Chapter 107: Dark Arrow
In the pitch-black gloom of the monster zone, the man pressed forward with meticulous care. Every step he took was calculated, his boots making near-silent contact with the earth. He paused, his dark gaze cutting to his right before pivoting on his heel to follow a narrow opening between the trees.
*This feels ominous. It's like I'm heading towards something that I'm looking for, even though I don't even know what that looks like. So this is what it feels like.*
A sharp, violent whoosh sliced through the air directly toward him. His internal alert system spiked instantly, his heart slammed against his ribs, his blood ran hot, the fine hairs on his arms stood on end, and his muscles coiled tight like steel cables. He spun his body toward the sudden surge of raw, murderous intent. In a fraction of a second, his eyes locked onto a single arrow flying straight for his chest.
He leaped to his left, diving clear of the projectile's path.
*What?*
The arrow whistled past his shoulder by a hair's breadth, driving its point deep into the trunk of a massive tree directly behind him. The instant the arrowhead embedded itself into the wood, it detonated with a sudden burst of white mist. Frost surged across the bark in every direction, crawling over the trunk like thousands of living, frantic icy insects, freezing the giant tree solid in a blinding flash of white ice.
His heart hammered violently in his chest at the terrifying display. He reached to his hips, drawing both black daggers from their sheaths, their dark steel catching the faint ambient light. He scanned the dense wall of shadows ahead.
"Who's there?" he shouted into the dark.
He activated his skill, Clear Sight. Instantly, the oppressive pitch-black forest transformed in his vision. The shadows vanished entirely, replacing the darkness with a crisp, fully illuminated blue landscape that revealed every branch and leaf in sharp detail.
*That was definitely an archer.*
He turned his shoulders, but his breath hitched in his throat as his blue-tinted vision caught a silver-haired woman sprinting between the trees. An arrow was already nocked and traveling on a direct trajectory toward his head. He jerked his head violently to the side, feeling the wind of the passing shaft brush against his ear.
*It's a woman?*
He drove his boots into the dirt, preparing to launch himself directly toward her position. But the arrow that had just missed his ear struck a tree behind him and exploded. A wave of heavy, pressurized mist erupted outward, expanding exponentially in seconds until a massive, fifty-meter cloud of thick white fog swallowed the surrounding forest whole.
He leapt backward, flinching as he raised his forearm to shield his eyes from the sudden burst of vapor.
*Mist. Is she trying to stop me from seeing the incoming arrows?*
A ruthless grin broke across his face. *How stupid.*
He activated his skill, Quick Step. An explosive surge of energy flooded his nervous system, his body growing impossibly light as his movement speed surged by fifty percent for five minutes. He launched forward like a missile, sprinting straight through the swirling fog toward Rebecca, who was running off toward his left.
Though she remained enveloped inside the mist, his Clear Sight cut through the fog effortlessly, keeping her outline outlined in bright blue.
Rebecca glanced over her shoulder, her eyes stretching wide with shock as she saw the assassin barreling straight for her through the fog, dual daggers drawn and his feet moving in a terrifying blur.
*He spotted me.*
A sharp realization hit her. *He must be an assassin.*
An arrow sat nocked on her bowstring. She drew the string back, but as the shaft flew, the assassin's eyes narrowed on her wrapped weapon. Beneath the white bandages, a concentrated, unnatural glow pulsed from a specific spot at the center of the frame.
*Are those runes?* A fresh spike of panic flared in his chest.
Rebecca released her shot. In a split second, the assassin reached into his belt, pulling four tiny steel nails between his fingers, and hurled them violently toward her. The four nails cut through the air, bypassing the incoming arrow on a direct line for her frame.
Rebecca spotted the incoming steel and triggered her skill, Archer's Flight, boosting her movement speed by forty percent for three minutes.
The assassin prepared to dodge her incoming arrow, but his heart slammed against his chest in absolute shock. Mid-flight, the single arrow suddenly split apart, multiplying multiple times in the blink of an eye into a dense, terrifying wall of razor-sharp arrowheads.
"Shit," he muttered.
He raised both black daggers, his arms blurring into an incredible frenzy of rapid slashes. He intercepted the incoming swarm in midair, his steel blades clashing against the arrowheads, shattering the shafts apart one after another in a shower of flying splinters.
*There's so many! What kind of skill is this?*
A single arrow slipped through his whirlwind defense, its sharp point burying deep into his right shoulder. He winced in pain, forcing his focus to hold as he crossed his daggers over each other, swinging continuously to block the remainder of the deadly barrage. Severed arrowheads and broken wood rained into the brush around him, the force of the impacts echoing through the trees.
When the barrage finally ended, the assassin leaned forward, his lungs heaving for air. His right arm hung lower than his left, trembling from the sheer impact of deflecting the onslaught.
Behind a nearby tree trunk, Rebecca pressed her spine against the bark, her teeth clenched tight. *Damn it, I'm not fast enough. I couldn't dodge it.*
She looked down at her hip, where one of the tiny steel nails was driven deep into her flesh.
*Damn it.*
She pinched the exposed tail of the nail between two fingers. The moment her touch met the metal, a searing, agonizing pain radiated straight into her hip bone, surging through her entire body. She was certain she possessed an exceptionally high tolerance for physical injury, yet she knew with absolute certainty that a small puncture wound was not supposed to hurt like this.
She couldn't understand why the sensation cut so deep or why the pain burned with such overwhelming intensity. Without wasting a single second, she gritted her teeth and yanked the bloodied nail free, dropping it onto the earth in front of her.
"Come out, you coward!" the assassin roared into the fog. "Show yourself!"
He reached up with his left hand, wrapping his fingers around the arrow shaft protruding from his right shoulder. Clenching his teeth against the agony, he ripped the arrow free from his flesh, tossing the bloody tip into the dirt.
"This fucking bitch," he muttered under his breath.
His eyes swept the blue-illuminated forest. *I was so distracted by those arrows, I have no idea where she hid. But if she moves even a little bit, I'll spot her.*
At the edge of his vision, a faint shift of movement caught behind a tree trunk.
*There you are.*
He exploded into a sprint, the rushing wind driving his hair backward as he tore across the ground.
Activating his skill, Throw, he cocked his arm and hurled his right dagger straight at the tree trunk. Rebecca dived violently to her left just as the heavy dagger struck the wood with a thundering impact, shattering the massive tree trunk as if it were dry kindling.
She ground her teeth together, scrambling backward across the forest floor. Her eyes widened in horror as she saw the assassin closing the remaining distance. The man carried a dark, ruthless expression, sprinting straight for her with his remaining dagger raised to strike.
He was almost upon her, and she knew that if he closed the distance completely, she would be at a massive disadvantage.
"You're dead, bitch!"
Seeing the distance between them shrinking too fast for her bow, Rebecca made a split-second choice to draw her dagger. She pulled the blade from its sheath, but before her arm could move, the assassin's elbow slammed violently into the side of her neck, choking off her breath in a strangled gasp.
With his forearm still pinned against her throat, he drove a heavy fist, still clutching his black dagger, straight into her stomach. Keeping his weight pressed into her body, he shoved her backward across the terrain, driving her frame meters back until she rammed violently against a thick tree. The trunk groaned under the collision, bark splintering onto the forest floor as her body crashed against the wood.
Rebecca groaned in pain, her breath ragged.
"Who are you?" the man pressed, leaning close. "Who sent you?"
Rebecca looked up, catching a sudden shift in his dark eyes. His broad gaze widened, his angry snarl dissolving into stunned horror as if staring at a phantom. Taking advantage of his shock, Rebecca drew a second, concealed dagger with her free hand. The blade ignited with a brilliant, white-hot crimson glow as she slashed it upward toward his wrist.
The assassin jerked his arm back just in time, stepping clear before the burning steel could graze his skin. Rebecca pressed a trembling hand against her bruised throat, coughing violently as she fought to draw air into her lungs, hot tears stinging her eyes.
"How is this possible?" the man muttered, staring down at her with wide, incredulous eyes. "Are you..."
"I'm going to kill you!" Rebecca barked, cutting him off before he could finish.
The assassin froze for a moment, then let out a low chuckle. The sound quickly escalated, twisting into a loud, hysterical laugh that echoed off the surrounding trees.
"It really is you," he said, pointing his remaining dagger directly at her face before spreading his arms wide in mock celebration. "After so many years... I had almost forgotten you were still alive."
Rebecca's eyes flicked to his side. Her bow lay resting in the dirt where it had fallen when he drove her backward. She knew she desperately needed to reach it. She was trapped in close quarters against an assassin, a class designed specifically for lethal melee combat, and as an archer, she stood no chance in a knife fight.
The assassin dragged his gaze slowly up and down her body, his eyes lingering on her curvy frame before settling on her face. "Well, you've definitely grown into a very fine woman. You take after your mother, I see," he said, a sickening grin spreading across his lips.
Something deep within Rebecca snapped at the mention of her mother. Pure, unadulterated fury surged through her blood. She planted her foot to spring forward, ready to hurl herself at his throat.
Her leg gave out completely, and she collapsed hard onto the dirt as if she had tripped over thin air.
The assassin giggled at her fall. "Wow, you're just as wild as you were, I see. Even after so many years."
Rebecca lay on the ground, her chest heaving in shock. She didn't understand why her body had failed her, but the horrifying reality quickly set in. Her left leg felt completely dead, as if the limb had been severed from her hip entirely.
She looked down at her left thigh where the tiny steel nail had pierced her skin earlier. To her horror, dark black and purple veins were bulging beneath her flesh, raised, unnatural tracks spreading rapidly across her skin like venomous roots.
*It was poisoned?*
The assassin stepped forward, his boots crunching against the forest soil. "Looks like the poison is setting in. Took long enough."
He crouched down to her eye level, that dark, twisted grin still plastered across his face. "Can't wait to tell the boss about this. He's not going to believe it."
"Shut up, you disgusting pervert," Rebecca spat, her voice trembling with hatred.
"A pervert?" The man's smile vanished. He stood up slowly, rolling his shoulders in a casual shrug. "How could I have not done what I did when I was in front of such a beautiful woman?"
He raised his black dagger to his mouth. Extending his tongue, he dragged it slowly across the flat side of the steel blade, his eyes locked onto her. "Now I get to have the daughter as well."
The assassin's head snapped backward, his eyes bulging in sudden shock.
Without a moment of hesitation, Rebecca drove the tip of her dagger directly into her own poisoned hip.
The blade was no longer burning red; a faint, icy blue glow radiated from the metal. The instant the point bit into her flesh, a wave of solid frost erupted from the wound, spreading across her skin in every direction. The ice encased her thigh, racing down to her knee and surging upward around her waist, instantly freezing her flesh and deadening the venom in her veins.
Rebecca clenched her jaw tight against the blinding agony of the frostbite and the blade. "I'd rather die than let you do that to me, you disgusting pig!"
Shaking violently, she planted her hands flat against the dirt and forced her body upward. She pushed herself into a sit, then slowly dragged herself onto her feet, standing tall on trembling, frozen legs.
"I swear on my father's name, you're not getting out of here alive! You hear me?" The words tore from her raw throat, dripping with pure, burning fury.
*The poison should have made it impossible for her to stand. Is it because she froze it?*
Rebecca took a quick, painful step forward, reaching toward her bow on the ground. The assassin hopped to the left, his heavy boot stomping down onto the wooden frame, pinning the weapon to the earth.
Rebecca halted, a sharp gasp tearing from her mouth as an agonizing wave of pain surged through her frozen leg. The numbness she had felt earlier vanished, replaced by an intense, vibrating throb that pulsed through her bone like a feverish heartbeat at the exact spot where the nail had pierced her hip.
A dark grin spread across the assassin's face. "You're pretty tough, I'll give you that. Kind of like your old man."
"Don't talk about him," Rebecca rasped, her voice thick with pain.
In that exact moment, a sudden, sharp sound broke from the dense foliage directly beside the assassin. The unexpected rustle echoed through the quiet forest, and the attention of both Rebecca and the assassin snapped instantly toward the direction of the brush.
A rogue slime erupted from the thick leaves, hurtling through the air on a direct trajectory for the assassin's head. Driven by raw instinct, the man turned, bringing his wide black dagger up in a swift, sweeping arc to slash the creature in mid-air.
As the blade cleaved the slime in half and it dissolved into a cloud of blue dust, Rebecca recognized the split-second opening.
Gathering every remaining drop of strength in her aching body, she launched herself forward, gripping her dagger with both hands. She triggered her skill, Archer's Flight, her movement speed exploding in a sudden, desperate surge. Her eyes locked onto the unguarded opening along the man's ribs.
This was her moment.
Her blade was inches from his chest, its steel glowing a faint, icy blue as she aimed to freeze his lungs solid in a single heartbeat. But the assassin's smile widened as he spun. With terrifying speed, he flipped his black dagger in his grip and drove the steel downward into her back.
The blade sank deep into her flesh. Rebecca spat a spray of blood, her eyes stretching wide in shock as her legs gave out. She collapsed hard onto the dirt beside her bow, the glassy slime core tumbling close to her waist and rolling several feat across the ground.
"You didn't think that was actually going to work, did you?" the assassin taunted, watching the pool of dark blood coming form her back. He drew his boot back and kicked her hard in the ribs.
Rebecca wheezed in agony, her body flipping over onto her back.
"I thought you were actually smart, but you decided to attack me," he said, stepping over her. "Then again, even if you tried to run, you couldn't."
He slammed his heavy boot down directly onto her poisoned hip.
Rebecca squeezed her eyes shut, a strangled scream trapped in her throat. She pressed her elbows against the dirt, trying desperately to push her upper body off the ground. In an instant, his boot swung upward, the heavy leather sole smashing directly into her nose.
The blunt impact cracked against her face, driving her head back onto the hard earth with enough violence that her brain rattled inside her skull. Crimson blood poured from her nostrils, pooling across her lips and jaw.
"It's a shame," the man said, looking down at her battered face. "I'm sure the boss would have loved to meet you before you die. And I can't let this chance go to waste."
He licked his lips, a dark, hungry glint in his eyes.
Dropping to his knees, he seized her free hand and drove his dagger straight through her palm, pinning her hand flat to the dirt. Rebecca's eyes flared wide as a high, agonized shriek tore from her throat, but his hand slammed over her mouth, stifling the sound.
"We wouldn't want to attract any monsters," he whispered, kneeling over her chest. "Let's enjoy this quietly."
A wave of pure, suffocating disgust swept over Rebecca. Every fiber of her being screamed to tear him off her, but the strength in her limbs was draining fast, cold numbness spreading through her veins.
The assassin reached down with his free hand, unbuckling his belt.
She turned her head to the side, her cheek pressed against the cold dirt. Inches away, her eyes caught the glint of an arrow lying in the dirt, one of the shafts the assassin had deflected during her earlier barrage.
Summoning every remaining drop of strength, Rebecca reached out with her unpinned hand and wrapped her fingers around the wooden shaft of the arrow. The assassin leaned low, his face dropping toward her neck as his hot, foul breath brushed against her skin.
Rebecca drove the arrow point toward the side of his neck. But inches before it could pierce his skin, his hand clamped over hers, his fingers locking over her grip and halting the arrow in mid-air.
"What are you doing?" he asked, a twisted smile spreading across his face as his leering eyes stared down into hers. "You can't stop this, Sharp. Just let it happen. Let's enjoy this."
Hearing him speak her surname sent a sickening wave of repulsion through her body.
Instantly, the arrow in her hand flared with a faint red glow. Before the assassin could even react, the arrow detonated within both of their arms.
A violent explosion erupted between their clamped hands. The blast blew apart the fingers on both their hands, sending severed flesh and bone flying in all directions.
Racked by the blinding agony of her own mangled hand, Rebecca lay on the ground, her chest heaving as she clenched her teeth to keep from blacking out.
Fighting the excruciating pain, she relied on her only remaining option, her other hand, still pinned to the dirt by the blade through her palm. Gathering every ounce of strength, she swung her pinned hand in a violent, side-slapping arc, driving the blade straight into the side of his neck.
The steel bit deep, plunging into his throat. His eyes bulged in shock, his jaw clenching against the searing pain as blood gurgled in his neck.
Rebecca ground her teeth together and yanked her hand violently backward. Resistance met the steel as the razor edge cut through dense human muscle, tearing through her own flesh between her fingers as it ripped clear out through the front of his throat, severing his windpipe.
The blood-slicked dagger clattered onto the earth.
"It... can't..." the assassin gurgled, blood pooling from his neck before he collapsed onto the dirt beside her, going completely still.
Rebecca breathed heavily, her eyelids barely open as she stared up at the night sky, framed by the dark canopy of the trees above. She had done it. She had finally killed him after so many years. But the overwhelming, agonizing pain in her body began to flood her senses. She raised her exploded hand into her line of sight, and horror seized her throat, nearly her entire hand was gone. Only her thumb remained, dangling uselessly from her wrist by a thin thread of torn flesh.
"No," she rasped, her voice breaking. "Not like this."
Summoning every remaining drop of energy, she turned her body, flipping over onto her chest. The stab wound in her back had bled profusely, painting her entire back in deep crimson.
Disoriented and weak, she began to crawl away from the dead assassin, dragging herself through the dirt.
*It's pathetic. It can't end like this.*
A violent, stabbing pain rammed through her skull, feeling as if a thick needle were being driven slowly into the back of her head. The cold frost she had cast into her hip had failed to stop the venom completely, she felt the dark poison surging into her upper body, spreading rapidly through her abdomen and chest.
Dark, raised veins bulged across her skin, tracing over her limbs. Shock washed over her.
*No, please. Not just him.*
She dragged her body forward using her elbows, her boots scraping weakly against the ground.
*It can't end with him.*
The pain multiplied exponentially. Her heart hammered wildly against her ribs, but every single beat felt like a sharp needle piercing directly through her heart. She had never experienced agony so intense.
Then, without warning, total darkness swallowed her vision. Everything vanished into black. Though still conscious, she was rendered completely blind.
She knew why. She had heard of this horror before, and now she was experiencing it firsthand.
It was the assassin's skill: Poison Weapon, one of the most feared abilities in the world. The venom inflicted unimaginable agony, driving its victims to die in sheer terror. Before taking their lives, it stripped away their sight, trapping them in a world of absolute pitch-black pain and fear.
Even in the pitch-black void, she forced her elbows to dig into the dirt, dragging herself forward inch by inch. She didn't know where she was going or why she kept moving, but fighting was the only instinct left to her.
"Please," she muttered, her voice fracturing.
"Someone..." she whispered into the dirt.
With a final, desperate surge of will, she opened her mouth and screamed with everything she had left. She tried to cry out for help, but the sound came out choked, dragged, and barely legible.
Instantly, her body went rigid, completely paralyzed. Her head dropped heavily to the earth like a discarded mannequin. The venom continued to stab through every nerve in her frame, an agonizing fire that grew worse with every passing second. Unable to see, unable to move, she lay helpless on the ground.
*I can't take it anymore.*
Through the roaring pain in her ears, she caught a sound, footsteps, coming to a halt right in front of her.
Though blind and immobile, her heart pounded against her ribs, a fragile spark of hope flaring in the dark.
Standing directly before her was Tyler. His eyes widened in absolute shock as he took in the sight, the bloodied, silver-haired woman lying mangled on the forest floor, and the corpse of the assassin resting in the dirt just meters behind her.
"What is this?" Tyler breathed out, his voice barely a whisper.