The marketplace was a complete madhouse.
People pushed and shoved each other. A construction worker, caught in the chaos, was knocked to the ground and rolled toward Enkrid, curling into a ball and clutching his head in a desperate attempt to protect himself. Survival instincts at their rawest.
Thwack!
"Shut up and keep moving!"
Several patrolling soldiers could be seen swinging their spear shafts, barking orders at the unruly crowd.
Enkrid’s senses sharpened to an unprecedented level, his concentration a blade honed to its finest edge.
He recalled how he had taken down the centaur leader.
At that mont, it had felt as though every elent around him was within reach, every tool and path laid out before him. He knew exactly where to step, how to act, and what to use.
Now, he remained perfectly still, his half-lidded eyes calm as his breathing steadied.
"Boss?"
Kraiss’s voice betrayed a hint of unease as he called out to Enkrid.
Not far from the fallen construction worker, a middle-aged woman and a small child had also been pushed to the ground by the panicked crowd.
People instinctively kept their distance from Enkrid, not wanting to risk being caught in whatever was about to unfold.
This created a bubble of space around him. Within this bubble were the construction worker, the woman, and the trembling child.
The boy, pale with fear, quivered violently. His sleeve was torn, and blood dripped steadily from his scraped elbow.
“He’s hurt,” Kraiss muttered, glancing at the boy.
Still, he didn’t intervene. It wasn’t a girl, and Kraiss knew better than to act rashly in a mont like this.
Fighting wasn’t his forte, but understanding when to stand firm and trust his leader? That, he knew well.
The boy’s head hung low, his frightened eyes darting around, unable to suppress his terror enough even to cry.
Enkrid, having steadied his breathing, suddenly flicked the dart he had been holding.
The motion was so fast that Kraiss couldn’t even see his hand move. In an instant, the dart sliced through the air, aiming for the construction worker’s thigh.
But the man twisted his ankle and narrowly dodged.
The dart grazed the thick fabric of his pants before embedding itself in the ground.
To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a lucky escape. But such precise movent in a mont like this? It wasn’t luck.
It was instinctive, reflexive—a telltale sign of his true identity.
The construction worker, despite the unexpected attack, reacted quickly. With a flick of his wrist, six darts flew from his hands.
Three were aid at Enkrid’s chest and stomach.
The other three targeted Kraiss: his forehead, chest, and thigh.
A calculated move.
Before the darts could fully leave his hands, Enkrid’s left hand moved. The gladius in his grip beca a blur.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
All six darts were deflected mid-air, scattering harmlessly to the ground.
At that mont, the child, who had crept close enough to be within striking range, suddenly lunged forward, thrusting a short sword at Enkrid.
The child’s approach had been so silent and quick that it was almost supernatural.
Where had such a small body hidden a blade that size? The short sword, about the length of a forearm, had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
Gripping the hilt with both hands, the boy drove the blade forward with speed and precision, aiming for a critical strike.
Enkrid, still in the motion of deflecting the darts, smoothly pivoted as though he had anticipated the attack all along.
As he turned, he angled his gladius, eting the short sword with its edge.
Ting!
The short sword was deflected sideways, its trajectory thrown off. In the sa fluid motion, Enkrid’s gladius struck the boy square in the chest.
Thud!
The blade didn’t cut deep—likely due to the sturdy leather armor the boy wore—but the force of the strike was imnse.
The boy dropped the short sword, his ribs caving in from the impact.
Enkrid’s strength had grown to the point where even a glancing blow could inflict critical damage, enough to rival a Frokk in an arm-wrestling contest.
“Gah…”
The boy coughed violently, struggling for breath as he reached into his coat with trembling hands. Persistent to the end.
But he never got the chance to act.
A small leopard appeared out of nowhere, striking with its front paw and delivering a crushing blow to the boy’s chest.
Crack!
The sound of bones shattering echoed loudly.
The boy collapsed, choking on his final breaths as his body went still.
The blow had broken his wrist and delivered a fatal second impact to his already fractured ribs.
His hand remained inside his coat as life left him.
“You son of a bitch.”
At last, one of the assassins spoke.
The voice ca from the middle-aged woman, who had been disguised as a noblewoman.
Enkrid heard her but had already moved. No, he had finished moving.
In the span of a single breath, he had deflected the darts, neutralized the boy’s attack, and extended his right hand forward.
Three seamless actions in perfect succession.
The tip of his finger pointed at the construction worker, who had just begun pulling sothing from his belt.
A knife flew from Enkrid’s hand, striking the man squarely in the forehead.
The force snapped his head backward before he collapsed to his knees, his chin dropping to his chest.
He was dead instantly.
“What was that?”
Enkrid finally responded, but the noblewoman had already thrown sothing at her feet.
Boom!
A smoke bomb erupted, filling the area with a dense, pale fog.
“Esther,” Enkrid said calmly, entrusting Kraiss to her as he tuned his senses.
He focused on the assassin’s movents, using his enhanced intuition and hearing.
The woman was fleeing, heading toward the outskirts of the territory.
And she wasn’t alone.
‘How many of them are there?’
The mory of the half-blood elf assassin briefly crossed his mind. The one who had gifted him the Whistle Dagger before vanishing.
These assassins would have hidden weapons, secret techniques, and tools designed solely for killing.
When he had fought the half-blood elf, he had envisioned countless outcos.
So what about today?
Enkrid felt confident. He had gauged their level and assessed his own abilities.
Besides, these were not the type to retreat quietly if left alone.
Letting those who had targeted him slip away wasn’t in his nature.
“Clean this up, Kraiss.”
With that simple command, Enkrid took off.
“Wha—?”
Kraiss’s bewildered question was cut short as he stood there, watching. But knowing Kraiss, his quick mind would soon take charge.
Enkrid was already chasing the assassins, his focus unshaken.
***
Kraiss stood amidst the chaos, the smoke grenade’s effects still lingering as panicked voices surrounded him.
“He wants to clean this ss up?”
He scanned the crowd. The assassins seed to have fled, but had they all really left?
One of them had thrown darts at him earlier, hadn’t they?
He stayed put, watching as the wind began to clear the smoke.
It didn’t seem like the smoke was laced with poison.
“If it was poisoned, things wouldn’t be ending this easily.”
“Shut your mouths and keep your heads down!”
The soldiers patrolling the area shouted, swinging their spear shafts to regain control of the crowd.
Thwack!
One soldier struck the head of a man who had been shouting, sending him staggering sideways, blood dripping from where he’d been hit.
“Ugh!”
The scream was expected. The man, a local resident, stumbled as the patrolman raised his voice further, veins bulging in his neck.
Order and discipline were priorities under Marcus’s command.
The soldiers understood that even a hint of disorder—an assassination attempt, an attack, any kind of uproar—needed to be dealt with decisively, or their own lives could be forfeit.
“That’s how it should be.”
The chaos would eventually settle down, thanks to the soldiers.
Kraiss formulated a plan in his mind, turning his gaze to the scene before him.
The dead child caught his eye.
Looking closely, he realized the “child” wasn’t a child at all. The face was weathered, with wrinkles around the eyes and mouth.
The hunchback was the sa—his appearance had been a deliberate disguise.
Kraiss’s attention shifted to the short sword that lay on the ground.
The blade glead unnaturally, coated with sothing.
“Poison.”
He had suspected it from the beginning.
What was the Black Blade aiming for?
“Persuasion.”
If persuasion failed, the next step was intimidation.
And what forms might that intimidation take?
The first had been the ambush on their return journey.
Sending rcenaries—swords bought with coin—was their initial move, but even the Black Blade must have realized by now that neither the Whistle Dagger nor the rcenary band was enough.
“Would they give up?”
If it were Kraiss, the answer was no.
Backing down now would ruin the Black Blade’s reputation as thieves, reducing it to nothing but a joke.
Their actions seed to ask the question: Did you really think we’d just let you go?
He hadn’t expected such a large-scale assassination attempt.
Kraiss scratched his head, taking in the now quieter market.
“Esther, take care of things.”
He said this as if leaving the rest to her. If there were still assassins lurking, Kraiss knew he wouldn’t survive.
But he couldn’t abandon the task Enkrid had assigned him either.
He had a decent sense of the enemy’s intentions. The assassins weren’t targeting the territory itself—they were targeting Enkrid.
If this had been an attack on the territory, it would have been a completely different story.
To target royal domain citizens outright? That would bring down the wrath of the knights.
Even if the kingdom was chaotic and busy, the knight orders could spare the effort to cut down a few bandits.
“What’s the cleanest way to avoid that?”
You aim for just one person.
What the assassins had done was bait Enkrid. Did they think he wouldn’t realize that?
“There’s no way.”
“Alright, everyone calm down. You there, don’t step on soone else’s goods. rchants, gather your belongings. Construction workers, group up and keep your heads down. Patroln, what unit are you with?”
“Second Company, Second Platoon, sir!”
Under Venzance’s command.
Kraiss nodded, then addressed the soldiers and patroln.
“Stop beating people and get this under control.”
The soldiers and patroln quickly gathered to restore order. With Kraiss’s keen eye and the combined effort of a squad-level force, the chaos was brought under control in no ti.
“My goods! My goods!”
One rchant wailed as if the world had ended.
“What goods? A few broken wooden arrows? That’s hardly anything to cry about.”
“You saw that?”
The rchant, who had been on the verge of tears, instantly changed his expression.
Kraiss dealt with the shaless rchants by talking them down, while pacifying the genuinely affected.
“You know what makes our battalion commander great? We’ve got gold coins to spare. While we can’t compensate you for what you’ve lost, there’s plenty of work to go around. Work as laborers for a couple of months. You’ll make more money than you would’ve selling your goods, I guarantee it.”
Kraiss knew how to turn a crisis into an opportunity.
After all, they still needed to widen the roads, build watchtowers, and finish digging the moat.
And if they were digging a moat, they’d need to build a drawbridge too.
They needed all the manpower they could get, and they had the krona to pay for it.
“Alright, anyone with experience in construction, step forward and let us know.”
He took the initiative, steering the situation toward benefiting the territory.
People, despite the abrupt change, quickly adapted.
An ambush was an ambush, smoke was smoke, cold was cold, and krona was krona.
With a nod from Kraiss, two soldiers began collecting the bodies while the rest corralled the crowd.
“Raise your hand if you’ve built anything before!” Kraiss called out.
***
Gold coins couldn’t lure them.
They couldn’t be sweet-talked into stepping aside.
If soone stood in their way, all it took was placing a blade in the hand of a passerby and saying:
“Go stab them.”
If such simple thods worked, what would you do?
The Black Blade had chosen that approach.
Enkrid knew this was a lure.
He had been targeted with volleys of darts more than five tis already during his pursuit.
And among them—
Whistle!
A sound he recognized with a faint sense of nostalgia.
There weren’t many assassins who used a Whistle Dagger.
Enkrid instinctively pinpointed the location of the one using it.
Stealth wasn’t his forte, so he simply ran after them, openly and directly.
Naturally, this made him an easy target.
The assassins hurled all sorts of projectiles at him as they fled.
Enkrid deflected every single one with the sword in his left hand, using it like a shield.
So of the assassins, watching this, were left in stunned disbelief.
“What is he?”
“Wasn’t it the people around him we were supposed to worry about?”
“Why doesn’t anything even graze him?”
The weapons were all poisoned; even a scratch would be enough.
Yet nothing touched him.
One assassin even threw a Whistle Dagger, only for Enkrid to catch it effortlessly mid-air and pocket it.
That particular dagger wasn’t poisoned—did he know that?
How did he even do that? Catch a Whistle Dagger mid-air?
Even the most skilled assassins within the Black Blade would hesitate to pull off such a feat.
Enkrid deflected bolts with his sword, his eyes constantly scanning his surroundings. Every glance seed to pinpoint the locations of the hidden assassins.
Despite this, the group pressed on toward their rendezvous point: a reed field that stretched up to their waists, located in the northeastern part of the territory, between the outpost and the domain.
The Black Blade didn’t fully understand.
They knew there were dangerous individuals around Enkrid, but they hadn’t realized that Enkrid himself was a threat.
Delusion can be dangerous and deadly.
For these assassins, their misunderstanding, their lack of information, was no different from facing death itself.
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