Chapter 88: A Night in a Mansion Full of Assassins (4)

The assassin prepared another bolt in his crossbow with a trembling hand, though not from fear.

He coughed blood, covered his mouth by reflex, and when he moved his fist away he saw the wet red staining his fingers.

“I don’t have much time… Better you die quickly, or my partner will get angry.” He aimed the crossbow at Ebony. His voice was rough and tired, but still firm, like someone who had already accepted his own death and only wanted to finish his job first.

Ebony was barely still standing. The poison had left her muscles numb and her jaw stiff.

“He… He…” Ebony tried to pronounce a word with all her strength, but her entire body no longer responded.

“That’s how I like it, trying to call for help until the very end, ha ha ha.” Ecstatic, the assassin ran his tongue across his lips. His eyes shone with a disgusting mixture of excitement, pain, and madness.

The trigger began to give under the pressure. The small sound of the mechanism was minimal, but to Ebony it felt as if the entire room had stopped at that exact moment, waiting for the shot.

But suddenly the maids lying on the floor jumped onto the assassin, throwing him down and managing to deflect the shot toward the ceiling.

They had all passed forty years of age, and each of their black heads of hair already showed streaks of gray. They were tired women, without weapons, without visible magic, and with no logical reason to place themselves between a crossbow and a stranger.

But seeing the face of a young woman desperately trying to ask for help made their bodies move without reasonable judgment, guided only by pity for another human life that had barely begun.

They grabbed the assassin by his clothes and tried to force him to the floor. The movement was clumsy and desperate, done with hands free from their fake bindings and trembling shoulders, but they had done it. They had bought a few seconds.

“You damn bitches! You dare interrupt something as sacred as an execution ritual?”

The enraged assassin drew his knife, shaped like a crescent moon.

With a short movement he slit the throat of one of the maids. A quick, precise cut, and the woman brought her hands to her neck while the blood slipped between her fingers.

Moving his body as if it were a game, he began cutting each one down. He moved from one to another with short, almost light steps, taking advantage of the fact that they were tangled together and had no room to escape.

Blood began splattering across Ebony’s face as she stood completely still. It fell on her cheeks, her lips, her neck, and even into her left eye without any chance to blink.

“HE… HE…” the blonde tried to say it. She wanted to save those women, every syllable scraped her throat and made her chest ache.

But it was too late, they were all covered in too many cuts and losing too much blood, soon they would stop breathing. Some were already on the ground, others barely conscious, but none of them would stand again.

“Look what they did just to buy you a few seconds of life… In the end it was useless, don’t you think?” the assassin said.

He straightened slightly, breathing worse than before, though still enjoying himself enough to keep smiling.

“I was going to kill them anyway, but it’s a shame it had to be like this… I wanted to hear their screams a little longer.” He spoke with almost childish disappointment, as if someone had ruined his entertainment.

The assassin loaded another bolt into his crossbow and aimed at Ebony again. This time there was no pause, no game, no intention of dragging things out. He wanted to end it before his own body collapsed.

The blonde, her face twisted with rage, forced her muscles to their limit. Every fiber hurt, every movement felt ripped out by force, but in the end she found a bit of voice and pushed it out.

“HEAL!”

{{Life Magic: He▲li▚g}}

A green glow surrounded the girl’s body, healing her rapidly. The sensation was brutal, like numb flesh suddenly waking and the poison being forced to fight something far stronger.

But the assassin, by instinct, didn’t lose a second and fired his crossbow directly at the girl’s heart. He didn’t wait to see the spell’s result. He simply released the string and let the bolt do the rest.

Ebony fell to the floor with the bolt embedded in her chest. The impact threw her backward and knocked the air from her lungs in a single blow. For an instant, even she felt as if everything was going dark.

The assassin, confused, loaded another bolt when the green glow didn’t leave the girl’s body. The light still clung to her, pulsing around the wound as if refusing to let her fall completely.

In that moment of doubt Ebony rose with a savage scream. It wasn’t an elegant movement. It was violent, driven by pure rage, pain, and the sight of the dying women around her.

Breaking the bolt stuck in her chest, she used the splintered wood to stab it into the assassin’s ear. She moved almost without thinking, throwing herself at him before he could prepare another shot.

With all her fury she pushed the wood deeper until it pierced the inside of his skull. She felt the resistance, then the wet crack, and finally the man’s body loosening as the improvised weapon sank deeper.

“W-what the hell… you bi—”

The assassin lost consciousness and died seconds later. His fingers released the crossbow and his body fell to the side with a short twitch before going still.

“Damn dog…” Ebony panted as she approached the maids, her chest burning with pain. The poison was still there, the arrow wound still burned, and every step felt heavy, but she moved anyway.

The women, struggling to breathe, saw that the girl had survived. Some widened their eyes, others barely managed to move their heads, but in all of them the same strange mix of relief and fear appeared.

With expressions of relief and terror, the women in front of her died. One by one they lost their strength until they fell still, leaving Ebony standing before a line of bodies she could no longer save.

Ebony couldn’t bear the sight. She felt the urge to vomit at the thought that lives had been sacrificed for her. Her chest rose and fell unevenly, and for a moment she truly thought she would collapse right there.

But before she could rest, the door behind her opened.

The sound was slow and heavy, arriving just as the room seemed ready to sink completely into the silence of freshly spilled blood.

A magic filled with bloodlust flooded the place. It wasn’t just pressure. It was a filthy sensation, as if something cold and sick had entered eager to taste every last drop in the room.

A man appeared.

One wearing black boots and a mask shaped like a black crow, like the plague doctors of old. His silhouette was short, but his presence filled the room with unsettling ease.

“Did you finish wi—”

The man, barely five feet tall, saw his companion dead on the floor, bleeding from the ear with the bolt lodged inside. His sentence cut off as he took in the scene before him.

He stood still for a moment, looking first at the corpse, then at the slaughtered maids, and finally at Ebony, who was still breathing heavily in the middle of the disaster.

“Ha… I thought this would be boring. I’m glad to be wrong once in a while,” the man said as he raised his hand. Even behind the mask, his voice sounded amused, almost grateful for the unexpected turn.

“Coagulate!”

{{Blood Magic: Flesh Puppets}}

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