Novel Lived
Assassination
Assassination
I stepped into the dungeon's first floor and smiled when a goblin immediately screeched and attacked me viciously.
'Ah how I missed this!' I thought as I casually bitch slapped the goblin hard enough to snap it's neck.
I didn't bother harvesting the stone and directly crushed it underfoot reducing it to sand while the corpse burst into smoke that flowed into my tattoos. I took off in a nice and easy jog after that to drop floors as fast as possible without becoming too tired. It wasn't until the fifteenth floor that I had to stop and not because of a monster either.
"Your overconfidence has made you careless kid." A female voice said out of nowhere from the mists as a sharp pain went through my chest and I looked down to see a gleaming curved blade sticking outside my chest right where my heart should have been.
What wasn't obvious was that I had played the cliché trick of moving my heart the the right side of my body so I was actually totally fine right now, well besides the knife sticking through me but you get the point.-
"Who?" I asked while playing off the injury to be as bad as it normally should be.
"I suppose I can give you the courtesy since you are already dead, names Anne, Eris familia." the assassin said smugly.
"Evilus then, good to know no one will miss you then." I said casually before activating my technique.
My head twisted a full one hundred and eighty degrees to face her while arms bent backward at unnatural angles to grab her stunned form tightly.
"What the fuck are you!?" she screamed in horror while trying to escape but it was far too late for that.
"BURN." I spoke with a gravely raw voice since my wind pipe was all sorts of fucked up with my head like this and black flames sprung to life from my hands holding the assassin.
She struggled and screamed but in a short span of a minute nothing remained of her beyond the dagger still stabbed through my chest. Speaking of that knife I flexed my technique and my flesh around it writhed as it gripped the blade and slowly backed it out of my body until it clanged to the ground.-
'Should have gone for the head, I'm offended by the lack of research they did on me to think merely stabbing me with a poisoned blade in a vital location would be enough to put me down. To be fair though it would probably work on any other level three.' I thought as I righted my head and arms back to their normal places while knitting the damaged part of my chest back together easily.
I was satisfied however knowing that I made the assassins final moments as nightmarish as possible. A fun fact about my flames was that they became more painful the more sinful ones soul was. For the assassin who was stained quite thoroughly my little show plus the flames was more than enough to give a hellish(pun intended) experience.-
I reached down and picked up the knife, a dagger really, that had been used to stab me and inspected it. My craftsman sense told me at a glance that while not a first rate weapon it was close as it was easily at the peak of a second class weapons ability. I wasn't terribly surprised by this as there were obviously skilled craftsmen working with Evilus or they would never have been a threat to begin with.-
It was much like how a swordsman without a sword was half crippled as the greatest strength they could exert lied with their weapons and without them those options were totally out. There was no touchmark on the dagger but that made sense as it was an easy way to damn oneself if the weapon made was ever taken by an enemy. The design for the blade wasn't anything special really as it was a straight thin blade with a needle-like point. There was no guard and the handle was stylized like a snake coiled around a stick.-
Thanks to my technique I also discovered that the blade was hollow with the pommel of the handle being a cap that could be taken off to fill it with poison, truly a blade made for assassinations.
'They used Peluda barbs to make this blade it seems, a good fit for an envenomed blade given the powerful toxins of the monster. Even the lightest cut with this blade might be enough to kill even a level five if they didn't get treatment quickly. A pity that I am the bane of venoms and poisons alike.' I thought genuinely impressed with the weapon even if it wasn't the best it could have been had I been the one that made it.-
I broke off some stone from the dungeons wall before refining it to an emerald green color and shaping it to fit the dagger since the original sheath had been burnt up along with the assassin. While I had no intention of passing off the work as my own that didn't mean it wasn't a good weapon that with a little tender loving care from me could be a valuable addition to someone's repertoire.-
I don't like the idea of weapons being made for show so even if I wasn't planning to sell this blade it could still go into the familia vault to await a user worthy of it. An interesting thing I should point out is that no one would immediately think any bad of someone based on them having a blade so clearly designed for assassination. Plenty of reputable adventurers hunted in the dungeon with similar weapons since venom and poison also worked well on monsters that tended to be made of flesh and blood. Hell this was one of the reasons rogue archetype adventurers existed and worked even if it took a special set of skills to pull off.-
The way Bell fought was taking some aspects of a rogue style though only a little as he was far more open in his confrontations with his enemies. A true rogue style involved either trying to take out the target in a single strike or if that wasn't possible having team mates draw aggression while you whittled away at the monsters using the openings this lack of attention on you created. Bell did something similar to the latter of those but he didn't do the whole attack of oppurtunity thing so much as he sought to overwhelm with attacks.
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