“You recovered that,” my father asked quietly.

“Yes, the Apostate recovered it during our fight in the ritual room, and then I took it off his corpse. Not much blood on it thankfully. But what is it made of?” I couldn’t place the material.

“The flesh of creatures.” I almost dropped it right then.

“What?!” I asked.

“It is rare, but this is called a Ritualistic Blood Tome. Each one is custom made and incredibly rare. Also, incredibly dangerous in the wrong paws. We can look into it once we are back with Mousethief. For now, put it away.” I put it away and we set off back towards the lake.

All major artifacts had been recovered. No threats remained. No secondary threats in the immediate area. That meant my mission was complete. It was tempting to look at my Interface, but I held off. It was a shame the rest of the ducks had fled. It would have been nice to kill more creatures and get more EXP.

“You didn’t see the Apostate outside?” I asked my father.

“I saw a cloaked figure enter the building. But I couldn’t make out the silver trim of their cloak. I thought it was just a regular creature,” he replied, and I nodded at that as we made our way through the tall grass. “So, ethereal snakes and poison?” my father asked.

“Yes, and imbuing the power of scales within himself,” I replied.

“Standard stuff for an Apostate. The High Apostates can call on the full Snake Ancestral Spirit.”

“Oh, he used a sparkly powder, that floated in the air,” I added.

“Ground glass imbued with venom. It will dig into your flesh and poison you, while ripping your body apart from the inside.” The biggest shame of this mission was that my father would get all the money for completing it. It was tradition. While my father was many things, he wasn’t one to buck tradition with how much scrutiny he was under.

A Quackening would have caused a couple of billion credits in damages. With an Apostate and the artifacts recovered, I was looking at a huge payday. Or I would have been if I was a full fledged assassin. With a mission like this, I would only need two or three more missions like this to get promoted. It had gone perfectly.

The ritual partially going off was not something I would be held accountable for. I would be credited for interrupting it before it got worse. The escaped duck cultists were all low ranked members. While it was preferable to kill them all, killing an Apostate took priority.

There was actually a list of priority targets. Rituals were at the top, followed closely by Apostates. Low ranked cult members were way down the list. It would have been better if I had killed the duck cult leader without him starting the ritual, but in this job stuff like that happened and the organization understood that.

As long as the important creatures were killed and any rituals stopped, it meant top marks. My time was too valuable to spend chasing down low ranked cult members. That was for the clean up crews and the regular forces of the Covenant Church to handle now that the main threat had been stopped and understood.

That was also why Assassins were sent in, instead of soldiers. That Apostate would have cut them down and easily escaped without overwhelming force. Which would disrupt the entire region. The Covenant Church preferred to keep events like this suppressed to avoid mass panic.

Making our way back to the boat. I carefully swam over, while keeping the book above my head. I passed it up to Tom Cat who scrambled into the boat first. I got into the boat and took the book back and put it into my pouch.

“All done?” Mousethief asked me.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Cats…cats!” the old rat said. I pulled out a silver and gold seal. A golden sun and a silver sword. The symbol of the Covenant Church.

“Covenant Church business. You are to ask no questions. Nor talk about this. Do you understand?” I asked and the old rat quickly nodded. “Return us to town immediately.”

“Um, but other creatures will spot you,” he said. Mousethief then whipped out two cloaks and handed one to me and one to my father. He gave me a wink while handing me the cloak. This Inventory had a lot of uses. I would have to consider it a lot more. We put on the cloaks as the old rat quickly set the boat back across the lake.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I explained what happened to Mousethief. “Let me see the tome,” he said, and I passed it over to him. He began to flip through it.

“This is perfect. Good job recovering it. I have managed to work out the next site. The goal of the Quackenings is to shake the ground. Each one getting worse. That way all land bound creatures die and only the ducks are left or birds,” Mousethief said and snapped the tome closed.

“You know the next location?” I asked.

“It is just a modification of the ground disturbance ritual, with more Quacks,” Mousethief chuckled. “It honestly isn’t that dangerous or powerful, but it appears that the Apostate was directing the ducks to target fault lines. They want to sink a good portion of the continent or disturb it to set off a chain reaction. Hence the Seven Quacks.”

“That is stupid. What do they think they will accomplish?” I muttered as Mousethief closed up the Ritualistic Blood Tome.

“They are cultists. They aren’t rational. It is just a move by the snakes to weaken us, like always. At least you got the Apostate. That always makes Maximilian happy,” Tom Cat replied.

“We can head out right away once we get back. You can rest up while I get us to the next location,” Mousethief said.

“That dealer from the Nine Tail Syndicate, what about them?” I asked.

“I will file a police report and get it stamped urgent. They will round him up and the clean up crew should get here by tomorrow. They are small fish. Stopping this Quackening takes priority. What will those snakes think of next,” Mousethief chuckled at that.

“He is right Mittens. A dealer is a small piece and probably doesn’t know anything. Now that Mousethief has a lead to a more urgent situation we should pursue it with all haste,” Tom Cat explained. I nodded at this. That was how you made those credits, and it became immediately clear how Mousethief was able to keep my father on top.

He just cut through all the time it would take to figure things out and direct us right at the problem. No waiting around or delay. No wonder my father was the Warrior’s Shadow. Mousethief pointed him perfectly every time. Even now I wasn’t that upset, that things had gone off the rails.

Having a huge success like this right away was important to make sure I set expectations for very high difficulty missions. I just needed to stop this Quackening in full. I rested on the boat as we made our way back to the town. We reached the docks and Mousethief paid the old rat some credits.

We returned to the truck and container. The damage to the town had been minimal from the earthquake across the lake. Mousethief left for a bit once we reached the truck. He was going to get food and arrange for a police report. I sat down with my father and filled out a mission report. I had seen him fill them out on the previous missions when he had picked me up, but he had insisted I focus on stretching and the reports would only confuse me before I was ready.

The mission completion form was simple, date, name, list of events, creatures injured or killed, reason for my actions, and artifacts recovered. I needed a paperwork skill, and I was itching to look at my interface, but held off as I carefully filled in the report in detail. Tom Cat was also filling in a report detailing his observations.

Once I was finished, we traded reports and checked over each other’s. While I had seen a lot of examples during my training, including my fathers, it was important enough that it should be double checked.

“Good, you kept it simple,” he said. Reports weren’t meant to be stories but convey the key details and events. My father left them on the table as Mousethief came back with two freshly cooked fish for each of us. I was starving after the long night.

“Once you finish eating, we are taking off. I will need to stop and refuel and then after that, we will drive through the day and night, getting to the next location tomorrow morning. The clean up crew has already been alerted along with the local guard, who will try and take the dealer into custody,” he replied. He certainly had been busy. But that was his job as a Technician. To handle all these little details.

“Any word from on high?” Tom Cat asked.

“They signed off on our pursuing the site of the Second Quackening. Nothing else has come up in the area,” he replied. Well, that was a shame, we couldn’t combine missions. Really get those credits rolling and get me promoted as quickly as possible so I could start earning. Once I was the rank of Assassin, then I was set. Becoming a Master Assassin required surviving for five years.

That showed, I could be trusted with making decisions on behalf of the Organization as a Master Assassin. While the other ranks went quickly, they were meant to be quick. But the real test in this job was surviving for years, when a single mistake could mean my death.

Mousethief picked up the reports while my father and I ate. He looked them over and nodded. “Everything is in order. I will put these away for now,” he said.

“Not going to send them back?” I asked. That was standard procedure.

“Normally that is the case. But since we are engaging in a follow up mission, we will be holding onto everything and filing it all at the same time. This generates a single payout that is higher than smaller payouts, since the actions of the cultists are much bigger in scope,” Mousethief explained, and I nodded at that.

“It honestly isn’t common, since there are very rarely any follow up missions. Normally things get processed as quickly as possible, shipped back to the Organization for review and storage,” my father said. I pulled out the pendants and the sword and set them on the table.

“I will pack these away,” Mousethief said, and collected them to take into the back of the container along with the tome.

“They get melted down in the vault?” I asked.

“And studied to see if there are any new developments, but they are carefully destroyed for the most part,” Tom Cat confirmed.