Wizardly Dude
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[TEA] (69) 2.20. Baited and Outsmarted
🕑 Added 2025-07-10 16:00:12 +0000 UTC“You know you could warn me when you plan on sleeping over,” Rosh said, staring down at him with a raised eyebrow. “I’d have the tavernkeep bring in some extra blankets or something. There’s no way that’s comfortable.”
“Didn’t know I’d be spending the night myself,” Asher yawned, both hearing and feeling his joints pop and creak as he stretched out against the cold wooden floor of Rosh’s room. After spending the night on the hard floor, his body was feeling surprisingly good, no doubt thanks to Eternal Regeneration.
“Dare I even ask why you chose to spend the night with me rather than your girlfriend? God knows if I had your teleportation powers I certainly wouldn’t be crashing on the floor at my friend’s place.”
“I needed to wake up early, and you’re the only person I know that gets up at an ungodly hour,” Asher groaned, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he forced himself to his feet. He had a feeling Complete Resilience helped with lack of sleep at least a little bit, but it had nothing on Rosh’s evolved exhaustion resistance. The man seemed to get a full night's sleep in only four hours, so Asher had grown more than used to being woken up by him before the crack of dawn while they were sharing a room together.
Seeing Rosh roll right out of bed with bright eyes and a smile on his face was enough to make Asher contemplate picking up exhaustion resistance right then and there, but he managed to stay his hand. His next two resistances would only cost a hundred and then a thousand shards respectively, but they’d start getting very expensive, very fast.
“Are you planning to let me in on why you needed to get up early?” Rosh prodded, crossing his arms as he leaned back against his desk. “You’re not already on the run from the truthseekers, are you?”
“Not yet,” Asher grinned, stifling another yawn as he pulled his bandolier out of his Personal Rift and secured it across his chest. The fact that it was ever so slightly lighter than normal bothered him, and he made a mental note to go find a replacement dagger before remembering he actually already had one. With a thought, he reached back into his rift and pulled the strange living wood dagger he’d taken off Latch’s corpse. It was still somewhat odd to him to see a dagger made out of wood, but the blade was just as sharp as any of his others. With a shrug, he tucked it into the now empty dagger slot.
Mithral… Cold iron… Silver… and now living wood. Not to mention steel and iron of course. Am I trying to collect the rainbow of daggers or something?
“Just try not to bring any trouble back to my door, alright? Don’t forget, I can feel all those shards on you that you didn’t have last we spoke. I’m betting you didn’t just find 50,000 or so shards just lying on the ground.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Asher said, his grin fading as he took in one of his few friends. He briefly imagined the beaten and battered form of Rosh that Loratta had shown him overlaid on top of the mildly-annoyed current version standing before him. Now that Rosh had his tier 2 amulet and a somewhat normal life, albeit one where he was employed by Whikoga’s largest gang leader, the last thing Asher wanted was to risk hurting him again. He’d been careful not to mention anything about his current situation with the Guild, and he prayed Draken didn’t involve Rosh either.
“Well, seeing as you’re here, want to grab breakfast? This tavern actually sells food other than stew,” Rosh smiled, no doubt remembering the tavern the two of them had shared a room in. For whatever reason, that tavernkeep seemed to have an unnatural love of stew, and he’d served little else during the entire week they’d been there.
“As much as I’d love to, I’ll have to take a rain check for now,” Asher said, focusing on his Eternal Mark and noting that both Jennifer and Leonard’s corpse were finally on the move. While the accuracy of his skill wasn’t perfect at this distance, he could tell at the very least Jennifer was either moving the body herself, or was travelling with whoever was. Based on the distance they’d travelled from the cell, they couldn’t have been on the move for more than twenty or so minutes. “Does the tavern even sell breakfast this early? It’s still dark out!”
“Why do you think I picked this tavern to stay at?” Rosh scoffed, as if the thought of not being able to get a piping hot breakfast before the sun had even come up was simply barbaric. “Well, whatever it is you’re up to, be safe. I’ll remind you my healing skill only works on myself. There’s not a lot I can do if you pop into existence beside me with blood coming out of your eyes.”
“Noted, I’ll make sure it’s coming out my ears,” Asher grinned, ignoring Rosh’s eye roll as he finished getting ready. Despite only getting a few hours of sleep at the most, that was more than enough to fully replenish that strange stamina that skills seemed to use up. “Stay safe, alright?”
“I’m pretty sure I should be telling you that,” Rosh said, shaking his head and waving him goodbye as he headed into the tavern proper to go bother some poor chef.
Asher’s stomach growled at the thought of some fresh food, but he silenced it by pulling some dried meat out of his rift Samantha had given him days ago and nibbling on it as he slipped through the wall and began heading toward his marks. It was a good thing the different objects within his Personal Rift didn’t seem to touch, because he’d yet to actually dump the two dead bodies of Cinder’s gang.
It had been a couple of days at this point, and Asher was not looking forward to finding out the rate a corpse decayed at within his rift. While he’d yet to actually test putting anything alive in there, the fact that fire continued to burn within his rift indicated that there was air in there somehow, or at the very least, oxygen. Presumably, that meant there would be rotting as well.
Putting the matter of his spring cleaning aside for the moment, Asher used Distortion to get up onto a nearby rooftop and began making his way across the city. The sun would be rising soon, and he had no doubt Jennifer intended to try and make it to her destination before that happened.
Even in the seedier parts of the city, people took notice if you were lugging a corpse around in broad daylight.
Being able to walk from rooftop to rooftop allowed Asher to traverse the city quickly, and it wasn’t long before he caught up. To his surprise, Jennifer wasn’t alone.
Asher crouched low on the old rooftop of some dilapidated storehouse in the first ring as he watched Jennifer slowly walk with Leonard’s corpse thrown over her shoulder. The assassin was clearly struggling with the weight of the dead man, even with him back in his regular-sized human form, but the person walking ahead of her didn’t seem to care in the least.
Knowing Jennifer most likely still had her own Bracelet of Observation on, Asher was careful not to look at the assassin directly. Thanks to his Eternal Mark giving him her precise location, he was able to keep her in the corner of his eye without accidentally looking at her.
He was far more interested in her companion anyway.
Assassin - 2/3 Elements
Clad in a dark blue leather outfit was a woman with a perpetual frown cemented across her face. She was the same height and build as Jennifer and didn’t look all that threatening, yet the younger assassin was clearly terrified of her.
Asher’s Judgement skill allowed him to see why.
There was a chilling, swirling blue aura surrounding this newest assassin visible only to Asher’s eyes, and even from this distance he could feel the pain and suffering that seemed to follow this woman wherever she went. While Leonard’s aura had been bloodthirsty and murderous, this woman’s was frigid and painful. A simple glance was all Asher needed to get to understand she most likely tortured her targets before finishing them off, and Asher quickly added her to his newly formed kill list.
Seeing as he was now using the assassin class, it felt only natural that he start making a list of his own hits after all.
Making sure to stay low, Asher silently followed after the two assassins as they wove their way through the seemingly endless twists and turns of the outer edges of the first ring. Asher didn’t know where they were going, but he was surprised by how close they were to the city wall. If they got much closer, he’d have to find some other way to follow them, else he’d be risking one of the guards up on the wall turning around and spotting him slinking around on the rooftops.
Part of him had hoped that he’d be able to catch the senior assassin berating Jennifer about letting Leonard die and that she might let something important slip he could use in his hunt for Eight. Unfortunately, it would seem the senior assassin was more professional than that, as she walked silently onward without a peep, her frown only growing more prominent by the minute.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. After they’d spent twenty minutes of simply walking around in what looked like completely random directions, Asher grew confused.
The longer he tailed the two of them, the stranger their decision making seemed to him. In fact, he was pretty certain they’d actually doubled back at one point, walking down the same alleyway twice. He’d originally assumed they were just being overly cautious and trying to throw anyone off their tail that might be following, but now he wasn’t so sure.
At this point, Asher was beginning to grow tired from using Distortion back to back so many times in a row to cross between rooftops, and he could feel his newly replenished stamina dwindling. He was either going to have to make a move and go after the second senior assassin, or retreat for now and wait for them to actually make it to the cell.
Just as he was about to make his decision, Jennifer shifted Leonard’s body she had strung over her back into a more comfortable position, and there was an ever so slight tug at the back of his mind. It was only thanks to his similar skill that he realized what he was feeling.
His bracelet had warned him that someone had glanced his way.
Jennifer knew he was there, but was trying to hide it.
Asher started as he realized he’d been made, and he reflexively went to activate astral dip, intending to slip away and put some distance between himself and the two assassins.
His quick reaction was the only thing that kept his head attached to his body.
Before he could escape into the astral, a pitch black arrow the size of a javelin appeared out of nowhere and connected silently with the side of his neck. Something so large and moving at such incredible speeds should have been whistling through the air, but the projectile was as silent as the night as it pierced his flesh and continued forward.
With no time to spare Asher’s skill finally activated, and he vanished as the arrow cut a third of the way through his neck, disappearing just before it could reach his spinal cord. The arrow continued onward with his blood on the tip, silently shooting through a distant building and cutting cleanly through the stone wall as if it wasn’t even there. As Asher clamped a hand to his partially severed neck and desperately tried to stop his life blood from pouring out of him, he activated his second tier of Comprehend, slowing the world down and trying to buy himself time to think.
Judging by the angle, that arrow came from the city wall, Asher realized with a start, shocked at both the realization that the assassins had someone up on the city’s wall, and that they’d laid a trap for him. They must have not only known I was up on the rooftops, but that I was using my skills to travel between them. All the wandering around must have been in an attempt to get me to tire myself out. If Jennifer hadn’t accidentally glanced my way…
If Asher wasn’t all but frozen in time, he would have shuddered at the realization that the assassin’s slip up was the only reason he was still alive. Despite his evolved Eternal Regeneration, he was pretty certain he still couldn’t survive decapitation. He’d severely underestimated just how dangerous the Guild truly was, and it seemed taking out one of their senior assassins had made them take off the training gloves.
In the last few seconds of sped up time he had left, Asher came up with a plan. He could always activate Recall and run away, but the Guild had already killed him once. He wasn’t ready to admit defeat a second time just yet.
If they wanted a fight, he was going to give them one.
Comments
Stephen Swanson
So I only just now discovered what that phrase actually means haha. The intention was that she was looking directly at him out of the corner of her eye, not that she was watching him with her peripherals. I'll make the change!
vuduman78
The problem with this chapter is in the last chapter he noticed Samantha looking at him out of the corner of her eye. And in this one that’s how he’s observing them.
Stephen Swanson
Haha this is correct actually, he's just purposefully being a bit snarky to Rosh in this case!
InLucidReverie
“Noted, I’ll make sure it’s coming out my ears,” -> not coming I think this was tje intent
