Redaction is one of the more curious services offered at System Shops. By redacting a skill or some other aspect of one’s status, it becomes impossible for both the individual in question and anyone using an assessment or analysis skill to see it.
Why is this important? It is fairly simple. In the past, those in power used assessment-type skills to keep tabs on the capabilities of individuals living within their territory. Even today, this practice is common, and in some of the more advanced civilizations in Cytheria, it is often required that one reveal one’s full status to a government official on a regular basis.
In such cultures, redaction is a sign of criminal intent, and such individuals are marked as antisocial or even renegades. However, in the more primitive cultures of the world and those where governmental authority is weaker, redaction is simply a method of controlling one’s information.
There are costs to redaction, however. Utilizing redaction on one’s name – a rare occurrence, despite what one might think – has deleterious psychological effects, up to and including an identity crisis. In the past, madness often followed such psychological events, but in recent generations it was discovered that picking a moniker to attach one’s identity to had the effect of stabilizing the mind and personal identity, though this also had its own problems.
Redacted skills, Arts, and Gifts are another issue entirely. When one utilizes a redacted skill or Gift, there is a cost extracted by the System. This cost varies and is usually stated at the time the redaction is purchased. As an example, utilizing a redacted ‘poison-making’ skill has the potential to cause one’s immune system to become weakened, causing illness and making one vulnerable to even mild toxins. Utilizing a redacted weapon skill will at times result in a visceral aversion to violence that will last for a set period of time based on how much the skill was utilized.
The System does allow one to choose the price paid, but it is always somehow related to the function of the skill, Gift, or Arts redacted. The higher level the skill, Gift, or Arts involved, the more crippling the price will become, though it will never directly threaten the user’s life.
For this reason, redaction should only be used with caution and in a measured manner. The suggested use of the redaction system is to seal away skills when one has chosen to alter their path in life, allowing them to essentially ‘forget’ their previous path. The more deceptive practices of intelligence agents and assassins are not the intended use of the redaction function, thought they are the more common usage…
~From a Study of Basic System Functionality
Fox maidens, otherwise referred to as fox therianthropes or fox women, are one of several female-only races that coexist with the more standard races. Though they are often considered to be a therianthrope species, the truth is that they are actually descendants of the Ascended Beast known as the Nine-tailed Fox and her many lovers. Fox maidens are known for their predatory pursuit of ‘worthy males’, their manipulative and mischievous natures, and their universal gift for the rare Illusion Magic and Spiritflame Magic.
Fox maidens, like all female-only races, always breed true. However, unlike the arachne, lamia, scylla, and sirens, the fox maidens have always been travelers and reject communities of their own. Despite this, families with fox maiden mothers and daughters tend to follow a similar pattern.
Fox maidens will often pursue a ‘worthy male’ for months, years, or even decades at a time once they find one. This is thought to be an inherited thought pattern from their racial progenitor, who was known for her taste for powerful men and her willingness to pursue them for long periods of time, even going so far as to curse one man in particular with immortality until he eventually gave in and gave her a daughter.
This persistence is thought to be linked to the second common public image attributed to fox maidens… that of the devoted wife. A fox maiden who chooses a male and succeeds in catching him will obsessively serve him, often willingly offering anything and everything she has to the male in question if he will give her a daughter. This was a trait also seen in the Nine-Tailed Fox, as several of her lovers used her to conquer large swathes of Territories, and there are nations that still exist today that were formed by men using her as a weapon.
However, this devotion will sometimes suddenly disappear, and the cause is poorly understood at best. When this happens, the fox maiden in question will simply leave her mate’s life, never to return. This event is often traumatic for the male in question, as it is a fox maiden’s nature to make their chosen male dependent on her and indulge his every whim.
More than one man who suffered from this particular event has gone mad or become a misogynist, incapable of believing in the words of women, no matter how much truth obviously lies behind them. Paranoia, aggressive behavior toward women, and a virulent hatred of therianthropes are common behaviors seen in such men.
In rarer cases, a fox maiden will only take up temporarily with a man, clearly stating she only wants a daughter and leaving him after the child is born. This is particularly common in cases where multiple generations of fox maidens have created a culture of avoiding deep connections with men. This usually occurs when a fox maiden was enslaved and had children with men not of her own choice. Such fox maidens teach their daughters to only produce children with men they feel they can leave afterward, and they are instructed to leave as soon as the child is born.
However, such family lines rarely last more than two or three generations due to the passionate nature of fox maidens. While a fox maiden might have multiple husbands over the course of her long life, the most natural state for the species is to devote themselves to a single mate at a time, not even looking at other males while he lives.
~ From a study of the Races of Cytheria
The Mongrel vomited into the slime toilet attached to his room, his body heaving as it expelled masses of blackened, necrotic tissue through his mouth. He was naked from the waist upward, and he’d closed both his door and window to prevent anyone from seeing, but it was still humiliating.
System take it! I hate how the backlash from using my Gift always comes the next day! He thought sourly. His Gift was powerful, and because it was redacted, he wasn’t protected completely from its effects as he would have been if it were visible on his status page.
Moreover, his use of his Art and one of his redacted skills had weakened his Flesh Magic, making it impossible for him to use his usual method for compensating after the fact. The best he could do was shift his body so that the dead flesh would exit through his stomach rather than causing a fatal infection.
He would have to deal with feeling weak for at least a few days, and he was having to down nutrition pills and pitchers of meat pudding every few hours to keep his body from withering away. The former was bitter and the latter was disgusting on every level (since it basically consisted of powdered meat in water with beaten eggs). Restoring muscle and organ tissue ruined by his Gift’s side-effects was consuming all his energy regeneration, as well as some drawn from the ambient energy around him.
The only good part about all this was that he didn’t have to deal with the fox maidens next door. They were apparently polite enough not to barge into his room, though he could vaguely sense them outside his room on the walkway balcony.
Do I give off some kind of weird pheromone I can’t get rid of with my magic? Almost all the women who chase me are from female-only races with a reputation for obsessive behavior… He wondered. All the women that had approached him in the last decade with serious intentions had been from female-only races. He was beginning to think he really was System-Cursed.
An hour later, he was able to rise to his feet and stumble over to the bed, where he opened his status.
Name:
Level: 34
Class: Mercenary Variant
Race: Mongrel
Body: 43
Mind: 41
Spirit: 81
Skills:
Gift:
Arts:
To his surprise, he’d gone up a level. Apparently, he’d pushed himself enough that the System felt the need to recognize his efforts. He wasn’t surprised his weapon skills hadn’t moved at all. Fighting zombies wasn’t exactly conducive to growing high level weapon skills. His Flesh Magic had improved by a few percentage points, probably due to the healing he’d done on the infected boy in the sewers. His skill percentage didn’t even move for altering or healing himself anymore.
His body had gone up two points, to his surprise. Apparently, his training with the weights and the lead sword had paid off. Mind – as always – had only improved by one. He had trouble understanding why he had so little talent for that stat, given that his mother was a Shadow Elf, who were known for having high Mind and Spirit stats.
His Spirit stat went up by three. It always went up by at least two, with occasional threes interspersed. His talent for the Spirit stat was why he had such high energy reserves and they regenerated so quickly. If not for that, he wouldn’t be much of a Flesh Mage, given how energy-intensive his magic was.
Most people had trouble increasing the Spirit stat, as it was one that very few had a talent for, and the requirements for training it were just too high. He’d lost a few Spirit stat points as part of the price for redacting his name… and part of his stat growth in that stat as well. It made him wonder just how high it would be if he hadn’t done that.
He examined his body with his magic and determined that he wouldn’t need to cleanse it again until the next morning. There was still some minor spots of weakened flesh that hadn’t yet tipped over into necrosis, but his natural immune system could deal with those.
He looked at his hand, and he saw that it was shaking when he lifted it, telling him just how weakened he was. It would be best if he stuck to his room and kept eating the meat pudding and nutrition pills until he recovered. The powder used in the pudding was made by him draining all the moisture out of hunted meat using his magic, then grinding it with a mortar and pestle until he could pour the resulting powder into a box for safekeeping. He had figured out it was the most efficient way to handle backlash after a lot of trial and error. Without the immense amounts of protein he consumed, his body would devour itself in the process of purging the necrotic tissue.
Necrotic tissue could not be used by Flesh Magic for healing, unlike merely damaged tissue. It was apparently no longer seen as ‘flesh’ by the skill at that point.
Once his hands stopped shaking, he took up a pitcher of water from the nightstand and used it to gargle the last bits of necrotic tissue from his mouth, spitting into the slime toilet. He used to do it the other way, but the effects passing necromantic tissue had on his intestines were far more painful and disgusting then just vomiting it up.
Still, that necro… he was probably being backed up by the Corpse King, given that it sent out death warriors to claim the fox girls, He thought. The Corpse King was one of a half-dozen highly-intelligent undead known to be in the necropolis. His name was also his race, the result of a wight evolving repeatedly until it regained a measure of self-control and intelligence. Like all undead that reached that level, it could reproduce through conventional means with other evolved undead… which probably meant it had intended to capture and slowly turn the girls over the course of weeks or months so that he wouldn’t have to evolve them into an appropriately powerful race.
Most likely, it had used the necro as a lure and distraction to find females that fit its tastes and other conditions. He wouldn’t be surprised if he found out that it had kidnapped numerous other female adventurers from amongst those listed as dead or missing.
I feel sorry for them, but there isn’t anything I can do about it, He thought with pity.
There were several worlds that were entirely ruled by the ‘living dead’, undead whose ancestors evolved to the point that they could produce descendants that functioned similarly to the living. It wouldn’t surprise him to learn that the under-layers of the necropolis were populated by similar beings, given how long the Corpse King and his fellows had supposedly been in existence.
Now, as soon as I’m recovered, I’ll need to get out of this town… Gillie deserves an explanation in person, though I don’t know how much I’ll tell him. Mary deserves an in-person meeting too, though I wish she’d stop sending me coupons… He thought. Gillie had welcomed him and helped set him up with a cheap inn soon after his initial arrival in Tonarre, when he was nearly broke. His friendship with the Madame Mary had begun by accident when he saved one of her girls from goblin raiders last year. They were the only two he really considered friends, though there were a few fellow mercenaries he sometimes went out for a night on the town with.
He’d never utilized the services at Mary’s, but she kept sending him coupons every week when he was in town, somehow finding the inn he chose within a day or two each time. An envelope full of them were slipped under his door the last three nights in a row. There were men in town who would gladly kill for just one of those coupons, and she seemed to take a perverse glee in sending them to a man who was a bit averse to using them.
When he saw another envelope slip under the door he sighed and pulled a hardcover book out of his storage, sitting back to read while he waited for his body to recover.
______________________________________________________________________________
Three days later, the Mongrel sat on a chair upholstered in purple velvet with gold trim, across from an excruciatingly beautiful cat therianthrope woman in a filmy black negligee. Every part of her was a picture of perfect physical beauty, from her long lithe legs with their soft thighs to her perfectly shaped body and idealized face. Even the fur of her ears and tail had a shine to it that made any man who saw it want to touch her.
The scariest part was that Mary, the madame who practically ruled Tonarre’s red-light district, was entirely natural. Her body had never been modified, she wasn’t wearing makeup, and she had never bothered to work at maintaining her beauty beyond eating well and keeping her body clean.
However, that very lack of artificiality had allowed her to claim and break the hearts of thousands of men (and more than a few women) over the four decades she had been present in Tonarre. The only concession she made to the limitations of mortality was using her inherent Life Magic to retain her youth and keep her body free of blemishes.
At the moment, her expression was sad but understanding, “So you’re leaving us __________?”
The resonance of the Mongrel’s original name was blotted out by the System, but it was a mark of his trust that she knew it at all.
“Yes. I made too much of a mess of things with the necro and the Baron before that. My brother will have already figured out where I am by now,” He said with a light shrug and a bitter smile. Mary was the only person in Tonarre that knew his past, so he didn’t bother hiding his motives with her.
“You just can’t stay quiet, can you?” She said, taking a sip of the brandy in the glass perched on the stand next to her chair.
“What can I say? Bad luck follows me wherever I go, and I’m not very good at hiding,” His lips flattened as he considered his own foolishness. He always made the same mistakes, and that led to partings like this one.
“You could always hide at my home,” She said suggestively.
“If I thought you were serious about it, I might take you up on that,” He said with a sad smirk. She echoed it with a false smile of her own. They both knew she had too many precious things to protect to risk them by taking him in now. They were both destined to live long lives, so this wasn’t a final goodbye, but it also wasn’t one that either of them relished.
“What are you going to say to Gillie?” She asked.
“I honestly don’t know. He is a good friend, but I’m afraid he’ll try to baby me even worse than you. You know how he gets with people he likes,” The Mongrel replied, shaking his head ruefully. Gillie was actually quite wealthy – primarily due to his breweries – but he ran a bar and inn in the slums as a way to keep his charity cases off the street. More than one broke adventurer had been put back on his feet after a disastrous job by taking a room at Gillie’s.
“I saw you were being followed around by fox maidens again?” She said with a smirk. She was quite obviously enjoying his discomfort.
“Do I give off some kind of smell that attracts them?” He asked glumly. It wasn’t that he didn’t find fox maidens beautiful. His first real relationship was with one. It was just that their values just didn’t match, and he was one of the rare cases where a fox maiden was likely to break off the relationship on her end.
“Probably, given that lamias and arachne like you too. Mongrels seem to make better mates for their kind than purebloods or half-bloods, from what I’ve seen,” She observed, shifting in a way that revealed more flesh in a way that would have had the average man staring blankly at her for an hour after.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
However, while he noticed, his eyes immediately went back to the brandy in his hand, “I wish they would just leave me alone. I don’t have the energy for relationships that aren’t going to work out anyway.”
“You should just give them the daughters they want. Those races will take the girls and raise them without you having to do anything, so why not?” She asked curiously.
“I don’t want to be my father,” He said grumpily.
“Ah, so that’s it… well, I can see where you are coming from, but speaking from a woman’s standpoint, it’s the wrong reason to reject them,” She said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that’s the reason why they follow you around like a lost puppy. Fox maidens like to take care of their males, and you are both strong and give off an air of vulnerability that attracts them like flies to honey,” She pointed out.
“What the hell does that even mean?” He grumped, failing utterly to understand what she was getting at.
This was typical for their conversations, so she let it go. She still tried sometimes, but she knew that he wasn’t likely to see the writing on the wall anytime soon.
Mary felt a deep sorrow at the upcoming parting. The Mongrel was one of the few men she’d met since settling in Tonarre that had looked at her without lust or contempt for her place in life. He noticed her beauty, but it didn’t entrance him like it did most others. She could make complaints to him without worrying about him using them against her later, a luxury she had not been able to afford otherwise in decades.
Gillie was a friend, but he was a friend who had priorities that often conflicted with the necessities of her work. His desire to raise up the poor and downtrodden of the slums often got in the way of their friendship, since part of her work was drawing young women onto her path in life. She didn’t resent his opposition to that aspect of her work, but it did make things awkward at times.
Most of the other men in her life were either customers of one of her brothels or people who otherwise wanted something from her. The transactional nature of most of her relationships – even now that she’d stopped taking personal customers – came back to bite her now that she wanted something real.
The Mongrel was not particularly powerful as mercenaries went. He was foolish about the women in his life, ruthless when protecting his secrets, and willing to work hard to make himself stronger. However, he was also young. He had horrible luck with clients, so much so that she had expected him to die shortly after their first meeting. He used swords even when a mace or an ax was a better choice. He had redacted his gift, even though doing so pretty much sealed away his real build.
He collected trouble like some of her girls collected gifts from patrons, and she was terribly afraid his survivor’s luck was going to change at exactly the wrong time. That it was likely to happen where she had no way of knowing of it pained her, as she valued their friendship a great deal more than he realized.
She reached inside the spatial collar that used to be her slave collar (a silver band with a ruby set in the middle) and pulled out a letter she’d written shortly after their first meeting, tossing it to him.
“What’s this?” He asked curiously, examining the high-quality paper envelope with its blue wax seal carefully.
“That’s a letter of introduction to the leader of the Shrieking Harpy Battalion, a mercenary band based out of Silorania on Takus. If you hand that to her, she should let you join the band and use it as a shield for your identity for a time,” She said with no apparent emotion.
Iai-la, the individual in question, was an old friend and fellow courtesan who had picked a drastically different path in life once she had the funds to buy her freedom. Unlike Mary, whose excessive beauty and charisma made it difficult for her to live outside the red-light district, Iai-la had a talent for survival and weapons that made her valuable to the Mercenaries Guild.
“She is an A-rank mercenary, and her Battalion is B-rank. It will take you a few years to arrive, so make sure you get promoted to B-rank before you join her,” She said.
From what her high-level Grand Assessment and Grand Analysis skills told her, the Mongrel’s skill levels were only a little short of higher B-rank . If it weren’t for his low level (and the resulting lower stats), he would have likely easily made the promotion.
To reach A-rank, he would have to have an evolved weapon skill or magic skill and be at level 70 or higher. Ideally, to reach B-rank, he should have all his stats at 60 or above and be at least level 50. B-rank mercenary jobs tended to be large-scale roles in major conflicts where conscripts had no place.
Most people stalled around level 40 or so, but she thought he would probably make it to A-rank, eventually. The only question was whether he would be able to take the next step after.
I sometimes regret taking my path as far as I did, and mine isn’t nearly as soaked in blood as his looks to be, She mused as he slipped the letter into his ring.
“Take care, my friend. You don’t have the luxury of rolling the dice like the rest of us, given your awful luck. I want to see you back here after that nasty brother of yours dies of old age,” She admonished as he left her behind, giving her a shrug and a smile before pulling his hood back up to walk out into the rain.
_____________________________________________________
The Mongrel and Gillie drank silently in the back room of the bar. Unlike the front, the back room, which was separated from the inn and the bar by a corridor that slanted downward and past the cellars where the beer and wine were kept, was decorated with works of art, the floor covered in a thick hand-woven rug, and with two large bookcases against the stone wall at the rearmost part. Its place two floors underground kept it at a comfortable temperature year-round, and Light Magic enchanted magitech devices kept it illuminated without the need for oil lamps or candles.
A young wolf therianthrope woman with deep scars running across her face stood behind Gillie and refilled their glasses whenever they became empty. Her frilly maid outfit was a bit odd considering her appearance, but it was apparently her own fetish. Hilariously – to the Mongrel’s mind – she was Gillie’s wife.
Gillie and the Mongrel sat in soft overstuffed leather chairs across from one another, neither of them really interested in speaking. Gillie knew that his friend was leaving, and the Mongrel knew his friend had figured it out. Since neither of them was the type to cry over a parting between friends, they just silently drank the hard liquor that Gillie’s grandfather had named the Burning House.
There were all sorts of things Gillie might have said, but he was accustomed to this kind of parting. Most of those he helped eventually left his care, only a small number joining one of his businesses or staying in town permanently. That he still helped was a mark of his idealism, not a desire to hold onto those who were ready to move on.
In the end, neither of them ever said a word, while a faintly exasperated wife pretending to be a maid looked on.
____________________________________________________________________________
Roughly two weeks after the necromancer incident, the Mongrel looked over the bodyguard and escort requests on the Mercenaries Guild wall for the hundredth time, Nothing leaving the Kingdom… that’s a problem. I’ve been everywhere in the Kingdom, and if I go back to Roscar or Lugendz, my brother’s agents will find me before I can make enough money to go elsewhere…
The five major cities of the Kingdom were Roscar, Lugenz, Halfax, Iodore, and Sigsend. Over the last ten years, he had spent at least a few months in each, until he attracted the wrong sort of attention and had to make a getaway. There were a few other large frontier towns like Tonarre, but he doubted he would be able to hide in any of them at this point.
“Hey Mongrel! The Guildmaster wants to see you!” A dark elf woman in a battered steel cuirass with a cutlass sheathed at her hip called from the second floor.
The Mongrel tilted his head to the side quizzically before shrugging and heading up to the second floor. As he passed, he caught the cold gaze of the dark elf ‘assessing’ him. What he saw in her eyes was all too familiar, so he suppressed his sigh of exasperation as he headed for the Guildmaster’s office.
The woman followed behind him, getting a little closer with each step. When she came within one meter, she lunged forward, a long dagger in hand… only for the dagger to slip under his armpit as he spun around, slamming his knee into her jaw with a dull crack. The glove covering his right hand disappeared as he grabbed the back of her head and molded her flesh and bone so that the joints in her arms and legs would be disconnected.
She moaned in agony as he hefted her onto his shoulder, using his magic to seal her lips shut just in case she tried to bite him or spit poison in his face (he had experience with assassins trying that on him after he disabled them in the past). He also checked her teeth for poison pills, as well as the back of her throat with his magic, and when he found one in her right rearmost molar, he grew a new oversized tooth over the fake one one so she couldn’t break the capsule inside.
This was one of the reasons why most people wouldn’t choose to go after a Flesh Mage with a dagger or any other weapon that put them within arm’s length. All a Flesh Mage needed to disable or kill was to touch bare skin. Once that happened, they could do anything they wanted to the inside of an opponent’s body, up to and including disabling vital organs or shapechanging them into an animal.
Of course, if the opponent had a higher spirit stat and a high-ranking magic resistance skill, he wouldn’t have been able to do that, but his spirit stat was abnormally high due to his inborn talent. Moreover, the magic resistance skill was notoriously hard to gain, as individual elemental resistances took priority when gaining resistance skills.
Which made him pretty much ideal as a Flesh Mage. Unfortunately, he also shared the common disability of most Flesh Mages when it came to the mind stat. Most Flesh Magic users had slightly boosted spirit stats in exchange for being unable to grow the mind stat through training. His inborn talent had added more points from the beginning, which was why his stat was so high.
He began to whistle cheerfully as he thought of the amount of credits this particular assassin would bring in when she was sentenced to slavery. At the same time, a part of him noted that when he first left home, he would have been horrified at the idea.
Zerag looked up from his paperwork as the Mongrel walked in, his eyes widening in surprise as he looked at the dark elf slung over his shoulder, “Why is a member of Tonarre’s Black Guild slung over your shoulder?”
“She tried to assassinate me after telling me you were looking for me,” The mercenary explained.
“Ah, I did send for you, but I am pretty sure I asked Ruskie to get you…” He said, looking worried. Ruskie was a young daemonic mercenary that was freed from slavery by Zerag after a disastrous job. His loyalty was unquestionable, so it was unlikely he was part of this.
“I hope he’s alive…” The Mongrel said, his brows furrowing. It was unlikely the dark elf was stupid enough to have killed a personal protege of the Mercenaries Guildmaster, but some people made bad choices when it came to large amounts of credits.
The daemon took out a small gray crystal and looked at it, narrowing his eyes, “He’s tied up in one of the training rooms on the second floor. I’ll have to have a word with him later about what happened…”
“So why’d you call me, Guildmaster?” The Mongrel asked curiously.
“The Governor wants to hire you and a dozen others to escort his son to the Academy in Philucca on Tarnec. The others were informed yesterday, but you left the hall before I could call you up,” He said.
The Mongrel furrowed his brows in consternation, “Why would the Governor ask for me specifically? I’m only C-rank, and I won’t be able to reach B-rank for some time…”
“Those kids you saved a few weeks ago were apparently his cousins by marriage. They put in a good word for you, and he decided that it would be a good reward. The other mercenaries are all B or A-rank, so you don’t need to worry about being the leader or anything. The pay is only one hundred credits a day, but it includes room and board,” Zerag explained.
Those kids I practically kidnapped put in a good word for me? I guess someone must have told them what happened after I knocked them out, He mused.
“Can you take care of this one and send me the credits after?” He asked, pointing at the half-conscious dark elf on his shoulder with his thumb.
“I can do that… I would appreciate it if you restored her first. Life Mages can’t fix the kind of damage your kind do when you are in a bad mood,” The Guildmaster replied with a shrug.
With a sigh, the Mongrel first knocked her unconscious by adjusting the hormonal balance in her brain, followed by unsealing her lips and restoring her limbs. He also extracted the false tooth from earlier and replaced it with a new one, straightening and repairing her other teeth (there were hairline cracks and cavities in several of them). Last of all, he repaired her jaw and fixed a number of small imperfections and organ damage caused by poor lifestyle habits.
“… I don’t think I asked for you to make her perfect?” Zerag said dryly when he saw the slight shifts, his eyes glowing as he observed what the Mongrel was doing through his racial skill.
“I don’t have much of a grudge against her, and it is better for her if she gets sold for more, given what usually happens to criminal slaves who don’t get sold at auction,” The Mongrel observed. This wasn’t the first assassin he’d sold, and she apparently hadn’t killed anyone before making the attempt on him. That meant she had either decent common sense or a sense of honor that made her want to avoid collateral damage. Either way, she wasn’t just another thug with a dagger.
“No chance of a beauty like that one not going for a high price. The nobles love pretty assassin slaves,” Zerag said as he helped tie her up and place her on the chair in front of his desk.
“Mmm… how much would it cost for me to buy her?” He asked after a moment of consideration.
“Since you caught her, you have first buying rights before the next auction… probably around five thousand credits, depending on her build. If she has lifestyle skills, it could go up to eight thousand or ten thousand,” Zerag speculated. Combat-oriented slaves were most valuable in times of war. If the Kingdom was at war with one of its neighbors, the price would have been in the tens of thousands, but given the current peace, her price was likely to be low.
The main reason the Mongrel thought of purchasing the assassin was because he wanted someone he could rely on to watch his back at night. While he managed to survive numerous assassination attempts over the years, this one would have taken him if it had occurred earlier in his life. Criminal slaves were not just bound by their collars but also by a curse that prevented them from harming or disobeying their masters. This meant she would be an ideal way to keep him safe when he had to sleep or were otherwise vulnerable.
Moreover, he had the money and her attempt on his life had impressed him enough that he felt she could survive watching his back on the battlefield.
“Could you make the arrangements? Please inform the Governor I’ll take the job,” He replied, taking a gray crystal out of his ring and charging it with ten thousand credits before tossing it to Zerag.
Zerag took the crystal, placing it in his own spatial device with a nod, “I’ll take care of it… I assume you want her outfitted?”
“Ask her what her favored weapons and armor are and I’ll pay for the Guild Standard,” He replied.
The Guild Standard was the recommended quality of weapons and armor for a given rank, up to C-rank. The Guild offered the service in larger towns and cities as a service, buying wholesale from larger workshops so as to get a cheaper price, then offering them to mercenaries at a slight markup that was still well-below market prices. It wasn’t possible to mass-produce B-rank equipment or above on their particular world, though worlds closer to the more advanced civilizations of Cytheria sometimes could.
“Got it,” Zerag said with a nod as the Mongrel turned and left him alone with the young dark elf woman.
_____________________________________________________________________
After he left, the two fox maiden sisters walked into Zerag’s office from the side-room, their eyes fixated on the dark elf, who still lay unconscious across the chair.
“Well, you two got what you wanted,” The Guildmaster remarked mildly as he sipped at a cup of tea that appeared from his spatial ring.
“Why did you let an assassin go after him in the Guild?” Kaede asked curiously.
“I wanted to see if he was as good as you said he was. If he was, he can survive the job, if he wasn’t, then he would be dead and I could forget I ever met you two,” He said calmly.
“Are you actually going to let him buy that… thing?” Fururu asked with some distaste, gesturing at the dark elf. The girls weren’t exactly thrilled at having a potential rival appear on the scene so early in the game.
“Of course I will. Just because I owed your grandmother a favor doesn’t mean I’m going to break my promise,” He replied mildly. The debt he owed to their grandmother was a minor one, and the only reason he was paying it to them was because it was a matter that would have no effect on his position.
Even if the Mongrel had died to the assassin, it would not have effected him at all. The Black Guild knew better than to harm his indentures and slaves, and they would have happily paid the blood money to cover for the act of killing a mercenary on Guild grounds. The fact that she even attempted the kill inside the Guild meant that the assassination contract was worth the blood money many times over, or they would have waited until he returned to the inn.
“Old snake,” Kaede remarked.
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Don’t throw mud in my face by prioritizing your pursuit over the job,” He warned coldly.
“As if we would be that stupid,” Fururu said scornfully.
He was a bit sad that the grandchildren of his old ally had turned out to be typical fox maidens, but he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. That species took after its progenitor to a ridiculous extent at times, to the point that he honestly thought she had cursed her descendants on purpose.
This was actually typical of most of the races born from Awakened Beasts. While they showed some individuality as they matured, their essential natures and personalities tended to echo that of their ultimate ancestors. This was because Awakening was a phenomenon that occurred when a sentient monster reached the end of its path, thus becoming a unique being that possessed no racial peers. The only way for such a being to reproduce was to mate with other races, so the System allowed their descendants to breed true, resulting in the birth of numerous sapient races that hadn’t existed at the birth of Cytheria.
The reason why personalities tended to be similar within those races was because bits and pieces of their ancestors’ paths were what allowed them to breed true. Sadly for them, this often meant they inherited less than desirable traits from their ancestors, such as the Arachne’s predatory mating (often literally) or the fox maiden’s tendency to revel in spoiling their mates rotten.
The girls continued to exchange sarcastic statements with him for several minutes before giving up on their plans to eliminate their potential rival, leaving the Guildmaster to the headache of considering the trouble he’d just inflicted on the Mongrel.
_____________________________________________________________________
Syana D’Arvin awoke with a start, the rattling of chains as she attempted to push herself upright shocking her into making an uncharacteristic shriek of surprise. She tried to look down, but she felt the cold sensation of something holding her head still, a band of some kind of metal binding her forehead to the hard surface beneath her.
A familiar daemon stood looking down at her from the side of her resting place, his arms folded across his chest, “Awake, are you? I’m only going to explain this once, so save your questions for afterwards.”
“You attempted to assassinate one of my mercenaries inside my Guild, and you failed and were captured alive. The Governor’s Magistrate has already sentenced you to life as a criminal slave, and the binding curse has already been embedded in your heart. The Black Guild expressed regret that one of their members would break the rules by making an attempt inside a protected area and paid the weregild. As a result, there is no chance of them coming to rescue you,” He explained coldly.
She felt a deep sense of shock and abandonment. The Black Guild had commanded her to make the attempt inside the Mercenaries Guild, against her wishes, and now she was abandoned to the whims of whoever paid the most. As a criminal slave sentenced to life, the only way she could be freed is if the government of whatever Territory she was in agreed with her owner to grant her freedom, and that was highly unlikely, as most rulers hated to free criminal slaves.
For the past twenty years, she’d worked for the Black Guild with absolute devotion, even stalling her own path in life to prove her loyalty. However, it appeared that the Guild didn’t value her as much as she had valued it…
The dark elf’s despair was obvious, but the Guildmaster continued mercilessly, “The man you attempted to assassinate, known as the Black Mongrel, purchased your contract in advance, so your owner has already been decided. You will be equipped with C-rank equipment matching your style. Your first command from your master is to select the best equipment available for your build.”
She felt an intense desire to follow the order she was just given, her body twitching and spasming as it tried to break free of the restraints and fulfill the command.
“Ah, sorry about that. Be at ease. You don’t have to do anything until you are released from your bindings,” He said gently, his manner betrayed by the sadistic glint in his eyes. Though he rarely showed it, he loved to see others suffer. He just had the common sense to restrict his desires to slaves and courtesans.
“I know your origins, young D’Arvin, so I have decided to inform you of the Black Guild’s reasoning. Apparently, your family cut off support for the Guild a few years back without informing you, and so the Guild decided to dispose of an unsupported member in a way that didn’t look like a betrayal to the uninformed eye. Your real betrayers were your family… though in a way, isn’t that typical? Has it ever been otherwise with the drow?” He said, not bothering to hide his sadism now that he had the chance to let it all out.
It was true, the drow – the dark elves – were ruthless and cruel with their own. As descendants of high elves who were corrupted by an elder black dragon, they didn’t value family beyond using it as a base of power. She was sent to the surface to be their liaison with the Black Guild, providing funds in exchange for products and materials that couldn’t be produced in the underground. If that funding was cut off, it was only natural the Guild would decide to dispose of her…
She knew it was possible… but she had always worked for the sake of the family, ignoring the internal politics. Being sent to the Guild had been a godsend, the first freedom she had experienced in her short (for a drow) life. Unfortunately, now even the good memories from her time in the Guild were tainted by her family’s machinations, and she felt a deep veil of despair fall over her as the daemon looked down at her with a satisfied smile.
Name: Syana D’Arvin
Level: 25
Class: Assassin Criminal Slave
Race: Dark Elf
Body: 30
Mind: 61
Spirit: 44
Skills: Crossbow 4, Rapier 7, Martial Arts 4, Dual-Wield 3, Darkness Magic 5, Ice Magic 6, Energy Manipulation 8, Fire Resistance 2, Poison Resistance 6, Disease Resistance 5, Alchemy 4, Herbalism 6, Disassembly (Monster) 4, Backstab 3, Daggers 5, Cooking 5
Gift: Domain of Self
Arts: Deadly Thrust