Chapter 97 - Assassin Sect (Patreon)

Chapter 97

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Outer defenses of the City of Rebirth.

"It's been, what, a year?" Asked Allya as she let go of the older woman.

"More around two years." Answered Trira, before taking a seat on Allya's bed, and patting a spot on the side, which the baroness happily took. "I came as fast as I could once I received your letter."

"My letter?" Allya blinked. "Oh, right, that was…a long time ago." In fact, she'd written that letter right after talking with Neptunite, after the defeat of the Republic's first batch of commandos. It seemed like a lifetime ago, despite knowing it had only been a few months! "But yeah, I remember."

"Good. I'd hate to think my most brilliant protege had gone senile!"

"I'd hate to think so as well." Answered Allya, her voice dripping with irony. "I assume the 'dozen' or so odd people with cleverly forged documents the caravan master told me about are members of the sect?"

Trira clicked her tongue.

"I knew we shouldn't have rushed this much, and picked a caravan with a less annoying leader. But yes, they are. Six members, five apprentices, they were all I could scare up in time."

"That's more than fine by me." Said Allya, and she meant it. Trira could have a soft heart -there was a reason she'd taken the broken Erisian noble under her wing after all-, but she was a brutal taskmistress, and she didn't keep idiots or incompetents in her sect. "They are going to be invaluable."

"To do what, exactly?" Asked Trira. "I saw your letter, and the promise of very generous compensation, not to mention your word, were enough to get me to scramble the sect and move it here, but I am curious as to what you need us for. We aren't bodyguards, although we really should train yours."

"Well, that, at first. But after I talked with Neptunite-" She shook her head as Trira gave her a questioning look. "One of the Republic commandos from the first wave that attacked us." The assassin leader nodded. "I realized that I didn't even have a counter intelligence arm, or any intelligence gathering of my own. Hence why I thought of you and the sect."

"Spying isn't our job."

"No, but you are very, very good at it regardless, and I know half the sect's job is to gather intelligence to set up assassinations. We've even been hired to find and execute spies and moles for that matter! So I'm offering to hire the sect for that."

"The sect? You mean all of us?"

"Yes."

"That's going to be extraordinarily pricy Allya."

"Trira. As it is, my town is making around a hundred and fifty thousand mana per hour during the day, just from the dungeon delve taxes. I am literally drawing a budget to buy military fucking airships. Believe me, my budget will accommodate hiring the sect, the entire sect quite handily."

Trira looked at her in amazement.

"I…see. Well, if you have that much mana lying around, it would be churlish for me to turn down an offer to get some off of your hands! Besides, you're Erisian, hiring assassins to watch your back is in your blood!"

Allya chuckled. The first Empress had been famous -among many, many things- for having hired an assassin who tried to kill her as her personal troubleshooter, and then outright spymaster.

"I suppose it is. Plus, aside from counter intelligence, I'll probably also start to need some…fellows removed from the other side."

"That, however, we'll know perfectly how to do."

"Good. Because given how this war is going, I'm going to need all the help I can get."

"Indeed." Trira stretched, before looking around the room. "Say dear, I was wondering, but this does not look like a room for a single person."

Allya froze like a deer in headlights as the tone of Trira's voice registered. The assassin leader had become something of a second mother…with all that entailed.

"W-Well, you see…It's a bit complicated, there was this elf, and…"

"Oh?" Trira smiled, laying her head on top of her hands. "Do tell dear, do tell…"

*****

"So, that is about the gist of it." Finished Allya, in front of her council, the light of dawn peeking through the windows and bathing the room in rich, golden light.

Most of them looked stunned. A few looked thoughtful, and Anders looked outright rebellious, but overall the reaction to the fact that she had just hired an entire sect of assassins was much better than she'd feared. Especially as she had told them she had been part of said sect, once upon a time, before leaving it for her own ventures.

"That is…remarkable, milady." Said Willard, leaning back into his chair. "And I am honored by your trust in our discretion. Still, I have to wonder if hiring assassins -no offense, lady Trira- to defend ourselves is the best course of action."

"It's my job, mister Willard, and unlike my dear Allya here, I am no lady. Still, I understand your concerns -for that matter I share some of them-, but the baroness had convinced me it was a good course of action. As it is, you do not have any counter intelligence apparatus worthy of the name, your guards aren't properly trained to counter assassins or spies, and even if you found better than my sect eventually, we could just revert into our original role and start working to take out your enemies."

Anders sat up suddenly.

"My guards are-"

"Perfectly competent as soldiers and wasteland expeditionary units." Said Trira, cutting off the commander's no doubt heated tirade. "But they weren't trained for this level of assassination or enemy infiltration. They are corporate security, with a lot of teeth mind you, but not secret service. I am not questioning the base competence of your troops commander, I am simply pointing out their deficiencies in this specific instance which they simply weren't properly trained for. Hellfire, I walked into the baroness' bedroom unhindered! I could have slain her, and her girlfriend -I'm sorry, her knight and de facto heir- and no one would have suspected a thing until morning! How obvious do you want it to get?"

Anders opened his mouth, and closed it, gritting his teeth, before taking a deep breath and obviously forcing himself to relax.

"I…deserved that. My apologies, miss Trira. I did not mean to play down what had happened, but hiring assassins goes…against the grain, to say the least."

"That's because your people are stubborn mountaineers with more honor than sense commander. And that the only assassins you ever saw were the Republic's."

Anders laughed.

"That we are! And I suppose so." He sighed. "I…have my misgivings about this, but given what you have accomplished, I am willing to wait and see. Provided that you, however, find either someone outside your sect to train my guards, or have some of your assassins do it themselves."

Allya smiled.

"Well, as a matter of fact that is precisely one of the reasons I hired her and her people, commander Anders. They will handle training for your guards, while simultaneously starting their intelligence web. The training will have to be discreet however, with a cadre of NCOs you absolutely trust being instructed first, who will then go on to pass that knowledge to the rest of your men. The fact that we have hired a sect of assassins to watch our backs Does.Not.Leave.This.Room." She hammered her first into the table at each word. "Am I understood?" Everyone nodded, and she nodded back. "Excellent. As for her price, well…" She turned towards Melia. "Every member, which include her, gets fifty thousand mana a month, plus a hundred thousand a month for the sect itself, that's a total of seven hundred thousand mana…per month, for now."

Melia, and several people around the table for that matter, winced. But as absurd as those numbers were in absolute -and they didn't need to know Allya had insisted the sect was paid well, while Trira herself had offered a friendly price, to instil loyalty and have no one within the sect question the contract-, they were ridiculously low in relative terms. Seven hundred thousand mana, a full fifth of their previous monthly budget, they now made in five hours thanks to the taxes on the steps alone. Their estimate for the newly monthly budget was fifty four million mana, which was starting to approach the entire damned annual GDP of a fucking barony. And although Crystal had lowered the pace of new stuff, probably to rebuild her main dungeon, no one doubted that it was going to keep going up, especially as people started getting used more and more to the steps and the labyrinth, refining their techniques and bringing back more and more loot rather than dying by overestimating their chances of success!

"I'll work it into the budget." Simply said Melia.

"Excellent. Anders?"

"I'll pick the NCOs, although most of them will come from your guard detail by default." He smiled. "That's where I put the best and most loyal of them after all!"

"Right. And I'll have my own bodyguards rotate in as well. Well, it looks like that is all for this meeting, unless anyone has something else to bring up?" Everyone shook their head. "Excellent then! Let's get to work everybody!"

*****

"Alex…this might be a bit overkill."

Alexandra looked up from the prototype she was working on, blinking, before gazing over her shoulder at Emilia.

"What? This?" She gestured at the steel armor. "It's just a new type of armor."

"No, I mean…the security. I can understand being cautious, but this is starting to get…cumbersome."

Alexandra looked at the golems assembled throughout or even outside the room, and sighed.

"Look, vampy. I sympathize with you." A hell of a lot more than she'd admit. She wasn't supposed to know it, but some of the 'grizzled, recently transferred NCOs' who just happened to be part of her deployment group when she was on Vesta station looked and moved suspiciously like Eurofed commandos. And she was virtually certain she'd recognized one of Arcadia's personal mercs as well at some point. "But until I'm sure we aren't going to be attacked I'm not taking that risk."

"But-"

"No buts!" Alexandra slammed her fist against the solid stone workbench, cracking it and leaving a sizeable dent. "For fuck's sake vampy, you could have died! If CQ hadn't sacrificed herself you would have! Even your fucking maids almost didn't make it! I.Am.NOT letting that happen again! Do you hear me?!?"

Emilia backed off raising her hands at her dungeon core's raging anger.

Alexandra took a deep breath, steadying herself, a corner of her mind wondering once more why she was having those outbursts…or why she didn't have them previously.

"Sorry. That was uncalled for. But the point is, I know. It's annoying. But I'm not going to risk losing you because I was careless…again. If, however, you have some ideas that would reinforce your security while not necessitating so many bodyguards, I'm all ears."

"Well…once Sarah and Ella are back to full strength…"

"They got massacred. Oh, yes, they gave a pretty good account of themselves as long as they were up, but they got massacred nonetheless. It's the same problem as with those fucking disruptors, as long as they remain a threat I simply cannot rely on my normal abilities to keep us safe. That's why I have wires running all around the place, why I've started installing security cameras, why every damned minefield has remote and automated detonation sequences."

"Right, but neutralizers are extremely rare!"

"Not rare enough apparently. What the hell are those things anyway?"

"Specialized anti vampire items. Kind of like disruptors for vampires, in their own ways. They…turn our advantages against us. Our regeneration begins eating us alive, our enhanced muscles start tearing apart…that kind of thing. It's based on technology from the Age of the Gods, originally."

Alexandra winced. She knew it had to be painful, but she had no idea it was that horrendous. Gods, it was almost like an EMP, a stun grenade and a nanoswarm weapon combined!

"Right. Can it be countered?"

"Not like the disruptors, or at least not in the ways the UDC manuals say." Getting the contents of those manuals in practice had been priority number 1 in terms of defence as soon as they had enough of a fortified location and troops to actually make it useful, and Emilia had been tremendous in starting work on the first prototypes of the 'influence stabilizers', as they were called. Not one was finished yet -and the first few had all exploded-, but they were getting there. "But yes. My maids already have some of those counters built in. Normally, they could have shaken it off after a minute or so, if they hadn't been wounded afterwards."

"Well, we can't count on that."

"Obviously. But the problem is while there are counters, they're unique to each…brand of neutralizer. They aren't standardized like disruptors. Those are all based on the same tech, on the original work of the same archmage, and while each nation's has their own quirks, their base principle are all the same. Neutralizers aren't like that. Each 'line' of them, for the lack of a better word, works completely differently from the others, and there are only so many countermeasures you can pack in one person."

"I see…So how did you deal with it? I mean, your mom is a military officer, and the Western Marches' armies are composed of vampires, so you had to have a workaround."

"Well, first those neutralizers are hideously short ranged. At least for a battlefield. One hundred meters, three hundred at most. Then, they're very, very fragile. Armoring them interferes with the neutralizer effect in some way, so a single shot from even an arrow can take them out, although wards and energy shields will work."

"Would armoring the maids dampen the effects?"

"No. It's just on the generator. Kind of like you talking about how having iron armor might fuck up an 'electro-magnetic rifle' when firing, but iron armor wouldn't do anything for anyone being fired at by one. It's just on the generator itself."

"Right. So how do you deal with it?"

"Well, since only wards can protect them, and the neutralizer themselves are magical, the common method is to just fire antimagic projectiles in volleys. But even that doesn't work sometimes." Emilia shifted uneasily. "My mother became famous because one of her armies was crushed thanks to neutralizers. She had to…enact a massive blood magic ritual to counter the advancing armies."

"What kind of ritual?"

"The kind that gives you the title 'Harvester of a hundred thousand souls'."

Alexandra winced. Although compared to how many people she'd directly or indirectly killed, it was paltry, she could definitely understand the vampire girl's bitter tone.

"I see. So not an option on our side…Well, I guess we could try some antimagic projectiles, mmmhhh…What would be the issue with those?"

"Well, they have to be individually enchanted. And the materials would have to be fairly high grade as well. Not to mention the fact that-"

Alexandra laid her head on her hands as she listened to the vampire girl listing the myriad of possible problems with such a device…and mentally beginning to modify her katyusha schematics.