Tim's POV
I had been planning this night for fourteen months now.
The black clothing was practical and simple, dark cloth, close-fitting, nothing too fancy, and a face covering too. The sack of gold coins I wanted to carry was heavy and I tried to distributed the weight carefully, the coins divided into smaller pouches that each had ten gold coins, that I could given individually without much worry.
I started at east side of the city. The plant perception gave me a continuous map of the operation's layout as I moved, mosty form grass and weeds, that were everywhere, but not the buildings exactly, the human density of the slave houses, the movement patterns of the enforcers on their routes. I don't have the whole picture, but if anything was outside, than I'll know.
I moved through the darkness in the city without being seen, not full speed, which would have been counterproductive in the confined geometry of the lower ward's streets, but the specific speed that was between fast and quiet.
The first building was a drug operation on a side street I had marked in the first month of the survey. The two well-armed men on watch outside were dead before they had registered movement, and I was through the door before they finished falling.
I want to be precise on who I killed, if I don't know if their evil, than I wouldn't kill them.
I killed the managers and the real enforcers, the people who had chosen this work and maintained it through deliberate choice.
The bottom of the food chain I left alone, which was most of the people physically present in most of the buildings. The workers who cleaned and cooked. The labours who were poor men paid barely enough to justify the danger and who would walk away from the work the moment the organisation they worked for ceased to exist. These people I stepped around, or walked past while their attention was elsewhere, or simply did not engage because they were not what I was here for.
I spent some time healing the victims.
Not all injuries were visible, and not all visible injuries were physical, and the *Light Healing* spell was a tier one tool with tier one limits. But it closed the wounds that could be closed, and the ten gold coins I pressed into each pair of hands, as I have too much gold to know what to do with, as I set them free.
The nobles were whole another problem.
Most of the wealthy involved in E-Rantel's Eight Fingers operation were not people who had stumbled into this evil through circumstance. They were even invested. Some had bought human beings for MEAT. Good thing they will not see tomorrow.
I did not extend the same mercy to them that I extended to the desperate poor at the bottom.
The first two hours covered the eastern quarter. I moved building by building with the systematic efficiency of the vermin-clearing of my childhood, but scaled up.
But vermin are vermin.
Somewhere in the third hour, new abilities began arriving out of nowhere.
---
I think my assassin job class had been accumulating since I started the night's work, the knowledge who to better kill people in the dark, was flooding my head.
Shadow Clone arrived first, I refuse to explain this one.
Merge with Shadows followed, which was functionally what it sounded like, the ability to reduce my physical signature to something that occupied shadow, present without the normal markers of presence.
Body Swap was the ability was my fav, as exchanging positions with either an ally or an enemy, the tactical applications were significant and I was already mapping them, this was a broken ability.
I send out five of my Shadow Clones, sending them into city, as the speed of my *Cleaning* increased.
By midnight I was seventy-five percent complete.
And then something arrived that felt different from the preceding abilities, as this one felt odd.
*Perfect Unknowable.*
I stood in an alley in E-Rantel's northern quarter and held the ability's activation for thirty seconds and experienced what it meant to be completely absent from the sensory world. This was the removal of all traces, the comprehensive erasure of presence from every detection method that the ability's name suggested and that I could verify empirically by the fact that the guard standing four metres away with a lantern was looking directly at where I was and finding nothing.
That meant assassin class had reached its ceiling, I was also above level sixty-five, which meant the ninja job class had unlocked.
*Perfect Unknowable* in a ninja was a tier-accessible spell as much as an ability. Few Spellcasters could use this spell, But for ninjas like the summon hanzo, this was a basic ability.
By 2:00 am the city was cleaned.
Not entirely, the Eight Fingers as an organisation existed beyond E-Rantel, the people who ran the network from a distance were untouched, the structural conditions that produced criminal organisations were unchanged and would produce new ones over time. I had not solved the problem. I had removed one city's worth of it, which was what I had in my capability.
I walked home through streets that were quieter than they had been.
My room in the orphanage was the way I had left it, I removed the black clothing, folded it, stored it.
Lay down.
Then I closed my eyes.
No one would know it was me.
Sleep came before I had finished the thought.
---
Tim
LeveL [75]
Assassin: [10/10] [MAX]
Paladin: [3/5]
Ninja: [1/5] [Unlocked with Assassin [MAX] + over level 65]