Arrowcat had to follow the dreary dullards through the dark halls for what felt like a millennium. She wondered why Hideo cared so much for them. During her brief time in the library, she had already found the New Jade City elite to be incredibly irritating and banal. As the Inferno assassins hauled the wealthy hostages down the dark corridors submerged within the bowels of the library, she heard the most predictable of platitudes.
“Please let us leave!” remarked one noblewoman in a ridiculous-looking brown hennin as she was pushed forward. It is a wonder why that giant samurai has not let you go yet. That was so well argued. She trailed behind them in the darkness of the hollow corridor. The lack of light worked to her advantage. Only a few hanging sconces were lit, and apparently, the Inferno Clan had never been trained to think about, perhaps looking behind them occasionally. Regardless, she still took cover behind corners and pillars every time she advanced.
“How about some coin?” another bearded nobleman in a green kaftan pathetically offered the large black and gold Samurai leading the escort. “I own much land. Do you desire castles, women?” Unsurprisingly, the Samurai did not take him up on any of the offers, only uttering a word in Arkovian. “Is that a yes?” the moronic nobleman asked with sudden hope in his voice.
He called you a shithead. Arrowcat ran on light and ghostly footsteps, taking cover behind a statue of some unrecognisable maiden, perhaps a high noble or a previous queen. It mattered not to her. She noticed one Inferno lagging. He trailed behind the escort, resting his long spear against the wall. He approached a white marble bust of King Sigismund Greenfire, his black armour shrouding him in the shadows, with only his bronze demon mask still visible. As the sound of trickling water echoed down the corridor, Arrowcat soon realised that he was in a vulnerable position.
She nocked a steel arrow and admired her sapphire bow as it shined under the sconce’s firelight above her. She set the arrow free. It swooped down the hall with the grace and majesty of a blue phoenix. It hurtled into the bronze-headed assassin and his water sprayed upwards and over King Sigismund’s marble face.
The Samurai’s little party had already passed through the large doors at the end of the stretched hallway by this point. The fallen assassin had already been forgotten about before he had even been slain. With the coast clear, she allowed herself to pace down the centre of the hallway. The busts and statues watched her from both sides with ghostly grey eyes. She did not believe that this part of the library was made for the public. There was an unwelcome aura around the bottom story of the flashy building, as if the uses for the lower parts of the tower were to be darker affairs than simple, leisurely reading.
She approached the large mahogany doors and stopped herself. It would have been foolish to enter this way. If the Samurai had any wits about him, he would have positioned a guard there, and unlike some other assassins, she knew better than to kick the door down and cause a scene.
Erector made her exit through a glass window. She stayed close to the edge outside. The fall wasn’t high enough to be lethal from the library’s annexe building, but she still didn’t fancy her chances. On the horizon, she saw the incandescent lights from a dozen City Watch carriages hurtling down cobblestone pathways that were only a few streets away, their bells dinning in urgency. That doesn’t appear promising.
She hoped that if Hideo did, in fact, survive his encounter with the Inferno Clan’s Thane, he wouldn’t have the cruel luck to then be caught and arrested shortly after. She heard an explosion, but from the angle that she was hanging out the window, she could not get a good enough view of what could have been occurring from above. The library was ablaze. She gathered that much. She could smell the ash and saw the tentacles of thick smoke leering down towards her.
She leapt onto a caryatid that hung beside the window and would grant her access to the one above. The marble angel’s face was buried in her hands as if she were aware of everything happening around her.
Upon crawling through the higher window, she silently moved across one of many overlooking rafters that interwove and crossed over one another like some great oaken web. Below her, she had a perfect view of the Inferno assassins and their squabbling hostages. The captives were gathered by a large fireplace. The room’s interior was marvellously opulent. The floors were covered in various wolfskin and bearskin rugs and there were full bookshelves that stretched up to the crossing beams the Archer was hiding among. Each armchair looked so cushioned and deep that one could fall into its embrace and never get out. Perhaps this was meant to be Reynard Woodard’s own personal chamber, and he was certainly making good use of it. The hostages had laid him onto a large crimson rug and the Samurai seemed to have permitted one of the nobles to cover the Viscount with a blanket. Reynard hardly looked content. His veins were turning a dark green colour and his eyes appeared to be growing larger and bulging. All his words were desperate wheezes.
The Inferno assassins were preoccupied with overturning furniture and pick-pocketing various trinkets that they found. One assassin in a bronze helm in the twisted shape of a fanged serpent’s head picked up a small globe and then chucked it away in agitation without even glancing at it. “How long must we wait?” he protested in Arkovian. “Let us leave him here to perish. The City Watch will be here soon!”
The Samurai turned from one of the bookshelves and Arrowcat saw that under the large black and bronze kabuto was a silver mask resembling a ghostly face with small spikes jutted from his cheeks. His heavy dark armour clanked and rattled every time he took a step towards the complaining assassin. “His orders were to wait and make sure he’s dead from the venom,” the metal giant said with a hard yet quiet voice.
“And how long will that take?” the snake-helmed assassin asked. “Just slit his throat, burn the books, and be done with it.”
“He wants the Viscount to die slowly,” the Samurai reiterated.
“Please!” The loud shriek came from one of the noblewomen hostages in a red dress. A ruby amulet was draped about her shoulders and her red hair was coiffed. She was hunched over the Viscount and holding his hand to provide comfort. “Can’t you spare him? Or at least give him something to ease the pain.” Her request was not met with a response.
“He can’t understand you!” the bearded nobleman in the green kaftan called out, responding to her yet looking directly at the Samurai as he made his insults. “He probably doesn’t speak the common tongue. He seems too dim-witted to speak many words in general.”
The Samurai made a clanking noise as he turned his metallic head towards the nobles. His armour continued to rattle as he stepped closer to the bearded noble. The ghostly silver mask looked down on him and he pointed a metallic finger inches away from his paling face. There didn’t seem to be a part of the Samurai that wasn’t covered in metal. “I most likely speak this pompous language better than you do,” the hard voice said fluently in the common tongue of the Midlands.
The bearded nobleman turned pale white. He fell to his knees in a pathetic attempt to beg. “I me-meant no offence, sir,” he said hurriedly. “Perchance you then understood the offers I made earlier; I can give you anything you desi-”
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The Samurai slapped the nobleman across the head with his metallic hand. The hostages shrieked and gasped as if he did not have it coming. The bearded noble crawled back to his fellow hostages like some reprimanded dog, specks of blood from his nose staining the bearskin rug as he shuffled over. “When the Viscount finally succumbs, then we can all leave,” the Samurai boomed, both at the assassins and hostages. They all fell silent, aside from the Viscount’s wheezing and pained croaks.
Perhaps Hideo had the easier task. The chamber was not particularly spacious, and the many candlelights and torches eviscerated all shadows and darkness for her to take refuge in. She deduced that a distraction would be the most viable option. It had irked Arrowcat greatly that Hideo requested her to keep the hostages safe, too. The Viscount would be enough trouble to look after, especially now that he seemed too ill to stand on his own. Her stunt would have to not result in any death or injury towards the nobles. I should have asked for some of his bloody blue dust before I left him. Oh, how she had scoffed at his little magic trick for so long. Another cruel, yet perhaps deserved farce from life.
Arrowcat kept her eyes focused on the snake-helmed assassin who appeared to be the most impatient of the Thane’s little brood. She suspected him to also be the biggest liability. He tossed books from the shelves and onto the floor aimlessly and in frustration. He soon lit a match in an attempt to start his arson early. Arrowcat focused her view on the small spherical and rusty ornament hanging from his daggered belt. It was a strange and intriguing object. Surely it was placed beside his other weapons for a reason. She nocked an arrow back, pulling the string on her sapphire bow and holding it in place as she aimed the arrowhead towards his belt. Let’s see what happens…
The arrow swooped down like a microraptor flying for the final kill on its prey. It penetrated the rusty sphere and within a few seconds, the entire corner of the chamber was engulfed in flames. The explosion blew the three remaining assassins off their feet, except for the Samurai, whose thick metal armour seemed to keep him balanced in place. The hostages all screamed and shrieked, but none of them were close enough to be caught by the birth of the great blaze. The fire started to spread across the surrounding bookshelves and soon took a hold of the beams Arrowcat was hidden amongst, leaving her no choice but to drop down and make her presence known.
She landed atop one of the floored assassins and inserted an arrowhead into his neck without much concern.
Arrowcat arose to find another in a winged and fanged gold helm charging towards her. She deflected the swing of his katana with her bow and disarmed him in one swoop. She whacked the helm off his head and delivered a stern punch into his pointed nose before finishing him with another of her arrows that she wielded like a dagger.
She felt her quiver turn lighter as she drew another arrow and nocked it. She let it fly into the last of the Samurai’s henchmen, who turned limp and dropped like a fallen marionette. The flames began to bite into the body.
The Samurai studied the Archer in blue from behind his silver and spiked mask. The nobles carried the ailing Viscount as far away from the spreading fires as they could, whilst the metallic giant rattled his armour as he made slow, cautious steps towards her.
Arrowcat smiled under her zaffre hood. “In my defence, I didn’t expect the orb to do that.”
The ghostly giant raised a long black yari spear with a silver blade that glistened under the flames above. The Samurai’s walk evolved into a slow charge. He was a black and bronze spiked wall hurtling towards her. Arrowcat rolled away from him. Neither her bow nor her arrows would be of much help against the thick metal that covered the brute. She cast her gaze over the trembling chandelier above the Samurai that the flames were beginning to flirt with. She fired one of her remaining arrows with three swift motions, and the hanging chain snapped asunder. Crystallised chimes shattered around the Samurai and waning, flaming candles flared against him. The ghostly giant aggressively swatted the fires and broken shards away and grunted in frustration whilst doing so.
With the Thane’s right hand sufficiently distracted, Arrowcat turned her attention to the shrieking captives. She kicked the mahogany doors and with a violent swing and a howl from the draft; they opened. She loomed over the hostages who all trembled at the sight of her, their mouths open and aghast. “Leave,” Arrowcat sternly ordered.
“But the-”
“I shall be taking the Viscount,” she cut off the plump noblewoman in the hennin. “There is little you can do for him at this point.”
The two noblewomen gathered their long dresses and obeyed, as did the noblemen who fled ahead of their spouses without so much as a look over their shoulders. All but that irksome bearded noble who stubbornly struggled to lift the Viscount as he pulled Reynard’s limp arm around his shoulder. He dragged the Viscount along as if he were a large rag doll until Arrowcat pressed the blade of her curved dagger against his throat. “I wasn’t offering,” she said icily. The nobleman nodded with a pale face. He threw the limp Viscount to the Archer before dashing ahead through the broken doors, the left of which was starting to catch the flames.
It was only a few moments later that four of New Jade’s finest ran into the chamber with raised crossbows. The watchmen were covered in soot black armour and kettle hats, and their mouths were covered in black cloth to protect themselves from the smoke and fumes. Luckily for the archers, they directed their full attention towards the towering Samurai, who had just finished swatting away the fire and clinging chimes.
“Halt!” they all yelled in unison. “Drop your weapon!”
The Samurai did as he was bid and instead swatted them away with his metal arms as if they were merely pesky flies. One watchman went flying into a bookcase. The metallic giant lifted another watchman and squeezed his neck as crossbow bolts ricocheted off his black and bronze armour.
Arrowcat let them settle their disagreement without her presence as she carried the Viscount towards a glass window. She smashed it open with her shrouded elbow, which gained the attention of two more watchmen.
“Halt!” she could hear one of them yelling over her shoulder. “Halt or I’ll fire!”
“She has the Viscount, you fool!” she heard another yell at the one who made the threat.
She rather callously threw the Viscount over her shoulder with little regard for his frailty and carried him through the window, leaving the fire and pandemonium behind them both. The descent was made easier by some nearby scaffolding that she could leap towards. She nearly dropped the Viscount in the process, but the venom had taken such a hold on him that he could no longer voice any complaints. Only wheezes and croaks.
As Arrowcat descended into the street, she slumped the Viscount over her shoulders once again and ran down the nearest and darkest alleyway she could find. She heard the bells of City Watch carriages ringing nearby. They seemed to be sending every watchman they had on duty to the incident and had never-ending reinforcements. She made another turn at a small crossroads, down a narrower and empty alley. The more darkness she could find, the more at ease she became. Away from the chaos, Arrowcat could hear the Viscount’s desperate breaths more clearly. They were a most unpleasant listen. She halted and laid the Viscount on the stone pathway to get a good look at him.
He still appeared conscious. Barely. His pale, bulging eyes were open and frantically blinking, but the veins around his neck and face had turned lime green. He grabbed her arm and clung onto it desperately, as if she were the anchor that would keep him from drowning in the afterlife. He tried to speak to her, but all that came out were pants and pained wheezes. She heard a splash from behind her. Arrowcat turned and aimed her sapphire bow, her arrow promptly nocked.
She saw Hideo crawling through a puddle of mud, his black and sapphire suit covered in dust and debris. He looked up at her. The lightning-blue eyes behind his mask were only half open and fading. He stretched his hand out towards her.
Under the torchlight of a nearby sconce, Arrowcat could see that the veins around his scarred fingertips were tinted with the faintest colour of green. “P-Pax…” he whispered in pain before passing out. His masked face splashed into the puddle.
You are a stubborn fool; she thought angrily. Damn you to the underworld. I warned you that this would be your outcome. She felt the Viscount’s grip tightening around her arm. She looked back down at the dying royalist. Green, gooey froth started trickling from the corner of his twitching lip. He appeared dazed and confused, becoming numb to the pain and panic.
She placed her hand around the Viscount’s limp fingers and delicately stroked them. She smiled lovingly at him. “This is a mercy,” she whispered softly before dragging the seamless blade of her curved dagger across his throat.