly turned in place, examining it as I did so. I paused when my eyes set on a large portrait of what must be Karl Eisenhorn, a heavy set, square jawed brute of a man. Once upon a time, he would have probably passed as formidable-looking. Now he just looked like an old boxer long gone to seed, to me, all dressed up in frippery that didn’t suit him at all.

At the very least, the painting was well done.

But…

It couldn’t be that simple, could it? Maybe it was. I had to remind myself that what seemed cliché to me was probably thought of as clever by the people of Vereden. They didn’t have the easy access to media and stories like I had, growing up back on Earth.

Oh, what the hell.

I approached the large portrait hung on the wall and lifted a corner, looking behind it.

I resisted the urge to cackle at what I found.

Sure enough, there was what looked to be a safe set into the wall behind the portrait. I bet this was where old Eisenhorn was keeping his dirt on his long-time friend, the gigantic dumbass.

I removed the portrait from the wall and set it on the ground, fully exposing the safe.

I eyed it for a moment in thought.

Safes were a different matter from simple locks. I wasn’t actually confident in my ability to crack something like this. My lessons as an Agent had yet to reach that point.

Good thing Hook had told me it was fine if I was a little overt.

I raised my hand and pointed at the safe, triggering Poisonthorn Shot. The sizzlingly poisonous crimson thorn shot from my palm and lodged itself in the surface of the safe, corroding the locking mechanism shortly. When I tried to open it after letting it work, the entire door fell off altogether.

I managed to catch it at the last moment before it hit the floor. I breathed a sigh of relief at the close call. I don’t know if that noise would have brought the guards, but better safe than sorry.

Setting it down gently, I took a look in the safe and smirked at what I found. Inside were stacks and stacks of parchment, scrolls, and even what looked to be gems and gold.

Jackpot.

In more ways than one.

The Division could always use some extra funding in hostile territory, after all.

Taking out a sack I had brought along for just this purpose, I scooped everything inside.

Time to get out of here.

Turning to leave, I paused when my eyes fell on the portrait still leaning against the wall.

I wonder how much Eisenhorn would panic when he found that his stash had been looted.

Sucks to be you, asshole.

I turned and left his office, quickly retracing my steps to the window I had entered from. Climbing back on the roof, I found that the guards had hardly moved from their positions while I was inside. Not even the couple shivering in the snow at the entrances had heard anything.

With one final glance to check that the coast was clear, I left the office behind and started making my way back to the Nocturne safehouse.

I’m sure Hook and the analysts back at HQ would find all this stuff very interesting.

Mission accomplished.