An unspecified time later in another place....

A man stormed into the room with bloodshot eyes, a black-clad woman close on his heels.

"Is there still no news of my son's whereabouts???" Shouted, almost shrieking, from the visibly enraged and slightly crazed man as he brought his two fists down with force on the heavy maple wood desk, almost knocking over the small inkwell that the man sitting behind it was actually writing with.

The quick-tempered man visibly and audibly gasped loudly, while the other man behind the desk sighed loudly and clearly and put the shimmering black and blue writing pen back into the holder provided for it. "No, mayor. We have been searching for your son for months now, and have been unable to find any traces or remains of the boy. It still looks like he ran off with the girl."

The mayor, as if he had been struck too hard on the chin, slumped backward in the chair and stared at the floor, exhausted and confused.

The woman who had entered behind the mayor and hurried after the man shook her head in disgust and bowed her head slightly in the direction of the man behind the desk. "Excuse me, master... I couldn't stop him without getting physical..." It came out slightly ashamed and between clenched teeth, looking at the foot of the desk and not daring to look at the threatening guildmaster.

"It's okay, sweetie... We don't want anything to happen to the mayor... Quite the opposite of you, later. I await your presence in my chamber." Came back the cool and emotionless answer, and chased a shiver of fear and fright down the young woman's spine, accompanied by a small amount of ecstasy.

Whenever she made even the smallest mistake, whether her fault or not, the guildmaster would "punish" her in private while he took his perversions out on her. At the beginning, as a novice, she had felt only pain and fear, but over the years of service and various tinctures he had given her, she had developed a certain lust for it.

"Yes, master!" She managed to say in a voice that trembled only slightly, and continued to pull herself backwards out of the room, bending slightly, and closed the door in front of her, careful not to turn her back on the man in the slightest.

Lower servants and subjects had, according to custom and also in the nobility, always to remove themselves backwards from the presence of more respected persons.

A sigh escaped the black-clad young woman, and she ran shaky hands through her long, shiny black hair to smooth it out. A kind of tick she had developed over the years, whenever it had come to such situations. "For god's sake... It was just my turn yesterday..." Came a low murmur from her mouth as she marched down the dark underground corridor of the Assassins' lair.

Meanwhile, in the room of the guild master of the local assassins.

The mayor had already regained his composure and stood up on shaky legs, as drunks often stagger, and took another step toward the guildmaster's desk. A crazed look and a feverish gleam in his eyes.

But before the man could do anything, he suddenly froze.

A black billowing mass of smoke and shadow enveloped his raised right arm, with which he was about to strike the table again, and a dangerous glint answered him in the gaze of the man behind the desk. "Enough!"

Loud and ominous, in an authoritative voice, the assassin guildmaster held his fevered and delirious gaze. "I have said several times in the past weeks that we will keep you informed! Didn't I send someone to inform you just last week? And you DARE barge in here like this?!"

Meanwhile, visibly trying not to make the mayor's head shorter, the guild master hissed at the mayor. "ONLY because you bring more trouble with your connections to the royal court, if you suddenly disappear, have i gone along with your theater so far! But now it is ENOUGH! We've already lost a handful of acolytes and even two fully trained members of our organization in the search when the search was widened!"

"And all to find your son of a whore! Who probably ran off with that young bitch to have his way with her in the middle of nowhere!"

The mayor himself knew about the seriousness of the situation and healed his mouth, but inwardly boiled when he heard the name of his son from the mouth of the guildmaster in front of him. Gritting his teeth and clenching his fists so much that it stood out white, he was standing on the spot listening to the man's clamor.

"And then you dare to almost ruin hours of work by almost knocking over the inkwell on my table! Get out! Out of my sight! I've sacrificed enough people to the search and allowed your antics." Roared the guild master now at the end, and even a little saliva flew out of his mouth so angry he became at the end.

The shadow that the mayor's arm had bound dissolved, and the assassin master made a dismissive hand gesture like one would make at an annoying dog to shoo it away.

The mayor, by now seething with rage, gritted his teeth and spun around in place, strutting out of the room with quick strides while hissing something quietly in anger. "It's not over yet...!"

The guildmaster himself, as soon as the door closed behind the hurrying mayor, dropped into the chair with a click of his tongue, and a lustful but evil grin spread across his face. "At least the bastard gave me the opportunity to find another reason to let off steam on HER, hrhrhr..."

A pleasurable lick of his tongue over his upper lips, and he turned back to his writing tasks, with thoughts, however, already at the perverse games in the evening.

The assassin guildmaster hurried down the hallway toward his chamber, a sizable bulge clearly visible in his crotch. He was looking forward to seeing the young thing he had chastised and educated over the years since she joined his branch here, pumped full of medicine and drugged with love potions, so that by now she would let him do anything to her, no matter how borderline or crazy it was.

With a slight jump of expectation in his step, he marched down the corridor, only slightly lit by torches, until he stopped in front of a heavy double stone door decorated with gold. Ornaments of various typical types of weapons used by the assassins, such as daggers, short swords, bows, poisons, small crossbows and many other masterfully crafted handicrafts adorned the two doors.

With hands trembling slightly in anticipation, he pushed both doors open with a flourish and entered his personal chamber. The young woman, dressed in black lingerie, was already lying still on his large canopy bed, while next to her was a rolling table containing various torture tools and bondage utensils.

"There you are, my little dove!" He spoke in a hoarse tone and walked with pleasurable slow steps towards the large canopy bed, while behind him the stone doors fell heavily shut with a rumble. He opened his right hand and out of nowhere a small vial with a purple liquid materialized in a white haze. "I also brought your favorite potion."

The bottle in his hand was an aphrodisiac that the assassin guild sometimes used on certain missions and was freely available to him as the local guild leader. Magic, and therefore magical objects, were rare in this world, and only one in a hundred thousand inhabitants was born with a magical talent, and even that ranged from pathetic to world-class. Only because he was a guild master himself and ran this branch, he had a spatial artifact in the form of a simple ring that could be used to store and keep a certain amount of items.

A few steps further and he found himself in front of the bed, his pants already off. "Don't be so coy, sweetheart. I know you want it too!" He whispered hoarsely to her, and dismissed her silence as shyness or fear, as she had so often shown again and again. With a vice-like grip, he grabbed the young woman by one of her bare ankles and pulled her towards him with a jerk, giving a fuck whether he hurt her or not, as it was always part of the evening's pleasure.

But unlike usual, the young woman in lingerie remained completely silent, and not even a yelp sounded. Something shiny was at the head of the bed where she had just lain and he had pulled her to him. "What the bloody hell?" Cursed the man as he leaned forward to take a closer look at what was wrong with his toy as his decades of training and survival instincts screamed for attention.

He rolled away to the left side of the bed as something whizzed past where his head would have been a moment ago. Cursing under his breath, he rolled to the floor and reached down into his two leather boots to pull out two shiny green hidden daggers and set himself up in a fluid motion toward the attacker.

Contrary to his expectations, however, there was no scary opponent in front of him, but a small brown-haired teenage girl dressed in black assassin garb with two throwing daggers in her hands, just emerging from the shadows on the right side of the room.

"What the fuck, is this some kind of joke? And who let you in, little brat?!" He spoke angrily to the girl, more upset that he had been disturbed in his evening activity than that he was afraid of the intruder. As a professional, he had immediately realized that his bedmate was no longer among the living when he saw the bloody puddle under her head and smelled the scent of blood in the air.

Contrary to his expectations, the girl did not answer and walked toward him with an expressionless face, only a cold glint in her eyes indicating what she was about to do.

Only one thought flashed through the guild master's mind at the sight. *Which of my competitors sicced her on me?!*

When he noticed this professionalism in the girl, which actually only assassin veterans radiated.

Suddenly, his attacker disappeared from his field of vision in a flash, and only his many years of experience allowed him to promptly dodge with a roll forward to immediately throw himself with both daggers in his hands and still without pants on the girl who had stepped out of the shadows behind him.

Metallic sounds of steel on steel echoed through the room as both opponents attacked in perfect maneuvers, parrying, blocking, and dodging. Shadows billowed from both sides, trying to gain the upper hand in a magical test of strength, shadows materialized, and to a normal human observer it would have looked as if two black shapes were teleporting through space all the time.

"You stupid whore! Who sent you?" Shouted the guild master, as he crossed his blades with the girl for the hundredth time, inwardly more than astonished how such a small and fragile thing could keep up in strength with an adult man.

Instead of an answer, only silence greeted him, and suddenly something dripped down from his left cheek, followed by a pulling pain. In his brief inattention, she had thrown one of her throwing daggers with pinpoint accuracy, and had his reflexes not reacted as he had trained, it would have cost him his left eye at best.

With an angry yell, but still in control of his emotions, the man lunged at the attacker with renewed energy and strength, finally pushing her back piece by piece. Taking advantage of the girl's brief stumble, a poison-green blade materialized out of a hazy mist to land directly in the teenager's right thigh.

A painful hiss escaped her, and she again retreated a bit further into the defensive. The dagger was coated with a paralyzing poison of a manticore, which in an adult human would enter the bloodstream in a few seconds and paralyze the limb where the poison had entered.

Surprisingly for the guild master, the little assassin's right leg slowed down, but the usual paralyzing effect was completely absent. "What in the name of all the dark gods are you?" He hissed angrily at the waste of the expensive poison in her direction, while he continued to build up pressure and chased her further and further through the dormitory.

But the impairment in his attacker's thigh was enough for him to knock first one of the daggers out of her hand, and only a few seconds later the second. The girl, by now visibly breathing more heavily and struggling with the poison in her bloodstream, retreated on one knee to the wall from which she had first attacked, and her previous stoic expression had given way to a mask of pain as she breathed heavily in and out.

The guild master, visibly relieved and overcoming his surprise, walked slowly toward his attacker. "Hah, whoever sent you, you stupid bitch. You're easily thirty years too early to compete with me." Although he had been cursing inwardly the whole time, wondering how it was that such a young woman could keep up with him until he had gotten the advantage with the manticore poison.

"And since you just snatched my playmate for tonight out of my clutches, you will simply replace her. And after that, I'll get rid of you like the dirt you are. Or what did you think you were going to do, challenge me here all by yourself?!" He laughed maliciously and now full of anticipation again, when he realized that he would fully enjoy the pure terror of this young girl.

Only a few steps away from the young girl sitting on one knee in front of him, the guild master suddenly faltered as an amused glint and contemptuous smile came to his lips. The girl was still breathing heavily and sweating, but had raised her head and was looking at him with that defiant look.

"Who says I'm alone, you scum?" Came out of her mouth in a melodic young girl's voice as she propped herself up on her knee.

As if on command, the shadow in the right side of the room suddenly billowed, directly behind the girl, and a three meter high shadow formed out of nothing. The guild master stopped, and even his heart faltered momentarily as two glowing green eyes emerged from the shadow, followed by antlers covered in bloody runes and a bony skull. A beast from the worst nightmares, breathing green mist that slowly fell to the ground and gently enveloped the girl below, and with a substance dripping claws.

A millenium beast, a wendigo, but a more evolved species than the guildmaster had ever thought possible.

"W-what the abyss...?" He stuttered as he involuntarily took a step back, and only then did his fighting instincts take over again and he shifted into a tense fighting stance.

An unearthly sound, a scratching, and something unnatural came out of the skull of the monster in the form of a voice. "Little human... The only filth here is you... And the only thing you're good for is being devoured by me." At the sound of this emotionless voice, fear and sweat beaded all over the guildmaster's body, and before he could form a single further thought about the situation or what was being said, his entire field of vision spun.

He suddenly saw the ceiling, and then the canopy bed with the dead young woman in it, and suddenly the floor in front of the bed, which was approaching with considerable speed. A wet splat, and everything was black.

"Not bad, Mary. But for opponents like him, I need to devour more assassins and similar fighters, and work their skills into your body..." I said to my little companion, who was still staring at me, breathing heavily, but overjoyed. An enthuistatic nod followed my words.

"Then let's clean this place up.... I'll take care of the bodies, and you collect all the important and valuable objects. Start with the spatial ring on the right hand of the guild master. It will certainly make everything else easier to transport..." I gave my order, and walked with heavy but preternaturally quiet steps towards the two corpses, while my little blood slave set off to execute my command with fiery zeal.