Asher stared down from the rooftops at what looked like little more than a rundown shack jammed between an old clothing shop which probably got a grand total of five customers a year, and a large bakery that had to be abandoned seeing as it was already nearing four in the morning and the lights weren't even on yet. As far as cover for the headquarters of the worst mass murderer in all of Whikoga went, he had to admit, it was rather decent.

There's no way Eight has his entire operation running out of that little shack… Is building secret underground compounds just the go-to for people in this city? Why doesn't the nobility just send people around with Earth elements and check for them every couple of months?

Shaking his head, Asher mentally prepared himself to put an end to this whole ordeal. It felt like a lifetime ago that he'd received the mysterious package addressed to The Reaper, only to open it and find himself lying dead on the floor. In reality, it hadn't even been a full week, which just went to show how jam-packed his nights had been since he'd returned to Whikoga.

He was more than ready to put all this behind them and spend some time relaxing with Samantha and Brian. Though from the sounds of things, The Council of Death might make that rather difficult.

Focus, he frowned, shoving down his concerns about the council of millennia-old liches who wanted to perform soul surgery on him. Leighann had sounded more than a little concerned about the council, and while he was hoping she'd been blowing them out of proportion at least a little, he wasn't about to discount them as a massive threat. One problem at a time.

Pulling up his interface, Asher took a look at the improvements he'd made over the last week of battling the Guild.

Name: Asher Holden

Class: Assassin

Unique classes available: Demon Slayer, Awakened Beast Hunter, Assassin, Librarian

Element: Spatial

Ability: Astral Dip - Lvl 23

Ability: Distortion - Lvl 24

Ability: Personal Rift - Lvl 19

Ability: Spatial Lock - Lvl 12

Ability: Recall - Lvl 6

Element: Knowledge

Ability: Identify - Lvl 20

Ability: Comprehend - Lvl 23

Ability: Incorporate - Lvl 16

Ability: Secret Seeker - Lvl 18

Ability: Judgement - Lvl 8

Element: Eternity

Ability: Eternal Regeneration - Lvl 24

Ability: Complete Resilience - Lvl 22

Ability: Eternal Mark - Lvl 17

Ability: Permanence - Lvl 11

Ability: Sever the Thread - lvl 3

Resistance: Darkness - Tier 2, Truth - Tier 2

Shards: 128,275

While he hadn't managed to pick up any shards from Leighann's corpse, Draken had been kind enough to give him a rather hefty sum, calling it an advanced payment on finally ridding the city of Eight once and for all. The gang leader wanted the head of Whikoga's Assassin's Guild dead even more than Asher did, and Asher certainly wasn't going to turn away free shards.

Especially not when his Identify had finally hit level 20.

Praying to whoever up there was in charge of these things, Asher focused on the waiting skill.

Spend 100,000 shards to evolve Identify?

Yes please, he grinned, crossing his fingers.

Shards: 28,275

Identify (passive) - Lvl 21

Tier 1: Learn the truth of all you see.

Tier 2: The truth will not be hidden.

Huh… No active component or anything… I'm sure that's going to be useful as all hell, but still, that's kinda boring.

Out of curiosity, he pulled one of the potions he'd snagged from the Guild safehouse after raiding the place. Where Identify used to give him [Unknown Potion], instead, he now received something slightly more helpful.

[Potion of Lesser Restoration]

Yep, no complaints here, he decided, storing the potion back into his rift. It wasn't a flashy evolution by any means, but he supposed they couldn't all be mind-blowing new powers.

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Skill evolution taken care of, Asher went back to observing the silent shack, running through the last-minute mental checklist of things he'd wanted to take care of before his final showdown with Eight.

Before running over here, he'd made a quick Recall back to Samantha in order to snag Bordan's ring one more time for himself. According to Bordan's warning, he only had a few more hours at most before the ring lost its enchantment and became nothing more than a pretty band of metal with a gem attached to it. Part of him had wanted to forgo grabbing the ring and simply rush straight to the given address and start stabbing whatever he found inside, but the Honest Ears skill would be critical for his ability to ensure the person he found and killed truly was Eight.

With the magic quickly fading, he'd been tempted to simply make Honest Ears permanent once more, before realizing he might need the effect of Theorn's signet ring sooner than later. He still didn't know exactly what he was going to do when it came to preventing Leighann's resurrection, but he figured having the ability to slip back into the Frent estate and access whatever building he needed could only come in handy.

During his brief visit with Samantha, he'd also reclaimed the universal antidote for himself that he'd snatched from the lich's tower and gave to Samantha for her and Brian's safety. Seeing as he was finally about to launch himself headfirst into Eight's private sanctum, he figured it only made sense he had a back up in the event he ended up horribly poisoned.

He still had no idea if the antidote would have even the slightest effect on any of Eight's concoctions, but he figured there were decent odds it would at least help. The lich had obviously been extremely powerful, but Asher didn't know if that really meant anything when it appeared as though it were his bound imps that were the ones making all the potions. It might be overkill now that he had his purge function from Complete Resilience's evolution, but using the skill's second tier effect was extremely draining, and he didn't think he'd be able to do it more than a couple of times if he also planned on fighting.

And he doubted Eight was going to go down quietly.

Satisfied with his equipment check, Asher silently crept into the alleyway, keeping his eyes peeled for any sort of trap as he slipped into the astral and entered the shack with his daggers at the ready. He wasn't taking any chances when it came to dealing with Eight, meaning he already had his mithral dagger out and ready to go.

He'd expected to slip into the rundown shack and find it was nothing more than a clever façade, hiding an elaborate and highly advanced alchemical workshop underneath its rotting wooden walls and grimy exterior.

Instead, he entered the rotting, decrepit shack, only to discover it was in fact nothing more than a rotting and decrepit shack. The only life he found inside was that of quite a few nasty clumps of mold, which looked like the kind one needed a flamethrower to really do anything about.

…Huh. Asher looked around, stepping carefully despite his assassin class that worked to keep his movements almost silent without him even trying. Recalling how The Spider had coated her own door handles with an extremely toxic and deadly contact poison designed to seep in through the skin, he was careful not to touch anything as he crept his way through the old building, hunting for any signs that someone had recently been here, or anything to trigger his Secret Seeker skill.

If I were a hidden trapdoor, where would I be?

It took him longer than he would have thought, but eventually, his skill did in fact pick up on something. But it wasn't a hidden trapdoor in the floor.

It was on the wall.

Secret Seeker - Lvl 19

Asher had been all but certain that he would eventually stumble upon yet another secret underground lair similar to Loratta's sprawling compound, which made it all the more surprising when he felt his skill drawing his attention to the mold-covered wall, revealing a hidden door.

No way… he blinked, slipping into the astral and sticking his head through the door into the abandoned bakery.

Rather than ovens and dough racks, the 'bakery' was filled with bubbling vials and oblong glassware that looked like they'd been taken right out of a mad scientist's lab.

Asher looked around in awe, astonished at how well Eight had managed to hide himself in plain sight. All it would have taken was one belligerent drunk deciding they wanted a freshly baked bagel and trying to break down the door to expose his entire operation. The Finger must have had some fail safes in place, or a plan for such an occurrence, as Asher couldn't imagine how else he'd managed to keep operating over the years.

Carefully, Asher phased through the rest of the wall, making sure to minimize his movements to allow himself to stay within the astral realm as he scoped the secret lab out. Unfortunately, while he'd definitely discovered Eight's base of operations, the Finger himself was nowhere to be found.

In hindsight, he supposed hoping to stumble upon the man with his eyes shoved into a microscope and his back turned to him was perhaps a little optimistic.

Slipping back into the material realm, Asher gingerly crept forward, his eyes darting around the active workshop and his daggers at the ready. The entire workshop was one massive room, but it was filled with so many rows of foreign equipment and bubbling liquids that he couldn't see very deep into the alchemical jungle. For all he knew Eight was only a single row over, waiting for him to drop his guard so that he could lob a vial of acid at him or something.

It was both nerve wracking, and utterly exhilarating, Asher decided, grinning as he felt the adrenaline of the battle to come start flooding his system.

As he made his way slowly through the workshop, his newly evolved Identify received quite the impressive workout. There weren't any functional potions lying around, but he was still able to pick out all sorts of strange ingredients and half-dissolved reagents incorporated into Eight's experiments.

[Ground Ignal Leaf] - High Quality

[Dissolved Ogre Enamel] - High Quality

[Dried Phortok Root] - High Quality

Oh hey, I think I've seen that one before, he blinked, doing a double take at the shriveled up root of some unknown plant sitting on an old-fashioned scale. Pretty sure the lich had some of that in his own alchemy lab. Wonder what it even does?

While Asher couldn't really make heads or tails of any of the colorful, half-baked potions, there was one thing he noted rather quickly that was rather strange to him.

Eight, it seemed, had something of a fascination with mold.

Clumps of mold decorated multiple workbenches. Chunks of mold were currently dissolving in various colored liquids. He even spotted a few bits and pieces of mold currently growing on a number of different strips of some foul-smelling fabric hanging from the ceiling.

Now, having lived in an apartment complex back on Earth owned by some large corporation that only cared about his health so long as it was cost effective, Asher wasn't exactly a stranger to mold. He'd seen the occasional patch before in his bathroom, or tucked away within the maintenance closet whenever he'd actually managed to get someone to come by and check on his faulty water heater. But those had only looked like tiny black patches, and were fairly easily taken care of.

Similar to the mold he'd seen over in the shack adjacent to the hidden laboratory, the mold growing on these strips looked like it would laugh in the face of open flame, before demanding his lunch money and then killing him anyway.

Some of the mold strains had small, branching stalks growing out of them that looked like long, spindly mushrooms swaying in the wind, despite the completely still air. Other strains were glowing red, pulsing with what unnervingly made him think of an actual heartbeat. One strain seemed to be dripping, and seeing the half-melted glass bowl set up underneath it, Asher was pretty certain it wasn't dripping with water.

Deciding he might have better luck searching the other half of the workshop, far from these creepy hanging mold colonies, Asher turned and went to head into the next aisle.

Which naturally, was when the massive glass apparatus to his left exploded without warning, dousing him in about a half-dozen different liquids.

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