Faye blinked. The leather-clad newcomer had not been wearing scabbards, nor any indication that they were hiding weapons. Seeing those deeply curved daggers appear from thin air and drop into their waiting hands made her hesitate.

Of course, the newcomer was not giving her any time to prepare. They ran straight at Faye and Maggie, letting out a high laugh as they came.

Lifting the short sword she held, Faye slashed across her body, a rising cut that could slice open an opponent’s belly if it connected.

Unfortunately, her opponent had their wits about them and clearly knew what they were doing.

Using a strange, stuttering step the rogue-assassin dodged the swipe of Faye’s sword. Then, with a grin, stepped into range.

Close-up, Faye could smell something strange from her opponent. She was not sure what it was, but it was cloying. She tried not to breathe it in too much.

In that moment, one dagger came in lightning fast, striking with the speed and agility of a cobra. Faye jumped back out of reach, she thought.

The line of fire across her belly was the only way she knew anything had happened.

Hissing, Faye backed off rapidly, swinging the sword she held left and right. Each extension pulled open the wound on her belly and with that came a fresh bout of pain.

Those daggers, now that she looked at them properly, were more like sickles, their crescent-moon blade able to hook around and reach the body in ways she would not expect.

She pressed her free hand to her stomach and stepped back a moment.

Maggie jumped forward, pressing with her shield.

Faye risked a look down, pulling her hand from the wound. There was little blood. She pressed her hand against the line of pain and looked again.

No blood, she thought, so why does it still hurt so much?

She could not stand and ponder the mystery though, as the assassin was toying with Maggie. Her friend was grunting and making small sounds of shock as the faster opponent side-stepped everything the young woman tried.

Just as Faye looked up, the rogue-assassin seemed to flow around Maggie in a swift movement, grabbing her and flipping her over the stranger’s hip in a throw that slammed her hard against the ground.

Faye was already moving. She launched herself at the assassin with a cry, making them disengage from Maggie’s slumped form.

Wishing that she had the reach of a longer sword, Faye knew that letting this opponent get too close was a death sentence.

The sickle blades were exotic enough that Faye had zero experience fighting against them.

Adopting a middle guard, Faye paused for a moment to get her bearings.

It was the wrong move.

The assassin darted forward, their blades coming from two directions at once, on different angles. If Faye blocked one, the other would strike home.

Scant few milliseconds had passed since she had thought about her response, but of course stopping to think about responding to the strange weapons was all that her opponent needed to score another hit.

This one ran down her off-hand, the one not holding the sword. She let out a curse and swung for the already-retreating assassin.

“Fuck,” Faye muttered. The same stinging pain that her belly was afire with sprung up on her arm, too.

She narrowed her eyes at the assassin. Their eyes were the only thing she could see. They betrayed nothing, but the harsh laugh that erupted from her opponent as they darted in for another attack was disturbing.

They were enjoying this.

As they came forward, Faye reacted instinctively. She thrust with the sword; a stop thrust designed to use the attacker’s own momentum to deliver the fatal blow.

Of course, with this opponent, there was nothing to impale. They had recognised the danger and avoided it deftly.

They’re faster, more agile than Arran, Faye thought. I still don’t have a great track record against him in spars.

For a faster opponent, the dangerous lure was to react to everything they did. To let them come in and try and take them down with wide, powerful moves that went somewhat to negating their speed and manoeuvrability.

Faye sensed that would not work in this case. Especially as the assassin was using skills that changed the way they moved.

No, she would need to attack as well. Do what the assassin might not be expecting.

As her opponent came in and Faye made them retreat with a similar wide sweep of the blade in a defensive pattern, Faye switched tactics and lurched forward.

She swung the blade in an ever-moving pattern of sweeping cuts, occasionally switching her intended target at the last moment. The assassin moved backward, and with the face mask Faye could not tell what they were thinking, but it did not seem like they were surprised — nor concerned.

“Curious,” the assassin-rogue said. Their voice held a strange quality that made it difficult to pinpoint.

Maybe some magic is at play?

Not wanting to be drawn into banter or wordplay that could distract her, Faye ignored the comment. The assassin was about to move in for another exchange when Faye decided to change tack again.

She lifted her hand and sent out a Fire Dart. Forcing a little more mana into the spell, she encouraged it to fly faster than it normally would.

It burst out in a streak of light and smoke, and this time the rogue did seem to be surprised. The dart hit them in the shoulder, pushing them back a step and ripping the hood off their head with the force of the hit.

Their hair had been shorn close to the skull on the sides, leaving only jet-black hair on the top that was pulled back. Out of the shadow of the hood, Faye could also see that they had darkened their eye sockets with a dark make-up.

“Well done,” they said. Whilst nothing could be gleaned from the way they looked at Faye earlier, now she sensed an anger that she would rather not have touched. “But that shall be the last time you hit me.”

The fight turned truly deadly.

Each pass the assassin made came with intense speed and focus. It was all Faye could do to simply respond and allow her arms to do what she had trained them to do over the years.

It was difficult, with the unusual weapon choice of her opponent, but Faye had drilled herself relentlessly since she had arrived. She was in better physical condition now than she had ever been back home.

Every time the assassin made an attack, Faye was certain it would be the last. She could feel herself slowing, making mistakes in the placement of her blade, enough that nicks and cuts were appearing with depressing regularity on her arms, despite the gambeson she wore.

The pain was building.

Part way through the fight, however, the assassin stepped back. With a flicker, the blades in her hands took on a different hue. Before, they had been dark, as if the blades were coated in a black lacquer. Now, they took on a deep burgundy, or a dried blood colour that made Faye sweat just looking at it.

They’re using imbuement. Faye thought.

In that space, Faye flicked another Fire Dart out. This time, the assassin was expecting it. They actually cut the dart out of the air with a practised motion.

It looked like something out of a movie.

Faye gritted her teeth.

[Swordfighter’s Sense] pinged.

Sweeping backward and ducking low, Faye avoided a thrown dagger. It snapped into the stone of the ground with a clatter.

Looking at the source of the throw, there was another leather-clad assassin-rogue wannabe.

Though, the more Faye thought about it, the more the reality set in that these might actually be assassins.

“What do you want with us?” she asked.

“Absolutely nothing, you’re just in our way.”

With that, the first assassin came for Faye again. They closed in with their daggers, and Faye realised with a shock that the danger sense her skill gave her was pinging wildly each time the daggers came close.

She gasped through the information overload, parrying one of the swipes, and then throwing herself sideways into an ungracious roll that avoided a second thrown dagger.

With a curse, the other assassin stalked forward.

Faye half-expected stupid but witty banter from these dark rogues, but they said nothing. The only difference between the two was that the second was a little larger, a bit wider.

That was the one who came in now. This one had conjured two daggers from thin air, as well, but instead of the cruelly curved crescent moons of the first assassin, this one wielded a dangerous style of paired push-daggers, known on Earth as katars.

The triangular blade of the katar extended from the front of the assassin’s hand, each weapon secured firmly to the assassin’s wrist. Much more effective at thrusting attacks, the force delivered by a strike with one of those would undoubtedly punch through her armour like it were paper.

Coming in with a flowing, fast series of strikes from unexpected directions, Faye fell back from her assailant, parrying the occasional blade that strayed too close.

They were passing the downed Maggie when suddenly the assassin stumbled, shifting upwards from some kind of force pressing on them from below.

The disruption in their attack was all Faye needed to slide forward and cut at their momentarily defenceless body. She struck the head, cutting through some of the cloth of the hood and mask.

The assassin dropped backward, cursing.

Maggie rolled over and got to a knee.

“Sorry, needed a nap,” she said, weakly.

“Stay out of it, Mags,” Faye warned.

Unfortunately, it seemed that by revealing herself willing to take part in the underhanded sneak attack it made Maggie fair game to the two assassins. They swarmed forward in a rage. The second assassin’s hood and mask fluttering in the wind of their attack. His beard showing through as he came, face caught in a rictus of hate.

Faye tried to stave off their attacks, and Maggie defended herself heroically, but with two experts in close bladework at play, Faye had no hope of protecting her friend.

With a guttural cough, Maggie slumped over the katar that had punched into her belly.

Faye screamed with rage and bore down on the man.

She was not sure what she wanted to achieve, because she was opening herself to attack from the crescent blades of her original opponent.

The blazing furnace of mana inside of her roared with anger. Levelling earlier had provided her with a rapid regeneration of what she would normally have. It was roaring higher than ever before.

She grabbed hold of that power and shunted it through the short sword, going more by feel than anything else she had tried before.

The katar was an effective weapon, but Faye thought they were too focused in their job to be useful as a main weapon. For example, with the way that they were strapped to the forearm to prevent dangerous impacts that snapped bones, the katar’s blade had an extremely limited range of movement — if the whole forearm could not move to that position, then the katar would not be able to, either.

That meant that when Faye came at the assassin from the side, he parried in a very predictable manner. The feinted cut switched to a higher angle, slicing through the meat of his shoulder with some difficulty. But Faye followed up on the strike with another step forward, a swift kick to the man’s outer knee, causing him to grunt in pain, and then an elbow to the side of his head.

Normally, Faye would not go for physical martial arts. She always preferred a weapon, one that was elegant and allowed for her to retreat before getting into reach of the opponent that was normally larger, and physically stronger, than her.

However, here, Faye was no longer simply a smaller than average woman who had extraordinarily little bulk. Here, the magic of the system said that Faye was strong.

The kick to the outside of the man’s knee was not debilitating, he would still be able to move on it, but if Faye provided another few, he might find himself out of action. The blow to the head, however, was against his unprotected temple and had been struck by one of the best striking points in the human body, the elbow.

The man was stunned, but for a moment, and it was all the moment Faye needed to bring up her blade and slash savagely across his neck.

She did not watch as the man’s lifeblood drained out in a wave. She did catch his shocked expression as she turned to face the first assassin.

Congratulations! You have slain a level 15 [Black Rose Rogue].

The other opponent looked down at the slain rogue for a moment and let out a sigh.

“I can’t let you go, now, I hope you realise.”

“I don’t care what you think,” Faye replied. “Get out of our town.”

The rogue-assassin shook their head, they went to gesture, but Faye did not want to let them get anything off.

She stepped forward and swept the blade in front of her, igniting the mana that she had pushed into the sword; into it she pushed her anger, frustration, thrill of the fight, and her fear. A healthy dose of emotions, all balled up inside her for so long, she let out into a wave, like the rogue’s blood as it erupted from his split neck — her revulsion at doing that to another human being went into the mana as well.

And something clicked.

The mana along the blade did ignite, as she knew it would, but instead of igniting in an explosion like Fire Dart, or into the intense, cutting heat of Scorching Lance, the mana rippled along the steel of the sword and sheathed the blade from handle to tip in a flickering flame.

The assassin-rogue stepped back in surprise.

Faye stepped forward too. With each swing of the blade, she surged forth with the mana she held inside. She encouraged the mana coating the blade to target her opponent.

Every time the arc of her swing came into alignment with the assassin, the sword let out a small curling blade of flame that expanded slightly as it moved forward. The assassin had to sidestep and then use a skill to get further away as three, four blades of fire came after them.

Stopping the precipitous drain on her mana, Faye came to a halt a few steps in front of the downed rogue and injured Maggie, holding her flaming sword directly at the assassin, warning them to stay away.

Congratulations! You have created a new spell. [Blades of Flame] has been added to your spell list.

Bonus experience awarded for creating a [Tier 1] spell.

Bonus experience awarded for creating a [class skill].

For creating a class skill before being assigned that class, you have been granted insight.

What the hell, system? Is this really the time?