Vildelph’s Assassin’s Guild, or ‘the Dark Guard company,’ that they’d used to hide in plain sight, didn’t take their full-frontal assault lying down. Almost immediately, assassins began flooding in from other areas of the building, attempting to dispatch the unexpected intruders and potentially make a name for themselves.

  Instead, the three of them ensured that the only names anyone would be making anytime soon would be those carved atop the head of a gravestone.

  “On your left!” Moxy shouted, launching herself past Samantha with a blast of air and colliding with a burly man covered in thick, dark, bristling hair all over his body who had appeared out of nowhere. His jagged fangs had been mere inches from Samantha’s neck before Moxy’s bulk smashed into him, and Asher couldn’t help but wince as Moxy knocked him down, before firing a devastating air blast directly down into his skull, effectively throwing out a coup de grace and ending his life. But before he could thank her for keeping an eye on Samantha’s wellbeing, he had to deal with his own surprise combatant as a woman’s head and hands melded out of the stone floor beneath him, grabbing his feet and pulling him partially into the floor, up to his knees. The moment she let go, the stone solidified once more, and Asher realized he was effectively trapped.

  Wow, that would be a devastating skill to have to face in combat, he thought, trying and failing to move his legs so much as an inch. You know… for anyone but me.

  As the woman fully emerged from the stone just a few feet in front of him, well out of dagger range as she looked down at him with a smirk on her face, Asher compressed a tunnel of space and drove a dagger straight into her neck. He didn’t even wait to see her crumple to the ground as he slipped into the astral and pulled his legs free of their stony tomb. There were too many assassins coming at them to focus on any one of them for more than a few seconds. And these were still all just the cannon fodder. The moment any more of the senior assassins showed up…

  As if he had been waiting, a thin man covered from head to toe in scales walked calmly into the room, giving the three of them and the weaker assassins alike a look of disdain before he pointed and snapped his fingers. Immediately, a maelstrom of jagged scales erupted out of his body, shooting across the room and slicing their way through everything they touched. Deciding not to waste energy with a Spatial Lock, Asher slipped into the astral realm, letting the scales shoot straight through him. Samantha folded her wings around her, trusting in Winged Shield to keep the sharpened projectiles off her. Moxy timed an explosive nova of air for the last possible moment, knocking the scales off course and trusting in her living pelts to stop the few that managed to hit her. When the devastating attack was finally over, Asher returned from the astral, blinking as he looked around the room.

  The senior assassin hadn’t so much as scratched any of them, but he had managed to utterly eviscerate what looked like a good ten of his own guild members.

  “Uh…” Asher started, taking in the shredded flesh and scattered pieces of assassins all around them. “You’re not much of a team player, are you?”

  [Assassin] - 3/3 elements

  “The weak exist only to be used as stepping stones for the strong,” the senior assassin spat, rapidly growing larger and more dangerous-looking as he activated some sort of transformation skill. Within moments, the thin, scrawny man had been replaced with a muscular giant who would have looked down on Crush had he been here, and he roared as he rushed forward, his footsteps shaking the room as he made a beeline directly for Moxy. Asher was surprised by his choice of target, seeing as he was much closer to the man than Moxy was, but he realized he’d probably picked Moxy out as the most vulnerable of the three of them. He and Samantha had effortlessly dodged or blocked his swarm of scales, whereas Moxy had been forced to put in a little bit more effort and had still received a few small gashes that had been quickly healed up with her Life element. No doubt he expected her to go down the easiest.

  Asher almost felt sorry for the poor man.

  Yet as much as he wanted to witness Moxy take this guy apart, the three of them were a team now, and they did have something of a mission they still needed to accomplish. As the man went to run straight past him, no doubt trusting in the defense of his scales to keep him safe, Asher lashed out with Crescent, slicing straight through the assassin’s prized scales and lopping one of his thick legs off at the knee. He would have gone straight for the man’s head, but the assassin had kept his guard up even while running, and Asher figured he would have actually attempted to dodge such an attack. To his surprise, he actually did feel a modicum of resistance to his slash as he cut through the man’s leg, which meant that the assassin’s defensive skill truly was a powerful one.

  Just not powerful enough.

  Though to his credit, rather than tumble to the ground in shock, the assassin reacted near-instantly. Turning his stumble into a roll, he slammed his fingers into the ground and launched himself the rest of the way forward, effectively throwing himself across the room at Moxy with a snarl. Luckily, the warrior reacted just as quickly, blasting herself out of the way of the living projectile with an explosion of air. The scale-man smashed into the wall, twisting and actually hissing at them as he glanced down at his leg.

  “What did you do?!” he hissed, ignoring the three violet arrows that bounced off his scaled chest as he shook his head. “No matter, poisoned flesh is an easy solution.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The assassin surprised all of them by reaching down and tearing his own injured leg off at the thigh, splattering blood everywhere as he did so. With a shudder, he tossed the leg aside, and roared as a brand-new one free of injury all but erupted out of his bloody socket, growing outward with explosive force. In barely a second, he was whole once more, stretching his new scaled leg as if getting a feel for it.

  “He’s got some sort of Lizard element!” Asher called out, cursing their bad luck that they’d managed to find one of the few enemies that had a natural counter to his Sever the Thread skill. Preventing an injury from healing was only an effective strategy if his opponents weren’t capable of simply throwing away the injured portion of their body entirely and growing a new one.

  “I’ve never taken down a Lizard before!” Moxy grinned, cracking her neck as she stepped forward to stand beside Samantha. “Hey, runt, let us have this one. As much as I love fighting, we should probably wrap this up before someone runs off to warn the other senior assassins and bring them all down on our heads. I love a good fight, but I’m not completely crazy. You go find the Finger, wings and I can take this chump.”

  “Wings?” Samantha asked, raising an eyebrow even as she never took her eyes off the senior assassin, who was still stretching out his new leg and staring them all down like he was plotting the best way to make their innards turn into outards.

  “Alright, but be careful!” Asher said, turning and running deeper into the building as he left the fight to the two of them. It was a tough call, as he had no doubt his mithral dagger was probably the most effective weapon against the assassin’s tough scales, but Moxy had been right. The thought of taking down all of the senior assassins in Vildelph was appealing, but probably a tad unrealistic. If multiple of them showed up and somehow managed to fight together, getting out of there without sustaining any serious injuries would become next to impossible.

  Not to mention now that the scaled assassin knew Asher was capable of cutting through his defenses, the man would no doubt fight far more cautiously if he was still around, not wanting to waste his energy on regrowing any more limbs. His taking off would hopefully result in the assassin lowering his guard again, and he was more than certain Samantha and Moxy would manage to take advantage of that somehow.

  Venturing deeper into the large building, Asher easily dispatched a small handful of assassins here and there as he went. All of them had but a single element to their name, and not one even managed to throw up a defensive skill before he drove a dagger into their skull. He had no idea what Vildelph’s Guild put their recruits through, but he continued to be astonished by aura after aura as he went. Back in Whikoga, he’d encountered Jennifer, an assassin with the Guild who wasn’t really a fan of the whole ‘killing’ thing, and who had only a few dark smudges in her aura. She’d managed to get herself put into the position of guarding a safe house, and thus had kept her hands relatively clean in doing so.

  In contrast, every single one of these assassins he encountered had auras that reeked of death, almost as if this Guild went out of their way to ensure that the baton of killing was passed around evenly.

  I wonder if it has something to do with their strange cover as a legitimate company, he wondered as he materialized behind a yawning assassin and drove his dagger into the woman’s back. If they mask their hits as official ‘jobs,’ maybe they have some sort of rotation, or spread out the workload. What a weird system.

  Deciding he’d have plenty of time to contemplate Vildelph’s Guild later, Asher kept going. It wasn’t long before he came upon a staircase, and he blinked as he finally realized what he should have tried doing from the start.

  Nine, or Talon, was capable of flight. Odds were, she had a room on the top floor.

  Deciding that was as good a place as any to start, Asher took the stairs three at a time as he rushed up them. The Dark Guard company building was a good five stories tall, making it one of the larger buildings in all of Vildelph’s second ring. Skipping the second, third, and fourth floors entirely, Asher slipped through the door leading to the fifth floor, not even bothering with opening it.

  Which turned out to be a good idea, as the corridor leading to the stairwell had four separate crossbows trained on the closed door, each one no doubt linked to it via magic somehow, based on the lack of anything resembling physical wires.

  Staring at the booby trap with wide eyes, Asher slowly walked down the corridor, keeping his upper body still so as to limit the energy drain Astral Dip consumed. Luckily, he was able to reach beyond where the crossbows were pointing, and he let out a soft sigh as he finally returned to the material realm. While he’d infiltrated the Frent family estate and their enchanted defenses, this was the first time he’d witnessed physical weapons incorporated into a magical grid.

  Somehow seeing actual crossbows pointed at him felt far more deadly than knowing a certain building would just kill him if he stepped into it.

  Still, the placement of the crossbows made him feel good about his guess that he’d find Talon up here, and he pushed further into the fifth floor, quickly discovering that the corridor led to a single room. Slipping into the astral once more, Asher walked into the room, looking around in search of any more traps or Talon herself.

  The entire fifth floor had been transformed into what was effectively a massive penthouse suite. A large, luxurious couch wrapped around a crackling fireplace, and the door to a filled larder was still wide open, revealing more food than Asher had seen in any one place since arriving in this world. From the cup of still-steaming tea sitting out on the table, it appeared as if Talon had caught word of their assault and had left in a hurry. While annoying, Asher couldn’t say he was all that surprised. From what he’d heard, it sounded like Talon was much more of an ambush-style assassin who relied on the element of surprise than one who enjoyed getting up close and personal with their targets like he did.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, doing another slow sweep of the large room and confirming that it was completely empty. There was a large window that strangely had looked like a solid wall from outside the building, and a giant pane of it had been thrown open, no doubt to allow the flight-capable assassin the chance to escape.

  Ah, well. At the very least, I can leave a mark here and pop in later, catching Talon entirely by surprise if I’m lucky. Even if we don’t kill her now, unless she decides to up and move her entire operation, we’ll get her soon enough.

  Deciding that was as good a plan as any, Asher slipped back into the material realm, walking over to the steaming cup of tea and placing a hand on the table. But just as he swapped the eternal mark he had from Vildelph’s noxious tunnel to the pristine penthouse, he came to a sudden realization that the open window and signs of leaving in a haste might have actually all been a ruse to fool him into lowering his guard. He wasn’t normally so paranoid…

  But the sensation of talons stabbing through his back as a giant bird grabbed him from behind and took off through the window into the sky were a little hard to ignore.

  Discord