Chapter 71: Attending the Invitation
The man lit the lantern at his hip. A special oil fed green flames that threw unsettling color across everything nearby.
He stepped outside and a wall of heat met him head-on. He pulled a face, but the season was what it was. Even with the sun long gone, the Kingdom baked in a close, airless warmth that had nowhere to go.
"God, it's hot tonight."
"Tell me about it. Heard it gets cooler further north, toward the sea."
The complaint, then the easy response from his partner.
"Could really use some rain."
He looked up. The night sky was clear — not a cloud anywhere.
"Right. Back to work."
To call them ordinary villagers would have been a stretch. Long swords at their hips, leather armor on their bodies, and in the set of their faces and the way they carried themselves, the particular quality of men for whom violence had been going on long enough to settle into their posture. Not farmers.
The two of them moved through the village without speaking. The settlement lay wrapped in night-silence, a stillness with something extinguished about it, and through that emptiness the two men walked their patrol without urgency.
The village was ringed by a high wall. Six watchtowers were visible from where they stood, their construction more solid than anything you'd expect from a border settlement. This was less a village and more a fortified position.
What made it stranger was that the fields were inside the walls. Defensive walls were built to protect living quarters, not cropland. But whoever had built this place guarded the growing things within as carefully as they'd guard gold.
The man registered the gaze from the nearest watchtower. A partner was stationed up there, lantern in hand. One shake of that light and backup would come.
He'd probably catch an earful at the shift change for being too jumpy, but he'd decided he was raising that lantern the moment anything felt wrong. He had no interest in dying over something small.
Not that he expected anything to go wrong. Months of the same patrol, the same route, the same silence. It would probably carry on forever.
He was halfway through the circuit when something covered his mouth.
Not a hand. Something with the texture of a tentacle.
His chin was jerked upward, and a burning pain tore through his throat. Less than a second, start to finish.
The last sound he ever heard was the sound of liquid being swallowed.
The hand over his mouth released. The blood-draining blade was drawn out only once it had confirmed the throat was empty.
The figure holding him upright was dressed entirely in black. Every part of her was covered in cloth except her eyes. The metal plate across her chest showed the clear shape of a woman's body.
Across the village, her partner gave a slight nod.
Both kills confirmed.
She checked the surroundings. The lantern gave light, but she and her target had been pressed close enough together that the watchtowers couldn't have seen anything of use.
She kept hold of the body, letting it lean against her rather than drop. A patrol guard stopping mid-circuit was unremarkable. A body hitting the ground face-first was not. That part wasn't her problem past this point, but still.
Then she felt it through her palm — the dead man's body driving hard against something, like a fist against a post. The next moment, the corpse began to move. Stiff and deliberate.
She let go and activated the ninja skill [Shadow Concealment], dissolving into the dark. No ordinary eye could ever find her there.
The two men resumed walking. Their pace was wrong — heavy, dragging, nothing like before. The red lines across their throats no longer bled. There was nothing left to bleed. They were corpses following an order, and nothing more.
"This side's ready."
"Perfect."
Voices kept low. A response equally quiet.
"I'm moving to the next position. Need to get someone with a high enough rank."
A different voice this time — higher, younger, with the particular edge of youth still in it.
"We're starting the raid. What about the other two?"
"Holding position near the village. Everything's in place. I'll handle the first priority — you two move on schedule."
The companion who had been hidden in the dark rose smoothly into the air, using [Flight] to move toward the building that had to be taken first. There was a contact inside who needed to be secured before anything else happened.
The two remaining figures broke into a run, moving from shadow to shadow in a way that would have given a senior adventurer serious trouble tracking.
The one running alongside her moved her fingers in quick patterns. Assassin's hand-sign, executed at the speed of ordinary conversation.
— Good thing there were no dogs.
— Agreed. Cleaner this way.
— I'm heading to the target building.
— Understood.
Her partner peeled off in a different direction.
She ran alone. As she passed the fields, she glanced sideways at them.
Not grain. Not vegetables.
What grew in careful, tended rows was the source plant for the most pervasive illegal substance in the Kingdom — a drug known as Black Powder.
Black Powder went by another name: Leila Powder. Black and fine, it was dissolved in water and drunk. Cheap enough for nearly anyone to afford, and reliable enough for a rush of warmth and ease that made the world temporarily manageable. It had become the Kingdom's most infamous drug for exactly those reasons.
Wild-harvested versions of the plant made for something close to outright poison. Cultivated stock was somewhat weaker, but the addictive pull was no less severe.
Most users who tried to stop went back before the poison had cleared their system.
The worst part was that the addiction showed no obvious signs. No dramatic physical deterioration. That blankness had let the Kingdom's upper class look away, and the Empire had lodged formal complaints against the Kingdom's apparent tolerance of the industry.
She herself had used it before. Not enough to find the idea objectionable now. But the commission she was carrying had come through her captain rather than the Adventurers Guild, which put it at an angle that didn't entirely sit well with her.
She reached the building designated as Target Two. Her task was straightforward: recover any intelligence, then burn the fields. The smoke from burning drug crops would carry toxins that could endanger the villagers. There was no time to move them out first.
She filed the villagers' safety somewhere in the back of her mind and left it there. She had been raised from childhood for this kind of work. Death had a very limited reach over her feelings.
The one thing she didn't like was the expression that crossed her captain's face when this came up. But her captain had given approval. That was enough.
When this was done, she had another village to move to. Then the one after that. The cultivation sites weren't limited to this location — there were at least ten large-scale operations scattered across the Kingdom, and almost certainly more that hadn't been found yet.
Written orders would have been ideal to find here. She wasn't counting on it. The best she could hope for was that the contact handler inside had something worth taking.
Even a single thread to pull would be enough to put a look on her captain's face that she actually wanted to see.
The criminal organization was called Eight Fingers — a name taken from the legend that the god of thieves had only eight. They ran eight divisions: slave trade, assassination, smuggling, theft, narcotics, security, finance, and gambling. The Kingdom's underworld answered to them.
What was being grown in plain sight in front of her made the reach of their influence obvious. The noble who owned this land was almost certainly complicit, and even if someone filed a report, that noble would simply say they hadn't known.
Legal channels didn't have the reach to touch this. Burning the fields was a blunt instrument, but it was the only one available.
She knew, honestly, that burning a few drug crops didn't address anything at the root. The illegal network eating through the Kingdom had put down roots too deep in the political structure to be cleared by fire alone.
Re-Estize Kingdom. Royal Capital.
A carriage moved through the morning mist. Lucian lifted the edge of the curtain and watched the city's outline come slowly into focus through the thin haze, gaining edges and definition.
He hadn't yet received any reply from Sebas. And yet here he was, already in a carriage bound for Lorente Castle.
Lorente Castle sat in the deepest part of the capital. Its outer perimeter ran fourteen hundred meters, with twenty massive cylindrical towers forming the defensive ring, and high walls enclosing a vast area of ground within.
The Golden Princess Renner had invited both him and Lakyus to come and discuss the matter of Eight Fingers.
He had no particular desire to get any closer to this twisted, monstrous princess. But without Climb by her side now, he was worried Renner might behave in ways even more extreme than the original story had ever accounted for. Which left him no choice but to go.
He had tried, at the time, to keep Lakyus and Renner from meeting. It hadn't worked. They had found each other anyway, without him knowing.
During that period, Lucian had briefly wondered whether certain world lines simply couldn't be changed.
It wasn't until the Theocracy successfully moved against Shalltear that he finally allowed himself to breathe. The story was still on course.