Assassinate Wonderwind [Book 1 Completed!]

Author note:

Summary of last chapter for those that skipped it:

They fucked.

Morning sunlight shone through the window with Veyra lying on my chest, eyes closed and soundly asleep. My eyes wanted to shut as well, having spent way too much time in VR last night, but I certainly didn’t complain about waking up in a situation like this.

Someone knocked, then opened the door. My head snapped up. The hell?

“Sawasdee?” a voice called from the entrance, followed by another Thai phrase that I didn’t understand.

Oh. That was Aree’s voice.

Footsteps approached, and we were seconds away from being caught in bed together. I quickly grabbed the blanket from the floor—we’d tossed it away due to the hot and sweaty night—I covered us just as Aree walked in, spotting me first.

Her step froze on the spot. All of our clothes were revealed on the floor under the blanket. She glanced at them, until she awkwardly took a step back, hiding behind the corner. “Sorry!”

Veyra mumbled herself awake as well. Groggily, she said, “Where’s my phone?”

I found her phone on the nightstand. She squinted at it, clicking the power button. The screen stayed black. “Oh, it ran out of battery… We missed the alarm.”

Her hair was a complete mess, eyes barely half open. She kept holding her phone with seemingly no thoughts at all in her sleepy head.

“Aree?” she asked sleepily in English. “What time is it?”

“Eight am,” Aree said. “Do you want me to, uhm… give you a minute?”

Veyra’s hair tickled my chest as she moved her head up. She looked around her apartment for a bit, until she plumped her head sideways back on my chest, speaking from there. “Aree, can you put my phone on the charger?”

I could have done that as well, but Veyra had locked me as her pillow. Aree showed herself, flushing a little, and put the phone on the charger. “Anything else?”

Veyra yawned. “That’s all, thanks. I need some more sleep.”

“Alright,” Aree said. “So I’m free to go?”

“Yeah, thanks Aree,” Veyra said again.

Aree smiled at me awkwardly before wishing us a nice day and leaving. The door closed, and we were back alone.

“Can we sleep in?” Veyra asked softly.

Even if I said no, she would have probably fallen asleep regardless. VR wouldn’t have let her in with how tired she was.

Even though my shoulder was getting tired, I enjoyed heaven a little longer, and we fell asleep.

***

Back at home, I usually rose from bed relatively quickly after waking up. Lazy mornings were surprisingly uncommon. There was always something to do in Wonderwind. If nothing else, seeing Veyra online gave me the motivation to rise from bed.

Today, my usual reason to wake up was being lazy in bed with me. The sun glared through the thin curtains brightly enough to wake us up around noon. I, personally, wasn’t in any rush to get out.

“So, uh, Aiden? You’ll kind of have to be my assistant for today.”

“Can’t wait. You ready to wake up?”

She kept her head on my chest. “Five more minutes.”

I stroked her hair, while leaning my head slightly to the left to avoid the sun.

“Today can be your trial day,” Veyra said. “I’ll still let you escape if you don’t like this. And let’s have our serious talk today.”

“Alright,” I said. “So, trial day today, you can decide whether you want to kick me out or not after.”

“I mean,” she said softly, “if you’re not slacking off, I’m not kicking you out. But just remember that I can be demanding.”

“No worries, I’ve trained for this.” I flexed my arm, revealing a not so impressive bicep.

She chuckled a little. “Can you give me my phone? I want to see the forums.”

I also wanted to see what the community thought about yesterday. Veyra opened the app, and on the front page was immediately what we were looking for. “The Largest Guild War of Caverns Of Creation: Full Video!”

The recording was a collection of perspectives from everyone that had streamed the battle. Most of it came from Dazzarth—Zenith Protocol’s warlock atop the battlements, or Merami, but snippets came all over the battlefield from the viewpoint that had the best closeup of the action. Whoever had edited the video had done a phenomenal job.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelFire for the genuine story.

“We had a bet, right?” Veyra asked before reading the comments. “Whoever gets the most upvotes on their clip has to pay for our next date?”

Two weeks hadn’t passed yet, but I said, “Sure, let’s see who’s more popular.”

By Kimchiwin, 4,780,551 upvotes: “Did Assassin and Veyra just guild wipe the whole fkin server?”

Reply By ErrinLols3rdwife, 3,882,129 upvotes: “LETS GOOOO, PURPLE VEYRA, WE BREAKING UP WITH ERRIN, VEYRA IS THE NEW WIFE”

Veyra choked a cough, immediately placing her phone down.

“Well, there’s almost four million for you,” I said. Veyra sighed, amused as she dubiously picked up her phone to scroll past. The next comments were a bit more normal.

By ChaosAlien, 3,129,788 upvotes: “Wow. That’s one messy battle. I’m impressed that Syntrix and Eon Covenant almost managed to push FireBrand back. Renlia controlled everything so well. Maybe she could have broken through if she wasn’t betrayed?”

Reply By Zoro148, 369,213 upvotes: “I’m losing respect for Annath more and more. Her guild just sat back, contributing absolutely nothing, except the moment it looked like Renlia was struggling. She betrayed them without any thought at all. And it’s not like she performed well either. Her whole guild got absolutely fucked in under a minute by two players. I hope her sword or armor dropped tbh.”

Reply By Chew7gum, 4,216,976 upvotes: “The betrayal was scummy, but Annath actually performed well. She didn’t need one minute to reach Renlia from the back. Look at 4:17, she side-stepped Zenmir’s Absolute Zero, killed him, and then canceled Renlia’s casting with Celestial Slash. That was the final straw for crushing Syntrix’s formation. She’s a god for a reason.”

Reply By DingusChungus, 5,567,117 upvotes: “And she once again got crushed by Solo Mage. So when do we start looking at which two of the gods get replaced?”

Reply By Aniomaly, 5,895,156 upvotes: “Assassin and Veyra played so fkin well. Maybe their performance wasn’t as flashy as in Worlds, but they dismantled the fight so well. A literally earned enough to retire from collecting Annath’s body.”

“That five million doesn’t count,” Veyra said. “He’s praising both of us. He just mentioned you as an example.”

“Alright,” I said with a laugh, and we kept reading.

By Trixterx, 6,751,988 upvotes: “Holy shit, look at FireBrand’s casting. He’s gotten so much faster. It’s like he’s enkindling immediately. It almost looks like he’s double casting.”

Reply By Greenwitch, 681,228 upvotes: “I think you’re spot on. That actually looks like double casting. And it’s not just him. Look at Veyra at 2:16. Her staff shows the casting circle for Frost Storm, but when her spell comes out, she fires Hex Of Dawnbreak as well. I’m not 100%, but it actually looks like she’s double casting.”

“Oh, it’s Greenwitch,” I said, a grin appearing. I wondered where this guy had disappeared to. Maybe we were just so popular that getting comments onto the front page was difficult. His comment also had way less upvotes than others, meaning many people seemed to disagree with him.

Reply By SaviorSal, 3,682,179 upvotes: “You mean, double casting with the method Fire theorized in like 2020? Everyone deemed that impossible lol. Like, not just impractical but actually impossible. I’m pretty sure someone else fired the hex at the same time so it just looks like that.”

“My sister is actually playing with that guy, by the way,” I said.

“Wait,” Veyra said. “With Greenwitch? The same guy who asked for our signatures?”

“Yep. She was practicing quick-casting earlier. I wonder how they’re doing.”

Veyra chuckled at that. We continued scrolling for a bit, though most comments were quite similar. People were arguing about whose god status should be revoked, praising us, praising FireBrand. The less upvoted comments got a bit nerdy with analysis, trying to study new items, my sickle being one of them. A lot of people were already making predictions for Worlds 2027.

Sadly, we’d missed the five competitors’ invitations that would have been available had we cleared through Zenith Protocol and completed the quest. Still, obtaining at least one ticket should have been a given. “Can you check the top five hundred leaderboard real quick?” I asked. “We’ve probably climbed a bit.”

“Sure, I think it updated last night.” Veyra pulled it up. She didn’t need to scroll down a lot to find the first of our names.

Veyra - Rank 32

Assassin - Rank 37

“Wait,” I said. “You overtook me?”

She grinned. “Probably from the cheese spot at the castle. I got a lot of levels from that. I was actually higher level than FireBrand for a bit. He probably got past me after the fight yesterday, though.”

So that was pretty much Worlds tickets secured. At least one pair of them. “Should we try the guild PvP next year?”

“What, you want to expand the guild?”

“Nah, together.”

She gave me a look. “Yeah, sure?” Then she laughed, clearly joking.

We stayed in bed for a little longer with Veyra finding herself in the meme section of the forums. The posts weren’t quite as high quality as they were when Worlds was around—the community really got together to create the good shit around that time—but that didn’t stop us laughing at whatever nonsense our feeds showed. Dragrath and VeilShot were being made fun of for missing the action entirely.

“Oh my god,” I said, showing my phone to Veyra. “It’s this guy again!”

The meme had the caption, “DJmooselele,” with a picture of the most awkward moose I’d ever seen, poorly photoshopped to stand outside Shaltar’s castle. It wore Miko’s cloak and his colorful warlock’s staff, while watching his guild get hit by Frost Storm.

Veyra just shook her head at it. “Why is there Shrek on the castle?”

“Hold up,” I said, and I burst out laughing when I saw that Dazzarth, atop the walls, had been photoshopped into Shrek for whatever reason.

“How is that the funniest thing to you?” Veyra asked with an amused chuckle of her own.

From there, ever so slowly, we finally gathered the energy to get out of bed, starting with taking a shower. I thought I’d need to learn how to take care of Veyra’s hair, but she told me that all I needed to do was carry her to her shower seat. She could take a shower just fine, all the way to the point where she had to put clothes back on. I got her dressed with her instructions, with a few kisses in between, and placed her on her wheelchair so she could watch that I prepared her food correctly.

“I can also technically make my own smoothie,” Veyra said. “It’s just a pain in the ass to do any of this stuff with one arm.”

“I can do this much every day, no problem,” I promised. Veyra had the recipes for all of her foods written in Thai for her assistants, which I of course didn’t understand. Instead, she just told me what to make.

“I have three different meals I usually eat,” she said. “Most days, I just survive with a smoothie. It’s designed to have balanced nutrients and low fat to be digested easily. I also can’t ever eat too much at once. Ideally, I need to take sips throughout the day instead of eating big meals like normal people.”

I followed her instructions carefully, until it was complete. “Yeah, this won’t be a problem. I can easily make one of these every day. What’s next?”

“I guess that’s it,” Veyra said. “I usually just get to VR now. Of course there’s cleaning and general house stuff, but I won’t make you do that. My assistants are still coming every day for the boring stuff.”

“You don’t seem nearly as demanding as you’ve made yourself out to be, Veyra.”

“Eh.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s just the brain up here that’s demanding. Just take me to VR. We still haven’t looked at all the loot we got yesterday.”

With our timeout for getting too spicy with each other lifted, we logged back into Wonderwind to examine the absolutely massive pile of loot we’d stolen from the best players in the world.