There were a lot of things to process as I turned to face a Wizard of some sort, associated with the organized crime ring I'd just stolen from, who was three times my level and who had successfully ambushed me. Among the critical things that flashed through my mind was that suddenly, the items I'd received from the Slenderman were themselves still below this enemy's level, and he would doubtless have items above his level, since that's how the Dungeons worked.

As a consequence, I had no problem whatsoever summoning the Slender Gloves and Suit and equipping them as fast as I could.

To this point, I still hadn't tested either of the items. The Gloves had an active ability to focus destruction, just like the Slenderman himself had smashed stone with his bare hands, and the suit had a [ Blink ] teleport ability, but I'd never used either of them, and in fact I usually lost all active abilities when transforming items into Soulforged copies. However, perhaps critically, the gloves also had a [ Hero's Bane ], one much more powerful than the one I'd gotten off the Devil's sword.

Merry stacked a bunch of things on my Dracula's Cape, including that older Hero's Bane, some auras, and of course the Vampiric Cloak booster, and then I braced for whatever incoming spell was next.

I guess he didn't want to destroy the chemical plant, because instead of a fireball or other wide-area attack, I sensed a spell targetting me directly and only barely managed to dodge by throwing a lot of weight behind the Cloak's movement ability and getting as far from the place I'd been as possible.

I didn't really pay attention to exactly what hit the ground where I'd been standing, but I got the impression it was an insanely powerful lightning bolt. Given the level difference, the spell could have been a beam of pure elemental teddy bears and it would have killed me.

I used the moment of distraction to try to Blink behind the bastard, though of course he refused to be distracted by an enemy disappearing, and instead took the highly unusual and unpredictable act of looking around to try and find me, which led to him spotting me very quickly. I also hadn't quite gotten a lock on using Blink yet, so I wasn't quite in range. Given both together, unsurprisingly, the bastard had plenty of time to use a Blink or similar ability to teleport a short distance.

So I threw what I had into my Cloak and tried to catch him with that, since Blink was on cooldown, and I was also falling. He didn't know what ability I was trying to use, but--again, how odd!--he decided to block it rather than simply falling under my spell, summoning some kind of magic barrier.

I found myself grinning in spite of myself as I plummeted through the air. It really was different, fighting other humans instead of idiotic, predictable dungeon monsters, and all of my training against static, programmed things just really didn't help as much as I might hope.

That said, he had absolutely no idea what the Cloak was capable of.

Since I'd extended the range of my cloak up to the place where his shield was, I went ahead and spread it out in all directions, trying to envelop as much of the area around him as I could. This was no Dungeon stage, so in theory I could extend it out in some various direction as far as I wanted, but I had to worry about this bastard tracking me with a spell. Rather than killing him, all I really wanted was to dissuade them from looking into me until it was too late.

It took a lot of the weight out of my Cloak, but I did manage to force myself to move sneakily right behind him, an effect that was subtly different from the Blink--well, not so subtly for me. Blink was a teleport and felt like one, but using the Cloak to move rapidly felt like stuffing myself at high speeds through a garden hose.

"You are not," I said as I appeared above and behind him, trying to sound as imperious as I could, "the highest level creature I've defeated." That was, of course, purely for intimidation; I put everything I could behind the strike, including the gloves' Chaos Touch ability, my Vampiric Cloak's weight, hell, I used the class feature Merry got me to imbue the strike with my Assassination ability, hoping that would multiply the damage, all as I delivered a karate chop with all the strength I had straight to the man's right shoulder.

I was not prepared for that shoulder to cleanly detach from the man's body, and from the screaming, neither was he. I might have stopped there in shock for a long moment except that I was still falling, and instead I just had to flinch and re-activate my Cloak to blur my position as I flexed its telekinetic aspect and sped away from him, whatever reinforcements were following him, their base, and everything else that might be trying to follow.

I was... well, "in shock" doesn't quite cover it, since I had to keep my head on my shoulders, as it were, and keep running. Zoya had gotten cleanly out of the walled zone as soon as I distracted the wizard, scaling one of the buildings, and I quickly caught up with her, and she extended her own Stealth field to cover me, I guess because she thought my own efforts were inadequate.

I'd read plenty about the effects of critical hits on joints. I'd read a lot of things about critical hits in general, thanks to my focus on my Assassination skill. To put it mildly, this seemed like it should not have happened. Oh, it was possible, but if I'd been the same level as the guy, I wouldn't have expected such an immediate and gruesome result, much less given the level difference.

It was the flood of Experience, I think, suggested Merry. Maybe the Assassination skill got a heavier dose of it than we realized, or maybe it got changed while you were trying to reshape things with your will, or maybe it has a heightened effect when used that way, and the extra experience just made it a lot stronger than we were ready for.

I know there are a lot of factors, I snapped back at Merry, more disturbed than I really wanted to let on. Never used that high level Bane effect before, either. For all I know, that's a huge modifier. But they talk about that kind of violence as the kind of thing that only happens when you are seriously outclassed by a monster.

You're not a monster, reminded Merry, and that guy was pretty out-classed.

I decided not to argue, as Zoya and I made out way through the other side of the chemical plant, and I guided her in the general direction of a distortion in the air that I was pretty sure was the helicopter. They... weren't exactly waiting for us, and instead were moving towards what I assumed was an out of the way place to lay low, since they were still under stealth and looked to be landing.

It was a good thirty minutes before we caught up to them. They had found a grass field shielded on two sides by an L-shaped building that looked to be an apartment building or similar, and I would definitely not have found them if my new perception skill didn't react to the presence of ongoing skills. As it was, even with us being relatively fast, it took a good five-ten minutes of searching the general area they'd been before I could figure it out.

Both of Vlad's men, plus the pilot, were sitting nervously in or near the attack chopper, looking around nervously--but the kind of nervous where they expected some idiot to stumble into them, not the kind of nervous where they were expecting a mob wizard with a chip on his shoulder to show up and nuke them. And they definitely weren't expecting their former ally to appear out of nowhere and grab their pilot by the throat.

I know, I checked.

The pilot started making choking noises, and the two mercs immediately turned guns towards me, but something--maybe the blood all over my gloves, or the lack of blood on my suit--gave them pause. "Some help you guys were," I said, my voice making no bones about my seriousness. "Let me guess--you knew what I was getting into and figured I couldn't handle it, so you ran."

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The closer of Vlad's goons immediately put down the gun and tried to smooth over the situation. "No, no, we just... needed to get out of the line of sight. We were waiting for your signal. You were told the signal, right?"

"And I'm just waiting for your pilot to give me the signal before letting him go," I returned, tightening my grip juuuust a little.

"Okay, okay, look," he said, suddenly, backing off a step. "We don't know the location of their assets, but we know whose territory we're in, and we know they can pierce our stealth. Assets were already moving in on our location, and the only reason we even got away in one piece is because we ran while you made a scene. Most likely if you hadn't seemed like the more pressing threat, we'd already be dead. What did you expect from us?"

"Wow, so you did know in advance. Funny how you didn't give me a signal to let me know." I let the pilot go, and he dropped a few inches back into his seat, while I continued to stand head and shoulders above him. "Obviously we can't go straight back, but I want you to drop us off one hell of a lot closer to home before you run and hide."

"Us?" The second of Vlad's operatives asked, concerned.

"Oh, right, I never told you." I gestured behind him, and Zoya released her stealth, one long, curved blade very close to the man's neck. "This is my associate. She's been with us the whole time. So that's two people you betrayed who could kill you at any moment. By the way, we definitely stirred a hornet's nest, and we should probably go. Any more questions?"

The mercenaries either had no further questions or couldn't come up with one at just that moment.

We returned Northeast much the same way we came here, but less directly. They first headed Southeast over the Gulf before cutting Northeast, and went out well past Galveston before cutting back Northwest. They actually got me relatively close to where we'd dropped my car, leaving Zoya and me on a rooftop, and then disappeared to who knows where.

The concept that there were several such helicopters hiding in suburban Texas still creeped me the fuck out.

Before we got in the car, I stopped for a while and had Merry ensure that there were no active magical effects on me that might have been used to track me. That didn't ensure that they couldn't do something wizardly to track me, but at least, it wasn't me walking home with a tracer stuck to my butt.

Zoya seemed nervous, waiting there, and I pulled her doll out of my inventory and handed it over to her. When I did, I got a strange popup notification in my Dungeoneer interface, suggesting that I had the option of retaining control, but I refused it.

I watched the doll, much like a corpse item, in her hands start to wibble-wobble like a mirage before kind of popping like a balloon filled with ketchup, becoming drippy sludge that slid through her fingers.

Well, that was one problem solved, for now. I looked at her, wondering whether she would turn aggressive towards me now that she was free, but... she just kind of stood there, looking at her sludge covered hands, and...

And closed her eyes and started to cry, loudly.

I flexed my Cloak for stealth, not sure that it would really hide the woman's loud howling, but not wanting to draw attention to two strange people on a rooftop. I didn't know what else to do except offer the woman a shoulder to cry on, but I wasn't sure whether or not she would even appreciate that. However, given that we appeared for the moment to have gotten away cleanly, I thought we at least had a moment to deal with things.

"As a professional courtesy," said a voice from nowhere, "May I ask who you are?"

I looked around, spotting the skill effect on the far end of the roof--though the voice had sounded much closer. I glanced around, including the sky nearby, but didn't see anything else. "That depends on who's asking," I said, finding the line very cliche even as the words left my mouth.

"Who I am will depend very much on your answer."

"Are you with... the people I just fought?" There was no need to get into specifics.

"Unlikely," he replied, "given the fact that you were fighting them."

Bro, I think he's one of ours. Merry drew my attention to one of the Chain dolls I'd stolen, and when I put a mental hand on it, I discovered that it led directly to the man on the other side of the roof In fact, with the item in focus, his Stealth parted in front of me, trivially, showing a level over his head of 109. Merry nodded, and brought up the guy's statistics, and I could feel her frown as she went over the details.

"You're one of the owned assassins I rescued," I said aloud, noting as I said it that there was a whole lot of relief in my voice.

"Rescued?" The man cocked his head at me. "I didn't think of myself as needing rescue. I recognize that most people would not be content to be owned, but I am by my nature a killer. Having someone shield me from the needs of everyday life is... not entirely unpleasant."

Zoya, from the shiver that ran through her at his words, didn't agree with his sentiment.

"I take it then that you aren't eager to be freed." I looked at the window that Merry had pulled up, to find that it was full of a lot of very dangerous skills--poison creation, death effects, hypnosis, and other equally kid-friendly toys were stacked one on top of another in his toolbox.

The man shrugged. "I can tell you exactly how it would go," he said, simply. "I would need something. I would kill to get it. That would cause a scene. I would be hunted. I would hunt in return. Eventually, I would die, but not alone. Is that what you want? I don't care either way."

I couldn't help being completely freaked out by the cold, level attitude in his voice. As far as I could tell, he truly didn't care. There was a depth of bloody indifference to him that spoke of long familiarity with the craft of murder, and no matter how I looked at him I couldn't unsee it.

"I'm not in the business of encouraging people to kill--" I started to say something that I hoped would sound noble, but Zoya, with a grace and determination that I didn't expect, moved into action first. She leaped towards the man, and though I felt him starting to react, Merry put her mental hand on the doll and flexed her will, and for some reason, he simply stood there as the other assassin stabbed him in the throat.

The two of them remained locked in place for a long moment, and I felt Merry struggling hard with the item to keep him in control. After a moment, Zoya stepped back and made a series of fast strikes, which he seemed unable or unwilling to block, and the man died.

My immediate instinct was to yell at Merry, but then, I'd been considering the same. Mostly, it was my own need to not be counted as a Blooded Dungeoneer again, combined with fear of acting against someone who casually boasted he would make any manhunt against him very expensive. I wasn't... I wasn't some naive idiot whose anti-murder stance was entirely theoretical. I'd killed innocents, and I'd killed Ham Hands, and I had plenty of experience killing monsters.

Most likely, innocent people would have died if he'd lived, by his own admission. But being party to cold blooded murder... I didn't like it.

The slave doll turned into a corpse item, noted Merry, her mental voice a little deadened. So part of the benefit of the Skill is being able to recover someone if they're killed in action. That's... interesting. I guess.

I nodded, looking at Zoya, and just said, "Thank you." She turned to me, her eyes unreadable--some mix of panic, hatred, and pain, I guess, but it was hard to figure out exactly what she was thinking without actively using Telepathy. "I'm not sure... I could have done that myself."

"You should have," she said, simply, and then looked away, as though the thought occurred to her that I should have treated her the same way.

And perhaps I should have.

"If you have nowhere to go," I told her, "You can stay with me for a while." That was its own gamble, but... well, if I'm honest, she seemed more like me than him.

"How did you stop him?" asked Zoya, instead of answering.

"Merry was able to use the slave control item to hold him in place--"

"Not him," she said, gesturing to where the man had been. "How did you stop the wizard? How did you do such injury to a man so much greater than yourself?"

I felt my mouth go a little dry at the question. "A combination of things," I said, evasively. "I'm very strange."

Zoya studied the place where the other assassin had died, silently.

"Do you have more of those..." Zoya didn't finish the sentence.

"Many."

"Then you should not be alone." Zoya's swords returned to her inventory. "I will remain until you have no further need of me. Then... I do not know where I will go."

I nodded at her, before she slipped back into Stealth. And I, with some reluctance, slipped the other assassin's corpse doll out of my inventory, and after dumping his inventory into my own, placed it where he had been standing when he'd died, and left it there.

It was not impossible someone would find the item there, but on a random commercial roof in suburban Texas... it wasn't likely. It was smaller than a human body, and not particularly eye-catching. I suppose it was a terribly bad idea to gamble like this, but in the end, I just wanted nothing to do with the man anymore. Even just having his stuff made me feel grody, and I resolved to be rid of it when I could be.

And then Zoya and I went back to my apartment, together.