Anna woke up groggily, the effect of last night’s slosh fest still weighing heavily on her. Her unwillingness to get up from the couch was only aided by the fact that her head was throbbing, almost as if all the fluid in her brain was dying to burst out.

Anna tried to gather her bearings as best as she could, wondering how she would go through the rest of her day. The rest of her life even. Any purpose she had in life seemed to have been lost. She got up from the couch, stumbling over the furniture in an attempt to get to the kitchen.

That attempt proved futile, however, when her sight came across the picture on the mantle. That was all the impetus she needed to break down in sobs. Soon, her heart-wrenching sobs were accompanied by screaming, which was filled by curses and tirades.

“Fuck this world. Fuck this system. I want to go back to my life. My real life. Not this warped existence… where I am so powerless, so weak, so utterly incapable of exacting revenge on people who have wronged me, people who killed….” That was all she could get out before her sobbing intensified at the thought of what she had lost.

Time stopped for no one though. Nor did hunger let go of anybody. And it was hunger which finally forced Anna to finally get up and fetch some food for herself. And it was while she was at the medieval restaurant, eating food that her stomach was ill-equipped to handle when she heard something strange.

“Can you believe this idiot?”, a man was saying to his companions who were sitting with him in their booth. Despite herself, she found herself listening to their conversation, just because he was too loud to ignore, really.

One of his companions replied, his tone equally boisterous, “Yeah. Right? The Bounty Hunter? I bet you this new system has addled with at least some people’s brains. There’s no other explanation for most of the bizarre things happening around here.”

The only lady sitting with them spoke up at this point. “You have to agree on one thing though. The ad is catchy. It draws attention. And that’s remarkable, especially on the dark, underground part of the web, where people literally beg for attention.”

The one who had started this whole conversation replied, “I guess. I mean it does have a certain horrific charm to it. ‘Want to rid this world of annoying pests that exist only to hinder your plans and ruin your life? Look no further. Contact the Bounty Hunter and he will get rid of anyone for you. For the right price, of course.’ Nice, concise and clean. To the point, really. I wonder….”

That was all Anna heard as she got up to exit the restaurant. That sounded like another fool with delusions of grandeur. Bounty hunter? Just another selfish, entitled human being who wanted to step up in this world after walking over others’ corpses. Just like……them.

Anna went home, the desolate dump that it was, looking to get some sleep which would hopefully cure this headache that had afflicted her. She fell on the same couch she had vacated just an hour ago, looking to sleep and escape this world once more. Maybe, in her dreams, she would finally see him again.

Her brains, though, had other plans. Sleep evaded her. Her mind kept replaying the scene of that day. To take her mind off the matter, she found herself on the forums, looking for something to distract her.

That was when the conversation from the restaurant came back to her. In spite of herself, she found herself curious regarding the mentioned advertisement.

Getting to the dark side of the forums was no small feat though, especially for a person like her, who hadn’t yet had any cause to trudge through that section of the forum before. It was after a good half an hour that she finally found herself able to access the underground section of the forums. It was yet another fifteen minutes after which she found the advertisement posted by this rumoured ‘Bounty Hunter’. It seemed like others too had dismissed his ad as just another player blowing his trumpet and offering services way above his pay grade.

She had to admit that the advertisement did have the desired ring to it. Just reading the advertisement brought her mind back to the dreaded events her mind kept going back to. Against all odds, she found herself curious. And dare she say it, a tad hopeful.

Could this be the thing she was looking for? Could this…..Bounty Hunter…actually accomplish what he claimed? Could this be her opportunity for vengeance? For closure? A way for her to move on in life?

Rebelling against all the voices in her mind that were saying that this was stupid, she found herself clicking on the link provided by this self-proclaimed Bounty Hunter and sent him a message.

“Interesting!”

That was the reaction I had when I read the request that I had received in my inbox. Only my third employer ever. Potentially. The request was particularly specific and also wanted me to violate one of my personal commandments regarding my………. business.

The case sounded interesting though. And work was slow since my business was fairly new. So I was willing to hear this potential employer out.

Looking through the message once more, I tried to decide how to proceed with it.

“ I don’t know if I should be doing this or if your advertisement even holds any merit to it. But you might be literally my last hope. So, I have a request to make of you. I want you to destroy a guild. A fledgling guild, still in its infancy. It has only three members at the current moment. I would like you to do this as quickly as possible as they are actively recruiting new members. I don’t want any innocent party to come to harm because of my personal vendetta, just because they were recruited by this guild.

P.S.: In case it isn’t clear, when I say destroy the guild, I mean I want you to kill all of its current members. And I know this goes against one of your rules but I would like to take back one of my possessions from their watches.

Contact me if you can accomplish this. Else, delete this message and forget this ever happened.”

Those last few sentences of the message had me in splits. Although the message said it was a request, it had made more demands than actual requests. If nothing else, I had to respect the gall of this person. In my mind, I had no choice but to reply.

“I am interested. Let’s talk.”

The reply was almost instantaneous, almost as if the person had been waiting for my reply with bated breath.

“Do you agree with my stipulation?”

I replied, “That depends. On what you want from the watches.”

This time, I had to wait for a few minutes for a reply. It seems like the person was undecided about whether to divulge the information to me.

“It’s not equipment or a weapon. What I want is a plain platinum ring. Nothing more. If you can't agree to this condition, I can't employ you.”

Hmm, interesting. A personal artifact, holding emotional value perhaps. I could live with that. I replied quickly, giving my consent to the stipulation.

I wrote, “Now that we are agreed on the condition, why don’t you tell me your name? It would be nice to know the name of my employer, after all.”

Again, the person took some time to reply. And it was a short one.

“You can call me Anna.”

That had my eyebrows raised. That almost sounded like a real name.

“My, my. Am I needlessly excited or di you just give me your real name? Are you that naïve, Anna? You do know what happens should anyone you don’t trust know your real name, right?”

She replied much quicker this time. “You are right. That’s my real name. And I don’t care. In fact, I am hoping you can make use of my real name and finish me off too, once you have completed my task.”

That dampened my excitement somewhat. A suicidal employer. And here I was hoping for some fun. I just sighed to myself before replying, “So, the name of the guild?”

“Ark raiders.”

What a completely unimaginative name. even my victims were losing their appeal now that I was gaining more information.

“It will be done, Anna.”

Before I could switch off my watch though, I received another message.

“What about the payment?”

I thought about it for a moment before replying, “Word of mouth.”

“Huh?”

“I want you to post a positive review on the forum. In the early stage of any business, it must establish itself. So, word of mouth. The watches I take will be profitable enough.”

I switched off my inbox after that, wanting to get on with my task as quickly as possible. I scoured through the forums and found myself on the recruitment board, searching for any recruitment notices from the ‘Ark Raiders’. It was almost too easy to find them, as they had been promoting themselves every other hour in an obnoxious manner. Memorizing the address of said guild, I switched off my watch and set off towards my destination.

Soon enough, I found myself in a room apartment that had been modelled to look like an office. There was even a guy sitting at a table near the door, acting like some sort of receptionist. I went over to him to converse and find out if I was in the right place.

“Hey. Is this the headquarters of the ‘Ark Raiders’? I have come here after looking at the recruitment notice.”

“Are you looking to join?”, he asked back. Wanting to confirm the fact once and for all, I asked him again, “So this is the ‘Ark Raiders’ right?”

“Of course it is… Now…” Before he could say another word, I had drawn my broadsword and severed his head from his torso. It landed on the ground with a gentle thud, making enough noise to alert the other residents of the apartment.

The other residents looked up from their tasks before gaining a horrified look on their faces, seeing the beheaded corpse of their comrade. Faster than they could react, I was upon one of them and made sure he met the same fate as his fellow guild member.

I turned towards the last occupant of the room with what I hoped was a menacing grin on my face. He stared back at me, his whole façade reeking of fear. To his credit though, he got up and rushed towards me in a show of false bravado, his arms raised in an attempt to punch me. All that earned him was the loss of the raised limb as he collapsed to the floor with an ear-piercing scream, looking at the stump which used to hold his arm.

“Who are you? Why would do this?”, he asked me amidst sniffles and sobs.

“My identity isn’t of any consequence. What I am interested in are some facts. And your death can be very painful or painless, depending on how quickly and truthfully you can supply me with these facts.”

The man just sniveled in response to this. not bothering to hide disgust for his state, I asked him, “Know of any Anna?”

“Aaa…nna?”, he asked, “What does she have to do all of this?”

“So that answers my question. My next question is, why does she want you guys dead?”

This time he didn’t reply, just holding his arm desperately and looking everywhere else but at me. In an attempt to speed up this ordeal, I took out a potion from my inventory and showed it to him.

“See this, right here. Know what it is called? ‘Repentance’. Aptly named, in my opinion. Also, highly illegal. Even though this world is new, it still took no time for everyone to arrive at a consensus that this should be illegal. You know why? Because it wards off death and life in equal measure.”

“Three drops of this and you won’t die till I will it. But the bleeding and pain will never stop. Neither will hunger or illness, all of which will be inflicted on you in quick order. Believe me, when I say this, it is a fate you truly want to avoid. For it’s a fate worse than death.”

My victim just shivered after hearing my proclamation before finally opening his mouth to satiate my curiousity.

“We found Anna pretty soon after this system took over. She had been looking for her fiancée, who had been separated from her due to the ‘Isolation rule’.”

Ah, the isolation rule. A weird quirk of this system. The system ordained that every human being on this planet should be given a fresh start. In order to achieve this, every person was separated from their loved ones almost as soon as the system took over. When the geography of this world changed, so did the position of its inhabitants. You could quite literally have turned up on the opposite corner of the world to their most loved one and you wouldn’t know.

I, of course, knew of this firsthand as I still hadn’t been able to find my parents, the only people I remotely cared about before this whole fiasco with the system. Not that I had tried too hard to find them, mind you.

“Then?”, I asked.

“We had already formed this guild by then. We being myself and the two guys you……Anyway, we asked her to join the guild so that we could assist her more ably in her quest to find her husband. But then our leader, Andrew, fell in love with Anna. Or at least that’s what he said. He didn’t want to find her fiancée anymore. ”

“But pretty soon, reports reached our ears of a guy who was looking for his fiancée. Without much effort, we found out that he was the man Anna was looking for. In a weird twist of fate, he had been separated from Anna only by a town. We identified him from the fact that he was wearing rings that were identical to the one worn by Anna. He had also quite an affluent adventurer by this time.”

“Andrew couldn’t handle the thought of losing Anna. So he hatched a plan to murder her fiancée without her knowing. He thought that given time, she would come around to love him instead of her fiancée. We were lured into this plan by greed. Being a somewhat rich adventurer, he was sure to have good equipment and loads of money. So we agreed to assist him.”

“The plan went off without a hitch. We had scouted him and knew where. We waited for an opportunity when he came out of his building and ambushed him. He was strong, yes, but not strong enough to overpower all three of us. We did what we set out to do. We killed him.”

“What we didn’t know was that he had come down to meet anna. He had found her through someone on the forums and asked her to meet him near his building. To confirm their respective identities and finally reunite. So, it happened that we found out that Anna had witnessed the murder of her fiancée. When we came back to our place, we found her belongings gone. Andrew had been searching for her ever since.”

He finished his story by breaking down in sobs and started muttering “Sorry!” I couldn’t find it in myself to pity him, only feeling disgust at the sight of his snivelling face begging for forgiveness.

“So, what I am doing today is getting rid of the scum of this world. This will be my good deed for the month. That gladdens me. Don’t worry, I will hold up my end of the bargain. Your death will be painless.”

Saying that I slit his throat using my sword and stood up to exit that place. But not before collecting their watches, of course. it really did feel good to do something to better the world. Now to see if I can find this ring!

Anna hadn’t heard from the Bounty Hunter after their conversation earlier in the day. And frankly, she wasn’t hoping to. She assumed that he had passed upon her request, simply because he wasn’t able to take on three men at once.

Just when she was about to turn in for the day, someone knocked on the door. Carefully walking to the door on her tiptoes, she opened the door just a little to see who was the one who was knocking. To her surprise and anxiety, she saw no one.

As she was about to dismiss the knock as some sort of harmless prank, her eyes fell on the envelope on the floor. Bending to pick it up, she saw something scribbled on the envelope:

“Don’t forget. Word of mouth.”

Her hands were shaking as she opened the envelope and a ring fell onto her palms. A ring identical to the one she was adorning on her ring finger. She turned around to look at the picture of her fiancée, tears rolling off her cheeks. Finally, she had her vengeance and he could rest in peace. Finally, she could move on.

It was while she was in her bed and just before the warm embrace of sleep welcomed her, a wave of fear passed through her.

How had the Bounty Hunter known where she lived?