Killstreak Book One

by Stuart Thaman

  Pawing at the ground with large, sharp claws, the jackal growled and bared its teeth. Kadorax came on hard with his sword, keeping his whip coiled at his side due to the tight quarters, and the jackal sidestepped with magical speed.

  “Torment!” Kadorax yelled, and a sheath of darkness wrapped itself around his sword as it arced through the air.

  Again, the jackal’s reflexes were simply too fast. The beast jolted to its left and then came forward in a blur with its claws leading the way. Kadorax had no choice but to accept the hit on his chest. His armor blunted most of the force, but he was still pushed backward hard enough to send him crashing to the ground as his foot tangled on a protruding root. Had it not been for the reactive magic of Cage of Chaos, the bastion would have been rent to pieces by the jackal’s claws.

  A burst of foul, necrotic energy swept up from the armor like a cloud of accelerating spores, pushing the jackal back for just long enough to offer a moment of respite. Quickly running out of talents to use, Kadorax activated Chaos Step. The single second of charge time before the talent teleported him away felt like an eternity.

  With a flash, Kadorax appeared behind the jackal, but he was still on his back. As the jackal spun to find his target once more, Kadorax was able to get to his feet, still a few seconds from being able to strike. He knew he was outclassed. The jackal was a higher level, clearly had more combat experience than Kadorax in his current life, and he was smart.

  Kadorax had to think of something quickly. He looked toward the rest of the fight in hopes of finding rescue in the form of an assassin creeping up behind his attacker. All the Blackened Blades were engaged with the mass of jackals, and none of them were even looking his way.

  The jackal pounced and ripped at Kadorax’s stomach, shredding the bottom of his leather armor. Cage of Chaos triggered once more and sent a bolt of magical stone directly at the jackal’s face. The stone smashed into its jaw, rocketing it backward, giving Kadorax just enough time to push away and get his footing.

  Squared off on equal ground against the jackal once more, Kadorax didn’t have time to pay attention to the throbbing pain in his gut. He knew he was bleeding, he knew he was hurt—but he could not submit. Without Torment, his last option was to time a Riposte that could land solidly enough to end the fight with a single blow.

  The jackal was battered and a bit dazed from the magical assault it had suffered. Undefeated, the beast leapt forward, growling and showing its teeth.

  Kadorax didn’t recognize the talent the jackal had activated, but he had fought similar opponents enough times in the past to know what the next move would be. He took a chance, placing his life in the hands of a risky gambit, and turned to his left, leaving his back exposed to the jackal’s claws. As expected, the creature darted forward with impossible speed—directly through the place where Kadorax had stood just a second before.

  Kadorax’s sword sliced down along the jackal’s right flank, deep enough to carve a chunk of bloody meat from the bone beneath. The jackal howled and pounced again, moving slower without the aid of a talent.

  Claws rang against Kadorax’s blade, and his Agility was finally higher, thanks to the wound he’d inflicted, allowing him to execute a flawless Riposte. He turned the sword in his hands, flung his arms sideways through the attack, then cut back with all the strength in his body.

  Both of the jackal’s front paws fell to the dirt. Kadorax stepped forward, turning slightly on his heel to bring his body in line with the bloody, whining creature. With a single thrust, he claimed the jackal’s experience points as his own.

  “Finally,” he wheezed, falling to his knees as the adrenaline of the battle left his veins. Pain flared up from his torso, radiating from every inch of his body and thrumming with wave after wave whenever he took a breath. He lifted the tattered bottom portion of his armor and saw that it wouldn’t be fatal by any means—his innards were all where they were certainly supposed to be—though the knowledge did very little to stymie the pain.

  He looked back toward the clearing where the rest of the Blackened Blades were still fighting. The assassins held the upper hand, of that there was no question, but the cornered jackals fought well. Their numbers had dwindled to less than a handful. Kadorax watched as one of the rogues, a class more suited to open combat than his assassin comrades, capitalized on an opening left by a recently felled jackal. The man lunged toward the left side of the jackal formation and tore through the nearest enemy, showering himself in gore as he continued to slash. The jackal line faltered and then fell. When everything was calm and the last beast had been silenced, the rogue who had so brazenly attacked stood amidst a circle of bodies. Blood ran from his daggers as well as his arms.

  Only a few of the Blackened Blades appeared harmed, and Elise was quick to order her underlings to attend to their wounds with potions and bandages. “Over here,” Kadorax shouted, still clutching at his stomach.

  One of the assassins with a few potions on her belt helped carry him back to the others. She handed him a bottle, which he greedily devoured. After a few moments, the pain faded into a dull throb that Kadorax knew his mind would ignore before long. There were only two Blackened Blades who could not be brought back by healing magic. Both of them were face down on the forest floor, blood coating their armor and disheveled hair.

  Elise finally made her way to the dead bodies and rolled them over. The first one she touched was Pennywise. It looked like a jackal claw had torn through his neck, ripping out his throat. “At least you didn’t linger in pain for days, my friend,” Kadorax quietly lamented to himself. He had barely known the man, but still his loss was painful.

  Deep down, in the dark reaches of his mind where all the thoughts and memories Kadorax wished would simply die lurked, he knew why he felt a pang of sorrow when he looked at the man’s bloody face. The Earth-born assassin reminded him of home, and home reminded him of Estelle. He felt the old despair creeping up again, stalking him from the darkest corners of his brain, and he focused on the pain in his stomach to try and force it all away. All the effort accomplished was to make his pain a little worse.

  “None of them escaped?” Elise asked the recovering group of Blackened Blades.

  Kadorax met her gaze. “I took down the runner,” he said.

  The woman nodded and looked away. “We can follow their trail back to their den. If they get no warning, they won’t be ready. They won’t even suspect their group is missing until morning. We move.”

  Murmurs of assent spread through the group, and everyone began checking their gear and getting ready to move. Kadorax knew they wouldn’t bury the dead. He didn’t bother to look. More likely than not, the corpses had already been looted of anything useful they’d had on them when they died. Pragmatism was the ultimate lesson of the Blackened Blades, and it was probably the main reason the organization had been so profitable under Kadorax’s ruthless leadership. Still, leaving them to rot in the elements felt disrespectful, even though everyone knew the two men would respawn somewhere else on Agglor before long.

  No matter what Kadorax wanted, the Blackened Blades wasted little time. They were moving through the forest, following the trail the jackals had left, before the little miner gnome had even had a chance to inspect his machine to ensure it had survived the battle undamaged. As they walked, Kadorax inspected his character sheet. He hadn’t earned enough experience points to level, though he needed to get a solid handle on which of his abilities would be ready without a full day’s rest. Attacking a den of jackals head on was going to take everything he had to offer if he didn’t want to end up like Penn.

  Torment and Chaos Shock would both be ready by the time they found the jackal den, but that was it. His Riposte and Chaos Step needed a full day to recharge, and he wasn’t really sure if he had expended all of the magic in his Cage of Chaos talent. Since it was still in the first rank, he wasn’t confident there would be any strength left to whatever random elements it happened to conjure forth in the middle
of a battle.

  The trail wasn’t hard to follow. There had been a lot of jackals, and they had trampled the leaves as they went, clearly not worried about the gnome or anyone else following them back to their home. In most places around Agglor, jackals kept to themselves, so little was known about their society or cultural norms. A few jackals, strays who had likely been exiled from their own packs, lived in all the major cities, though assimilation had been one of the major factors leading to their acceptance by the human community as a whole. Still, most of the jackals living in Kingsgate or Oscine City were outcasts and beggars. Few of the hairy beasts ever progressed through human society to make anything noteworthy of themselves, but everything was different in the wilds.

  Kadorax had spent a significant amount of time lurking unseen in a jackal city—or what passed for a city by their standards—some years ago. He and Syzak had been paid a hefty sum to deliver a certain jackal head to a certain unnamed, wealthy jackal client, and the target had been the type to never leave his own home. The city had really been more a collection of low sheds, underground burrows, and crude pens of livestock than anything else. When not fighting or interacting with other intelligent races, most of the jackals preferred to live their lives as quadrupeds, more akin to their canine ancestors than their human pedigree.

  The den they found in the middle of the darkest part of the forest was small, and for that Kadorax was glad. He wasn’t sure if Elise was wise enough to turn away from a battle where the odds wouldn’t be in her favor. Fighting against a hundred or more jackals, even with the element of surprise on their side, would certainly be a battle best left abandoned. Kadorax had always been sure to demonstrate such calculations when approaching contracts when he had been the leader, but that was a different time, and Elise was a different Blackened Blade. Her ruthlessness was equally matched by her recklessness, like the two wild emotions were locked in a constant struggle for priority within her mind.

  Elise halted the group a good distance from what appeared to be the den’s entrance. There weren’t many torches, only a few scattered here and there without a thought given to their placement, so the entire compound was shrouded in thick darkness. Like the ring on Kadorax’s finger, most assassins had some way of seeing well in the dark, be it magic or talent. Jackals saw quite well at night also, so the torches were likely in place to help either the very young or the very old of their breed, or perhaps they marked something else altogether.

  The woman pulled a bit of onyx from a pouch on her armor and crushed it, then spread it between her hands and on her face—the reagent required for an assassin’s most powerful spell. “Sweeping Darkness,” Elise whispered, her eyes closed and a smile spreading on her face. Dark shadows began crawling through the trees to their position. The shadows were thick, blacker than they had any right to be, permeating the darkness of the night with something altogether unholy and vile.

  The talent was one that Kadorax knew well, though most of the lower-level members of the Blackened Blades had only heard of it in murmurs and rumors, spoken of like some unhallowed god whose name would invoke some measure of inexorable wrath. Kadorax had used the same ability himself. The preternatural darkness would cover their bodies, clinging to their clothes and weapons like a sticky miasma. It would last for hours, depending on the rank, and the inky fog would hide every movement and sound the Blackened Blades made. They would become invisible to anyone not standing within five or so feet of them. Even then, when their prey came close, their outlines would be obscured and their features would appear hazy, like specters or hallucinations. In Kadorax’s experience, there was no single talent that could ever match the usefulness of Sweeping Darkness. Accordingly, the cooldown time was measured in months as opposed to days.

  Perhaps one day he would get to see a high-level prior or chaplain cast some epic, battle-altering spell of their own, but until that day came to pass, Kadorax was utterly amazed by the inky darkness swirling around his waist.

  But the darkness did not cling to him as it gripped the others.

  When the rest of the Blackened Blades were covered head to toe in magical darkness, all of them were left regarding Kadorax and the gnome with quizzical expressions.

  Elise stepped forward and waved a bit of the fog from her arm toward Kadorax, and the darkness lingered for only a moment before dissipating into the night. “You aren’t one of us,” she said flatly. “The spell will only cover assassins and rogues, true members of the Blackened Blades. Your class… a bastion of chaos incarnate, whatever that means, is not affected.” She glanced at the gnome with the same pitiful expression. “Such a shame.”

  Elise turned back to her underlings and began to lay out her plan as Kadorax and the gnome backed off to the side.

  “Can you start that thing?” Kadorax asked.

  The gnome was quite literally shaking in his boots. His hands gripped the sides of the machine so hard that his knuckles had been white for probably an hour. The gnome’s collar was soaked with sweat. “Y—yes,” he stammered. “I think so.”

  “Look,” Kadorax started. He knew the exact plan Elise was explaining to the others, for he had been the one who had explained it to her. Complementing that plan would be tricky without a shroud of darkness of his own, but he knew it could be done with a little creative thinking. “They’re all going to slip into the den at different points, moving slowly and silently through the compound, slitting throats as they go. Inevitably, one of the lower levels is going to rouse an alarm one way or another, and then the whole thing will collapse into open combat. The shroud won’t mean much when that happens.”

  To his credit, the gnome was smart. “That’s when we start the drill?” he asked with a nod.

  “Exactly. Once the cover of silence is wasted, we can make as much noise as we want. Just be ready to fire it up the moment we need it.” Kadorax still wasn’t exactly sure if the drill would be useful or not, but he didn’t want to squander a perfectly fine opportunity to find out.

  The gnome checked a few levers and gears before responding, “It’ll work when we need it. But where? There’s isn’t much fuel, so it won’t cut that large of a path before running out.”

  Kadorax waited for the Blackened Blades to spread out around the den. One of the jackal huts in particular looked more defended than the others, with large wooden spears guarding the low entrance along with sturdier walls than all the rest, and it was located directly in the center. Kadorax pointed to it. “That’s where the alpha is going to be,” he said. “Think the drill will make it there?”

  An inquisitive hand on his chin, the gnome tapped his foot as he thought. “It should. It’ll get close, I know that.”

  “Perfect,” Kadorax replied. “We’ll come up right beneath the alpha. He’ll be worth the most experience points, you know?”

  “We?” the gnome basically gasped. “Here, let me show you how the device works, and I’ll explain what to do if anything goes wrong or if the blade slows down for some reason. Really, it isn’t that hard to operate, I think…”

  Elise gave a signal, and the Blackened Blades moved from their positions all around the jackal compound, slowly infiltrating it from a handful of places at once, daggers in hand. Their grim work would begin in a few seconds.

  “Come on,” the bastion said, grabbing the side of the drill and lifting it into the air.

  The gnome instinctively took hold of the other side and began walking forward in pace with Kadorax. “You can’t expect me to go with you,” he muttered under his breath when they set it down just outside the nearest building.

  Kadorax gave him a confident pat on the back. “You’ll be fine. Just operate the drill and bring me up under the alpha, then run back through the hole to safety. Easy as that.”

  “But that means I’ll be the first one to the surface…” the gnome said.

  “And the alpha won’t be ready for you, so you’ll have plenty of time to make an escape!” Kadorax reminded him. “Jump to the side, let
me climb out and get my footing, then run back.”

  The gnome’s eyes were full of just as much fear as when he had been accosted on the road to Skarm’s Reif. “It won’t be running. Crawling,” he urged.

  Kadorax shrugged. “Do you think the alpha will chase after you when I’m in his house and his pack is being slaughtered outside his walls?”

  With a heavy sigh of resignation, the gnome finally nodded. “I just bought a new enchanting talent last week. If I die before I get to use it, I’m going to find you in my next life and… pay someone to slit your throat,” he said.

  Kadorax had to stifle a laugh. The gnome, traitor though he was, was beginning to grow on him. “You’ll be fine, trust me,” he said.

  They only had to wait a few moments longer before a jackal, clearly wounded by the sound of its raspy howl, raised the alarm. “Light it!” Kadorax commanded, and the gnome burst into action.

  Sparks flew from a handheld contraption the gnome produced from his coat, and the coals were burning before long. Next, he smashed a glass vial onto the coals, instantly stoking the flames to a wild intensity. He dropped a few pinches of some foul-smelling compound into the water in the holding vat above the coals, and the drill’s blade began to turn. The machine was slow at first, but it gained speed with every passing second. When it was moving too fast to follow, the gnome operated a pair of levers which angled the bit downward until it made contact with the ground.