Legally speaking, The Deep Cut did not exist -nor did anyone in it. On the few occasions its existence was leaked, it was easy enough to hide. Not only did a hidden bar full of assassins sound frankly unbelievable, all the assassins were more than happy to work their magic on those few who did believe it. It was one of the few rules that even the scumbags and lowlifes of the Cut respected: Protect the Cut.

One of the other hard and fast rules was “Respect the Blackboard”. There were no ominous secrets or hidden meanings to that phrase, it was a literal blackboard the proprietor wrote messages on in chalk, outlining the very few rules the establishment held for its patron’s contract. For most of the Cut’s existence, it had said exactly one thing: “No Fellow Patrons”. A few decades ago, a second line had been added: “No Kraid”. Now the gathered clientele watched with bated breath as the blackboard was erased and rewritten. The first two rules had been added back already, but with room left for a third. The assassins watched as the bartender carefully marked down the Third Rule of The Deep Cut.

“No Vell”.

The tension in the room dropped in an instant, and some of the assassins breathed sighs of relief. A few raised their drinks and got right back to business. Not every assassin was relieved by the new rule, however.

“What, that kid with the magic tramp stamp? Why’s he suddenly off limits?”

“Wasn’t really on the menu to begin with, bucko,” one of the veterans said. “Now we’ve just got a good excuse not to take any contracts on him.”

“What, you can’t hack it with one kid?”

“Nobody can hack it,” the veteran said. “Duggan?”

Deadeye Duggan put his hand on a rifle nearly as tall as he was, then toyed with the rim of his cowboy hat.

“You know what I can do,” the Deadeye said. “I operate dozens of miles away, so far off I gotta use drone targeting to see my mark due to the curvature of the earth. I’ve got a supercomputer calculating wind variation, gravity drop, even the rotation of the earth, every time I fire a shot. Bullets are made of stable metamaterials to maximize inertia and travel at supersonic speeds while remaining silent and undetectable. I took a contract on Harlan. I found my mark, took my shot-”

Duggan mimed the action of firing a round.

“And that robot bitch caught the bullet,” Duggan said. “Bare-handed. Didn’t even turn around.”

“Well, she is a robot.”

“That ain’t the worst part.”

“Then what is?”

Duggan lifted his hat to reveal a small bullet-shaped indentation in the middle of his forehead.

“She threw the bullet back at me.”

The younger assassin scoffed loudly. Like many newbies to the assassination scene, they had an impractical black cape and a mask on. Most of the older crowd liked to refer to that style as “Dead-in-a-week Chic”.

“One guy gets a bruised forehead and you’re all ready to give up?”

“He’s not the only one,” the bartender said. “You ain’t even heard from the twins yet.”

The bartender pointed towards the back of the bar, where multiple shadowy corners had been set up for lurking purposes. Two shadowy figures emerged from one such corner, walking in perfect synchronization. They had perfectly matched black cloaks, identical haircuts, and even spoke at the same time.

“We are those who chain the barghest,” the twins said, and as they spoke the rattling of chains and the barking of a mad dog could be heard as if from a great distance. “The Black Dog of Death whose fangs never fail to seek the flesh of a foe. We unleashed the hound to seek the flesh of Vell Harlan, and he evaded death’s jaws.”

“How?”

The twins were silent, but not in an eerie or mysterious way. It was mostly awkward.

“Lads, be honest,” the bartender said.

“He put peanut butter on its nose,” the twins admitted, in perfect unison. “It got so distracted it forgot about him.”

The spectral barghest let out a loud yelp at the mention of peanut butter, and the twins retreated back into the shadows. The new assassin still seemed unimpressed.

“And that’s enough to ban the kid? Because you two look like idiots,” they scoffed. “Kraid I get, he kills people who go after him, all this Vell guy has done is embarrass you.”

“A reputation is a serious thing in our line of work,” the bartender said.

“Doesn’t having a reputation as an assassin mean you’re a bad assassin?”

The bar was silent for a moment.

“Well…”

“Among the right kind of people, a reputation is good.”

“Yeah, obviously you don’t want the suburbanites knowing, but if nobody knows about you you’re never going to get work,” another assassin added. The barroom crowd nodded in agreement with that assessment and continued.

“Anyway, you’ve only heard from the people who play far away,” the bartender said. “Jack?”

A man with knives strapped to almost every surface on his body raised a drink.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“See, after watching those two fail I had the bright idea to change the game. Take a hostage, use leverage,” Jack said. “I targeted the fat one, Hawke, figured the coward would be the easiest target. I pulled a knife, he pulled a stick.”

“A stick,” the hooded newbie said with a chuckle.

“That’s what I thought. Then the stick grew ten miles long,” Jack said. “Carried me right out into the middle of the ocean and dumped me there.”

“Every single one of them is like that,” another assassin said. “I went after his roommates. One of them put me in an antigravity bubble, then the other dumped me in a rowboat and put a chip on my head that made me row all the way to China.”

It had been a terrible experience, but he had great biceps now.

“Still not as bad as going after Harlan himself,” someone else said. “If that robot doesn’t get you, he will! I ambushed him with one of my trapper guns, and he shot it right out of my hands! Those things are expensive, you know.”

“Not as expensive as medical bills,” another assassin added. “I tried to do an underwater infiltration and someone sicced a lobster the size of a school bus on me.”

“I got frozen in a block of ice!”

“They cursed me to tapdance my way off the island!”

“I got hit with a shrink ray and mailed back to Russia in a box! They didn’t even do express shipping!”

More and more assassins kept throwing in strange anecdotes about their failed attempts on Vell Harlan’s life. The hooded newcomer watched people bandy stories about, and stood from their seat once they’d finally heard enough.

“Hold on, hold on,” they said. “Has everyone in this room taken a crack at Vell Harlan?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Oh, good.”

The mask made a clicking noise as she removed it, and let the hooded cloak fall to the floor, exposing bright blue eyes, blonde hair, and miles of muscle.

“Then one of you should know who’s hiring,” Leanne said.

Guns, swords, spells, and at least one slingshot all got pointed at Leanne in a second. She readied her fists in turn, but did not strike yet.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Name’s Leanne Mikkola,” she said. “I’m Vell’s friend.”

The slingshot was the first to fall. The guns, knives, and swords followed. Leanne lowered her fists as some of the assassins sat down.

“Wow, fight left you guys quick,” she said.

“They turned me into a penguin, man,” one of the assassins whimpered. “I don’t want to do that again.”

“For the record, I don’t do any of that stuff,” Leanne said. “I just punch people real hard.”

“I don’t want to get punched either.”

“Understandable. Well, in that case, anybody want to tell me who hired them to kill Vell Harlan?”

“It was those old bastards in the Board of Directors,” the bartender said. “They’ve sent the same damn contract a hundred times now. Had to start turning them away.”

“Oh, really? Not Kraid?”

“If Kraid wants people dead he kills them himself,” the bartender said.

“I suppose that does make sense,” Leanne admitted.

“I don’t keep any kind of documentation or anything, so you’ll just have to take my word for it,” the bartender said. “But it’s true.”

“Yeah, I believe it,” Leanne said. She’d never had much interaction with the Board before graduating, but Vell had texted her several unpleasant stories. It made sense they might start gunning for him after he consistently ruined their plans.

“Alright then, are we good?”

“Well, one more thing,” Leanne said.

“What’s that?”

Leanne picked up the table she’d been sitting at and hurled it like a frisbee towards the nearest wall. The ballistic table caught seven assassins as it flew and slammed them all against the stone as the rest panicked.

“What the hell, lady, we told you what you wanted to know!”

“You also kill people for money,” Leanne said. “I’m beating you up anyway!”

To the credit of the assembled assassins, it took about thirteen minutes for Leanne to kick their asses. Once she had beaten the last assassin into an early retirement, Leanne took the blackboard and cracked it over the head of the bartender, leaving only the part that said “No Vell” intact. She dropped it in the center of the broken bar to be a warning, not a rule, and left, to go let Vell know what she’d learned.

----------------------------------------

Back on the Einstein-Odinson Campus, a looper was waiting for news -but not that looper, and not that news. Helena looked up as Kraid appeared in a flare of green-black fire. He started walking down the halls, and she followed in his footsteps.

“So just for my own curiosity,” Helena said. “Why didn’t we hire the assassins to kill Vell?”

“Because it wouldn’t fucking work, as you saw,” Kraid said. “And because Vell’s not that kind of opponent.”

“An opponent is an opponent,” Helena said. “You eliminate them by whatever means necessary.”

“In the loosest sense, yes,” Kraid said. “But there’s always more to it than that. Killing people is easy. Like, really, really, easy, honestly, you would be astounded at how fragile the human being is.”

“I really wouldn’t,” said the exceptionally fragile Helena.

“And that’s the thing. Killing people is easy. Sometimes too easy. And therein lies the rub,” Kraid said. “To really beat someone you have to meet the challenge where it lies. Vell’s an intellectual threat, maybe even an ideological one. I could just kill him, sure, but to a certain crowd that’d look like I was too afraid to let an intellectual challenge stand. They’d think all they have to do is be a little smarter than Vell, and they could beat me.”

“So you want to crush Vell on his own terms,” Helena said. She didn’t necessarily agree, but she did see the appeal.

“That, and it’s just fun to mess with people,” Kraid said.

Kraid stepped up to a pair of heavy oak doors and straightened his coat.

“I need him alive for now anyway,” Kraid said. “He’s my key to the real prize.”

“He’s -what the fuck else is there?”

Kraid just smiled, stepped up to the solid oak doors, and pushed them open. Heads would’ve turned to him in shock, were any heads capable of turning that fast. The Board of Directors slowly turned towards Kraid as he waltzed in uninvited and took a seat.

“Gentlemen, I hear you’re running into an assassin shortage,” Kraid said. He lounged on an armchair and looked especially smug as the decrepit investors turned to look at him. Helena stood in the background, cautiously eyeing the braces and implants the Board wore, and mentally comparing them to the exoskeleton she wore as a mobility aid.

“Come to offer your services in killing Vell Harlan? We all know you’d do it for free.”

“I would, but that’s not why I’m here,” Kraid said. “I’m here to get you to stop trying to kill Vell Harlan. Even if it was going to work, which it wouldn’t, studying the rune on his corpse wouldn’t get you the real prize.”

Kraid, paused, both for dramatic purposes and to watch the stuff faces of the Board as they tried to decipher his meaning. Helena was also trying to figure out his angle.

“Do you people think apples just appear out of nowhere? That steaks spontaneously manifest in your kitchen?” Kraid said. “When something falls, do you wonder why it decided to do that, or do you think about gravity?”

Despite his attempts to be deliberately obtuse, Helena put together Kraid’s meaning on her own.

“You don’t want the rune. You want the source of the rune,” Helena said. “You want Quenay.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Kraid said. “Why would I want one apple when I could have the orchard? Vell Harlan is just a stepping stone to the real prize.”

“Considering our collective track record with one man, I question the wisdom of challenging a God,” a member of the Board muttered.

“I’m not going to claim it’s going to be easy,” Kraid said. “But if you want real power over life and death, you’re going to need to try. And to try-”

Kraid turned and leered at the members of the Board.

“You’re going to need me.”