Cloaking technology.

Midnight struck, and Wolf had managed to navigate his way deep into the Automata dug caverns in search of his target. Besides the messenger Raven, he had had no communication with the outside world. He much preferred it that way.

He didn’t like these caves, though; some of them would roast you alive; they all smelled somewhat sulphurous. As an assassin, Wolf did not appreciate that; he relied on all his senses in the quest for his bounties. So having one less was unpleasant to him, especially since it felt like his nose was being stopped up with rotten eggs, that or maybe like a giant farted; either way, the result was the same.

On the plus side, his target couldn’t be that hard to find; human beings were at somewhat of a premium round here right now. Given that the whole place would have roasted them faster than you could say fried bounty hunter (not a phrase wolf liked for obvious reasons.)

He sniffed the air again, realised why he had stopped doing so with a grimace, and instead pulled out a portable life sign detection scroll. He hated using these things; to call them flaky was an understatement. They made dandruff seem like amateur hour in comparison. They only scanned through so many walls as well, so he was fully resolved to having to use a small fortune's worth of the godsdamned things when to his surprise, a blip showed up on his first scan. He quickly noted the general direction and headed off (the scrolls being single-use and fading after about a minute was a great scam as far as he was concerned, but not one he was too keen to fall victim to as a lifelong cheapskate. There was a reason he lived in the wild; after all, inns were expensive, and he preferred to spend his money on new and creative ways to stab stuff rather than pointless, in both meanings of the word stuff like a bed.)

But it wasn’t that far to the target from here at least; how hard could it be to get closer?

Turns out the answer was pretty bloody hard; every time he needed to head left, the tunnel turned right, up was down, his skin was always prickly from the heat (really he had to reconsider his choice to wear wolf fur for missions like this, sure it looked cool, but it would look less cool later when he had to use straighteners and conditioner on the damned thing or run the risk of being mistaken for a hitman dressing up as a bloody poodle, he’d be a laughing stock. Then, of course, there was the heat; there was always the damn heat. Then the sweat making him chafe in places he never knew he could chafe, and a few he knew damned well he could, but really really really wished he didn’t.)

Then, of course, there was the movement usually having halfway decent night vision gave him an edge, but not here, for multiple reasons. 1. When the things wandering around in the dark have glowy eyes, and glowy torso, and glowy arms, and glowy legs, and glowy well..... everything really the night was not as good a cover as it usually seemed. Normally he only had to worry about searchlights; down here, everything was a walking searchlight. 2. Even had that not being the case sneaking around under cover of darkness only worked under the assumption that every single denizen wasn’t nocturnal. Now here he was in the protocity that never sleeps. Constructs never took naps, and they weren’t patrolling either, meaning they could show up at any time, no warning, no “freeze” no “hello anybody there? (Like anybody lurking in shadows is going to be daft enough to shout out “no”, say “actually yeah I’m here,” or silliest of all imitate a cat. The last one only works in plays because any guard with a brain knows a real cat will scarper if you shout BANG, but your average sneak has a vested interest in staying still, so all you need to do is yell BANG, then put a crossbow bolt where the meow came from 10 seconds later.) Really no warning whatsoever your cover was about to be blown. It was bloody bad manners, in his opinion. Then, of course, there was reason number 3. Constructs had Aura vision, and it was bloody powerful. Camouflage works on several fundamental principles, and one of those is that the things you are trying to avoid have roughly the same type of vision as you; in this particular job, that was definitely not the case. It became really hard to blend in as a piece of the wall by ducking into a traditional camouflaged cloak. When you had a mauve and purple aura that you had no way to turn off. So he had had to resort to more unconventional means of camouflage to resolve this issue. Thus the ratsuit was born.

He had basically strapped a number of small rodents into sections of a tatty and now extremely ratty old cloak. These acted as a way to give the Constructs the impression that it was not a human being in a cloak, but instead several rodents hanging around and making a nuisance of themselves. Of course, while this plan hid him, it had a rather sizeable downside, the rats had definitely not volunteered for this mission and lodged their objections rather pointedly, and scratchily, and bitily, and via other actions that shall not be described here, as we all do them, but they’re still rather gross. Between those things, as you can imagine, his camouflage, however effective it may be, was not exactly happy happy fun times.

But at last, he was nearly there, as he stepped out of the passages and took cover behind a stalagmite. He checked there were no constructs down here, then shrugged off his cloak. (Which promptly ran away,) oh well, he’d figure something else out for the way back, he figured. Carefully unsheathing a knife that was pretty much overcompensation in stabby form, as he crept slowly towards the sleeping target.