Asher kept his mental trigger-finger on his skills, prepared to slip into the astral in the event that the woman surprised him with another deadly skill. But to his surprise, she slowly raised her hands above her head, staring at him with fear-filled eyes as she quickly nodded.

Huh… Kinda thought members of the dreaded Assassin's Guild would be a bit more… I don't know, resistant?

"Do you know where I can find Eight?" he led with, deciding to start with the most important question.

"You're trying to find Eight?" the woman asked incredulously, so caught off guard by his question that she seemed to temporarily forget the dagger he had held to her throat. She clearly remembered rather quickly, however, as she swallowed and very carefully shook her head. "No, I imagine he stays within the Guild's main base of operations, and I don't know where that is."

"How do you not know where your own guild is located?" Asher asked, pressing the dagger ever so slightly harder against her throat and drawing a thin line of blood as the blade broke her skin.

"I swear, it's the truth!" she hurriedly said, her breathing beginning to come in rather sharp gasps as she started to panic. "The Guild has at least eight cells I'm personally aware of scattered throughout the city of Whikoga, only the higher ups actually know where the main headquarters is! Each cell is led by a senior assassin, and I'm pretty sure they're the only ones that travel back and forth between headquarters and the cells!"

"Don't tell me you or any other lower-tier member were never curious," Asher frowned, looking carefully at the panicking assassin. While he didn't have any sort of truth-detecting skill, he was pretty certain she wasn't lying to him.

"Of course, but attempting to follow them is grounds for immediate execution!" she said, looking pleadingly at him. "Only a few months after I first joined the Guild, I witnessed one of our more talented members try to follow our cell leader back to headquarters. Rumor had it she was skilled enough that she was on track to becoming a senior assassin herself, but apparently, that didn't even matter. Her body was found dumped in a random alleyway the next morning, her throat slit as a warning."

"I suppose that is a rather effective method of dissuading people from trying to find headquarters," Asher muttered, wondering what to do at this point. His plan up until now had been to corner the assassin manning the safehouse and demand the location of where he could find Eight. If they refused to tell him, he was going to place an Eternal Mark on them and let them go, stalking them back to their base anyway. After all, while he didn't have any qualms against killing people who deserved it, he wasn't about to start torturing people for information. But if what the assassin said was true, that threw a bit of a wrench in his plans.

Still, I bet she'll go report this to somebody if she 'escapes.' At the very least, I can use her to find other members of the Guild. Maybe I'll even get lucky and stumble onto one of these senior assassins that actually know where headquarters is.

Shoving the location of headquarters aside for the moment, he decided to try his luck with his follow up questions.

"How large is the guild?"

"My cell has around two dozen people that I know of, but I don't know if the others are the same," she said, obviously relieved that he hadn't accused her of trying to hide information from him.

"Two dozen people in just your cell alone?" Asher frowned, doing some quick math. "Assuming the other cells are the same, that's what, something like a hundred assassins in just this one city? That seems a bit high."

"Not all of us are assassins," the woman rushed to explain. "I don't know the exact numbers, but other than assassins, we also have support members like cleaners and information brokers. There are probably others, but like I said, I'm not important enough to know."

"That makes sense I guess. What's a cleaner do?"

"Sometimes hits go wrong and we need to call in a cleaner to take care of the extra mess, or we need to make sure no trace of us remains in the event we go after a high-profile target. I've never actually seen one in action as the few hits I've been given have all been rather simple and low-priority. My cell leader doesn't seem to like me very much, so I honestly spend most of my time on safehouse duty. Less dangerous, but boring and less pay as well."

While the woman rambled, Asher briefly contemplated what elements would function best for a class like cleaner. Fire to burn away any evidence? Water to clean everything without leaving a mark? He was pretty certain he'd read mention of a rather unusual Soap element in The Big Book of Elements: Volume Six, but he'd almost thought the author had been kidding about that one.

"Does the safehouse have anything useful?" he finally asked, deciding there was no point in leaving potentially useful gear here when he had an entire skill devoted to storing stuff. Realizing blood was beginning to drip down her neck from where he had his dagger pressed against her throat, he pulled back slightly, earning a thankful nod.

"Nothing valuable, but we have a decent amount of basic stuff," she said, seeming to grow less and less worried that he'd kill her the longer they spoke. "The only things worth taking in my opinion would be the potions of Lesser Restoration. All the backup weaponry is pretty crap if you ask me."

Having already asked her what he wanted to know, Asher realized he'd found a perfect opportunity to let her 'escape.' "Those still sound useful at the very least. Where do you store all that?"

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Just as he'd hoped, he picked up the slight glimmer of hope in her eye as she pointed over his shoulder. "That rug covers the entrance to a secret basement. Everything's down there."

Mentally preparing himself for some sort of attack, he dropped his Spatial Lock skill and purposefully shot a glance over his shoulder, pulling his dagger even further from her throat and looking away for a second. The moment he did so, she moved.

To his surprise, rather than summon one of her darts and try to kill him with it, the woman instead turned and hurled her dart away from him, shattering the back window as the glowing weapon shot outside. Before he could do so much as move, her entire body glowed a deep, sickly green before exploding, sending dozens of those ethereal darts in every direction. It was only because he was expecting some sort of attack that Asher managed to slip into the astral in time to dodge the surprise explosion.

By the time he returned to the material plane, the assassin was gone.

A quick check of the Eternal Mark he'd placed on her was all the confirmation he needed that she'd activated some sort of teleportation skill to escape, and was now fleeing through back alleyways, taking turns seemingly at random as though to try and toss him off her trail. Grinning, Asher ignored the mark for the moment, instead glancing around the room.

It seemed whatever skill had caused the explosion of darts hadn't been quite as powerful as the one she'd opened with. Rather than destroying the entire house, it looked as though these darts only had enough force to crack the wooden walls or embed themselves a few inches into the stone floor. Even as Asher watched, one dart after another quickly faded from existence, disappearing without leaving behind so much as a single trace.

Kinda reminds me of those daggers Latch threw at me way back when, he thought as he watched the last of the darts vanish. I'd guess she had a Dart element in that case.

From his long hours of research in the library, Asher had learned it was common for people with weapon-specific elements to obtain a skill that would allow them to summon some version of their weapon. Sometimes they looked completely real, such as in Latch's case, while other times they were obviously fake, like with the glowing green darts.

As he wondered what her other element had been, he walked over to the rug she'd pointed him toward. Sure enough, the assassin had been telling the truth, and he quickly discovered a sealed trapdoor with a small indentation he could only assume was for some sort of magical key.

Should have taken her artifact before she left, he frowned, realizing he'd forgotten about the artifact he wanted to give Samantha. Ah well, I'll just collect it the next time I see her.

Pulling out his daggers, Asher prepared himself for anything as he slipped into the astral and let himself fall through the sealed trapdoor. It was a shame he couldn't poke his head through first, but while waiting for Kree to give him something to work with, he'd spent the last few days finally getting around to some experimentation regarding Astral Dip's limitations.

First was the confirmation that he couldn't just poke his head through the floor, regardless of how much he practiced. It seemed if he wanted to phase through a particular object or structure, such as a wall or the floor, he had to allow his entire body to phase through it. So while he could poke his head through a wall and see what was on the other side rather easily, he couldn't just poke his head through the floor, as his feet would phase through as well.

Second was the discovery that there was in fact a limit to how much material he could phase through. He hadn't narrowed down the exact number yet, but from what he could tell it was somewhere around five or six feet of solid material. Anything thicker than that and he couldn't go through it, not even partway. No matter his desires, it continued to feel like a solid object, despite the weird properties of the astral realm.

And lastly was the confirmation that his skill was dangerous, to himself as well. The skill gave him both a strange sixth sense that allowed him to tell if he was overlapping anything on the material realm, as well as a subtle sensation of dread anytime he got too close to overlapping with anything before dropping the skill. Because of that, up until now he'd been careful to ensure no part of him or his weapons were stuck inside anything else when he returned from the astral realm to the material realm. During his testing, however, he'd tried sticking the tip of his pinky finger into a rock before cancelling his skill, just to see what would happen.

The tip of his finger had been sheared off as though erased by a laser.

Despite the blood that had gotten everywhere, as far as Asher could tell his fingertip hadn't exactly been cut off so much as it had simply stopped existing. He'd gone back into the astral to see if he could find it lying there, but there was no sign of his missing flesh in either of the two realms. It had taken the better part of a day for Eternal Regeneration to regrow his missing fingertip, and Asher had decided he'd start being even more careful now that he knew a single mistimed use of his skill could very well result in himself vanishing from existence.

Landing in the lightless basement, Asher's eyes swept the room, taking everything in. There were three potions lying on a table, a few racks of tools and weaponry, and quite a number of crates filled with different outfits, ranging from what looked like stuff nobles would wear, to things more befitting of a commoner.

Immediately heading over to the potions, Asher frowned as his Identify continued to tell him [Unknown Potion], despite the woman having claimed they were potions of Lesser Restoration. Deciding he wouldn't risk using them until he'd gotten them checked out, he stored them within his rift before investigating the hanging racks.

Sure enough, just as the assassin had warned him, nothing here was all that impressive. Still, Asher's Personal Rift felt like it was about the size of a small bedroom at this point, so he shrugged as he walked around and shoved every single tool and weapon into his rift. He even went so far as to tuck the crates filled with outfits into his skill as well, seeing as the skill had been leveling slower with every passing day, and the more stuff he stored, the faster the skill seemed to level.

As if agreeing with his assessment, he received a notification after making the final box vanish.

Personal Rift - lvl 18

"Nearly there," he muttered, wiping his hands free of dust as he glanced around the room. He'd looted everything that wasn't bolted down, which meant it was time to go. Checking the mark he'd placed on her, he confirmed she was still busy darting through alleyways, taking what he assumed was a very roundabout way back to wherever her cell was located. As tempting as waiting for her to stop moving and simply Recalling to her would be, Asher figured it would probably be smarter to stalk her from afar.

Let's hope her boss is on shift today, he thought, grinning as he prepared himself for the hunt.

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