Chapter 148 – The Flour Assassin.

Late afternoon descended with a coppery haze as Diana left Boran's shack after delivering a batch of lotus roots to the veteran tracker.

She walked along the service alleys skirting the rear of the south sector's massive grain silos. The lanes there were narrow, flanked on either side by four-meter-high granite walls, with virtually no wagon traffic at that hour of the day.

Diana kept her hands in the pockets of her black leather coat, walking at a relaxed pace.

She did not need to cast any advanced spells to detect the strange presence.

With her 92 Perception points, the surrounding world spoke far too loudly: she heard the dry scrape of a boot against a loose tile on the warehouse roof to her right, caught the sickly sweet stench of cheap serpent venom being dabbed onto an iron blade, and tracked the shallow, ragged breathing of someone whose heart was pounding at a hundred and forty beats per minute out of sheer nerves.

Diana continued walking without breaking the rhythm of her stride.

—Someone has been trailing you across the rooftops for three corners now, Diana.

The System's voice echoed in her mind in amused black gold.

—The fellow tripped twice on the eaves and nearly kicked a tile down to the street. I believe this is your very first assassination attempt in the Third Circle.

“I heard him stumbling two hundred meters ago,” Diana replied in thought. “He is far too amateur to be an inquisitor of Beelzebub.”

***

As Diana passed beneath the stone archway of an abandoned tool shed, the assailant decided to make his move.

The figure dropped from the four-meter-high roof with a piercing shriek that shattered the alley's silence:

“FOR THE BROTHERHOOD OF BLOOD BLADES!”

Diana did not even draw the dagger at her waist.

She did not use teleportation, did not activate her magical aura, and did not focus fire into her obsidian horns.

She merely took half a step to the left, calmly tilting her torso.

The assassin plunged through the air brandishing two short iron daggers with tips dripping watery greenish poison. Missing Diana's shoulder by half a meter due to her effortless dodge, the youth attempted to stick his landing on the packed dirt, but Diana extended the toe of her combat boot with mechanical precision.

The lad's foot caught against the sole of Diana's boot.

The assassin lost his balance in midair, tumbled awkwardly, and crashed face-first into an open barrel of stale rye flour resting against the shed wall.

CRASH.

The barrel's rotted pine staves burst on impact. A dense white cloud of flour billowed into the alley, blanketing the ground and the entire lane.

The youth lay legs flailing in the air inside the shattered cask, coughing frantically and kicking his boots against the ground as he struggled to dislodge his head from the bottom of the barrel.

Diana paused beside the wreckage, brushing white powder from the sleeve of her leather coat with a long sigh.

She activated the appraisal of [Command Eye]:

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

[COMBATANT APPRAISAL]

- Name: Kip

- Species: Lesser Demon (Rift Imp)

- Level: 33 | Class: [Shadow Blade Apprentice]

- HP: 180 / 180 | Strength: 16 | Agility: 28

- Current Status: Mild asphyxiation due to rye flour inhalation.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Level 33. One hundred and eighty hit points and sixteen Strength.

Diana extended her gloved left hand, hauled the boy up by his leather tunic collar with the effortless leverage of her 18 Strength, and set him on his feet amid the broken boards on the gravel.

***

Kip was the size of a scrawny teenager, with long impish ears dusted in white powder, a mouth coughing up flour, and wide eyes full of pure panic.

He spat a clump of flour onto the ground, lifted one of the iron daggers he had managed to hold onto, and aimed it at Diana's chest, his hand trembling so violently that the blade shook in the air:

“D-Don't move, human! I am... I am a blood assassin of the-”

Kip choked on his own words.

The white flour dusting the boy's face fell away from his eyelids, and he finally registered who was holding his collar.

His eyes drifted down to the two slender, curved obsidian horns with golden grooves sprouting from Diana's brow. They flicked back up to the deep black eyes where two rings of pure gold spun around vertical pupils regarding him with cold disdain, and locked onto the Crown of Arcane Sovereignty gleaming with magical silver and a purple diamond.

The lad turned ghost-white beneath his layer of flour.

The iron dagger slipped from his fingers, clattering into the dust with a feeble metallic clink.

“A-An... a Level forty-seven Archdemon...?!” Kip stammered in a shrill, squeaking whisper, his chin quivering with absolute dread. “The bounty poster... said you were a rookie human girl at Level twenty who sold glass in the Second Circle!”

Diana hauled the boy closer, pinning him against the granite wall with a firm shove that made Kip's knees buckle:

“Who paid for the bounty, Kip?”

“A merchant from the Quicksilver Guild!” the boy blurted immediately, whimpering in terror, his pointed ears pinned back against his head. “He crossed the official portal three days ago and placed a thirty-silver contract in the underworld for anyone who slit the throat of the 'human girl of Greed'! I'm just an apprentice! I thought it was easy coin to pay my rent!”

***

Diana stared at the boy for five seconds.

The Quicksilver Guild from the Second Circle was still trying to settle old scores over their commercial defeat, yet they had issued a contract with intelligence two months out of date, dating from before Diana had even cleared the Skeleton King's dungeon or undergone her soul metamorphosis.

Slaying a Level 33 imp who had launched himself face-first into a flour barrel would be a pointless waste of effort.

Diana held out an open right hand, black claws on display:

“The contract advance pouch.”

Kip jammed trembling hands into the torn pocket of his doublet and pulled out a small brown cloth pouch, dropping it into the Commander's palm without hesitation.

Diana opened the drawstring and counted the contents: five pure silver coins.

She slipped the coins into the inner pocket of her coat.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

[FULL FINANCIAL AUDIT]

- Previous Balance: 523 Silver Coins (52.3 Gold Coins).

- Reparations Confiscated from Apprentice Assassin: +5 Silver Coins!

- NEW VAULT BALANCE: 528 SILVER COINS (52,800 Bronze / EXACTLY 52.8 PURE GOLD COINS!)]

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Five hundred and twenty-eight silver coins secured in the faction vault.

Diana released Kip's collar, and he slumped down onto the packed dirt amid the broken barrel staves.

The Commander smoothed her black leather coat, looking down at the youth from head to toe, her dark eyes with golden rings gleaming in the alley's gloom:

“You are going back to your broker in the plaza,” Diana said in a calm, razor-sharp voice. “You will tell him that you carried out the hit, but the mark was no frail human girl. And if I catch sight of you or any other apprentice from your guild within two hundred meters of my estate... I will not use boots to disarm you. I will pump fire into your lungs. Am I clear?”

Kip nodded furiously in sheer terror, nearly spraining his neck in agreement: “Yes, ma'am! I'm gone! I'll never step foot in this sector again!”

The boy scrambled to his feet in a clumsy scramble, forgot the daggers lying on the ground, and bolted down the alley kicking up puffs of white flour dust with every stride, rounding the corner like a terrified rabbit.

Diana kicked the boy's rusted dagger down into a sewer grate, brushed the rye powder from her shoulder, and resumed her walk toward the Lower Cauldrons Estate.

The assassination attempt had been a cheap comedy.

Yet it had left five silver coins in her pocket and a practical certainty in the leader's mind: the time to reach Level 50 and return to the Second Circle to finally crush the remnants of Quicksilver was drawing closer by the day.