Thanks to the map of the Noala Kingdom Asher had already Incorporated, he knew that it would take them most of the day to fly from the capital all the way to Furora. With Samantha’s Long Flight skill, they wouldn’t have to touch down and rest for a good thirty or so minutes, so he did his best to get comfortable on Samantha’s back as she took off and began the long journey across the kingdom.

  Which made it all the more jarring when they were shot down barely ten minutes into the start of their journey.

  One moment, Asher was leaning forward over Samantha’s shoulders, watching the landscape shoot by beneath them from a good half-mile up and helping her navigate. After finding Moxy again and being a tad underprepared to try and convince her to join their team, this time, he was determined to have an explanation and speech ready to go for when they finally tracked down Rulfar. Yet while he was running through potential openers in his head, something struck him in the chest out of nowhere, tearing straight through him as it ripped out his back.

  Far more worrying, however, was the fact that whatever had attacked them, hadn’t gone solely for him. He was lying on Samantha’s back, after all, which meant the projectile had shot straight through her own chest as well.

  “Samantha!” he shouted as her emerald wings shattered into motes of light and they began plummeting through the sky. Based on the giant hole in the serpent hide covering her chest, Winged Savior had saved her from being shot through the heart, at the cost of her wings.

  “What’s going on?!” she shouted back as the wind whipped around them. Grabbing his hand to stabilize themselves as they fell, her eyes went even wider as she realized the state he was in. “Asher, your chest!”

  “I know!” he said, coughing up blood as he tried his best to self-diagnose while plummeting to their deaths. From what he could tell, his lung had been pierced clean through, whatever attack that had first hit Samantha missing his own heart by mere inches. He was more than a little worried about whatever had attacked them, but they had slightly more important things to worry about.

  Like the very hard ground that was approaching them at an alarming rate.

  With no time to explain, Asher tugged and Samantha vanished with a yelp into his Personal Rift. A split second later, he pushed his hand right back out, replacing Samantha with a rather startled Moxy.

  “Realms!” Moxy screamed, no doubt more than a little surprised to suddenly go from a silent, stationary room to plummeting through the sky. “Runt, what’s going on?!”

  “No time!” Asher screamed back, the ground mere seconds away. He could simply Recall back to safety, but that would mean leaving whoever had just tried to shoot them out of the sky free to do so again when they least expected it. “Air blast, now!”

  Thankfully, Moxy understood his intentions immediately, yanking him in close before triggering her Air Nova skill at the last possible second. A massive burst of wind exploded out of Moxy right before they hit the ground, jerking them to a stop and nearly halting the entirety of their momentum for a moment, before the skill ended and they both landed in a heap of limbs. Jumping off him, Moxy spun around, taking in their surroundings as she hunted for whoever had shot them out of the sky. Whoever had shot them down had timed their attack so that they’d land in a large, grassy plain without any sort of cover to protect from ranged attacks. The knee-high grass currently swaying in the wind surrounded them on all sides, and it could technically hide anyone, assuming they dropped prone fast enough after launching their attack.

  “See anything?” Asher wheezed, groaning as he got to his feet beside her. Now that he wasn’t in danger of splattering across the ground, he had plenty of time to focus on the excruciating pain having a two-inch-sized hole punched straight through one’s chest caused.

  “Nothing,” Moxy said, glancing his way and finally realizing the state he was in. Immediately, she pressed a hand against his wound. Asher let out an unintentional sigh at the violet glow of her Life element as the pain vanished in an instant. He could feel his flesh knitting back together under his fingers, and he grinned.

  “Have I ever told you how happy I am that you joined the team?”

  “Yeah, you have,” Moxy snorted, still scanning their surroundings. “Now stop being an idiot and pull Samantha back out here. We have no idea where that attack came from, and we need to be ready. Also, she’s probably freaking out right about now.”

  “Right, crap,” he muttered, doing just that as Moxy healed the last of his injury. Suddenly, Samantha was standing right beside them, an arrow already nocked on her bow. Rather than looking worried like Moxy had predicted, she looked like she was seething with anger.

  “What hit us?” she demanded, her eyes immediately going to his chest before joining Moxy in surveying their surroundings.

  “Not a clue,” he admitted, cracking his neck and pulling out two of his daggers. “I wasn’t actively watching the ground, but for an attack to reach us that high up? I feel like we should have at least heard something coming. Whatever it was, it was completely silent. And seeing as it hit you right in the heart, the attacker has incredible aim. Maybe some sort of enchanted bow, or…”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The rest of his sentence fell off as his mind went right to the only person who fit those two criteria. An incredible archer whose attacks were entirely silent, but extremely powerful. There really was only a single person it could have been.

  He’d wondered when the Head of the Assassin’s Guild would pay them another visit after they’d taken out Talon.

  As if he’d been waiting for Asher to connect the dots, a long, familiar frame rose out of the grass barely thirty feet away. Owl, the Knuckle in charge of Whikoga and one of the Head of the Assassin’s Guild’s right hand men, stood before them.

  Just like the last few times they’d spoken, Owl had no discernable features other than the jet black bow slung over his back. He looked like a swirling pool of shadows that had taken on a humanoid form, and he tutted a finger as the three of them turned to stare at him.

  “What in the nine hells?” Moxy muttered, narrowing her eyes at Owl. “Asher, this guy some freaky friend of yours with a weird way of saying hello? He looks just like someone who tried to recruit me one time, minus the giant bow.”

  “No. But I do know him,” Asher said, taking in a slow, deep breath as he prepared himself for the clash he felt was a long time coming. “That was a little more than a warning shot, don’t you think, Owl?”

  “I did warn you what would happen if you didn’t play by the rules,” Owl said, his voice echoing at them from all sides. The rising sun bearing down on the tens of thousands of stalks of dancing grass gave him no limit to the number of shadows he had to work with, and Asher cursed as he realized once again the Knuckle had managed to select the perfect environment for a fight. Just like the poorly lit tunnel back in Dormaul, the shadow-filled plain surrounding them was the last place he wanted to fight Owl.

  “I thought I was technically the finger in charge of Whikoga?” Asher shot back, trying to buy them some time to think. “You told me you couldn’t be the one to kill me.”

  “I did say that,” Owl nodded. “Of course, that was before you went and took down the Finger in charge of Vildelph. In doing so, you have broken the system the Head has taken such painstaking measures to put into place. One person cannot be the Finger in charge of two separate cities, which means we need to handle this once and for all and get things back to the way they should be. We Knuckles fulfil the wishes of the Head. The Head wishes for a return to the status quo, and that starts with dealing with you.”

  “He sure likes to talk a lot,” Moxy pointed out, her grin growing until it filled her face with manic excitement as she cracked her neck. “Enough talk, let’s-”

  Without warning, Moxy jerked to the side, narrowly avoiding a death that Asher hadn’t even seen coming. But she hadn’t moved fast enough, and Asher looked on in horror as the head of a jet-black spear made from shadows ripped through the front of her chest, having been thrown at her from behind without any sound whatsoever. Moxy stared down at her front, her eyes wide with shock as they took in the weapon. It was only from her incredible reaction time and ability to feel movement in the air around her that she’d managed to avoid being pierced through the heart.

  Of course, getting stabbed through the chest wasn’t really all that great regardless of where it happened.

  As the spear morphed back into shadows and melted away, blood began gushing out of the hole in her chest, and Moxy collapsed to a knee, placing a glowing hand over her own injury as she got to work. A quick glance behind him was all Asher needed to see to confirm that the Head wasn’t messing around any more.

  A second, identical shadow-clad figure stood thirty feet away in the opposite direction as Owl, flanking them with the aid of the other assassin. Unlike Owl’s bow, this one seemed to fight with a spear, which reformed from the shifting shadows in front of him as it rose back out of the ground and was snatched back up by the newcomer.

  “I am Wolf,” the figure said, waving his spear at them in greeting like he hadn’t just tried to skewer Moxy from behind. “The Knuckle in charge of Vildelph. As Owl already said, the Head is not pleased with your actions.”

  Almost more jarring than finding themselves trapped between two of the Head’s most elite assassins was the fact that Wolf’s voice was identical to Owl’s. The two voices had the same tone, same pitch, and they echoed from all the surrounding shadows in the same way. If he wasn’t staring at the second figure with his own eyes, Asher would have assumed it was just Owl trying to trick them.

  Almost as strange, was the fact that Asher wasn’t picking up anything from either of the two assassins with his new Shard Detection skill, which could only mean that neither of them carried any shards on them when they went to carry out a hit, or that whatever artifact the Head gave their Knuckles to provide them with the shadow form was strong enough to block tier-two investigative skills. His Identify and Judgement still weren’t giving him anything back from the Knuckles, which definitely supported the theory.

  “For your information, the Head is well aware of your ability to teleport by now. Combine that with your evolved scrying resistance, and tracking your location has become rather difficult,” Owl said, drawing their attention back toward him. “Before you choose to run away, hear this. Wolf and I have been assigned the task of killing you. That means we will hunt you down to the ends of the realms, chasing after you regardless of how far you try to go. Personally, I would recommend fighting us here and now, as it will save the two of us quite the headache.”

  “The Head thinks two of their Knuckles are enough to take us down, huh?” Asher asked, his heart pounding as he did his best to keep eyes on both assassins at the same time. After triggering Winged Savior it was going to be a while before Samantha had access to her wings again, and Moxy still needed a bit more time to fully heal the hole in her chest. They’d already discovered that his Eternal Regeneration drastically sped up how quickly her Life element worked on him, but she was merely mortal. From the looks of things, retreating to lick their wounds and prepare for a future battle with the Knuckles was probably the wisest course of action, even if they wouldn’t know when it was coming.

  But Asher really didn’t like the idea of living in fear, never knowing when the master assassins would strike next. A quick glance at the angry fire still burning in Samantha’s eyes from being shot out of the sky she loved so much, and the way Moxy’s smile had actually grown to the point where it looked physically painful, Asher could only chuckle. Turning back toward Owl, he grinned.

  “Who said anything about running away?” he asked, motioning with his dagger for Owl to step forward. “It’s a shame the Head has to deal with replacing two Fingers because of us. Might as well tack two Knuckles onto that list while we’re at it.”

  really doesn't like that idea.

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