They descended from beyond the clouds, seemingly benevolent halos of blue-white light. Columns of benign radiance that continued seeming to be so, humming a soothing, slightly eerie tune, till a good  fifteen seconds after they were gone, and the world slowly awoke from its stupor and realized that certain things that had gone missing and everything else seemed to be a little on fire.

This was a worldwide event. A phenomenon involving nearly all of the planet of Embla, but the only one’s with any real inkling of what had happened, were a young woman in Alcide, the capital city of Palmas, her family in Otmar, and her husband who was elsewhere, preoccupied with sect matters.

Vanessa Oedheim, current honorary Palmas Princess of Wind and Storm, current member of the royal council of Lords, stood on the balcony of her manse. She had a large bottle of brandy in hand and ignoring the glass that sat on the table beside her, she took a deep drought straight from the bottle and grimaced at the taste.

The warmth entered her stomach which currently felt as if it were filled with ice and then abruptly disappearing, not even giving her a ghost of inebriation. Which left her feeling sorely disappointed, as this was the exact kind of moment in which many people would very much like to take refuge in alcoholic oblivion.

“Well…...fuck!. Maybe I did overreact just a little bit there…” said Van. Staring out into the night, looking in the direct where a proud tower once stood, but was now absent. Absent like many other such buildings, buildings that had been both obvious and inconspicuous in design. All of them having gone missing. Leaving no rubble, leaving only cleanly anesthetized holes in the earth, with the walls and floors of those holes covered in a smooth glass finish.

Vanessa Oedheim, of the Vis-Oddmunds and the McBriars, took another sip from the bottle she was holding.

Van had lost her cool and now here she was, looking at a counter on a holographic display that hovered in front of her face. The display more or less confirming that her genetically inherited failure to breathe a little more deeply and take some time to think about her decisions had come with a terrifyingly high body count.

It wasn’t entirely her fault, it was more of a snowballing effect. She’d been living in the capital for a few weeks now, and for almost every day that she’d been there, there had been an attempt on her life.

She’d put up with it, because they’d all been largely ineffectual. It was like being in a bee suit and being attacked by a swarm of the yellow insects. Like being bitten to death by mosquitos on a hot summer day.

She wasn’t really seriously affected by what her inherited enemies did. She’d go to the market and be attacked. She’d take in a show and being attacked. She’d visit a political frenemy, and once again, be attacked.

Rarely suffering anything more dramatic than a few slightly embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions.

On some days, it reached a point of mundanity where she planned for the eventual attack on her person, like one would plan for the weather.

On other days it was an annoyance and an embarrassment because, despite all their failures the other side didn’t really seem to be giving up. And the people around her were starting to become wary and wearied because she was pretty much gaining a reputation as humanoid disaster area.

A walking talking target that would eventually either have explosions, or poisonous smogs, or dangerous knife and crossbow wielding cultivators, appearing in her midst.  

On the day she finally lost her patience she actually managed to capture one of the fellows alive. Her martial arts were perhaps slightly below average, but her physical specs, her speed, strength, reflexes, perception, and data processing abilities, were so high that it wasn’t hard for her to go toe to toe against grandmasters. Especially when their cultivations were relatively mediocre.

She caught one of her assailants and asked him why they and their employer were so dead set in attacking, and why they were so willing to throw away their lives.

“Daughter of the madman.” he’d said, whilst gasping his last breath. “The sons of the Golden-Shadow cannot and will not rest till they have regained their honor.”

A strange turn of phrase which took her a few minutes to parse.

She kept him alive just long enough to exact an explanation for his explanation and was informed that the group, whoever they were, were no longer being paid for all those attempts on her life.

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No, right now, they were doing this for free. Spending all those lives for free. Inconveniencing her...for free.

Which was probably the point where she lost her cool, though she wouldn’t know it till later that evening.

It was the kind the stupid thing that made people mad to try and contemplate, making so little sense that it either inspired fear or rage, or both.

As the wife of warrior of a cultivator-sect, as the sister of a former mercenary, now turned into a mercenary troop founder, she could understand and respect, the idea of work that dealt with blades and blood.

What she couldn’t understand was idea of taking the job personal, if one is hired to kill, then kill, and if one fails that just the way of things, but taking it personal, as if the target had wronged you by failing to die was...baffling. Stupid in the kind of way that lingers in the back of one’s mind and kind of festers for a bit.

Before she was in a bee suit, surrounded by bees, but it felt like her suit had gotten torn somewhere, or that the bees had somehow found a way in, and she was just repeatedly being pricked. She’d reached that part of a summer’s day where one had been bitten by enough mosquitoes to be okay with eradicating the entire species, regardless of any ecological consequence.

And that was...exactly what she did.

It was shockingly, frighteningly, easy. Her ship had taken recordings, and scans of every instance in which she’d been attacked. And supposedly secret clandestine groups, tended to be fond of little markers and tattoos that only they would be to notice and verify, but the rest of the world would just think of as innocuous body art or birthmarks.

Add to this a certain genetic similarity and the fact that the members of the group of assassins tended to share a peculiar body chemistry and the ship had no problem picking them out from the crowd. Which made Van wish, she’d A) thought of preemptively looking for her attackers beforehand, and B)had enough trustworthy political allies to be able to round up the assassins and their associates after she’d found them.

Unfortunately, a number of them were either hidden within the auspices of certain powers within the city or hidden amongst the people, and trying to round the hidden killers up would have meant giving away a fair number of her secrets.

A realization that only served to further frustrate the woman. Pushing her reasoning past that last point of no return.

She might not have done what she’d done, had she not been hopping mad by the time she’d gotten home, and had a second group of assassins not tried to a second attempt her life on the way to her mansion.

Unfortunately that second attack was a fact, and her mood when she arrived at her home was foul on a level, that left her looking, positively serene despite the murderous aura that was leaking out of her shadow.

Stormy enough that the servants at the manse, who still remembered when her lord father had been in similar moods, fled for cover as soon as they’d done their duties. Leaving her to fume, and work herself into an increasingly worse pique.

She’d called her parents, but they were busy with something, and after confirming that she was fine, they hung up saying they’d call her back later.

Then she called Edwin, who was also busy sitting in the lab in his ship, taking measurements and readings for a new strain of medicinal herbs that he was growing. However he didn’t hang up on her.

He asked her how her day was, and she told him, that it’d been miserable.

He stopped doing whatever it was he was doing and asked her why, and she’d explained about the assassins. He asked if she needed his help, but for whatever reason she said no, because in the back of her mind the issue wasn’t quite that serious and she still wanted to keep him as a final line of defense for the family, if she could.

She asked him, what he’d do, if he had a foe, that wouldn’t quit, and was just tedious to deal with. And he’d blithely responded with, “Extermination.”

“Extermination?” she’d said. Echoing the word.

He repeated to himself, his attention finally starting to drift after she’d repeatedly confirmed she was fine, and was not currently in need of his aid.

Then he vaguely mentioned that the ship's offensive suite had special targeting options for just that purpose.

The conversation wound done from there, and they traded small talk for a bit, before Van finally hung up and ended the call.

Still fuming, still furious, but also somewhat calmer, and in a more steady mood, less riled and spitting mad, and more perturbed and concerned, she went to go check the ship and its so-called special targeting options.

Still somewhat incensed and growing slightly more determined in her own mind about the dark things she was contemplating, she reasoned that it would probably be fine for her to act with force, if only just this once.

The people that her family were feuding with, had no clue as to what she was capable of and would surely not be able to guess, that she was the one responsible for what she was about to do.

She wasn’t sure what each of the weapons in the suite did, apparently some of the more energy based weapons, could be quite particular. Wiping out a particular target or target groups with pin-point accuracy, wiping structures where the occupants were made up with more than ninety percent of the given target group, while causing next to no damage to surroundings.

She was a Jotunness of Embla, targeted by a group that seemed to have decided to enter into a life or death grudge with her, when there had been no gratitude and grudges before.

Her actions had seemed perfectly rational at the time. She’d started changing the settings, using the data from the various assassins that had assailed her as model targets. Then she confirmed the fire order.

Now an hour later, and ninety million, six hundred fifty three thousand, five hundred ninety-two lives later, she wasn’t quite so sure.

It was common practice in Embla to end conflicts by destroying one’s enemies as a whole, or at least attempting to do so, as far as one was capable and it was economically feasible, but there were few who’d ever done it with as much completeness as Van had just managed.

Though they’d been scattered and hidden across the globe, Vanessa Oedheim had just essentially killed a small nation.

Having unwittingly stepped into the same cutthroat and bloody standing of some of the most ruthless of generals and kings, Van was feeling some pangs of conscience.

Feeling guilty not because of what she had done, but because, her first thought, after seeing that first resoundingly successful assault, was to feel slightly put out, that her family’s real foes couldn’t be similarly targeted.