The Only Good Assassin Is a Dead Assassin
The only good assassin is a dead assassin.
The attack came along a familiar trajectory.
From a defensive stance, I focused on the Shield Bash, channeling the force that ran through my legs and hips and shoulders all the way into my wrist.
Thooom!!!
The Reaper Mantis's posture—mid-swing toward my waist—collapsed completely.
It was a perfect recreation of the technique Cretus had once used against a spear-wielding man.
A little disappointing, though.
For something I'd learned in a single week, it was absurdly polished. Still, compared to the real thing Cretus had shown me, it left something to be desired.
Even so, it was more than skilled enough to use without a hitch in actual combat.
I already knew game knowledge wasn't everything… but still.
A regular Shield Bash would have done nothing more than nudge the Reaper Mantis's attack slightly off course. It was a simple skill whose power scaled with total weight, including gear—so against anything above a certain mass, the effect was minimal.
But after watching Cretus fight with my own eyes, even that ordinary skill was producing ridiculous results.
I felt it all over again: game knowledge really wasn't everything.
This is fun.
If I had my way, I'd keep pushing the mastery of Cretus Martial Arts higher and higher. But once a technique was already past ninety percent complete, the only thing left was to burn the proper applications into muscle memory—when and where to use it.
In other words, real combat was the best teacher.
First, let's warm up with some Bespoids.
They were the same dangerous monsters I'd once hunted with the Slash-and-Burn Farming method. But my status-ailment resistance was much higher now, and training Cretus Martial Arts had sharpened my senses considerably. I was confident I could take them down head-on without trouble.
Crunch.
I finished off the Reaper Mantis, cleaned up the area, and was about to move on in search of a new target when I froze.
…Huh?
It was a strange, prickling sense of wrongness.
— Young Master. If you ever feel a sudden chill in the forest, stop walking and take a moment to gather your thoughts.
…Bern.
The knowledge I'd gained from Bern—gamekeeper of House Revan and a veteran Ranger—was screaming that something was off.
Someone was here.
And not just anyone. Someone skilled enough that even a Ranger's instincts could only barely detect the dissonance.
An assassin…
Assassins were a genuinely dangerous blessing. Under the right conditions—first strike, ambush, surprise attack—they could take down even close-range dealers with ease. In a forest like this, their combat power was nothing to sneeze at.
The butler, then?
This was a dungeon managed by House Remington. Someone had guided the assassin here. The most suspicious party was the butler—already fallen out of the countess's favor, a man with no more strings to pull.
"Hooo…"
I wiped at nonexistent sweat like a man who'd just finished something exhausting, then carefully scanned my surroundings the way someone wary of approaching monsters would.
Still not coming out, huh…
The moments when a human is physically most vulnerable: sleep, excretion, and sex. Of those, the most plausible option here was—
I turned my back toward the direction I expected the enemy to be and made a show of starting to undo my pants.
That was when a clear spike of wrongness ran straight up my spine.
"Ugh?!"
I let out a startled noise and flicked my shoulder just enough to knock aside whatever came flying.
Ting!
Sparks flew with a sharp metallic ring.
A throwing dagger.
"…Poor bastard."
A man with a cloth covering the lower half of his face walked toward me with deliberate steps. His ambush had failed.
The optimal play would have been to keep chipping away at my stamina with repeated sneak attacks—striking during fights with monsters, or while I rested. In a dungeon, that constant pressure would eventually open a gap.
Yet here he was, standing right out in the open.
He must have looked down on me that much.
…Can I really blame him?
A man standing with his legs wide apart, shield dangling awkwardly in his left hand, looking like an easy mark. Even if I'd been in his shoes, I probably wouldn't have wasted time grinding someone down bit by bit. Variables like reinforcements could always appear. If you can win, win clean and fast. That was a valid approach too.
"Did the butler put you up to this?"
His answer was another pair of throwing daggers, aimed at the gaps in my armor—the neck and the inner thigh.
Ting! Ting!
They accomplished nothing. A light twist of the body was all it took. I was wearing solid heavy armor now.
"…"
Annoyed, the assassin's eyebrows twitched above the mask, speaking volumes.
"Guess the rumors were true. Only trash picks that blessing. Can't even kill a single Guardian…"
I smirked, flashing the kind of grin that usually earned me a beating from my brother. The taunt worked—he launched into a proper assault.
Highlight.
A derived skill unlocked by mastering throwing techniques: a rapid-fire barrage with absurd accuracy. His hand barely seemed to cut the air, yet nearly ten daggers poured toward me in an instant.
Ting, tidididing!
Completely meaningless. The heavy plate I wore shrugged off that level of attack without me even needing to pay attention. I could have blocked them all with the shield or simply dodged if I felt like it.
I deliberately did neither.
Shhk!
See? Deciding I was getting cocky behind my armor, he stepped right into my range himself.
Screeeech!
In a blink he had slipped into the corner of my vision and slashed at my calf. But that much I could handle without even looking.
"Wh-What—!"
Of course, I didn't let him know that. I twisted my foot in exaggerated panic and let the shin guard deflect the blade.
"Lucky."
The sneer was easy to read: You're a noble brat in armor a commoner could never afford. That's the only reason you're still breathing.
"Is it even possible to be unluckier than a sewer rat?"
I mocked him while keeping the shield tight, forcing him to retreat.
A sharp glint. His brow furrowed as his hand went behind his back.
And then—
Fwoomph!
Something hit the ground and smoke billowed up. For someone as slow as me, it was an attack I couldn't outrun.
"Heh."
A chuckle escaped from behind the mask. I made a show of holding my breath in panic.
"That's right. Correct answer."
But it was also the wrong one.
He'd thrown smoke bombs instead of more daggers.
Bang! Babababang!
Poison?
Impressive. Even in the game, when an assassin was forced into a straight fight, the standard approach was to use status-ailment items. You still had to match them to the opponent, though.
This level wouldn't pierce my resistance.
"Guh—!"
No reason to tell him that either.
Shiiing!
Sharper, more needle-like daggers came flying—less precise strikes and more a scattershot hoping to graze me somewhere, anywhere. The way something glittered on the blades that bounced off my armor told me they were coated with paralytic poison or the equivalent.
Tididididing!
Sparks showered endlessly off the plate, giving away my vague silhouette through the smoke. There was no clean counter for that.
But it was fine. He already thought of me as nothing more than a stationary sandbag.
Clink-clank.
The sound of iron chains tangling together.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
Something cutting the air—
Shhk!
—and the sensation of it flying straight at me.
Clang!
I managed to bat it aside cleanly with the kite shield, but—
Clatter! Clatter-rattle!
The chains coiled around my body as if they were alive.
He wove thin iron wire into the sickle end of the chain-sickle?
Even after I deflected the weapon itself, those slender metal threads wrapped me with almost magical precision. My movement locked, smoke pouring into my eyes, nose, and mouth—by every metric the situation looked hopeless.
"It won't hurt."
What he wanted was a death that could be staged as an accident. In this dungeon, the corpse that lasted longest belonged to anyone dragged off by a Demon Spider.
From his perspective, the job was already done.
And yet—
Footsteps. He walked toward his bound prey with one eyebrow twitching, victory already written on his face.
"How's it feel getting wrecked by a blessing only trash picks?"
Ah. That one landed. I could tell.
"Born into a good house, ate well, dressed well—you arrogant little shit."
Thud!
His knuckles cracked across the jaw of my helmet. It didn't hurt. Didn't even itch. Flesh Cut, Bone Crush's Barrier Concentration had focused precisely on the point of impact and nullified it.
"What the hell would you know about anything?"
"I don't. Don't plan to either."
He flinched hard and stabbed the dagger in his left hand straight at my eye—but I was faster. I yanked on the chains wrapped around me, and the man holding the other end staggered off-balance.
"Kh—!"
Even while falling, he twisted, planted one hand on the ground, and flung the dagger at my face.
Ting!
I flicked my outstretched fist lightly, batting the blade aside, then drove the same fist straight into his face.
"Gahk!"
He took a punch while doing a handstand. His posture shattered completely and he tumbled across the ground.
Clatter!
I whipped the chain around his neck and hauled him in hard.
"Ghk—!"
Crack!
Like a pig dragged into the slaughterhouse by the chain around its throat, he scraped across the dirt. I aimed a kick straight at his jaw. He barely got both arms up in time—but a kick concentrated with the Barrier of Flesh Cut, Bone Crush snapped both of an assassin's arms like dry twigs.
"Aagh—! Ghhhk!!!"
Arms broken, he screamed in agony and stared up at me with pure disbelief. In his world, what just happened was impossible.
Flesh Cut, Bone Crush let me deliver striking attacks that scaled off defense score rather than attack power. An assassin in light armor with an E-rank defense modifier had no business blocking that bare-handed.
Shame. Real shame…
If he'd decided I was too much trouble, he almost certainly would have abandoned the contract and fled. Because I'd been forced to act like I was at a disadvantage the whole time, I'd never gotten to see him go all-out. That was the only regret.
"Hey."
I planted a boot on the man who'd already accepted death and spoke.
"Just in case—who's the client?"
"…"
Yeah. That's more like it.
I'd never tortured anyone before, but trying was better than nothing.
"If you swear on your house… I'll tell you who the client is… hah…"
…Wasn't the cliché supposed to be the assassin repeating "just kill me" and keeping his mouth shut?
"And why should I trust that?"
"It was a big job. Naturally the ledger… hah… has a record, and there's a written order…"
Pain from the fractures threaded his words with intermittent gasps.
"Hmm…"
I folded my arms, pretended to think it over, then nodded as if I'd made up my mind.
"I swear on the seal of my house. Spit out everything you know and I'll let you go."
For a noble, invoking the family name was roughly the equivalent of staking your life. Only then did he relax enough to talk.
"…The client is Harold, butler of House Remington. The advance he paid the boss was one hundred Silverion gold coins. Success fee is two hundred gold."
A Silverion gold coin was roughly a million won back on Earth, which meant my head was worth about three hundred million. In this world that was a respectable sum—enough to buy a warhorse—but I still found it a little sad that my neck only commanded three hundred gold. I was a noble, for crying out loud.
Which is exactly why he spilled everything.
Hard money for a butler to scrape together, but nowhere near enough for a level-twenty-plus assassin to keep his mouth shut out of loyalty.
"You're not just framing him?"
"There's a box with the written order in my pack. If the wrong key is used… kuh… the order inside burns… kuh…"
Thorough. I took the key from him and opened the box. Just as he'd said, a mechanism inside would incinerate the paper if forced.
"Hah… hah… Keep your oath, Edwin…!"
I held up a dagger engraved with a seal for the wheezing man to see.
"…Huh?"
The seal on the blade showed a shield and an axe. Something I'd received from the Cretus Church.
"Unfortunately, the Revan family seal left my hands a while ago. My brother took it, you see."
"You—you son of a—! Ghhk!"
"Don't worry. I still have a minimum of conscience."
I unwound the wire and chains from my own body, then unwrapped the ones binding him as well. He wasn't in great shape, but if he managed to crawl out of the forest he would probably live.
So—
"Uwooooooo—!!!"
I roared a battle cry.
A Demon Spider nested near this zone. From the start he hadn't been strong enough to drag my heavy frame, so he'd simply followed me until I entered its territory. Make this much noise and of course—
Slither.
—a Demon Spider sensitive to its domain would appear.
"You bastard—aaaagh…!"
"I did say I'd let you go. Onto the ground."
There was a technicality, and I was still a noble. An oath sworn on the family name sat uncomfortably. So I'd avoided outright lies as much as possible.
"Two days. If you can last two days, Sir Kaiden will send a search party."
Entering the dungeon alone was free, but if I didn't come out by the agreed time, a search party would be dispatched. That was the deal I'd made. In two days Kaiden's men would arrive. Survive until then and he'd live.
Of course, the odds of that were zero.
"Fuck… Ray… I…"
Maybe he just wanted to leave me with a bad feeling—he murmured a woman's name and closed his eyes.
I felt nothing of the sort.
Prerequisite for the Assassin blessing: kill five people with a karma score of twenty or higher. In plain language, you had to murder five completely innocent civilians just to unlock it. I wasn't soft enough to feel pity or discomfort over a man like that.
The only good assassin is a dead assassin.
Alright. Time to collect what's worth collecting.
I methodically gathered his belongings into my pack, then lay down on the ground as if the poison had finally taken hold. That was the only way a wary Demon Spider would approach.
"Sleep well. Don't dream about me."
"You son of a—!"
Thwack.
I cracked him across the head and knocked him out cold.
Silence settled over the dungeon forest. Only then did the Demon Spider draw near.
Crunch. Crunch.
The creature that had sung both of us a lullaby began to move. Like a parent carefully lifting a sleeping child into bed, the Demon Spider gently gathered us up.
Drag. Drag.
It was binding us with webbing and hauling us along by its legs, but compared to Hector Training the motion was downright gentle.
"Haaah…"
Demon Spider venom barely affected me anymore. Still, I had to sell the act, so I pulled a poison pill made from a medicinal pellet out of my pocket, popped it into my mouth, and chewed.
Yeah… with this haul I might as well call myself a Golden Goblin.
The appearance of a Golden Goblin meant House Remington would end up giving me quite a lot. It wasn't one-sided plunder, though. The arrangement would be welcome from their side as well. If I had to put a label on it, it was closer to a win-win.
Thinking about that made the corners of my mouth twitch of their own accord. For once, it took me a full hour of tossing and turning before I finally fell asleep.