Chapter 058: Politics

Meanwhile, in Ambryxis.

The teleportation platform hummed quietly behind us. Slowly getting even more quiet, as the power it gathered to move us from the depths of the Dungeon back into the surface slowly disappeared.

I let our NPCs go. They had things to do. I could call them back whenever I wanted to go into a Dungeon again. Perks of being a Player and having Nexus connection.

Soon I was alone with Vhera. We began walking towards our quarters, as we decided earlier to postpone selling the loot for tomorrow. She was silent all the time. Suspiciously silent.

“Let me guess, you are fretting over Avhar and his Ardent Flame. Again.” She does that too often for my taste.

Let’s have this talk fast and then continue our return journey in silence. I couldn’t wait to get back home. I needed a bath, as any person would after a prolonged visit in the Depraved Pits. And I couldn’t wait for my slave to give me one - I mean, why clean up yourself when you own a slave? That can do the bathing for you… while using her mouth as an important tool for this process?

Well trained slaves were the best. And a certain part of my body seemed to agree with me.

“Vasyr, you are thinking about something perverted again, doesn’t you?” Vhera decided against answering my question.

“Said the person that seemed veeeery happy after falling into that tentacle pit.” I retorted. It was quite amusing thing to watch, even if she ended up damaged in the process (that big tentacle was a bit too much for her body to handle) to the point where we had to employ mercy kill. I’m totally going to have fun with that until the end of our lives.

“Ugh, this isn’t the point.” Said the person who started the subject. “I think they’ll be trouble. They’re growing in strength too much.”

“And I already told you, that it doesn’t matter.” I feel like I’m taking to a child. A hopelessly perverted child with a major tentacle rape fetish (and many lesser ones), but still a child. It’s really hard to straighten her up after she hooks to some subject like that. “There are four hundred Crimson Blades members, and I’m counting only combatants. 80 adventurer parties against, like, two? It’s 40:1. With quantity advantage like that, their meager quality advantage means nothing.”

Not to mention - she obviously knew that - them being a kill-on-sight for every servant of Ambryxis… if he ever noticed them and understood what they were plotting. Plus my… preparations.

Sure, Avhar was a smart fellow. But I was smarter.

The database I gave him access to? There was obviously another one, hidden, for key members of the Blades, with all the really sensitive information.

That paedo I had him kill? Well, completely coincidentally I had one of my underlings sneak inside before their visit and leave a little recording device. I have them breaking inside and torturing a persone to death on a tape. That was going to reach local authorities the second they outlived their usefulness.

Not to mention my greatest heist up to date. Avhar and most local ‘liberals’ (as we called those being against indulging in what that place offered) thought that I was amongst those thinking that this place was all fake and NPCs weren’t real and could be murdered etc. to our heart’s content. Local extremists thought I was closet liberal and was against using slaves/visiting ‘weird’ brothels/working for local drug lords etc. because I thought that NPCs were real and I believed they deserved human rights.

All of them were wrong. Or at least not completely right. I was completely sure that locals existed for real, but I was neither extremist nor liberal. We, Players, were bound to end up strong. Powerful. Influential. The rest? Even if they were real, human rights and all sort of ethics were bullshit.

It was natural for the strong to rule over the weak however they pleased. I loved this place precisely because it ignored all those hypocritical, self-righteous and half-assed arguments that pissed me off so much on Earth. “Human rights”? If you couldn’t hold to your rights and kick anyone who wanted to take them from you in the face, you didn’t deserve them in the first place.

If they didn’t understand my motivations, how could they predict my actions?

“I’m not afraid of them.” Vhera spoke. “I’m afraid that they might have backers above.”

I stopped.

“You think that they’re Gods’ pawns?’ She nodded.

I haven’t thought about that. The whole religious part of this world still eluded me. Religion as a whole was just a bunch of superstitions for stupid people (though it was useful if you wanted to rule over them), but… here there seemed to be some truth in it. I mean, if there are Chosen Ones with phenomenal powers… something obviously had to choose them.

Maybe… what if one of them was a Chosen One? That would give them enough firepower to fight against enemies normally too strong, obviously gaining levels much faster. A single Chosen One wasn’t going to make up for the gap in quantity, but… it could get painful later on.

“I… guess I’ll have to look into that. I already have an idea.” I said, resuming the walk. “But not before the elections. That takes the priority.”

“I’m afraid that the only way for you to win against Balq is for him to die. But you knew that already, did you?” I smiled wryly.

Local Adventurers Guild was led by a Masked Council member… that had his own personal council of advisors. This included a representative of the beginners of this trade - in short, of all local adventurers to the Silver badge included.

I was Silver badge. I could get elected to that position, especially now that the former advisor retired. Crimson Blades gave me enough electorate to be considered a number two in this race. But Balq… he was a number one.

The difference between us was rather major. He was from a very wealthy family. He could offer his supporters and voters gifts and promises I couldn’t beat. His family really invested in him, hoping to get one of their members into the proximity of one of Masked Council members.

He was also a good adventurer, so it wasn’t all nepotism and bribes. He had all the skills of a Silver badge adventurer… but an equipment of at least a Platinum badge. The only reason he was still a Silver badge was that the Guild judged you by merit plus the exams were done in equipment provided by it, precisely to avoid wealthy people rising too fast.

I already tried to assassinate him. It ended up badly. What’s worse, he retaliated and I was still around only because I got respawned by the system. He probably assumed I narrowly survived getting stabbed twenty times and decided that it was enough as a deterrent (besides, the Guild started watching us a bit too close after that exchange, at least for a while) so he left me like that.

Two weeks until the election that I was going to lose.

“I think we’ll need to try again.” I answered her with a smile. “And now that the blizzard ended, our options expanded.”

Finally, we reached our quarters.

***

In the Tyrant’s Hold.

We were outside when I got the message.

The blizzard ended, letting us leave the place for the first time in a while. The world around was… white. Very much. Three meters of snow everywhere. We had Firewing melt the snow, uncovering the stone ledge outside the Hold entrance.

Sure, we could walk on it, but I wasn’t going to risk that a meter away from the edge of the cliff going thirty meters down.

We lost a whole day uncovering our improvised graveyard and laying the people from the cathedral to rest. It was mostly a temporary measure to reanimate the half-dead Greyflame. I could still feel her power around, but it got weaker since the time before the blizzard.

While we were doing that, Kovacs got some kids out of the Hold and showed them (together with his party) what can you do with the snow. Even Midnight, the Hold’s cat, decided to follow them. Though mostly because Vila - Leria’s adopted daughter, with even the system showing her as Vila Khan at this point - wanted to go with them and he wasn’t going to let his underling spend time without his supervision.

I was about to join them when the message came to me on Nexus.

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: I have a little mission for you. Can you come to Ambryxis? Asap, if possible Tongue [https://www.royalroadcdn.com/public/smilies/tongue.png]

Avhar Khan [P]: Before I answer that - when did we meet?

No way I’m letting ourselves run into Red Mist again.

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: ???

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: Before Descent. You warned us about Fleshling.

Avhar Khan [P]: K. I just went through a rather weird quest and… some local being (a unique daemon very deep into mischief and lies) somehow falsified the Nexus message to pull us into a trap.

No way I’m telling him about Red Mist. He would ask us too many questions. Besides, getting attention of a Chosen One of Malice obviously had to have some deeper reason, which he might have started digging for.

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: …

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: This game gets weirder and weirder with every passing minute.

A snowball exploded on my face. Looked like some of the kids decided that a person standing around with his face in the weird floating tables will be a nice target practice.

Oh no, you don’t.

Several snowballs I threw at them managed to force them to scatter, giving me enough time to return my attention to Nexus.

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: There is a person in the city I’d like you to kill for me. Balq Tyrnir. From THOSE Tyrnirs. Silver badge adventurer about to join the guildmaster advisory group.

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Vasyr Mirenir [P]: I already tried to do that myself, but not only did my assassins fail the job, but he also retaliated and had few of his colleagues punch a lot of holes in me.

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: Any chance you can do it?

Huh. Politics in the city are as cultured as always, it seems.

Avhar Khan [P]: Any additional information or dirt about him?

Vasyr Mirenir [P]: Homosexual. Wealthy, and likes to throw money around to buy people’s attention. Is about to start policy of buying refuse slaves en masse by the Guild to hand them cheeply to members if they need some relief/someone to carry their burdens/person to throw into some daemon’s maw to steal his treasures while he is busy chomping on the meal they provided.

Well, I might’ve not been comfortable with homosexuality as a phenomenon, but I certainly didn’t consider it a reason to kill/maim/wound/insult someone.

Who the fuck does he think I am?!

What was that, a concentrated list of kill reasons in case I was: a) nazi, b) communist, c) anyone with a working conscience?

At least the last one was spot on. I didn’t really care about this Balq being gay, nor about him being wealthy (it didn’t matter what you did with your money, as long as you earned it legally). But the last part… Ugh. It should persuade Leria to not pester anyone about the assassination being wrong, for an added benefit.

Avhar Khan [P]: I can’t promise anything, but we should be in Ambryxis tomorrow evening. We can talk about it.

Suddenly another snowball hit me. I rose my eyes, expecting more children… only to see Kovacs and his entire group looking at me with wry smiles and with snowballs in their hands.

Most of my party was either participating in the burials or decided to stay in the Hold.

It’s going to hurt.

***

The First Great Snowball War of the Ardent Flame ended with Kovacs team winning approximately 345 to 0. Which hurt my pride but I couldn’t do anything about that so I decided to let it pass.

I’ll still get my revenge one day.

Kovacs and his party departed with our trainees soon after it concluded. Heading to the Dungeon. They were supposed to make a deep raid into it, testing how it modified itself to look and act more like common, domesticated Dungeon. While picking up Decemvirate parts and honey to sell, and Tzikimi artifacts for Firewing. While also following the trainees for a while and helping them not make horrible mistakes in the first ten minutes of their combat career.

We promised that we wouldn’t visit the place again, but this obviously didn’t include Kovacs… and they were going to announce what they are there for right after entering it, so the Dungeon probably wasn’t going to get homicidal. Worst case scenario, they accept that he doesn’t want them and go to Descent.

In the meantime my party was supposed to visit Ambryxis, sell stuff that we got from the cathedral raid, buy parts for Aurora (thankfully all memory cores and control circuits for automatas were standard issue), and everything that Firewing needed to set up a meadery. To mass produce red mead from the red honey we could gather in decent number from the upper layers of the Dungeon.

Securing a steady source of income was very important.

Plus, it seems, we were also going to murder someone.

***

The things we bring to sell turned out to be surprisingly valuable. Especially the potions of Firewing, since they were of great quality. Well purified and so on. Another few thousands ambries to spend.

Aurora’s parts were easy to find. There was an entire shopping center dedicated to techmaturgy. Several levels filled with shops catering to every possible need. You could buy parts for every type of machine from every source. Imperial, Decemviratian, Ashkarian… even ancient ones. Xylian, Kraadian, Val’zylian, Oleandrian, etc. etc. Plus, of course, parts from the Werks stalking the Black Woods during the Werkmonth though there was going to be a shortage in a few months at best due to the month interrupted by the coming of the Long Night.

There was even a shop that accepted ‘weird’ requests and issued necessary mission to adventurers. So if you wanted parts from a Mechanican land dreadnought (a kilometer high warmachine capable of leveling entire cities with a single salvo of its vast artillery batteries, used by Command AI to efficiently wipe out major population centers of the Xylian Dominion) or a clockwork guardian from the timeshifted Kingdom of Valra, you could get them easily as long as you had money.

A lot of money, since the only sources of both existed in Imperium and the word ‘embargo’ barely began to describe its approach to things like that reaching Dragonspine Mountains.

There were enough automatas in the city for the shop dealing in their parts to be set up right in the shopping center. Buying both a controlling circuit and a memory core (looked like a USB pendrive to me but ok) was easy. The shop had an entire data center filled with various information the automata might require, and they were nice enough to transfer an entire vocabulary, grammar and so on of the local language unto it.

We paid five hundred ambries for that, and three hundred more for spare parts that Aurora required to finish her repairs. She could manufacture them on her own (automatas could do that if given time and access to resources), but it was going to take a while, so let’s speed things up.

After that we went to buy the meadery equipment plus a few minor things that the Hold required. Which included ‘minor’ things like four hundred sets of clothes that weren’t made up of rags. Needless to say, it took us a while.

We met with Vasyr in a restaurant. Only me and Simea participated, since he already knew us and the less he knew in detail about the rest of us the better. Sure, he most likely watched us as close as possible when we were in the city… but everything he missed or misunderstood was an advantage to us.

***

Killing someone was a major pain, especially when the target was aware of the looming threat. Balq knew that Vasyr could try something funny - after all he seemed to have already tried to assassinate him once. So he refused to go anywhere without a group of bodyguards that seemed… painfully good.

We were stalking him for two days. Or, to be exact, Syna was stalking him, since she was the best of our rogues. If I had more time, I’d have him stalked for two or three weeks, figuring out his preferred daily routine and finding a perfect place to strike. Preparing alternative plans and escape routes.

But we had no time for that, obviously. According to Vasyr the elections were going to happen in a week, so we had to speed things up.

First assassination attempt occurred at the noon of the third day of our hunt. Syna attempted to snipe Balq while he was going to the Guild from his house. Unfortunately, his bodyguards had a magical device made to counter sniping attempts by detecting small mirrored surfaces in the vicinity. So they detected her scope.

They covered him with their own bodies, covered in aura armor so there was no chance to shot through them, before she managed to shoot. She still did, hoping to find a weak spot in the living shield. She did manage to graze his leg, but that was pretty much everything.

Sounds like Decemvirate technology. Locals had no counter-sniping mechanisms like that.

Ironically enough, Balq immediately decided that Vasyr decided to play with him again. A group of adventurers stormed his quarters that night. Vasyr, Vhera and Vasyr’s slave died. But then they got better.

Makes me wonder how they explained Vasyr being alive… after they delivered his head to Balq. It must have been a most hilarious talk.

City militia came in, interrogated both sides and decided that it was more political violence. Nobody confessed to anything, obviously. But they saw enough of this shit to be sure.

Rather than trying to stop them or anything they gave the two a briefing about things that were allowed during bouts of political violence and those that locals weren’t ready to tolerate, then they let them go.

Ambryxis was a place where the local Assassin Guild was a well respected organization that operated openly and paid taxes. As long as you didn’t kill innocent people and obeyed the rules, the militia ignored you.

Killing people in their homes or in temples was forbidden, though only ‘proper’ homes worked, not temporary adventurer quarters. Killing family members was a no as well, though slaves, co-workers and lovers (as long as there were no marriage ties) were fair game. If someone went into hiding, you could get information on his whereabouts via bribes but not tortures.

Also - killing by weapon, poison and even bare hands was ok, but if you purposefully caused pain for the sake of the death being painful, it was no longer assassination but a murder. Pain moved the assassination from the realm of Dagger to Agony, and that was a nope.

There was also a rule that every person being a target of an assassination contract could bail out at any moment. Most of the people being targeted by their competition or people they offended knew what made them target. If they publicly announced that they planned to change the thing that made them target or proposed suitable recompense, the contract was expected to be called off.

It was pretty much a logical consequence of Dagger, the Imperial Religion’s God of Assassins and Murder, being an accepted deity in the city. It was still stupid, but it was logical. The only reason the city wasn’t a permanent battlefield of assassinations was that it was… well. Cultured?

The local wealthy were a surprisingly close knit community. Every important person knew all other important people. Assassinations? If they had a conflict they couldn’t solve, they would bet on the different gladiators during the gladiatorial fights accompanying some of the religious festivals. But assassins were useful if a newcomer didn’t want to play along the preexisting rules. And making them operate openly allowed the Council to wag its finger when someone was overdoing things.

It made our job even tougher. Ugh. Vasyr should gather money and issue the job to the local Dagger’s temple. These guys were highly professional, well versed in the rules and considered their contracts sacred. We are amateurs! Complete fucking amateurs!

Revelation came suddenly. It was insane and stupid… so it was obviously a great idea, since there was no way Balq could expect us doing something so ridiculous. Though it took me a while to persuade Vaera.

The hardest part was introducing him to Balq in a way that didn’t make it look suspicious… while making our target aware that Vaera was in fact the prettiest boy possible rather than very pretty girl. Balq was known for his preference for shemales and young and pretty men.

We also had to hide the part about Vaera being a dragonbride. Required a bit of work with cosmetics to cover the markings on his skin. Thankfully we had that covered already, since hiding the truth about him was a pain. I talked about it with Firewing in the spare time and she figured out good solution. Two sets of magical cosmetics, one to cover the markings only and the other to make him look significantly less pretty.

Vasyr decided that we had a great idea and helped with the introduction part. After seeing Vaera once, Balq immediately decided that he absolutely had to put his dick in him.

Thinking with your dick never ends well. Important thing to remember for future.

The sweet rendezvous happened during the night prior to elections. Privacy of a local equivalent of love hotel, wine, sweets and a giant bed covered in pink quilt. With a red heart in the middle. Ugh.

Vaera spiced the wine with the fastest working poison we managed to find and buy. Balq didn’t suspect anything since his newest and up-to-date prettiest boyfriend drank it as well. Both died a few minutes after they drank the first glass. Vaera’s body immediately disappeared as he was resurrected in the Hold, leaving only Balq’s body in a room that was closed from the inside and had armed people guarding the entrances.

Let’s see them trying to figure out how that happened.

***

Surprisingly, Vasyr lost the elections. But only because Balq’s bodyguards fled from the city after discovering his body, in fear of his family reprisal. Because of that, the body was discovered only after elections concluded.

With Vasyr getting the second score, he ended up promoted to guildmaster’s advisory group. Some people seemed to opt for another election, but guildmaster representative cut it short with a snarky comment that he doesn’t want more assassinations to happen.

We celebrated in the evening. Vasyr invited us to a celebratory meal. Since he was willing to pay, I decided to come.

It was a surprisingly nice meal. Vhera and Vasyr were disgusting people when it came to their morals (or lack of them) but they certainly were intelligent and talking with them was quite nice. As long as they steered clear of subjects that could have make Leria snap and grab her sword.

Obviously I wasn’t stupid enough to not confiscate her sword before meeting Vasyr, so the threat was merely metaphorical. Although she could probably cause a lot of damage with her arms and Zealous Accusation alone.

“Actually… there is another thing I wanted to suggest.” After seeing Vasyr’s suddenly serious face I immediately understood that whatever he wanted to suggest, it was the reason why he invited us. “Are you willing to work with us for a while?”

Hmm? He obviously had something specific in mind. If there was enough in it for us I could be persuaded, though… there was always a risk of him learning too much about us if we spent too much time.

“Depends. What do you have in mind?” The rest chatted in the background. Leria somehow managed to fight off her deep disdain for Vhera for a while and they were busy talking about fashion, while Simea argued about sweets (what else) with Lena. Syna, obviously, was silent and was busy eating her meal while eyeing me and Vasyr with curiosity.

“The Guild is preparing a joint operation with the witch-hunters.” Oh? “There is a cult under the name of ‘Hand of Freedom’ that operates in the area to the northeast from city. It isn’t Ambryxis territory per se, but it seems that locals decided they can no longer fight against it and somehow remembered that they used to be part of the Ambryxian Dukedom when Northern Aevaria occupied the area. Search and destroy type of operation. Payment for participation, additional bonuses for achievements. I plan to send best members of the Blades, but… having additional firepower might be useful.”

Huh.