Both Mia and Flora took Catnip's new training extremely seriously. They had been really shaken, and it took Catnip a long while to convince them that they were truly fine after just a few minutes of regeneration, and that they could take being beaten up that hard again. It was kind of horrifying, but dying over and over again in sparring was a good way to train the Undying skill safely, and the bouts were really useful. Without killing enemies, they weren’t leveling up, but Catnips’ skill at fighting improved leaps and bounds on only the first day, their original sparring having been followed by Mia and Flora trying to teach Catnip how to fight for hours, only stopping once Frank found them and informed them all they had hotel rooms for the night. He looked a bit concerned by their roughed up states, but training wasn’t exactly an unheard of activity so he didn’t take it too seriously.
The next day, their training continued. Frank unfortunately had to guide around the Lady and her crew, who were now going around the city to tour the cheese place or something, so Catnip once again failed to start his friend route. They’d have to get his affection meter up another time.
The training lasted most of the second day, and the third day that they were there, neither Mia or Flora trying to explore the town much and focusing on Catnip. It was a bit much, but they appreciated it. Mia took charge of the physical fighting, since she actually practiced a physical style of fighting herself, and Flora took charge of trying to help Catnip access their mana once Catnip mentioned that their mana was as high as their other stats and they wanted to learn. Mia’s style of fast movement and slashing attacks with knives as a rogue somewhat worked well with what they had so far. It took a bit, but by the end of the third day Catnip was able to use their danger sense to dodge and slash at their enemies at the level of an amatuer fighter, and they could actually move their mana, earning them the general Mana Manipulation skill, and a very weak spell that was produced a small light. It was apparently the go to starter spell for mages, both useful for everyone as lighting and also incredibly easy to do. On the occasions where they sparred and were able to convince them to keep going until Catnip died(not that they knew they were dying, they just thought they were really hurt), they were also able to prove their theory of using mana to move more when dead. Using their mana in a similar manner when they were actually alive granted them the Very Weak Body Enforcement skill as well. Catnip could now manage sort of normal movement when dead if they fed like half their mana into it, lasting only a few seconds. It was still pretty pathetic but it was a start, the undying skill having leveled up enough due to dying on repeat that their health regeneration was fast enough that by the time they ran out of mana, they had regenerated enough to not be dead anymore.
They unlocked one possible class, Student.
Student[Rank 0]:
- You’ve been taught something. An achievement for the ages. You also learn like 2% faster regardless of the topic. A class for utter masochists who somehow didn’t get enough of school in the few hellish years it controlled their life.
- 1 mana, health, and free point per level.
It was a little odd getting the class option by being beaten up on repeat, but they supposed they were technically being taught. Plus a lot of leveling in fantasy worlds featuring leveling involved being beaten up on repeat, so it wasn’t all that odd for someone to become a student based on that same concept. Not that it mattered, since the class was never something Catnip planned to take, it was practically the worst one offered yet.
By the morning they were going to leave, their situation had improved quite a bit. Including their stats slightly, constant fighting, mana use, and movement earning them some bonus stat points.
Name: Catnip
Species: Catkin
Gender: cracking egg??
Sex: Female
Titles: Otherworlder, Death Defying.
Class: Feline Fighter[Rank 0] lvl 5/200
Class skills - Feline Instincts lvl 15/200
2nd Class: None
Class skills - None
General Skills:
Identify lvl 19/350
Undying lvl 14/100
Pain Resistance lvl 20/100
Throwing lvl 15/150
Punching lvl 8/150
Claw Slash lvl 20/300
Very Weak Body Enforcement lvl 2/200
Mana Manipulation lvl 10/250
Stats:
Health: 20/20
Mana: 19/19
Strength: 17
Speed: 18
Mana regeneration: 1.9 per minute
Health regeneration: 14 per minute
Unspent Stat points: 11
Available classes:
Thrower[Rank 0]
Brawler[Rank 0]
Feline Fighter[Rank 0] in use
Student[Rank 0]
____
The morning before they left, Frank gathered the party to check on everyone and make sure they were ready for the coming journey. Frank, being the responsible adult he was, had managed to gather just about everything they needed for the rest of their time escorting in the time the rest of the team had been beating eachother up. Ultimately, they had barely explored the somewhat small town at all, leaving checking out the cheesery to Lady Dacre and her crew, visiting like none of the shops, including the interesting ones like the places that sold locally mined materials and the smithery, and not even checking out the town’s ‘Mountain Nature Trail,’ a questionable hike that let you witness the majesty of the mountains at the cost of your personal safety. It was sad in a way, being an isolated border town that had a number of interesting things, but visiting none of them, moving on and likely never visiting again. But they had a schedule to keep, and Mia and Flora had deemed getting Catnip to be slightly less useless a higher priority.
“I uh… I have something to announce,” Mia spoke up as their morning meeting drew to a close. “I umm…”
Catnip, knowing what this likely was, walked over and hugged her a bit, giving them a thumbs up.
“Oh, lemme guess lemme guess!” Flora said excitedly. “Uhh, you’re… pregnant!”
“What? No,” Mia replied quickly, “That’s unfortunately never gonna be possible.”
“Never say never.”
“Flora, please. Let him speak. I think this is important for him.” Frank said with a glare.
“It’s okay Mia, I’m here, they’ll accept you,” Catnip whispered to her and rubbed her shoulders a little.
She flinched at the misgendering but looked around at her friends and seemed to gather her resolve.
“Um, I’m - I’m… I’m a girl! There, I said it!” she exclaimed suddenly.
“Damn nice prank I totally thought you were a guy the whole time!” Flora said, clapping and seeming completely serious. “How’d ya do it? Ya totally got me!”
“Um.. I..” Mia muttered, looking to Catnip for help. Catnip felt like it was hers to say though, and also wasn’t quite sure how to say it since transgender wasn’t a word here. They subtly encouraged her though by giving her a thumbs up.
“I… I’m a girl, but I wasn’t uhh born as one. I’ve always wanted to be one… And uh, now I realize I can.” she started. “Um, I, uh I want to go by Mia now, if you’ll have me.”
Both Frank and Flora looked a little confused, but eventually Flora just shrugged.
“Well, okay, I don’t really get it, but if that makes you happy then okay Mia! Nice to meet you girl!” Flora eventually said.
“Same from me Mia, whatever makes you happy,” Frank added after a bit of hesitation.
“... Thank you,” Mia said quietly, starting to cry. Catnip rubbed her shoulders, then hugged her a bit closer, whispering that they were proud of her. A second later Flora joined their hug. It was warm. Frank seemed unsure about whether he should join the hug, probably held back by stupid gender roles.
“Well then,” He eventually said with a clap, “Guess Catnip already knew. Good for her. Just remember we’re leaving in an hour.” He scratched his head. “I think I’m gonna go now,” he said and fled the room.
“HA! Look at that! Frank doesn’t know how to deal with emotions and physical affection!” Flora exclaimed, still hugging them. “We’re gonna have to tease him about that. You gals with me?”
They both made a ‘hmmm’ sound in affirmation and went back to the hug, Mia still kind of crying. The impromptu hugging and eventual snuggle session would end up lasting 45 minutes, at which point they realized they all had to get ready. They still spent a bit helping Mia with her disguise skills beforehand though, successfully feminizing her enough that she ‘passed’ mostly. Skills were kind of a cheat like that, it was utterly unfair for trans people back on earth to not have access to something similar. Well, unless you counted using makeup to pass, but that still took significantly more effort than a system boosted disguise skill did. Mia still stuck to her inconspicuous black outfit though instead of switching outfits to something more feminine, it was simply more practical. Everyone’s friendship meters were raised.
___
15 minutes later, the party stood around the carriage, ready to set off while watching the butler and maids pack the carriage with far too much cheese. Lady Dacre stood above them, watching them and directing where each cheese should be placed in the cart, looking very haughty and nobley.
“Hey Lady, can I have some! Pretty please!” Flora dared to ask, against the advice of her comrades.
“You are unworthy to even smell my joyous prizes,” She replied, sniffling. “They are for me and mine alone.”
“Oh uh okay, though it’s kind of hard not to smell the cheese cause we’re right next to it.”
“Remove yourself then.”
And so they did, except for Frank who once again had the job of wrangling the Lady into her carriage so they could actually leave. It was truly a job for the strongest souls. At this point Catnip was feeling a little bad about leaving all tedious and responsible tasks to Frank, but they still didn’t do anything about it. While waiting, Catnip tried playing chopsticks with Mia and Flora, only to realize the game was a lot more boring than it had been when they were a kid. It also confused their comrades more than anything else.
The carriage finally was ready to go about 20 minutes later, and so they left for another day of traveling. On this side of the border town, the elevation continued climbing and the trail continued winding in a way that would surely be terrifying to drive on with a car. The majority of this part of the mountain range was actually in Verbon, so they were looking at a good few days of travel in relatively high up and harsh conditions. Catnip asked Frank why they didn’t build a road lower down the slopes in some of the valleys they passed by, but apparently it was simply less dangerous monster wise. Not much lived up on the higher slopes, and what was there was warded off.
The first day of travel went fine. It was nice really, the weather deciding to cooperate and giving a very clear view of the area. Catnip was amazed how little their companions seemed to care about the frankly amazing views they were passing. The rocky slopes and cliffs that descended far down to foggy forested valleys and the snow capped peaks that rose above their position were frankly breathtaking, like something from a national park. Flora simply said that these views weren’t all that special, even for her who mostly grew up and stayed in her village. Flora instead focused on cycling her mana while they walked to train her magic, something Catnip only now knew that she had been doing the entire trip due to Flora’s brief lessons on magic. Catnip tried too to cycle their mana, and sometimes managed to get it above a sluggish pulse that seemed to permeate her body, all the traveling and slopes making any physical practice hard. Mia apparently did some of it a bit too, as she did use some healing and wind magic even if she was mostly a physical fighter. Being sort of a ninja required a variety of skills after all, not just disguise skills that happened to be very convenient for passing as a woman. Frank occupied his time by actually being vigilant but also occasionally seeming like he was focusing on something. Catnip asked if he was cycling mana too, to which he replied ‘sort of,’ instead practicing with something called “ki,” which was more or less a special variant of energy that one could only unlock through martial practice or some classes. It sounded interesting and reminded Catnip of cultivation and stuff but they were fine practicing with magic instead, cause magic. Cultivation stories also tended to involve far too much random killing anyway, not to mention all the unavoidable young masters.
The group's dismissal of the beauty of the mountains and the questions they asked the group due to it let Catnip understand this world a lot better. This wasn’t a world where appearance mattered much, survival was everything. So perhaps not that different from a cultivation world, but still with less casual murder. And this was also a world where huge swathes of wilderness and unpopulated areas existed everywhere, hence why the view into such a mountainous wilderness didn’t actually seem that special to the group. The reality was that once you got past the roads around towns and cities, nature ruled uncontested, and most nations had hardly fully explored their lands. This was partially because of the danger and much lower world population, but Catnip also got the sense that this world was just bigger than earth. Verbon and Alvaria were both apparently pretty small kingdoms, the empire dwarfing them in size in terms of primarily human kingdoms and the lands of other species being significantly larger and more prosperous. Humans were kind of at the bottom of the sapient species pole, and although they could theoretically become just as strong and live just as long as any other species by leveling high enough, that rarely happened in reality. Catnip kinda wondered why the hell they hadn’t asked the team about all this stuff earlier, but then they remembered that they were stupid and literally never bothered to learn to fight for like 2 weeks straight. Makes sense they never bothered to figure out much about the world till now. They just needed to think of it as gathering obscure lore in an open world game or something, Catnip would never say no to lore.
The second day, where they would travel through some of the higher and more desolate parts of the route, passing through essentially the ‘center ridge’ of the mountain range, started mostly okay. Breakfast was shitty oatmeal, Catnip still talked to Frank like only twice, Flora’s jokes kind of failed to land during most of the day for some reason, Mia had minor dysphoric episode(apparently dysphoria was much worse once you accepted you were trans or something), but other than that, it was all good until the afternoon.
Mia suddenly dashed a bit ahead of the carriage, and raised her hand up, gesturing to them to stop. She slowly walked back to them and whispered something to Frank, who quickly looked alert.
“This is kind of strange, but Mia says she can tell from the wind that there’s a group of people hiding somewhere by the road,” Frank said while walking over to Flora and Catnip, Mia dashing back to do rogue things and somehow get more information on their potential enemies. “If we were somewhere else, I would guess a bandit attack or something, but that hardly makes sense for this location. I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet, I trust Mia to detect these things far before anyone else, but…”
“Maybe they’re just ambushing people where they’d least expect it,” Flora commented, but seemed to get a bit more serious. “Actually… Do you know if the Lady has any enemies? Or expected any trouble at any point?”
Frank sighed. “She never said, but… that would make a lot more sense. Catnip, can you inform Lady and her entourage of the situation? I don’t think you’re really ready for a fight if it breaks out, so you may want to stay there too.”
“Uh, okay! I’ll tell them. I… I don’t think I’m ready either but I will return to support the party anyway, I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to yall.” Catnip muttered, and dashed towards the carriage before anyone could object. They knocked on the door quietly.
“What’s going on?” they heard from Lady Dacre as the door opened and they climbed in. Her two maids looked alert, and her butler looked worried.
“There’s a group hiding up the road in ambush. Lady, do you know if you have any enemies that might want to pull something? It wouldn’t make much sense for bandits to be in this desolate area,” they told her.
“I don’t think so, no!” She exclaimed, her eyes wide. “Fresia, Carol, Gorn, you’ll protect me right,” she said, turning to her maids and butler. “I knew we shouldn’t have skimped on escorts!”
“Milady, do you doubt our strength?” One of the maids responded, “Gorn will stay here to protect you, but we’re more than capable of facing a few bandits or assassins. You know that.”
“But - what if you get hurt?” Dacre worriedly asked.
The other maid sighed, “You know this is exactly what we’re trained for, right? The entire point of us being hired instead of much more normal maids? Your father has always wanted you as safe as possible, and we’re more than willing to comply for both him and you.”
“Okay…” she said, “But come back safe, or I’ll reduce your pay!”
The maids, presumably Fresia and Carol nodded and left the carriage to prepare for combat. Catnip supposed it made sense that they immediately ran into combat maids, this was an isekai after all. They honestly should have guessed that as soon as they knew the lady had maids.
Catnip turned around and was about to leave when everything really went pear shaped.
A sudden flaring of their instincts and a blur in the corner of their eye was all the warning they got before the carriage’s window was shattered by a bolt directly aimed at the lady. Almost unconsciously, Catnip had chosen to jump towards where they sensed danger, pushing the lady to the side, the bolt hitting their chest in a sickening thud a second later.
You have taken -
You have died! Congratulations!
Undying lvl 15
Catnip willed the system notifications to stop so there wouldn’t be any distractions, as time seemed to slow, another bolt heading through the window aimed right at where Dacre had been pushed too, screaming and splashed with Catnip’s blood. They pushed their mana into the undying skill and forced their dead body to move despite its protests about being well, dead, and managed to barely move into the line of fire of the second shout too, but unfortunately with their head. Half of their vision vanished in a moment as their eye was destroyed by the second bolt, the arrow piercing through to their brain. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter to them at the moment, as their thoughts continued functioning normally even if their hardware suffered damage. Maybe their soul was still able to think or something, it didn’t make much sense but it sure was convenient for situations like this.
Outside they heard the party try to dash back before what sounded like an explosion went off between them and the carriage, pushing them back and making Catnip’s sensitive cat ears ring painfully, flattening themselves against her head. Sounds of fighting started as the ambush seemingly designed to distract from the assassination attempt engaged the party and the maids, preventing the carriage from receiving any help.
“Adventurer! Look at me! Don’t- don’t die!” the Lady said in a panic, shaking their dead body. For a second their regeneration brought them back, only for them to immediately die again, poison in the arrows killing them as soon as they stopped being dead. It was inconvenient, because Catnip really needed to be able to move and they only had so much mana to force their dead body to move with.
Catnip tried to say something to assure her, instead coughing up blood onto her face. The lady pulled back from the cough, coincidently saving her life as another bolt flew through the broken window of the carriage, thudding into the wall behind her. She started hyperventilating, staring at Catnips blank one remaining eye.
“Gorn! Gorn you have to heal her! And - “ she started, only to scream as a 4th bolt went through the neck of the Butler as he turned to her, the assassin apparently deciding to pick off her servants first so they wouldn’t get in the way again.“Gorn!”
Catnip willed some mana into their undying skill again, forcing their mouth to open despite their dead state and using up a quarter of their remaining mana.
“We … we need to get out of the carriage,” they managed to wheeze out. “Regroup.”
The scattered and afraid girl looked up from the body of their servant, still utterly panicked. “What? But with no cover -”
As if to prove Catnip’s point about getting out, a burning bolt thudded through the window, setting the carriage alight right next to the butler’s body. Having failed at targeted attacks, the assassin simply planned to smoke them out.
Tears in her eyes as the flames started to consume Gorn, Dacre forced open the door and dragged Catnips body along with them, who had limited their movement to hopefully conserve and regenerate mana. They had died a 3rd time already, the poison showing no signs of slowing down. Hopefully once they unsuppressed their notifications after all this they’d get a poison resistance skill or something.
Dacre tripped on the last step, Catnip tumbling down with her onto the ground, once again coincidently managing to dodge a bolt that went over her head. Damn this girl was lucky.
Outside the carriage, things didn’t look quite as hopeless. The assassin was still unseen and there was a shattered, burning gap of road between them and their team, but the party seemed to be winning. Flora had restrained 5 people with her vines with no injuries, Frank had sliced up a good 8 people judging by the bodies on the ground with only a long slash on his arm to show for it, and Mia was flashing between enemies at a shocking speed, dropping them with knives and sending out blades of wind with every slash. The maids fought somewhat similarly, dropping people quickly with some fast hand to hand combat or stabbing them with something that quickly either killed them or knocked them out, presumably some sort of poison. There were only 5 living ‘bandits’ remaining, who all were looking a little panicked but continued fighting with a fervor, trading blows with Frank while their mage sent explosive bolts of energy at Flora and Mia as they dashed around. The ‘bandits’ wore uniforms with a coat of arms the others clearly recognized, but Catnip didn’t.
Spotting Dacre as she dragged Catnip vaguely towards the others, the mage suddenly switched their target and sent a bolt their way, missing slightly and hitting the rocky slope on the side of the road and throwing them both to the side. Ironically, this again managed to knock them out of the way of a bolt sent by the assassin. Dacre’s legs were hit by the blast however, so she struggled to drag Catnip any further.
“Fresia, Carol! Help! I need help!” Dacre cried and collapsed halfway across the blasted part of the road. The maids turned to her, one of them unfortunately being hit by a slash from the side due to the distraction and crying out.
Fortunately, after another death, Catnip’s poison resistance was apparently high enough and they temporarily were no longer dead anymore, allowing them to pull Dacre along towards their bodyguards who had temporarily left the battle to run to her, the wound on one of them hardly hindering them.
The mage went for another explosive blast at them, which once again missed and hit the rock walls, causing the slope to start shifting with falling debris. Flora used his distraction as an opening however, and managed to catch him with her vines, crushing him. Panicking, he shot another explosion directly at his own feet, killing himself, further shattering the road, and sending Flora flying and badly injured into the middle of the ruined road, not far from Dacre and Catnip. Seeing their friend injured, Frank and Mia faltered in their attacks, allowing one of the remaining four ‘bandits’ to dash forward to finish Flora.
Catnip wasn’t about to let that happen, pulling themself to their feet and running as fast as they could with their ruined body, hoping Dacre’s maids could deal with the assassin’s shots. They launched themself forward just before the man reached her, slashing at him with their claws. He dodged and engaged Catnip, fighting with a heavy looking ax they did not want to get hit by.
He swung harshly over and over again, Catnip barely dodging at the last second, heavily relying on Feline Instincts. They occasionally darted forward and slashed at him with their claws, aiming for weak points like the neck and eyes, only hitting once and glancing off armor. The man suddenly lashed out with a kick, Catnip easily dodging it only to realize it was aimed at Flora’s crumpled form, hitting her with a dull thwack and causing her to cry out in pain.
Catnip lunged forward recklessly at that in distress, overextending in what would normally be a fatal mistake.
For the second time that day, time seemed to slow down. Flora’s eyes were wide, staring up at them as the man swung harshly at Catnips’ neck. They tried to move away, the danger sense pinging overwhelming, but it was too fast. The pain started at the back of their neck, Catnip feeling the metal bite through their spine and past it. They watched, as the ax excited in front of their single eye, their viewpoint moving upward and tilting as blood spilled from their neck in spurts. A look of horror crossed Flora’s face, her lips silently mouthing their name, before their head spun her out of view. This… didn’t feel real, even more so compared to every other death, in this world or the last. Beheading sure was something else.
By the time their head had spun back around to see Flora, the man had raised the ax again, bringing it down upon Flora to Catnip’s horror.
Catnip considered life and their options, thinking faster than they ever had. If they hadn’t been beheaded, they would have been able to perhaps force their last mana through to get one more movement in to stop the blow. But they were a head with no ability to do anything. From a logical perspective, they could do nothing. Flora was as good as dead.
Catnip refused. Flora had been their first friend here, practically their first friend ever since they had basically no friends before, and they cared for her more than they knew. Having friends, being part of a group, they’d never experienced these things before. And the cat girl would be damned if they’d lose that experience now. Mia, Flora, probably Frank if they actually got to know him, they were all important people to Catnip, and they refused to lose any of them, no matter how shitty this world was. They hadn’t been serious enough about this world, knowing they could never die. Catnip thought they could just wander the world, unable to be killed, maybe see the sights or something. Make a couple of jokes about isekai worlds, have edgy self hatred sessions. They forgot that other people sure as hell could be killed even if they couldn’t.
So Catnip pushed the remainder of all of their mana into the Undying skill. Suddenly, they were able to feel their whole body. The pain in their head and eye, the wound in their chest, the empty feeling of the stump of their neck, even their blood flying through the air, they felt it all. They felt that maybe they could kick the man away from Flora with their beheaded body using this, but it wouldn’t be all that strong and he could just kill her a second later with another hit. Catnip needed a way to put the man down, at least temporarily. A wound that he would actually feel. But how?
They would never quite know how they thought of it at the time, how they knew how to do it, but as the time ticked down they focused and somehow managed to make their flying blood twitch. Catnip, half remembering vampires that made blades out of blood in an anime or something, jumped on that and focused all the mana permeating their dead body on the blood spurting from their head wound, shaping the blood. It flowed together into a sharp sickle in the air, and with one last push it flew forward at a surprisingly fast speed, aimed at the neck of the ax wielding man. Catnip didn’t want to kill people, they didn’t believe in the death penalty for goodness sake, but they found it hard to care as the blood slashed the man’s neck, cutting an artery and making him pull back from his blow at Flora as he put his hands to his neck. Catnip felt both relief and terror when they realized the wound wasn’t fatal, only a temporary distraction as the man started to use crude healing magic on it. After everything, they had only just bought Flora a little more time.
Catnip wanted to cry at their uselessness and failures, their head thudding to the ground and starting to roll towards the edge of the shattered road, when it happened. A bolt, clearly shot by the assassin, thudded into the middle of the battlefield and immediately exploded in a blast larger than any of the previous ones, the assassin perhaps sick of Dacre’s escapes. It somehow missed fatally injuring anyone, but the already crumbling road and slope broke apart completely, the falling debris gathering into a torrent of stone that triggered a landslide. The carriage, Dacre and her maids, Mia, Frank and their opponents, everyone, were swept up, crying out in pain and terror.
As their head was consumed by the tide of debris and sent over the edge into the valley below, Catnip could only hope at least one of the others would survive. Soon, their head painfully bouncing along, they all disappeared into the mists below.
___
Colin sighed from his perch high above the road as he watched the carriage and its assailants all disappear as they tumbled over the edge in a roar of rocks and stone. This had been messy. And not exactly what was intended. Hopefully his boss wouldn’t be too mad.
The issue was that if absolutely everyone was taken out, you couldn’t exactly frame a country’s soldiers of an assassination when everyone who saw those soldiers and witnessed the assassination died. The idea was Lady Dacre, who’s rather stupid cheese-based route was leaked by a servant or something ages ago, would be killed, but a servant or some of the hired attackers would survive and blab about the attack being by people in Verbon’s coat of arms. The uniforms were very much so real as well. This could easily be confirmed to be true via a truth telling skill, something that was always used for any serious situation by officials. Easy as pie, one country framed for killing a ‘hostage’ exchange student. But he fucked it up.
Fortunately, Dacre wasn’t the only exchange student being sent to the academy, and their organization had made sure to attack several of them just in case, really any that had their route leaked and subpar security. The other ambushes were in much easier locations than Colin’s job, so he sincerely doubted his associates would fuck it up and somehow send everyone off the side of a mountain like he did. Combined with the knowledge of all those other attacks, hopefully Dacre’s death would also end up getting pinned on Verbon just based on the timing.
He blamed the weird cat girl for all this. Cat girls were well known for appearing out of nowhere and causing chaos, no one could blame him for failing under such a situation. Truly, cat girls were too powerful, he half believed all the stories about a shadow organization run by them trying to take over the world, even though it was championed by bigoted assholes. It was always so oddly specific too, like, why couldn’t cat boys or those new-fangled nonbinary genders ever be mentioned, was the chaotic variant of catkin limited to just girls or something? Though it wasn’t like that whole ‘nonbinary’ thing was ever mentioned in any situation other than bigots complaining about it’s existence, so that probably wasn’t all that strange. Colin himself didn’t really understand them either, but he’d long prided himself on not being discriminatory or a bigot - he was an assassin for hire, not an asshole! The whole thing was odd anyway, ‘chaos’ catkins were always defined as distinctly different by the system even when they were practically identical to many feline beastkin.
There was a silver lining in this operation however, something extra he could bring back to his boss so hopefully he wouldn’t be punished. As a professional killer, Colin made sure his targets were dead. He had a somewhat rare skill for it really, Fatality, a skill that informed him when a hit was fatal so he always knew if he botched something up. Simply put he always knew for sure whether his target was dead or not, and he took pride in it. It’s partly why he had such a good reputation, he never left a target alive. The skill had never failed him before, hell it was taken as a given in this world that any skill from the system was guaranteed to work as it said it would and produce the right results.
So he had been very confused when the cat girl that his skill confirmed to be dead got up, and proceeded to die several more times. It was literally impossible for Fatality to be wrong, so she had to have really been dying, but she just kept getting up anyway. He had a feeling she would somehow get up from that decapitation too, no matter how fatal it seemed.
Immortality was always a bit of a touchy subject. You could theoretically rank up and level up enough to reach a point where you stopped aging, but only the very top of humanity ever managed to do that. And you still could die if you let your guard down. Humans weren’t even the only species to have this problem, really only the elves ever consistently reached eternal life, so much so that many were misinformed that elves were just a naturally immortal species. The human life span simply wasn’t long enough for steady leveling to prevent one's death, and the risks you needed to take constantly to level any faster than that were more likely to kill you than anything else. So, ways of possibly obtaining immortality without all that trouble were still incredibly valuable and coveted by kings and queens, as soon as even a hint of some item or something that seemed promising appeared people descended upon it like lions, tearing eachother apart to get at whatever it was.
Regenerators who just refused to die weren’t something new at all, Colin knew that. They still never actually system-confirmed died more than once though, only surviving seemingly impossible circumstances, and dying once at the end of their limited lifespan like anyone else, thus hardly immortal. But he also knew that this catgirl wasn’t just a regenerator, he had confirmed that she really did die several times. This wasn’t some two bit holy grail of youth found by some random villager in their backyard situation either, the immortality of this girl seemed better than anything that came before if it truly could bring her back from death. If he brought news of the cat girl and her ability to thwart death to his superiors, he might not only be forgiven for his mistakes on this mission, but rewarded. He really got lucky this time.
He imagined once the information got out everyone and their mother in law were going to grab at the girl whenever she resurfaced, which would suck for her, but it wasn’t really his problem. If anything it was his revenge for her sort of fucking up this mission for him.
She might not be able to die, but there were fates far worse than death waiting for her if she was ever caught, that was for sure. Serves her right for going through all those heroics for a fucking cheese lady of all things. Colin would never understand why anyone would take a shot for someone else, even if they were unable to die like the girl. Did she have no sense of pride or self preservation? How important could some stupid cheese obsessed lady really be?
He put his crossbow away at last, latching it to his back, and jumped down onto the part of the road heading towards that little border town. Maybe he could just say he saw the soldiers wearing the genuine Verbon set of arms stage the attack himself, it would still come out true to the investigators after all. Though he’d have to be very careful if they asked him any other questions, he rarely let himself ever be questioned just in case some sneaky bastard managed to pull some little dirty secret out of him. Hopefully the risk would be worth it this time.
Only now did Colin really realize he had also kind of killed literally all of the collaborators for this job, which was kinda also another big fuck up. Hopefully those guys were expendable, he hadn’t really listened to all the details of the job, knowing who to kill was all he really needed so he rarely remembered anything past that. He had been too worried about the consequences of no one being there to report the attack to consider the fact that it also just meant he killed everyone including his allies. Oopsie, hopefully his boss wouldn’t be mad about that either. He really didn’t have it in him to feel bad about it though. They were totally idiots anyway, and he hadn’t felt bad about just about anything in years. This wasn’t a world where one had the time to feel bad about things if they wanted to survive and thrive. Or at least that’s what he told himself.
This story is wild
(apparently dysphoria was much worse once you accepted you were trans or something),
Depends, but yes u become alot more aware after accepting that. So everything small you could ignore before, are now full sized hits to the heart.