Two hours later, Nadia had arrived in the target city; Alfred had yet to move. She walked out of the teleport hub building; essentially a building that was like a less used train terminal in terms of traffic flow. Outside, after failing to see any familiar face, she walked and sat over by a fountain.

 Herbenon City was one of the hubs of the twelfth floor, but it wasn’t the capital. Still, it was the evening and there was significant flow in the streets due to people coming home from work in the cities, or coming home after a day of adventuring and resource gathering. As much as Georgia would have loved to have said otherwise, Nadia’s attire wasn’t all that strange in a world where people wore armor made from monster parts, and iconography in worship of their chosen Gods. After waiting a few moments, she pulled her bracelet to her mouth and spoke into the gem.

“Elliot, where are you?” she asked, looking around the teleport hub’s plaza.

“Sorry, Boss. I’m a few minutes behind.”

“Fine; I’m starting the search without you.”

“What?! No! I’ll be right there! You shouldn’t go alone.”

“Sorry. I’m not keeping Lady Velqa waiting. Besides, the target was recently in the hospital, I doubt I can’t take one sick boy.” Before Elliot could reply, Nadia killed the call.

I appreciate that, Nadia, but you might be getting too cocky.

“Now, how am I going to find that dojo… I could ask the contact if they narrowed it down…”

Nope, that’ll take too long. That route will take twenty more minutes at best. I’ll guide you.

“Caw-caw.”

 I used my favorite trick, a black bird.

“Lady Velqa!” Nadia yelped, tears flowing down her face.

Nice. I knew you were sensitive to black birds now. Now I’ll just have this bird point you to the dojo.

Nadia quickly followed the bird through Herbenon’s streets.

***

Nadia Veloqui, 23 years old, was the first born daughter of the Veloqui family. She inherited the position of “Boss” from her mother, the previous head of that part of the family. The Veloqui Family were officially the principal rulers of the tenth floor’s capital and were unofficially the rulers of a vast majority of the settlements. Traditionally, the males of the family controlled matters above ground and the females, all other matters. When disagreements were had between the two arms of the family, although rare, parliament would be called with all the heads of the vassal families in order to sort out the matter. What unified the Veloqui Family’s arms and all their followers was the shared belief in Velqa. So long as Velqa existed, the family was united. That in of itself came about because of Velqa’s history of aiding the family since Remnant-Ark was created.

Nadia herself has never hated any part of her life. What you saw was essentially what you got. While this made her great as a heroine of a story, she was pretty terrible at actually being an assassin. After all, she had no indication, even on her information screens, that she was any good at any type of clandestine matters.

Nadia however was good at the other aspects of managing an underworld, so her mother didn’t see her as a total lost cause. It just caused a restructuring to occur when it came to establishing Nadia’s inner circle. Nadia’s mother traditionally had four people like Nadia as her Enforcers. Nadia instead was surrounded by four people with capabilities similar to her mother.

I brought all of this up because I was anxious. A quick skim of Nadia’s abilities, and a quick look at her bio showed me that Nadia didn’t seem to have any instant kill skills. I hoped that she would take a rifle with her, but I hadn’t noticed until it was too late. There was too much information going on at once to process that Nadia had run off with nothing but her fists! I tried looking to see if there was some kind of secret in her bio, but all I found were more signs of Nadia being too straightforward. I kind of started wishing that I had made it so Nadia would wait for Elliot, but now here we were, Nadia was in front of the dojo.

Trip_LLL

After this, we're heading into combat for a few. Wish Nadia and Strezza luck!