I suppose I need to keep leveling Eternal Regeneration anyway… Asher thought, trying and failing to convince himself that this was a good idea as he looked back at the bone monstrosity desperately chasing after him with its jaw snapping. Before he could talk himself out of it, Asher let his movements start to flag, pretending to be far more tired than he actually was. He dodged the bone construct two more times, before letting it finally catch him on the third.

  He didn’t have to waste energy acting out the screams that followed.

  Just as he’d suspected, the bone construct purposefully avoided most of his immediate vitals as it ripped into him. Sure, he definitely took a horn to the kidney, and from the number of lacerations it clawed across his body he’d definitely be bleeding out sooner than later, but the bone monster didn’t rip out his jugular or stab him through the heart.

  Talon enjoyed basking in her opponent’s pain and sorrow far too much to let things end so quickly.

  Almost as if she’d been waiting for her cue, Talon reappeared directly in front of him once her monster had finished tearing into him. As if his pain and suffering brought her physical sustenance, she leaned down and grinned as she breathed in deeply over his devastated body. Complete Resilience was admittedly doing an absolute wonder for the pain, but Asher was still experiencing more agony than he ever had in his entire life.

  “The mighty Reaper, beaten and broken like so many who came before you,” Talon said, crouching down over his form and taking in another deep breath through her nose as she shuddered. “Yes, this is why I drag out my kills. The smell of despair and the impending death that we both know is to come. That is what I live for.”

  “I’m pretty certain you can’t smell despair,” Asher said, coughing out blood and eliciting a frown from Talon.

  “Mouthy to the end, aren’t you?” she asked, flicking her hand and summoning a jet-black feather out of nowhere with a gleaming edge Asher had no doubt would cut through flesh like butter. “Let’s see if we can’t speed things along, shall we?” With a curt laugh, she bent down even further, plunging the feather into the side of his neck, careful to avoid the carotid artery and drag out his suffering even further.

  But that was exactly what Asher had been waiting for. The moment she leaned down, he activated Personal Rift, summoning the perfect item for the situation directly into his waiting hands.

  One of the vials of Eight’s fabled magadrine powder he’d looted from the assassin’s workshop after he’d killed him.

  With the state his arms were currently in he didn’t have the strength to shatter the reinforced glass or even uncork the vial for that matter, but he could do one better. A single touch of his finger was all he needed to activate the second tier effect of Distortion, and he grinned even as Talon stabbed him in the neck when he felt the cork sealing the bottle suddenly shrink to a fraction of its size.

  Shining blue powder exploded out of the vial at his side as it reacted with the air, covering the two of them in an instant. Even as he laughed at the familiar sensation of his lungs beginning to seize up, he watched Talon’s eyes widen as the blue powder landed under her hood and coated her pale skin. Without her own form of resistance, Talon dropped dead in a heartbeat, the magadrine powder proving once again just why Eight had been feared across the land as the kingdom’s deadliest alchemist.

  As the bone construct that had been waiting patiently off to the side crumbled apart, Asher quickly activated the second tier of Complete Resilience, purging the effects of the magadrine powder before he could follow her into the lands of the dead. His injuries were absolutely still going to do him in, as he was currently bleeding out faster than Eternal Regeneration could heal him, but he had one last thing he needed to do first.

  Ignoring the glowing sphere of shards floating over the dead assassin lying on his chest, Asher summoned his sending stone to his hand. Making sure to select the rune for Samantha rather than the rune for Donvath, he pressed it. There was always the chance that she was still in the middle of battle, but he’d flown with Talon for quite a good bit before they touched down. That should have been more than enough time for Samantha and Moxy to finish off Scale and get out of there before the other senior assassins showed up.

  “Asher?” Samantha’s voice sounded from the stone, and he let out a sigh of relief he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Despite knowing from the Eternal Mark he’d left on her that she hadn’t sustained any serious injuries, actually hearing her voice was much more reassuring. “Where are you? Moxy and I took down the Lizard element user, or whatever he was, and fled the building. We’re back in the underground tunnels, heading toward the arena. Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” he said, glancing down at the quarts of blood that were slowly pooling out of his mangled body. “Listen, don’t freak out, but I’m going to die in a minute, alright? I’m in a safe location, though, so everything should be fine.”

  Safe was definitely debatable, but as far as he could tell, Talon had selected this particular area to be her usual killing spot. He could only assume she'd taken the proper precautions to ensure that random monsters or wayward wanderers wouldn't be stumbling around into it while she was conducting her business.

  The other line was silent for a moment, and he could have sworn he heard Moxy shouting at him to ‘heal faster, runt’ in the background, before Samantha sighed.

  “That’s really not all that reassuring, for the record. What happened with Nine?”

  “Talon? Oh, she’s dead,” he said, his eyes trailing from his own injuries to her corpse. “Yeah, no question there. I ended up having to waste one of my few vials of magadrine powder to do it, though.”

  “Well, if it resulted in her dying and you not… yet, I guess… then it was a good use of it in my book,” Samantha said. “Why not just Recall here and let Moxy and I heal you? If you’re still conscious, you can just Recall over here, can’t you?”

  “For one, I need to keep leveling my own skills,” he tried to explain. “I’m not yet at the point where I’m crazy enough to purposefully kill myself to level Eternal Regeneration, but seeing as I’ve already got two feet in the grave, might as well take advantage of that. On top of which, I want to collect my spoils of war that are floating right in front of my face, teasing me, which means I need to wait until I can lift my arms again.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  When she died, Talon had collapsed across his body, resulting in her glowing sphere of shards to drift directly above his own chest. His arms refused to move so much as an inch, and his hands weren’t angled in the correct orientation to allow him to stretch out a finger with Distortion and touch the sphere. Talon had been one of the Fingers for the Assassin’s Guild, the assassin in charge of the Guild’s activities for an entire city. There were who knew how many hundreds of thousands of shards floating three feet from his face, and he couldn’t so much as touch them.

  He wasn’t leaving this spot until he’d snatched them up for himself.

  “Alright, that makes sense,” Samantha said slowly. Despite the fact that he couldn’t see her face, her tone made it quite clear what she thought of the idea. “I suppose the two of us will just lay low for a bit. Try not to draw any more attention to ourselves.”

  “The Guild is based out of the city’s second ring. I’d be willing to bet you guys can wander around the first one pretty freely,” he offered, blinking to try and get the sudden darkness out of his vision. As a deep chill spread throughout his body, he realized what was actually happening, and he hurried to end the call. “Sorry… gotta go… dying…”

  “Come find us when you’re back,” Samantha said quickly. The last thing he heard before cutting off the call was Moxy shouting something about him not truly dying before she got her rematch, and he was sent into his fifth death with a full-body shudder at the thought of Moxy forcing him to dodge air blast after air blast once more.

  It had been early morning when Asher died for the fifth time. Thankfully, based on how the sun was now directly overhead, he’d only been gone for a couple of hours. He also hadn’t experienced another freaky vision like the last time he’d been killed, which he was incredibly thankful for. Something about drifting about in an endless expanse of nothingness, knowing that an entity larger than anything he could physically conceive of was watching his every move, tended to freak him out a little. Frankly, it was a miracle he wasn’t having nightmares every night after experiencing whatever the hell that had been, and he was immensely grateful to discover not every death would result in him having to live through that again.

  A quick flex of his muscles was all the indication he needed to confirm that everything appeared to be in mostly working order once more. He still had some soreness in his kidneys, but that wasn’t all that surprising, seeing as organs were one of the harder things for Eternal Regeneration to repair. Pushing Talon’s corpse off of him, he sat up, finally reaching up and snatching the still-waiting sphere of shards out of the air before something could happen to it.

  According to what he’d read in the library, eventually, shards would begin to slowly dissipate over time if left outside of the soul, unless they were conjured in their maximum increment of a million shards. It seemed the reason why a million shards formed a flawless sphere was because that was their ‘stable’ form, a fact that didn’t matter to ninety-nine percent of the population, seeing as the only people who would ever have to worry about conjuring more than a million shards were the nobility.

  Back on his feet and shards finally collected, Asher took in his newest notifications.

  Complete Resilience - Lvl 33

  Personal Rift - Lvl 30

  Distortion - Lvl 32

  Eternal Regeneration - Lvl 34

  Shards: 1,142,467

  Nearly two hundred and fifty thousand shards… Not as much as Eight had been holding, but not bad at all. He didn’t know if that was due to shard decay, how long the shards had been floating out here for while he regenerated, or just because Talon was a bigger spender than Eight had been. But whatever the case, two hundred and fifty thousand more shards was nothing to scoff at. They hadn’t even had their auction yet and already he’d broken back into the seven figures when it came to wealth.

  I need to swing back by that artifact shop in Dormaul one of these days. If there are any effects I really want, I finally have enough shards to buy an artifact, use Permanence on it, and then immediately ‘return’ it back. Opal said I wouldn’t get all my shards back, but it would still be worth the exchange.

  Hell, he had enough shards that it might be worth hitting up the Grand Auction as a buyer once more. Only rather than going after any more popular elements, he could check out what unique artifacts were being put up for sale.

  The thought of artifacts reminded him that he still needed to check Talon’s body for whatever it was that had allowed her to vanish into thin air like she had. Yet strangely enough, a quick search revealed that while she did in fact have an artifact on her, it wasn’t one related to stealth.

  [Amulet of Perception] - Grants the user the domain skill (Tier 1).

  Well, at least that explains how she knew we were coming, he thought, recognizing the skill from his time spent skimming the Big Book of Elements: Sixth Edition. The Domain skill allowed its user to designate an area as their domain, most often a building or a chunk of land. The owner of the skill was then alerted whenever someone entered said domain, making it nearly impossible to catch them unawares. It was a useful skill, and one Asher could think of more than a few uses for.

  Realizing he was getting ahead of himself, Asher shook his head, trying to wash off any remaining brain fog from having just been dead. He was Moxy and Samantha’s ride back to the capital, and he’d left the two of them alone for hours. Praying that they hadn’t gotten themselves into any trouble while he was dead, he didn’t even bother scrying his mark on Samantha before triggering Recall. The world shifted around him, and he blinked as he suddenly found himself standing on the edge of an alleyway, looking at Samantha’s surprised face as she took a bite out of some sort of meat skewer.

  “Realms, that is jarring!” Moxy laughed, lowering her fists from the fighting stance she’d snapped into out of reflex. “Gotta say, you look pretty good for a dead guy! Other than the giant holes in your fancy outfit.”

  Samantha was still busy chewing, but that didn’t stop her from throwing her arms around him, squeezing him tight as she hurried to finish up and swallow. Letting out a gasp, she laughed as well.

  “I’m glad you’re okay!”

  “I told you I would be,” he smiled, enjoying the sudden embrace as he hugged her back. “Did the two of you have any trouble with Scale?”

  “What, Lizard boy?” Moxy asked, snorting as she shook her head. “Not even a little bit. Did you know your girl here can shoot a man in the eye mid-run from less than a dozen feet away? Some of the best archery I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s nothing, you should see what my brother can do,” Samantha said, blushing at the praise. “And Moxy’s selling herself short. She took the fight to him, dodging or blocking just about everything until I could get a clear shot at him. I have absolutely no idea how she managed to keep herself from getting her limbs ripped off.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it worked out,” Asher said, looking between the two of them. “No other senior assassins chased after you?”

  “Nah, I think they were more worried about their boss,” Moxy said, raising an eyebrow. “Wings here says you finished her off?”

  “Yeah, she’s down for good. I got her shards and everything.”

  “Well then, I’d say that means our first practice mission was a success!” Moxy grinned, raising her fist in triumph. “Let’s warp back to the palace and celebrate with a quick round of sparring!”

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