CaTastrophy427

This took a bit longer than I'd expected it to, especially considering how short it ended up being. Then again, I had to deal with some IRL stressors (an uncle I'm not a big fan of came to visit for a week) and... well... I also got distracted. Yeah, not a good excuse, but I figured honesty is the best policy.

“Your next mission target is Baron Felnore, also known as the Paranoid Noble. While your target isn’t very strong himself, he is never without one or more of his tier 4 guards, and one of his tier 5 guards is never too far away. His mansion has higher security than most of the imperial palace, with dozens of sentries, hundreds of arrays, and as mentioned before, almost a dozen tier 4s and two tier 5s residing within it. He never steps out of the mansion, and the windows and doors are never opened or unlocked unless there are multiple people standing guard over the area”

Yeesh, quite a tough nut to crack... is what I would say, but I’m pretty confident in my ability to cut open a hole in the wall to bypass most of that. The constant guards are the bigger issue, I might have to kill a few of them too. You know, speaking of, I was honestly expecting that I might have issues killing without being able to justify it as self defense, but I really don’t. Death is something I’m used to, perhaps even overly-familiar with, so... that might be a factor.

[Or you could be a psychopath. Or the author might’ve decided to conveniently skip over that issue until now. Or more likely, the author just forgot about the issue until now]

[I’m not a psychopath, and for the last time, there is no author, Leon]

[Sssounds like what a psssychopath would sssay]

[Not you too...]

While bantering with my spirit companions, I looked over the mission info, which included, among other things, a floor plan of parts of the target’s mansion, where he spends most of his time, and what each of his guards looks like and specializes in.

“It’s quite ironic, you know? He was so paranoid, thinking that people were trying to kill him, that he pissed off someone enough to get them to hire people to kill him”

“Or perhaps he wasn’t paranoid, someone was trying to kill him, but with his heightened security they couldn’t keep trying and had to resort to paying someone to do it for them”

“Oh... that could be. We didn’t do a full investigation on the client’s motives this time, so it’s possible they already had some enmity beforehand. Still, you should get going if you want to have a shot at completing it before you have to come back for tomorrow’s orientation and training”

Tomorrow’s what? I wasn’t informed of that... but I still dutifully left, racing towards the north, a trip that took almost half an hour despite shifting back to cat form so I could make use of Leon’s level 30 ability to nearly triple my running speed. Once I arrived, only an hour or so before sunset, it wasn’t hard to spot which mansion was Baron Felnore’s. It was the only one with solid stone walls reaching four or five meters into the air, and the only one that smelled like burnt insects due to the warding arrays frying even the bugs that dared to cross the boundary.

There are three ways to bypass such an array: find the item people wear when crossing the boundary and steal it from someone who is outside of the array for some reason; disable or destroy the array from the outside; or find some other method to prevent yourself from being hurt by the array, if not preventing your detection in the first place. 

While active Nothing could easily destroy the array, as it is made up of raw spirit for the most part, its attacks and detection are likely also based on spirit as well, meaning I could just as easily deal with that the same way, without leaving a trace like a broken array.

[But why do you care if you leave such traces?]

[If I can leave no traces besides my calling card, it’ll get more attention than if I leave a clear trail as I enter. Mystery attracts interest, interest breeds rumors, and rumors increase notoriety]

[And why do you need notoriety?]

[It’ll help me increase my rank faster]

[And why do you care about that? It’s not like you’re here to earn money, you’re here to gather information]

[I... yeah... but higher ranks likely have more access to the information I’m looking for, right? I mean, I’m looking for the bounties on a tier 4 and a tier 5 in addition to my own, I probably wouldn’t be able to look at those levels of requests unless I was at least a blood gold shadow]

[Fair point, but still...]

So, after one short conversation with Leon and a quick Nothing-cloaking later, I hopped over the outer wall, ran to the wall of the mansion itself, and made a long bent knife out of Nothing. I slid it into the wall and rotated it, separating a nearly spherical chunk that could now freely... just spin in place, really. It couldn’t slide in or out due to it being widest in the middle, but it could be put into a spatial ring or my spirit realm, and I did exactly that, slipping through the gap and plugging it up behind me. If there’s a serious rainstorm they might notice a leak, but until then the cut will be basically invisible.

However, I could immediately see a flaw in my plan: the mansion had no cats as ratcatchers, and so any cat inside the mansion would immediately arouse suspicion. After all, why would they need a cat, when the arrays killed any rats that tried to get in?

So, I skulked along in the shadows, spending an agonizing amount of time before finally finding a room I suspected had the Baron, due to a pair of tier 4s guarding the door. I moved along, making my way through a maze of hallways trying to find the kitchen - no, not to get myself something to eat, I figured that Baron Felnore would be getting food delivered to him sooner or later, as the sky was fading from the orange of dusk to the black of night, exactly when most nobles tended to eat their final meal of the day.

However, what I first encountered was a scent trail, one that I recognized as some type of citrus-glazed fish. I followed it and found a food cart being pulled by a maid, exactly what I was hoping to find. When she turned away from the cart to open a door, I ran out of the shadows and ducked under the nearly floor-length cloth covering the cart, and carefully kept pace with it as the maid pulled it along. Not too long after, the cart stopped once more, and I heard voices from above me.

“What have we here?”

“Food delivery, same as always. Same person, same cart, same time, every day”

“Still have to check, unfortunately”

“Just let her in, man. There’ve been no problems any of the several dozen times we’ve checked”

“But the Baron said-”

“The Baron is paranoid. This girl is loyal to a fault, there’s no way she’d try to kill him intentionally”

“She’s probably like us, loyal because her family is on the line”

Wait, what? That’s evil... holding the families of his guards hostage to ensure loyalty? How has he not been killed yet? Wait, that’s why I’m here, someone wanted him dead.

“Nah, from what I heard she’s an orphan, Baron Felnore’s father took her in and raised her from the time she was a wee lass. If she’d turned out prettier she might’ve become Lady Felnore, or been married off to another noble as the late Baron’s adopted daughter. Happens all the time”

“Can you please... not?”

“Hmm? What’s that?”

“Please just inspect the cart and let me through, I have other duties to get back to after this”

The guards didn’t even bother inspecting the cart, just waved her through, and by extension, allowed me to slip in unnoticed. Once inside, the guards closed the door behind the maid’s cart, and she pushed it next to a desk, under which I could see a pair of feet shod in fur slippers. As there was almost no gap between the two, I could move from one to the other, and then I waited for the door to open and close once more before I slid my claws through the Baron’s calf, and Snek’s venom worked its magic, causing me to hear a wet thump from above me before I could even retract my claws.

That thump was, of course, his head striking the surface of the desk, the wetness coming from his limp hand tipping over the bottle of ink so that a puddle could stain the Baron’s face when it landed. I spent a minute or so trying to get both his face and the clawmarks in one image, before deciding I needed multiple image beads to show that both of those were on the same corpse. 

After that, I just had to open the window a crack to make my escape... though I didn’t think about the fact that opening the window, even from the inside, would trigger an alarm. As I was slinking away in the garden darkened by the night, I heard many sets of hurried footsteps, as guards from all over the mansion swarmed the area to catch the intruder. Nevertheless, they weren’t looking for a black cat hidden in the shadows outside of the mansion, at least not until they discovered that the Baron was dead, but that news wasn’t spread to those searching until after I had scaled the outer wall once more, perhaps not until I was several blocks away.

Half an hour later, I (in my humanoid form as Glatisant) was waiting in line to deposit a trio of image beads as proof and ask for the fourth and final mission that was prepared for me. Unfortunately, when I got to be halfway through the line, Lavi went on break, and while I was able to hand over the proof of completion for the third mission to her replacement, said replacement wasn’t able to give me the fourth mission. He was, however, able to tell me to come back in four hours, as that was when her next shift started. Not much time to sleep, but as Lavi is a devilkin, she might sleep during the day... no, wait, she was working a shift in the afternoon too. Perhaps devilkin only need a few hours of sleep per day, or sleep in short bursts like I do? We’ll see.

[Find out next time, on Saga of Tama the Immortal]

[Stop that]

The beginnings of the man who transcended time, part 5

The changes within my body from that Primordial Time energy allowed me to assimilate with the flow of time and move more or less freely within it. The impossible was then possible for me, I could not only peer through time but also change the temporal trajectory of an object, speeding up, slowing down, or even stopping the march of time in an area. I could even regain my youth, push open my sarcophagus, and escape into the larger world - if I so desired. 

But my stay in that box was one of the most productive periods of my life, and I saw no need to limit my rapid progress to just what I had achieved at that point. I instead returned to my youth, only to rapidly age myself again, doing that repeatedly, sometimes even returning to infancy, all in pursuit of the ways in which life and death are intertwined with one another, sometimes separated only by time.

Seventy years passed, and I aged and regressed about ten thousand times, accumulating experience and insight into life and death rapidly. When I felt I had enough, I finally left my sarcophagus, and began searching for the spirit beasts whose patterns I would use to form my spirit companion’s ninth ring. I settled on temporal wyrms, and soon found a nest of them, with six of the ten I needed. The last four were harder to find, and I spent a few decades gathering them, but I eventually succeeded, my spirit companion formed its ring, and began working on my first spirit cyclone.

CaTastrophy427

Well, the poll from chapter 19 was overwhelmingly positive (nobody disliked the change, with a 40/60 split between liking and not caring) while the identical poll on chapter 9.5 of my other series was less clear, one person disliked it and the rest were split evenly between liking it and not caring. Low turnout for both, but... Indentation stays, those two polls are closed, and I'll ask the same question I asked on chapter 10 of GotDL since I'm curious. Besides that, all that's left is the obligatory discord link, and then... that's it, I'll see you next chapter, for the final of Tama's four trials and the penultimate chapter of book 1.

Edit: Silly me, instead of setting it to publish on October 9th like I'd intended, I added one to the month instead of the day, so it was set for November 8th. Well, it's going out on the 10th of October I suppose.

Edit 2: Extra-silly me, I forgot to include the poll