Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

Chapter 554: Interlude - Nina - The Paperwork of Assassination

Fifteen Years after the events at the Phoenix Peaks

Nina was the picture-perfect vision of a naive, rosy-cheeked and fresh-faced [Maid], excited to be working at [Countess] Brunswick’s castle.

Quite literally. She’d studied dozens of young human women, seen how attractive other people found them, then blended their traits and looks together to create just one of her many disguises.

It was tweaked after each use. Nina had made the mistake of reusing a ‘face’ exactly once, and the resulting fight had gotten her a half-dozen levels and set her target on such high alert that she’d needed to circle back a few years later.

It was as ‘real’ as it could be in so many ways. Nina kept the same size and most of her body shape, tightly wrapping her tails around her body so nobody brushed them and wondered what was going on. Being the youngest, newest member of the castle also meant she was the least protected and most vulnerable, and she was lucky to get a warning before someone bumped into her or rudely shoved her to the side. An easy price to pay for the access and intelligence she was gathering, but if she looked like a muscular brute of a man and people felt soft curves and a delicate frame when touching the ‘man’, questions would rapidly be asked and Nina’s cover would be blown.

She’d never made that mistake, it was too fundamental to being an illusionist and trickster.

Nina had a mop, bucket, and a job to do, and was scrubbing hard, her invisible ears twitching as they tried to pick up any and all information. It was unlikely she’d overhear anything sensitive or that changed her mind, but there was all sorts of low-level intelligence she could gather in the meantime. Who was in favor, who’d screwed up. Occasionally ‘hidden’ servant’s passages revealed themselves as people were moving in the walls, and it was generally a good idea to have an idea of who was around Nina.

If nothing else, the [Head Butler] would never catch her slacking off.

One of the infamous [Slayers] was coming up the stairs, and Nina polished off a section, making sure to properly position herself. The [Slayer] came up the stairs, medium armor and the classic tricorn hat, and the Valkyrie gasped.

“Oh! Sir Slayer! What an honor!” Nina shamelessly batted her eyelashes, letting a blush creep up her neck and cheeks, ‘innocently’ letting her breasts bounce. The picture-perfect blushing [Maid], overwhelmed at the fame and prestige of one of Vollomond’s most lauded warriors.

Ego. Pride. Sex. Vanity. Arrogance. Jealousy. All of them were weapons, and Nina had no issues in using each and every tool at her disposal to get what she wanted. She was walking a tight line. On one hand, if she stood out too much, some “noble warrior” would want to “rescue” or “elevate” her, and then she’d be stuck, her freedom effectively curtailed by a lover who wanted to spend far too much time with her. On the other, if she was practically invisible to everyone, then she’d be questioned far more often when found in sections she might not be allowed in, an unknown face that required challenging.

No, the middle path was the best one. Men and women, everyone liked their strengths pandered to, their egos stroked. An attentive ear, a pretty face. Nina’s methods weren’t perfect, nobody’s were. There were women jealous of the image she put forth, men who found her attention suspicious. But generally, the effect was there.

A pretty, eager, hard-working face that people recognized and let through unchallenged. That was Nina’s goal, and her hidden ears twitched as she made polite noises and shamelessly flirted with the [Slayer].

“Did you get the boar?” She asked breathlessly, like it was the MOST exciting thing that had ever happened. Nina could practically see him inflate, and she wondered how on Pallos people actually acted the way she did. She just didn’t understand it, unless they were doing the same thing she was.

“Of course!” He boasted. “His head will adorn the [Lady’s] walls on the morrow, and we shall feast on his flesh tonight!” The [Slayer] winked salaciously at Nina. “Perhaps we can find a place at the table for you on my lap, letting you pick the finest pieces?”

Nina gasped like the idea was overwhelming, her tails itching as they wanted to swish behind her but were bound tight.

“Oh Sir [Slayer]! Little me at the high table? I could never!”

Nina could and had on countless occasions. One memorable time she’d sat on a particularly paranoid [Baron’s] lap, and managed to poison his wine after the [Taste-Tester] had confirmed it was clear. Not her favorite moment, and it had taken weeks of washing for her tails to feel clean again. She much preferred a hunting accident, swapping the labels on potions, or best of all, being able to ‘properly’ and ‘honorably’ fight her target to the death.

Years of training under Iona had rubbed off on her. At the same time, she wasn’t going to risk an unfair fight, and both Elaine and Iona had quite a few words on the topic. The conflict between their words and actions regarding fighting seemed obvious to Nina, but both of them seemed to accept it without a blink.

The [Slayer] grinned flirtatiously at Nina. “We’ll see! The [Countess] wants to meet with us, so alas, duty calls.”

Nina continued to dutifully mop as his footsteps faded down the hallway, cleaning the section as quickly as she could while other members of the castle bustled back and forth. Her ears strained, slowly confirming the chance she’d been looking for was here.

People ebbed and flowed through the castle like a toy maze filled with sand being turned over and around. Sometimes one part of the castle was heavily populated, other times it was deserted as everyone moved to another section for one reason or another. Nina had been piecing together the castle and where everything was located over the months, and she was wrapping up work in the tower where the documents were, just as half the castle was shifting over to one of the great halls. She sped through her work, checked again to see if anyone seemed to be lying in wait for her or wanting to talk, and the moment the coast was clear she picked up her bucket and walked over to where she wanted to be.

There were thousands of ways to detect intruders that were using Mirages to sneak around, and by being a visible member of the staff, Nina was dodging nearly all of them. [Tremorsense]? Nina was right there, walking along. Of course it seemed like someone was there. [Whispers of the Wind]? Yup, there was a person there. [Echolocation]? Again - a person there, of the right size, shape, and weight. Vollomond was a hair easier to operate in than other places, as the high number of accepted werewolves gave easy explanation why Nina seemed to be hiding fur. Culturally, it was the thing to do.

Far too many of Nina’s compatriots in the Eventide Establishment - the ninjas, not to be confused with the Eventide Eclipse, the name for Elaine and her friends - tried to rely on pure invisibility and stealth when they first started training. That was one mistake the instructors were happy to beat out of them, instead of throwing them in the deep end and letting them find out for themselves.

There were no guards stationed at the office she wanted to explore, but the door was locked. Nina’s time in the Eventide Establishment had taught her more than basic skills and concepts.

Dragon. Monkey. Bird. Monkey. Boar. Ox. Serpent. Monkey. Rat.

Nina’s hands flashed through the hand signs of the [Jiu Jitsu], an extremely limited form of wizardry. Nonetheless, it granted her access to a wide variety of memorized spells. With a soft click the door opened, and without checking around herself - a sure indication she was up to no good - Nina slipped into the office.

She knew what she wanted - logging records of the magical wood the County was famous for - but didn’t know where they were located, apart from somewhere in the office. As a precaution, she leaned her mop against the wall, then turned it and her bucket invisible. Just in case she needed to rapidly not be there. Her ears peeled and straining to hear the footsteps of anyone approaching, she rapidly skimmed and [Memorized] dozens of documents.

Where is it, where is it? Nina thought to herself as she picked up document after document from the desk, carefully replacing it when it was done. Tax reports and missives from other [Lords], accounting records she’d already seen and training reports.

Nina opened the drawers of the desk, carefully looking at the tabs on the folders before moving onto the next one.

Found it! The kitsune triumphantly flicked the folder out, noting where it belonged. Just as she started to open it, she heard footsteps hurrying up the stairs. Her eyes flew over the documents, trying to learn everything she needed as the key started to rattle in the lock. The unlocked lock.

The Fox Valkyrie kicked the drawer closed, thanking all the gods for dexterity making the move silent, and popped [True Invisibility] on herself and the documents as the door slammed open. Silently, stealthily, she moved into a corner of the room as a harried [Scribe] dashed over to the desk. Praying to Selene and Lunaris that he wasn’t looking for the exact documents she was holding, she watched with bated breath, preparing a [Jiu Jitsu] that promised swift and silent death if needed.

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Horse. Tiger. Ram. Monkey. Boar. Horse.

All that was needed now was Tiger. She didn’t let the flicker of a black feather out of the corner of her eye distract her.

Fortunately for all involved, the [Scribe] found what he was looking for on the desk. With a sigh of relief he grabbed the papers, quickly leaving the office before locking the door again. He then took off at a dead sprint, and Nina silently cursed the minor misfortune.

The door not being locked once? Happened. It was a quick oversight. Twice now? She’d need to start getting lucky for nobody to start noticing things, and Nina hadn’t gotten this far by relying on anything as fickle as Lady Luck.

Nina waited a heartbeat before carefully replacing the documents exactly where they’d been, then wasted no time unlocking the door, grabbing her mop and bucket, and hurrying through the castle as her fresh-faced identity, just another worker after a long day. A discussion with the [Head Butler] resulted in reluctant unsolicited praise to her work ethic, and she was dismissed for the evening.

Nina went to her identity’s lodging, before casting another [Jiu Jitsu] to create an imperfect pillow-clone of her body, clothes and all. She tucked the pillows into her bed, noting the thousand and one inconsistencies that would give it away if someone broke into her room and gave it more than a cursory glance.

Honestly, she debated skipping the step entirely, but that one time in Cartref Clyde it had saved her mission, and it weighed heavily on the scales every time she evaluated them. Then she snuck out of her room, going to a second location she’d rented in the city under yet another alias. One where she could tabulate and organize documents, creating a clear picture of all the events occurring in the county.

Nina walked into the seedy inn, one of the cheapest places she could find in the city.

“Oi! You! Rent’s due, pay up!” The [Innkeeper] barked at Nina the second she walked through the door. She swaggered over to the bar, knowing that looking lethal was the right way to fit in here. Everything from her face to her body language was different, and she had no fear of anyone connecting her two faces together.

“I’m all paid up. Rent’s due tomorrow.” Nina mixed disdain with the subtle threat of violence in her voice. The [Innkeeper] wouldn’t be intimidated in the slightest, but it was expected. The right move for her current face.

The [Innkeeper] spat into a glass, then started to polish it. Face or not, Nina doubted she’d be having a drink here tonight… or ever again. She went a little green remembering how many times she’d had a cold one here after a long day’s work.

“Way I see it, you’re paid up until midnight. Gotta pay for the mornin’ shut-eye, less you want me throwing a bucket of cold water and calling the guards, yeah?”

A lively round of negotiation ended with the [Innkeeper] conceding that Nina could spend the entire night - but he did want the next week paid up already.

The mental tally of her finances showed she was in dire straits. Working as a [Valkyrie] - even one as unconventional as her - didn’t pay a single bent arc. There was simply no money in the business, and Nina refused to take assassinations for hire. She was paid as a [Maid] at her job, but at her fake displayed level, age, and seniority, it was barely enough to pay for her first room and food, forget an entire inn room and the significantly higher expenses of assassination. Then there was renting a secure storage unit in the city for her ‘true’ armor, saving enough money to travel to the next location she needed to, and general living. Seeing an occasional play, buying a treat now and then. Nina refused to let work consume every waking moment of every day.

Elaine and Iona were always more than happy to give her - and any other Valkyrie - as much money as they needed, no questions, no complaints, just a quiet sack of gems whenever needed. Nina felt terrible about it, no matter how they reassured her ‘that’s what friends do’.

She went upstairs, checking her improvised security measures.

Naturally, her room had been rifled through, and Nina mentally gave up setting the door check. The mallium she’d hidden in the walls was still there, and she pulled it out, wrapping it around her waist like a belt. She entered her room, going to the loose floorboard holding her documents, and saw her carefully placed hair was still intact. She pulled out the haphazard stack of looseleafs and notes, then sat on her questionable bed and started paging through them.

There was no desk.

When Nina had taken her [Creed], she’d never imagined the sheer amount of paperwork involved in ethically rooting out the source of the problem. First, she needed to hear about a problem, and everyone loved grousing about the local nobility, from the [Barons] to the [Dukes]. Not even [Kings] and [Princesses] were exempt, and it took quite a long time to find serious problems that required intervention.

Then there was proving the corruption and that the [Lady] or [Guild Master] was a problem. Were the taxes high and [Serfs] driven hard because the nobility enjoyed hosting lavish parties, or was there a purpose behind the taxes? A reason? Was the discontent due to gross mismanagement, or the simple eddies and flows of the economy? Were people starving because the king’s men took all the crops, or was a local famine to blame?

Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt to Nina’s strict standards that outright murder was mandatory was an insane bar to clear, and she occasionally went years between attempts, as nobody cleared the bar she imposed on herself. One notable case she’d been ready to administer a poisoned needle before discovering that the lavish parties being thrown were to woo multiple guilds into setting up significant expansions locally, and had succeeded. The use of resources in such a manner was questionable in the extreme, but in a twisted way had been for the good of the city and people living inside.

After all that, there was the issue of the heir and succession. Would a small civil war be sparked by the death? Would there be a clean transition of power, or would Nina simply be sowing chaos in her wake, a cure worse than the disease? Would the heir be better than the relative they were replacing?

The last part Nina had slowly been working on over the years, and the answer to that question was becoming ‘yes’ more frequently.

The magical wood documents were the last piece of the puzzle Nina needed. Removing the [Countess] Brunswick and letting her [Heir] take over would be a significant boon to all involved. Well, her, and the two [Advisors] who’d been a horrific influence, and who’d keep spewing poison in the young [Heir’s] ear after he took power. No, the situation in Brunswick called for the removal of three people. The fact that she would need to pay for another week’s rent in the inn didn’t influence her decision to execute on her plan now - but it was a nice cherry on top.

Nina spent the next few hours detailing every part of Countess Brunswick’s holdings and issues that she knew of, along with one to three proposed solutions for each. She then slipped the papers into an envelope, and drew a stylized fox on the front.

Her heart ached, the artist skills acquired through delightful candlelit evenings with Iona. Vollomond wasn’t that far from Exterreri… Nina resolved to head that way once she was done here. It had been far too long since she’d been able to kick back and relax a bit, spend some time with the only people she considered family.

Preparations complete, Nina gathered her stuff and left the inn, carefully feeding a number of extra documents to the main room’s fire, ensuring they would burn completely. She then dropped off what she didn’t need at the front of the storage in a bundle of rags. There was a chance she’d lose it all - but it wasn’t that important in the end.

She’d worked late through the night, and some people might consider the time of day to be unholy early in the morning. Her face as a [Maid] let her literally walk right into the castle, the sleepy guards simply waving her through. Nina picked up an oil can from storage, and being a recognized face, clearly doing a job, let her stroll through the castle with complete impunity, none of the fellow late night owls or early bird risers bothering her. Why would they? She was even visibly doing her job, moving around, refilling the occasional torch.

The first thing she did was slip the package of papers into the [Heir’s] personal washroom cabinet. He’d discover it soon enough, and Nina was a bad assassin. She had a reputation. When The Fox performed her bloody work, a detailed package was left for the inheritor, explaining all the current issues she’d identified, and proposed plans to fix them. As her exploits grew, as more people discovered her little information packages, people started to take them more seriously, letting the bar that [Heirs] needed to clear lower just a bit.

The first [Advisor] was easy enough. Nina walked right up to his room and silently slipped in, not bothering to go invisible or anything. Once inside, she morphed her mallium into a long, sharp knife, and surgically rammed it through his right eye socket, mentally expanding it once it was inside the brain to rapidly destroy it and kill him. The notification was nearly instantaneous.

He was a member of the Moon Cult, and in Nina’s experience, they were everywhere. Whenever she found traces of them, she took notes and sent them along to Iona, who seemed eternally plagued by them, but there was no telling what, exactly, they were aiming for, apart from worming their way into various places of influence. Short of a god to pray to, they were almost like a religious organization, helping each other out when they spotted one another but otherwise not seeming to have a coherent plan. At times, they ended up at the top of Nina’s list, like the advisor she’d just handled, and at others, they were some of the best people around.

Nina had adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach to them, but if there was a decision to be made on who to eliminate, she deferred a hair to Iona and eliminated the Moon Cult member.

He died in his sleep, almost peacefully. Far better than he deserved, with the endless torment he was significantly responsible for visited upon the tens of thousands of souls living in the county, but quick and silent was the name of the game. The moment his body was discovered, the moment one of the werewolves smelled human blood, their guard would be up and it’d be impossible to get anything done.

The second advisor was asleep with two men in her bed, and Nina aborted the attempt on her life. She had sworn to strike at the root of the problem, and while she was accepting of collateral damage in her quest to improve lives, the scales tipped the other way when their lives were added onto them.

Nina scurried through the hallways of the castle, approaching her final challenge. The [Countess’s] room wasn’t nearly as easy to get into. The assassin couldn’t just walk up and say she was there for cleaning, not with the guards on the door and the unusual hour.

Nina went entirely invisible, padding over on soft leather boots, rolling every footstep so it wouldn’t be heard.

The door was unlocked - with guards posted and Brunswick’s infamous temper, who’d dare inconvenience her by locking it - but again, guards were posted. Fortunately, they weren’t physically blocking the door, standing to either side of it.

Nina layered some tricky illusions. First, an illusion of the door, on top of the door itself. Next, she made the true door invisible, then carefully poured a bit of oil on the hinges to stop it from squeaking. It would smell, and the guards would pick up on the smell, but hopefully it smelled enough like everything else, and it wasn’t so overpowering that they’d pick up that the hinges had somehow been greased right under their nose.

Holding her breath, Nina carefully teased the door open, praying the [Countess] hadn’t left a window open and the guards weren’t about to get a cool breeze to alert them to the door. She slipped inside, closing the door behind her, and reformed her mallium knife.

Nina was a professional. No waking the [Countess] up. No discussions. No asking ‘why’, no monologuing, nothing. Simply a quick, surgical strike to the brain from the eyes, followed by a ding!

In order to avoid displaying too many patterns, Nina then changed her morphic weapon to a mace, and bashed the corpse’s skull in, making a pinky nail-sized piece of skull the largest remaining part of her head.

Her job done, Nina fled the castle, making it outside before the cry went up.

Each job was exhausting, and a caravan heading west cinched it for Nina.

It was time to go back to Elaine and Iona’s place.

It was time to go back home.

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