Chapter 38: The Assassin Who Couldn’t Be Detected

Reinhard’s hand ignited.

Ember flared across his fingers as he pressed the flames against the side of his throat. The bleeding had stopped.

Good.

The fact that his body was already burning through its reserves just to stay on its feet was considerably less good.

The mana stored in his cells was draining fast as the Immortal Emperor Body forced it through his damaged body. At the same time, the Demon God Tyrant Body locked his muscles in place to keep him from collapsing.

Reinhard took a slow breath, and then he looked up.

Someone stood in the darkness beyond the factory lights. Blue flames burned in the eye sockets of a heavy purple-and-black helmet, a skull-shaped visor covered his face, and a skeletal cuirass wrapped around his body.

A long, thin blade rested loosely in his hand. He had made no sound, and he gave off almost no mana, and yet the pressure coming from him was unmistakable.

B-Rank.

Reinhard’s smile returned. "So you’re the one who cut me."

The man didn’t answer.

For some reason, the sight of him stirred memories Reinhard hadn’t made himself, fragments from the body he had inherited.

Reports, rumors, and names overheard on nights spent drinking and listening to people talk about things they shouldn’t have known.

One name rose above the rest, the Silent Night Syndicate, an organization that worked from the shadows to eliminate people too powerful for ordinary methods to touch.

Most of its members were never identified, but the strongest belonged to an inner circle known as the Nights, and one of those Nights was standing in front of him.

A final memory surfaced.

Wednesday Blue Night.

Blue Death.

"Oh," Reinhard said.

The man finally spoke. "I thought that would be enough."

Reinhard glanced at the blood on his fingers, then back at him, and laughed. "Like I’d go down that easily?"

"Then you will drown in your own blood."

"Nah." Reinhard grinned. "I promised my wife I’d be home before breakfast. I can’t play with you sneaky people all night."

Four more figures stepped out of the darkness, and Reinhard’s eyes moved across them. Their mana was far denser than the assassins he had already beaten.

C-Rank, all four of them.

One had an enormous right arm, his Gnosis reshaping it into something nearly the size of a car door. The second stood inside a cloud of mist that twisted into half-formed creatures, and the third kept both hands raised near his chest, fingers slightly curled.

The fourth simply stood there.

"Okay." Reinhard pointed at the first. "Big Arm."

Then the second. "Fog Machine."

Then the third. "Heart Guy, I’m guessing."

He turned to the fourth. "And you’re..."

The fourth man was gone. He hadn’t moved, but his presence had vanished completely. Danger Intuition gave Reinhard nothing, even with its new Threat Detection, and so did Predator Awareness and his enhanced senses.

Whatever the man was doing, it was beyond all of them. "...wherever the fourth one went."

A blade appeared beside his neck, and Reinhard threw himself backward. The edge sliced through his shirt, missing his skin by a hair, and he landed several meters away. "Interesting."

Big Arm charged, his massive fist crashing toward Reinhard with enough force to flatten a wall, and Reinhard caught it with one hand. The ground split beneath his feet.

"You’re stronger than the others," he said, sounding genuinely pleased. He twisted, and Big Arm went over his hip and slammed into the concrete.

The mist around Fog Machine erupted, and creatures poured out of it, a serpent lunging from the left, a four-legged beast charging from the right, and a giant raising its arm overhead.

Reinhard opened a Space Tear beneath the serpent, and the air shivered as the rift formed just before its jaws reached him, and the serpent vanished.

He opened a second rift above the factory floor, and the serpent came crashing down onto the beast below. He reached for a third, and the air strained, then collapsed.

Nothing happened.

Only two?

Reinhard ducked as the giant’s fist smashed into the floor, and Heart Guy’s eyes sharpened. "He can only hold two."

"Rude," Reinhard said, rolling backward. "Accurate, but rude."

He closed one rift and immediately opened another as the giant’s arm swung through it, and the Space Tear snapped shut, severing the limb cleanly.

The rest of the giant kept charging, and Reinhard laughed. "That’s a pretty useful Gnosis, Fog Machine!"

Then something tightened inside his chest. At first it felt like pressure, and then the pressure became a hand, closing around his heart.

Reinhard coughed blood, and he understood at once.

Heart Guy wasn’t touching his real heart. He had created something connected to it, a false heart, and whatever happened to it, Reinhard felt.

"That’s annoying."

Heart Guy squeezed again, and Reinhard’s vision blurred, and in that same instant, the invisible assassin appeared behind him.

Reinhard’s body moved before his mind understood why, and he twisted. But the blade still carved a long line across his back, spattering blood across the concrete.

He landed several meters away, and his smile stayed, but his eyes had changed. They were good. Heart Guy forced him to react, the invisible assassin made it impossible to predict where the next strike would come from.

Fog Machine flooded the battlefield with creatures, and Big Arm kept pressing him from the front. And somewhere among them stood a B-Rank assassin who could attack without ever appearing in his senses.

Reinhard wiped the blood from his back. "You know, for assassins, you guys are awfully teamwork-based."

Nobody answered.

"I preferred the first group." He smiled. "They were friendlier."

The next attack came, and Reinhard Air Dashed upward as a blade passed beneath his feet. Big Arm’s fist followed from the side, and Reinhard twisted around it in midair and kicked the massive arm away.

Mist surged up toward him, and he reached for another Space Tear, and the air shivered as the rift began to form. Then a shadow moved through the opening, and a blade cut across Reinhard’s shoulder before the rift had even finished forming.

He landed hard, his hand going to the wound. He hadn’t sensed the attacker at all. He looked into the darkness. "So that’s how you’re going to play it."

Blue Death had noticed the delay.

Of course he had.

Reinhard fired a Mana Blast into the middle of the group, and the explosion drove them apart. For one moment, he stood alone in the smoke, and he smiled.

Then blue flames appeared behind him, and Reinhard moved at the last possible instant, and the blade meant for his throat cut across his cheek instead. Blood ran down his face.

He touched the wound, then laughed. "You’re really good at that."

The blue flames disappeared, and Reinhard reached for Space Tear again, and this time, he watched carefully. The air shivered, and he pushed, and space resisted before it finally gave, the rift opening slowly.

It was always the same, half a second, two at most, and always the same size.

He had been forcing Space Tear open every single time, and he had never noticed the weakness until someone started attacking him inside the opening.

The false heart tightened again, and Reinhard’s chest seized as the mist creatures lunged. He destroyed two with a Mana Blast, ducked beneath a third, and punched Big Arm across the factory, and then a blade came out of nowhere and opened his side.

He staggered back, and Heart Guy clenched his hand.

This time, the pressure was overwhelming, like an enormous fist closing around Reinhard’s heart, and his body stopped responding. His legs locked, then his arms, and even his breath stopped halfway through.

"Now," someone said.

Blue Death appeared directly in front of him, and Reinhard’s eyes moved to the blade that was already coming. He reached for Space Tear, and the air shivered. Half a second.

The sword went straight through his chest.

THUK.

Reinhard’s body jerked as the blade pierced his heart and came out through his back, and blood poured from his mouth.

Heart Guy opened his hand, releasing the false heart, and Blue Death pulled the sword free.

Reinhard stood for one more second, looking down at the hole in his chest, and then his legs folded, and he fell face-first onto the concrete as blood spread beneath him.

The factory went silent, and the assassins slowly gathered around his body as Big Arm’s massive limb returned to normal. "He’s dead."

Fog Machine looked down. "He survived the throat, but that went straight through his heart."

Heart Guy exhaled. "Weren’t we supposed to bring him back alive?"

"There’s no point now," the invisible assassin said. "We report that we took him. The client won’t know the difference until it’s too late."

Heart Guy hesitated, then shrugged. "...Fine."

Blue Death stood silently beside the body, blood dripping from the tip of his sword.

Fog Machine shook his head. "Still... who would’ve thought a C-Rank could push us this far?"

Big Arm gave a quiet laugh. "His body was abnormal. If we’d known what he was, we never would’ve underestimated him."

None of them noticed Reinhard’s fingers move.

He heard everything. He lay face-down in his own blood, with no heartbeat, no pulse, nothing, only mana. It rushed through his cells like water through a broken dam, holding every piece of his body together as his reserves kept draining.

Strangely, Reinhard wasn’t afraid. He was still. For the first time since he had awakened, he wasn’t forcing his body to do anything.

There was no heart to force and no muscles answering his commands, nothing left to control, and so he simply felt the mana. It moved through him naturally, without being pushed or forced, finding its own path.

And slowly, Reinhard realized something.

It had never needed him to force it, not in his body, and not anywhere else.

He felt the air around him, the faint mana hanging inside the factory, and then he felt something else.

Space.

As his attention moved toward it, he could suddenly feel the seams. They had always been there.

Every time he used Space Tear, he had treated space like a locked door and forced it open, but the seams were everywhere, thin lines running through reality where the world was already willing to separate.

He didn’t have to break them.

He only had to ask.

Reinhard tried, without moving a finger, and a tiny rift the size of a coin appeared across the factory. There was no shiver, no delay, and no resistance. He closed it and opened another, large enough to swallow a truck, and closed that too.

Then another, and another, until three rifts hung open at once, and he held all three with ease.

Three.

He let them disappear before anyone noticed.

[Mana Sovereignty has Awakened.]

[Space Tear has been Enhanced.]

Something twitched inside his chest, where his heart should have been, and his shoulders began to shake.

"Haha..."

The assassins stopped talking.

"Hahaha..."

The blue flames in Blue Death’s helmet narrowed.

Reinhard pressed his palms against the blood-slick floor and pushed himself up, and the assassins took a step back. He should have been dead. His heart was gone, and yet he was moving, and laughing.

He rose slowly, blood running from his mouth, down his chin, and across his ruined shirt, and then he raised his head. A wide grin spread across his face, and his blue eyes shone brighter than they had all night.

"You should’ve cut my head off."

The assassins stared.

Reinhard wiped the blood from his mouth and laughed again. "Why aim for the heart?" His grin widened. "It’s useless."