Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2 A LITRPG Adventure

by Peter Meredith

  Their eagerness to desecrate the dead was revolting. “I don’t need anything but the thumbs. You can go ahead and burn the bodies and be…” Roan stopped as he heard a tread of heavy boots from within the tavern. The Sign of the Dirty Krown had mostly cleared out. While he had been bargaining with the goblins, there had only been the muttered cursing of the staff as they went about cleaning up.

  But now there was a heavy tread of boots thudding across the blood and spit-stained wooden floor. The sound of them prickled the hairs on Roan’s neck and suddenly there was a nervous quiet from the tavern.

  “Where are the bodies?” a deep voice asked.

  The goblins looked back and forth in terror before rushing to what looked like the opening to a burrow beneath the building. Squeaking, they crawled down into it, leaving Roan alone. He didn’t wait around either. In a flash he ran to the wall and went up it faster than he could believe.

  Dropping down on the other side, he froze as the sound of the boots seemed to disappear. One moment there was a thud, thud, thud and the next it was as if whoever had been coming just vanished. Roan put a hazel eye to a crack in the fence, where he saw two men in black—they seemed to flow across the ground leaving less of a trail of their passing than their shadows. With them came a chill that went right up Roan’s back

  They stopped at the pile of bodies. “Taking thumbs as proof of kills,” one said. “Who do you think? The Double A’s? The Shadows?”

  “It’s the Ghak,” the other answered. “They have cause, and this sort of amateur hit is just like them. Double the patrols and put out a bounty on the assassin. Five thousand should give us his head by morning.”

  2—

  Roan slipped away from the tavern, his feet unsteady. He had nine more pairs of thumbs to acquire but now he was no longer the hunter, he was the hunted.

  And it didn’t take long for word to spread. He had barely walked two blocks before running feet behind him sent him diving behind the Daggerland version of a dumpster. Two thugs raced by and too late, Roan realized he might not get a better opportunity than that. From then on, it would three or four against one.

  “Alright, how do I cut those odds? How do I get them alone? How do I…” More running feet. This time there were two men and a woman. Roan shook his head at the sight of her, wondering what sort of woman would ever work for men as evil as these.

  “An evil woman, I guess,” he murmured. The thought had that harsh anger in him welling up. “This entire city needs to be eradicated. It needs to be burnt to the ground.” It was an evil thing to say and Roan could feel the blackness in his heart grow. “Evil or not, it’s true. This city is built on selfishness. No one would lift a finger to help a neighbor whose house is…on…fire.”

  Picturing this gave him an idea. A fire would be perfect cover and ten fires would be more perfect, still. There would be chaos and within it he would be able to strike.

  The building across the alley seemed as good a place to start as any. Glancing left and right, he slipped across to a stout door that had been padlocked. He brought out his picks and, after worrying at the lock for half a minute, popped it open(XP +20).

  Creeping into the gloomy building, he was disappointed to find that it was nothing more than a shop that made and sold marble tiles. Still, there were thousands of chiseled pieces that were expensive enough to require a guard who sat near the front show room with his feet resting on a bust of some unknown king.

  Roan considered killing him and taking his thumbs, but then he remembered the creepy drow that worked for Tarranon. She would see right through any lie he told. Sighing, he turned back for the door and when he did, he almost tripped over a bucket. It sloshed green fluid onto the floor that stank of something very familiar.

  “Almost like nail polish remover.”

  He guessed that it was used to clean the marble. And if it was anything like nail polish remover, then it was likely to be highly flammable. “The marble won’t burn, but the building around it will.” Taking the bucket, he crept to back of the shop where the uncut pieces of marble were stored.

  Here he found an entire vat of the green fluid. The chemical stench was enough to make his eyes water and his head swim. After splashing the contents of the bucket on the wall, he scooped out more until he had the entire room coated. Then he took one more bucket’s worth and left a trail of the green fluid to the back door. Then it was just a matter of taking his box of matches and striking a flame.

  The green fluid created a flame that burned green as well and when the back room started burning, it did so with an eerie glow as if there were some sort of other-worldly entity within the building conjuring alien magic. But it was just fire, though it was a rager.

  People began streaming down from the upper floors as the flames ate up one side of the building. Soon a crowd gathered and scattered within it were K Street Killers. Like the dull sheep that surrounded them, they stared up at the flames and didn’t notice Roan move along the back of the crowd.

  He went back and forth until he had singled out a thug who stood too close to the edge of the alley. Like a shark attacking from out of the deep, Roan came out of the shadows, dagger in hand. Just as part of the building collapsed, he attacked. It was a perfect strike and, as the dagger punched straight through the man’s chest, Roan saw the words: (Critical Hit!) flash across his vision. This was followed by (XP +35) as the man collapsed and died.

  With everyone looking away, it was nothing for Roan to drag him out of sight, snatch eighteen gold pieces and a sapphire from a pouch and take his thumbs. He then hid the corpse beneath the piles of trash ranging along the edge of the alley. No one would notice the body until it started to stink.

  He then went to look for his next victim.

  There were two standing by themselves. Roan guessed that they hadn’t heard the news about the increased patrols or about the reward money. The pair wore matching and extremely vapid expressions. It wasn’t long before they began to look bored with the fire even though the flames had just jumped to a second building and the crowd had exclaimed: “ooooh!”

  Soon, they started heading back to K Street with Roan following. There were dozens of people streaming towards the fire, but they all seemed like normal NPCs to Roan and, throwing caution to the wind, he unlimbered his cocked crossbow, aimed and fired at one of the thugs.

  In the dark and with most people gaping at the fire as they walked, only a couple of them saw Roan shoot and miss. The bolt sailed just to the side of the thug’s neck and flew off to bounce harmlessly against a building half a block away.

  The thug’s response to the near miss was to scratch his neck and look around in confusion; he didn’t look back at Roan, who dropped to one knee, working the winch. A few people nearby looked at him strangely and he knew that he had been foolish, but he was getting tired.

  By the time he had his weapon cocked, the two thugs were almost at K Street and it would have been stupid to try a shot there. Instead he took a right at the next block and trudged along for a quarter of a mile until the fire was just a glow on the horizon behind him. Now, he looked for another building to burn.

  There were hundreds to choose from however, he didn’t like the idea of burning people alive, even if they weren’t real people.

  He found a row of warehouses and slunk to the back of the first. Settling in front of the lock, he squinted in at the tumblers. The alley was pitch black; he would have to work the lock by feel, which was no problem until he felt something within the lock. Something moved that shouldn’t have moved.

  Pulling his cloak around him to hide the light, he flicked a match on the wall and in the flare of the light he peered in at the keyhole and saw a wire within the lock. He went cold at the sight. It was a trap and there was no telling what would happen to him if he tripped it.

  Leaving the pick in place, he stepped back to stare up at the building, which was a windowless block of concrete. Other than this employee entrance, the only ways in were th
rough the loading doors and Roan was sure that these would be trapped as well.

  It would have been smarter to leave altogether. There had to be easier places to break into, but Roan went back to the lock, figuring that half the battle was seeing the trap. “Now, I just have to disarm it,” he said as the match burned down to his fingers. Dropping it, he lit another and inspected the lock once more.

  The wire he had seen had a loop at one end designed to hook a pick. Using a tool that resembled a long needle, he pushed the wire through the backside of the lock. Once the way was clear, he used his picks to turn the tumblers. Only when the locked clicked and the door edged open did he let out the breath he’d been holding (XP +100).

  The dark and shadowy interior of the warehouse was filled with hundreds of industrial-sized storage racks that soared three stories overhead. Each rack held containers and crates and boxes of all sizes. He was just creeping up to one when he saw light out of the corner of his eye.

  Ducking behind the crate, he peered around its splintered edge and saw a bored-looking guard shuffling along, holding up a lantern, the light from it glinting off his armor. Although Roan was not even five feet away, the guard walked past and didn’t see him(Hide in Shadows Successful! XP +20). A second guard, this one lanternless, came up and grunted something to the first before marching off along one of the canyon-like rows.

  Roan waited a few minutes for them to move further away before he began poking through the crates and boxes, looking for anything flammable. He wasted thirty minutes discovering a hundred items that wouldn’t burn: tin bowls by the thousands, pewter plates in cardboard boxes, tons of lead ingots stacked on pallets, and enough glass jars of pickles to choke a giant.

  It wasn’t until he started climbing up into the racks that he found what he needed: yards and yards of cloth, racks of silk robes, vast reams of paper and about a thousand pairs of children shoes.

  He stared at the shoes, wondering if he could really light them on fire. It seemed cruel. If he didn’t do it, he’d have to search for a new building to set alight or change his strategy altogether, something he didn’t want to have to do. “Son of a bitch. Why did it have to be children’s shoes?”

  If it had been a thousand wigs or a like number of belts, he wouldn’t have hesitated to light them up, but now he stood over the crate wasting time and growing angry that he had to pretend to care about imaginary children living in an imaginary game.

  “These shoes aren’t even real. They are figments of someone else’s imagination that have been stuck in my head.”

  What about Cricket? a voice inside of him asked. Is she imaginary?

  “She’s different,” was his simple response. Cricket had been around enough real people to take on their characteristics. In a sense, she bridged the gap between the robotic NPCs and actual people—or so he told himself as he began to gently lower the heavy bolts of cloth to the ground. He then placed them around the racks, end to end so they would burn like logs.

  What about the people who owned all of this stuff? the same voice asked. What if some of them are real?

  Roan paused, remembering the Ukrainian woman he had met the year before. She made a living shipping items back and forth in Daggerland. Her profits paid for magical goods that people in the real world paid top dollar for. She blamed him for losing two separate deliveries; what equated to a month’s worth of income.

  “That wasn’t my fault, and this? People should get real jobs in the real world. Why play make-believe merchant when you can actually employ real people and make a real difference? Why don’t…”

  He stopped as he saw one of the guards creeping from the front room, a sword in one hand, a bullseye lantern in the other.

  This was definitely not a real person, so Roan could kill him without an issue, at least without a moral issue. Physically, the guard was bigger and stronger than most of the thugs Roan had been killing. He was an actual fighter. Judging by the half-plate he wore, he wasn’t a noob, either. Roan would have to kill him with his first strike; if not, he would call the other guard and together they would probably be able to kill him.

  Roan couldn’t risk that, so he climbed, spider-like, back to where the silk robes were stored. As the guard moved down one aisle, Roan dropped the robes, one by one, each barely making more than a whisper as they fell to the floor.

  He had tossed down maybe fifty of them before the guard turned up the aisle Roan was in. To distract him, Roan grabbed a coin from his pouch and threw it as far as he could down the next aisle, where it tinged off of something and bounced away.

  “Bolger!” the guard hissed cutting between the racks to the next aisle. “Get in here!” The second guard came running, his metal armor clattering around him. “I heard something over there.” They pointed their lights away from Roan, who waited thirty feet above them, crouched on his rack, and thinking that the two would move away from him. All he needed was another minute or two and he’d be ready to light his fire and escape.

  “You go up this aisle, I’ll go up the other,” the first guard said. Roan watched as the two separated and for the briefest moments, as the guards bracketed the rack he was perched on, he thought that they would miss the mess he had made.

  But at the last moment, one turned. His light swept quickly to the ground which was strew with silk robes and rolls of cloth. “Bolger, look.”

  The second guard whispered a curse and then, before Roan could duck away, he spun his light straight to where Roan was hiding.

  Chapter 15

  K Street Territory, Oberast

  The bullseye lanterns were like World War Two searchlights. They swept in different directions before coming back to catch Roan in the crosshatch of an X.

  The light framed him perfectly as he fired his crossbow. His +4 attack bonus failed against his target’s 17 armor class. The bolt struck metal but bounced away.

  Strangely, all three of them cursed at exactly the same time. Roan did so as he wound the bow’s winch, the guards cursed as they rushed for cover beneath the rack.

  “What do we do?”

  The guard’s whisper carried up to Roan. With the bow ready, he leaned over the side of the platform ready to shoot one more time. All-in-all, his situation wasn’t terrible. Unless they had some sort of magic climbing gear that enabled them to fly up the crossbars of the structure holding the racks, Roan would be able to get off seven or eight shots. Even accounting for the armor, he’d kill at least one of them.

  “You go get help,” one guard said to the other. “I’ll stay here and keep him treed.”

  “You’re faster; you should go.”

  For the next few seconds the two hissed back and forth until it decided who should go. Roan waited with the bow ready, knowing that he had one shot. Had he been holding an M4 in the real world, he couldn’t have missed, but in this world there was a strange element of chance, as if everything he did was based on a roll of the dice.

  There was no subterfuge on the part of the fighters. “You ready?” one asked. After a grunt, he yelled, “Go!” One of them broke from cover beneath Roan and he had a shot perfectly lined up. He did not miss this time, but neither did he kill the man. The bolt pierced metal and then the flesh of his back, pinning one to the other and causing him to stumble. Somehow he kept going, his friend cheering him on.

  “Now your goose is cooked,” the second guard yelled from below. “Unless you want to make a deal. How much gold do you have?”

  “Ten gold and a few silvers,” Roan answered. He didn’t think the man would let him go under any circumstances.

  A laugh echoed up from below. “Stop your lying. If you drop fifty gold down here and your crossbow, I’ll walk back to the front and say you slipped away.”

  That would put him in more danger than he was already and yet, he couldn’t just sit there, either. What Roan needed was a big distraction, which was pretty much what he had come there for in the first place. And the ingredients for a distraction were all around him. N
ot bothering to be quiet, he climbed to the next rack, where there was a wooden crate filled with parchment.

  Putting his shoulder to the crate, he tried to heave it over but only succeeded in straining a muscle in his neck. Giving up on the idea, he jumped into the crate itself and started heaving out ream after ream of paper.

  “Stop that!” the guard screamed.

  Roan ignored him. He concentrated on throwing out the paper as fast as he could. When the crate was half-empty, he grabbed some of the loose paper, lit it on fire with a match and then tossed it into the crate. He then climbed to the edge of the rack and jumped across to the next, where the silk robes were folded in boxes.

  These boxes were much lighter and he was able to throw them down much to the remaining guard’s consternation. When Roan had heaved over half the boxes, he struck a match and lit one of the remaining silk robes on fire. As he expected, it went up as if it had been dipped in gasoline. He tossed it with the rest.

  By then the crate holding the paper was burning bright enough to light the entire warehouse. With the robes going up as well, Roan had to turn from the glare as he went to where the bolts of cloth had been stacked. Setting one on fire, he dropped it down to land among the rest. He then set fire to the remaining bolts on the top rack.

  The heat was now so intense that he had to leap to another rack. He was about to look for something else to set on fire, but then he saw the guard was now out from beneath the flaming racks and was just standing there, a perfect target.

  Roan unslung his crossbow and fired all in one move. The bolt sunk home, hitting the man in the cheek. He flinched, spun in an odd circle and ducked beneath the rack right behind him. Roan might have been able to take another shot, however he was bent on escape.

  Throwing the crossbow over his shoulder, he started climbing down. He only made it halfway before he heard shouts coming from the front. Seconds later, a dozen of the K Street Killers came rushing into the warehouse.