A knife is arguably one of the first weapons ever made, and one of the few that has survived the test of time. While halberds and ranged weaponry with artillery all fade in and out of obsolescence, that only applies if you are able to afford heavy arms and military gadgets. Oftentimes, a revolution or murder starts small and humble using an innocent yet deadly implement found in every home. The king of cutlery and progenitor of all sharp edges, the knife is, without a doubt, the most convenient and patient of all weapons, content to cut the flesh of animals and man alike without hesitation.

The history of murder, by the Master Assassin of the Thief’s Guild circa 1300 years after the fall of the Omnic Empire and around 100 years before the birth of Blade-Empress Silk.

The Listener was much faster and stronger than Victor had thought. At least he could talk now, with the false anti-words of that thing proving to be true. Those noise-seeking tentacle objects didn’t reach here, most likely because they would get absolutely destroyed by the book-sorting machine at the entrance of this place. At any rate, it was somewhat refreshing to fight a normal being for once. The Listener’s main attack was that of brute force, using a frankly improbable and physics-defying size as a meaty and unwashed club. It hadn’t hit him yet, and Victor had no intention of letting those filthy ink-crusted claws on the moldering hands of the behemoth touch him.

Hands swiping and missing, Victor simply danced around the limbs that could squish him like a bug without noticing until he saw his chance. Nodding to Silk, his compatriot proceeded to stab directly through the hand that had made a particularly clumsy swipe and pin it before leaping away from the hand that swatted at her in return. Seeing his chance, Victor did a flip and began his first strike of the battle.

“Hyah!”

Victor then did his hilariously impractical signature move as Silk found the time to facepalm at his stupidity. Spinning like a top horizontally, he used his knives to quickly roll like a deranged blade-wheel and made a long spiral slash across the pinned limb until he reached the neck of the abomination and began swirling around it.

However, the beast was not dumb. It proceeded to counterattack, shaking its head wildly and sending flakes of paper everywhere, with Victor rocketing off and hitting the bookshelf-laden wall. Silk quickly took out the sword that had pinned the massive appendage and caught victor as he fell towards the ground. Feeling dazed, Victor grinned.

“Thanks for the catch. I knew you could’t bear the thought of my pretty face getting smooshed.”

Silk retorted quickly as she helped him up.

“I couldn’t let such an ugly specimen get even more scarred. I already can’t bear to look at you for more than two seconds before vomiting. What horrors would you inflict if you were to get even more deformed? I do it for the sake of humanity as a whole.”

With that diatribe finished, she began looking at the terrain.

“Do you have a plan, by any chance?”

Victor nodded.

“This thing is durable. We need more firepower. Remember when we got fluffy by “liberating” that auction house?”, he responded quick wittedly. He glanced at the Listener, which began loping over to them in a hideous fashion. He judged they had about three seconds before they had to dodge the tackle.

“Of course I remember. That damn Bovis nearly collapsed the entire house by - oh. That could work. Got it.”

With that, they split up while Victor began to taunt the monster in his typical infuriating manner.

“Hey! Ink face spinster! Take look at this pretty face! I bet you can’t hit me! Too bad, it would be the closest you would ever get to touching a male specimen!”

His infuriatingly puerile form of mocking incensed the eldritch librarian, who had just smacked into one of her precious bookshelves and gotten a rain of codexes on her noggin as a reward. She could hear his heartbeat from over there, an infuriating mosquito-like rhythm that drove her mad.

How dare you! I am a perfect paragon of my species as an abomination. If I wanted to pass on my superior lineage I would have no shortage of suitors with which I could raise one with. When I’m done with you, there won’t be anything left to put in a coffin afterwards! You don’t deserve being in my collection, primitive soldier!

Victor waited for a moment, tensed up, and then pulled out the biggest weapon in his arsenal. Silk tensed. She knew that he was a weapon of mass distraction and liked to make others angry, but she regretted letting him loose like this a little and felt sorry for The Listener. Still, she had a job to do. She began resuming her surreptitious slicing of the bookshelf in the manner that Victor had reminded her to do, just like at the auction house.

Victor stood up straight, and tensed his stomach. Pointing his rear at the monster, he proceeded to let it loose and use his most immature, annoying taunt possible. A small Prap resonated from his trousers, quiet yet filling up the room with it’s horror.

In all her centuries of fighting extradimensional competitors and killing worthy heroes, nothing like this had ever happened to the Listener. Her mind went red and lost all semblance of rationality at the shere disrespect of this insult to existence.

Did you just - why would you- how the - AAARRRGGH! I’VE HAD IT WITH YOU! I WILL RIP YOU APART BIT BY BIT UNTIL YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A PILE OF MEAT! I WAS GOING TO SAVE THIS FOR THE RADIANT KING BUT YOU HAVE CROSSED THE LINE! FEEL THE WRATH OF MY TEN THOUSAND YEAR SOLITUDE YOU IMPUDENT CHILD! THE PAIN IS OF NO OBJECT ANYMORE IF IT WILL RID THE UNIVERSE OF YOU! DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!!

The being began throwing a temper tantrum and started scratching it’s face with it’s nails in intricate runic styles, black fluid analogous to blood flowing from the face of the withered hag and its slug-like back and filling in the grooves. Instantly, the Listener grew twice her size and filled up a full tenth of the massive office they were in, her parchment-like skin becoming an irritated carpet of hives as veins popped through the skin and tentacles grew at random. A full set of calcified spikes also began appearing, some becoming ingrown and digging into the body they inhabited while making an extra set of defense. The Listener, apparently, had lost her cool so much she was willing to do unstable mutation if it meant that her hated enemy would die.

Victor then began to run as the runes glowed red and started shining. Mishappen blobs of flesh manifested as beings that should never have existed, drones and soldiers made of vellum and leather rushing at him that would not survive the day. The only intent these had was to kill.

Even worse, some of them began to attack silk as well, disrupting her task of slashing the bottoms of the bookshelves in a certain pattern. Not as skilled at dodging as Victor was, she was quickly forced to dart around and parry some of the tentacle strikes that went errant in her direction, cutting them off while the progenitor of these attacks flailed about in a blind rage towards the young man.

Victor laughed like a madman as Silk continued her actions at a slower pace thanks to the distraction, his twin cleavers that he stole cutting through the minions and tendrils in an intricate dance as his figure spun around in curious acrobatics. Just when it seemed that multiple tendrils or arms would hit him, he grabbed ahold of the massive spikes of keratin and swung around them in his spinning attack, running along them and causing several limbs to be tangled up. His footsteps eventually reached the Listener’s furiously attacking face, the small spikes in the bottom of his shoes acting not only as grip-makers, but also as minor stinging irritants to the massive abomination.

However, underneath this veneer of overconfidence, it was clear that he might have taken off more than he could chew. Sure, he was fast, but he lacked the power that silk might have had to seriously injure his opponent. He was nothing more than a ghostly damage sponge, dodging the brunt of the attacks while Silk made the preparations. Small cuts and bruises began appearing beneath the blood spatters that sprayed with each of his attacks. Slowly but surely, he was getting injured, his tangle with the Listener in the very center of the ring of shelves overwhelming him in a battle of attrition.

Just when all seemed lost to him, he spoke out to the Listener in her tantrum.

“You really are stupid, aren’t you?”

FOOL! I AM THOUSANDS OF TIMES YOUR AGE! THE KNOWLEDGE YOU HAVE IS BUT A FRACTION OF MINE! YOUR PUNY WIT COULD NOT COMPREHEND A SINGLE THOUGH I WIELD!

“If you’re so smart, why did you not notice the web you are in?”, he taunted. He quickly tapped a string he has somehow tide around his boot to showcase his little trap, a spool of it spinning emptily as the razor-sharp object glinted in the crimson light of the office.

With a quick flip and run, he promptly jumped seven metres in the air, unhooked the remains of the spool from his heal, and deftly tied it through a small hole in one of the bookshelve’s top holes. After that, he proceeded to take one of his cleavers - which he swore was now stained black with the inky blood of all that he had killed - and broke his fall by jamming them into the neck of the creature and using the force he had accumulated to act as a weapon to cut his foe.

“SILK! NOW!” he said, his voice hoarse and his vision becoming blurry.

Wordlessly, she then ran at superhuman speeds while cutting each of the bookshelve’s bottoms, starting with the one that had been attached to the razor wire wrapped around the enemy, bindijng the Listener in place.

With a quick and decisive final stroke, the strings that had sewn the maw of this beast shut were slashed by the razor wire as it closed in around the Listener.

“You can’t break this stuff, you hideous insult to nature”, Victor said in a smug tone. “The tensile strength of this stuff is off the charts. I snagged it in one of the supply shelves you had and used your own building materials against you.”

Each of the bookshelves began toppling wildly, with each of them smashing into the Listener save the razor-wire wrapped one. As that particular one fell away and tightened the rope, the proverbial dominoes began to hammer the master of this accursed realm into the ground as its newly opened mouth began to scream for the first time in thousands of years. A hoarse cry of anger towards the puny insects that had slain the emperor of books rang out. Cut into wriggling pieces, the flesh of the Listener was then smashed into pulp in a disgusting show of force, with meaty paste being flung out everywhere until the beast was finally dead.

With her dying breath, the anti-words rattled inside both Victor and Silk’s heads in a final display of defiance.

You will still die, hated enemy. You cannot stop the voracious blight of IT from ending your world. All you know will be destroyed. The hush….will not….be thwarted.

And thus, with this monologue and foreboding warning, the entire realm’s crimson glow blacked out. Without the magic of the central leader that managed this realm, the runes that were responsible for the expansion of this place halted and the monsters that had taken orders from their leader suddenly stopped, becoming nothing more than mindless animals without purpose. At last, there was peace.

However, there was one last thing to be said by Silk, who had gotten wounds of her own across her body.

“Hey victor. The desk that the Listener used survived, and guess what?”

“What?”, replied Victor, who was struggling for breath and holding down a stream of vomit that would surely come out in response to the foul-smelling remains of the dead abomination.

“I opened the desk looking for treasure, and there is a crap load of cringy romance books from all across the world and from history’s most degenerate authors. Looks like I’ve gotten a brand-spanking new set of reading material ~” said Silk in a sing-song tone.

For once in his life, Victor was silent not out of shock, but of pure despair at the mindless stream of babble that would ensue as Silk would espouse the glories of the accursed, inferior genre while reading those heretical manuals.