Chapter 42.2: Pinpointing the Assassins Location
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 8th Month
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Assassins in Maya Village
The arrival of the assassins had not come unnoticed.
In fact they had been spotted by multiple Grimfangs before any of them had come within sight of the village proper, because the Grimfangs did not rely on sight as their primary instrument of detection and the assassins, for all their professional competence, could not disguise what their bodies produced. The scent of people who have spent their lives moving toward violence is a specific thing, layered with cortisol and the particular chemical residue of elevated alertness maintained over long periods, and underneath all of that was the older, deeper smell that the wolves catalogued simply and accurately as death. Not blood. Not decay. The smell of something that had ended many things and intended to end more. You cannot train that out of a person. You cannot wash it away or hide it from any specialized sensory organs. The Grimfangs had been tracking them through it since the previous day.
The pack communicated this the way the they communicated everything: through channels that did not require the sequential transmission of language. The howlings began at the territorial boundaries and moved inward toward the village in a pattern that anyone who understood Grimfang pack communication would have recognized as a specific category of alert: confirmed external threat, multiple targets, both on the road and in the forest approaches to the west.
Further confirmation from the human security elements came shortly after and aligned with what the wolves had already reported. By the time the formal alert went through the village's channels, the Grimfangs were already in their holding posture: monitor, track, report, and not to engage within the village territory unless a forceful engagement was necessary. The territory beyond the village's own declared borders was another matter. The beast lords who ruled those dominions had their own laws and their own enforcement, and they applied both without consultation.
Of the assassins who had left the road and veered west into the forest, taking the longer approach through the neighboring beast territories because the road felt too exposed, most of them were already dead or dying before the village's own forces had been called to action. The beasts of those territories did not ask questions and did not take any prisoners, but they acknowledged the heads up from the Northern Guardian Beast Lord who is also their neighbor and lives at that human settlement. Since they have found things that were moving through their domain that smelled wrong and had no permission, they responded with the directness of apex predators who had never had reason to develop more complicated protocols for that situation.
This had not been part of any plan that the village had currently made. It was simply what would happen when you tried to infiltrate and step on other borders without permission, just to target another territory that lived inside the Great Forest of Lonelywood and had spent years building harmonic relationships with its neighbors.
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The Assassins Numbers
Of the hundred assassins the Sovereignty of Arwen had dispatched, the distribution had been deliberate: ten had embedded with merchant convoys and visitor groups approaching along the road, the clean infiltration element that would establish presence inside the village before the outer force was needed. Ninety had taken the forest route, moving through the neighboring beast territories to approach from the west; outside the road's checkpoint coverage, they had constituted the outer support element, intended to respond when the infiltration moved to action.
By the time the day had progressed to the point where the ten inside the village had been watching and waiting for coded responses that were not arriving, the numbers looked considerably different from what they had been.
Twenty-five in total were still alive at this point. The ten inside the village were among them. Of the ninety who had taken the forest route, around fifteen had survived the beast encounters and had regrouped to build a hidden camp outside the territorial boundary. The other seventy-five had been reduced to nothing through a combination of beast territory enforcement and the ambush that had been waiting for them at the village's boundary line, which is what their surviving members were currently sitting with in a hidden camp, processing the information that something had gone very badly and with no apparent communication coming from inside to tell them what to do about, should they proceed or should they abandon this operation. The current leader outside, was deliberating if the team inside the walls were still even alive. Because if they were ambushed out here then those inside the village couldn't have survived. They also have no further news if some survived the ambush yesterday.
Meanwhile August and his team had managed to capture Twenty-five individuals of varying levels of injury, which all of them were currently being held and were bound with magical restraints outside the village in a temporary holding arrangement. While the fifty that died were distributed across the beast territories and the forest floor between the imperial highway and the village's boundary. These were the current total between those that lived and those that died in the process.
While the ten inside the village did not know any of this. As they were operating on the assumption that the outer support element was still intact and responsive. They had sent their coded messages outward and received nothing back, which had begun as a manageable anomaly and was becoming, as hours accumulated without response, something that tasted like the particular fear that professionals feel when the ground beneath an operation area turns out to be different from what the information they have received said it was.
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The Captured
The twenty-five prisoners that were being held in a temporary facility outside the village proper, which had been established quickly and secured with the specific efficiency of a village whose construction people could put a functional secure enclosure together faster than most settlements could organize the discussion about where it should go.
Watching over them, on August's request, were Grandmaster Ben Flameswrath and Grandmaster Miles Daemon.
Master Ben had received this assignment with the particular expression of a man who has been handed a responsibility that is beneath his capabilities but he took it nonetheless as this also, incidentally, was solving another problem he had a variety of headaches with entirely.
He was just glad that he was outside the village. As he was being pestered by Mirabeth from dawn to dusk, he was very appreciative that he was able to get away from Mirabeth who had been following him through his workspace asking pointed questions about his more randomized research notes which is what he had presented while hiding his actual current research in making sentient life and she was also expressing opinions about his less sophisticated experimental methodology that, while technically accurate, were expressed with a frequency and a confidence that he found deeply aggravating. And his current assignment was, from this perspective, less of a duty but more than a reprieve.
Though he communicated none of this and he simply went and accepted the task at hand.
Master Miles on the other hand had received his assignment with the focused attention of someone who had agreed to come to this village specifically to train August Finn and was now discovering, with increasing frequency, that training August Finn meant being present for things that most teachers of combat arts did not encounter in their professional lives. He watched the prisoners with the contained curiosity of a man cataloguing what he was seeing for future reference, because the captured members of the Sovereignty's shadow unit were, even if they were injured and restrained, a meaningful data source about what the Sovereignty trained its people to do and how they did it.
The prisoners were not in good condition. The fights that had produced their capture had been conducted by people who were operating at the upper end of expert rank and in several cases well into master territory, and the unit members had not been fighting from a position of tactical advantage. The injuries they had taken also greatly reflected on this. They had been treated to the extent that the treatment done to them kept them available for the information they carried, and not to the extent that made them comfortable, because giving them comfort beyond what they were trying to do was not a priority anyone had placed on the list.
Master Ben walked the holding perimeter twice and then found a position that gave him adequate sightlines and adequate distance from the unpleasant smell of people who had been through a serious fight and not yet had access to bathing facilities, and settled in. He had brought a random yet interesting book that he was going to read, while also monitoring the prisoners and while also thinking about his halted research, which Mirabeth had contributed to its current loss of significant valuable time and data which was currently wasted in trying to play along with that woman's whims.
Master Miles did not bring anything that would let him pass by time. So he just watched the ugly bastards whine about their injuries they very much deserved.
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One Day Earlier: The Ambush
Let us further retrace the steps to the battles that occurred outside the village the day before, before the ten who took the road had arrived at Maya Village proper.
The preparation had moved quickly after Talon One's arrival. The village had been secured, their cover story established, the council briefed and in agreement. By early evening, with the village's surface returning to its normal appearance and the security infrastructure humming underneath it, the outward-facing element of the response was ready to move.
Talon One's composition for the operation was composed of most of the original members: August, Erik, Betty, Bren, Milo, Adam, Isabel. Angeline was held back in a support capacity, along with Hiraya, Adarna, and Nina who were not included entirely, because they were needed with the newborns that required constant care and the support infrastructure of the village needed its medical capability maintained regardless of what happened in the forest. The new members of Talon One took rearguard and flank positions, supporting the forward element and protecting the other support units rather than pushing into the primary contact zone. This was their first real operation and August had been clear that the objective was not to test them but to use them correctly for what they were currently prepared to do.
Rexy went. Kirpy went. Finnester went.
The three bonded beasts brought the kind of combat multiplier to a night forest operation that made the tactical calculus considerably less complicated than it would otherwise have been. Aerial coverage from Finnester and Kirpy meant that anything moving through the forest canopy or open ground above the treeline was observed. Rexy coordinated with the rest of the Grimfang pack in ways that meant the forest floor information network was complete and had real-time information she would be feeding to Erik.
Talon Two was already positioned at the boundary before so they met up without further incident.
The Elite Warriors of the beastfolk contingent came in on the flanks, moving through terrain that was their native environment in the specific way that the beastfolk who had spent their lives in a forest territory moved throughout the forest: they were completely attuned with the terrain. The Grimfang Cavalry took mobile flanker positions, which gave the outer containment element the speed to close any gap that the initial contact created.
August gave his operational instructions to the combined force, there were only two points and nothing else, they would have to adapt to any necessary detail as the situation evolves on the field.
First, is to capture any of the assassins if capture was achievable. They could kill their opponents if it was not.
Two, do not pursue escaping elements to the point of spreading the force thin.
And as mentioned everything else they would have to adjust as the situation developed, because everyone present had the experience to do that without being told how.
They moved to the boundary position where the current movement of the assassins were anticipated to arrive and they waited and held that position.
The newly released forest biome combat suits that the village craftsmen had developed for exactly this kind of operation was being used by the beast folk while most of the old Talon Members both Talon one and two have their own specialized combat gear made by August — this new combat suits were dark, low-profile, designed to break the wearers silhouette against the forest backgrounds, and was treated to reduce the thermal and scent signatures that conventional clothing broadcast to any specialized eyes — this meant that the holding position was genuinely invisible to conventional observation. Even the new members, who had not worn the suits in a field context before, disappeared into the tree line with a completeness that would have surprised them if they had been able to observe it from the outside.
The three moon sisters were currently up and about doing their nightly rounds high above the skies of Centuury. The forest floor was cross-hatched with pale light of the three moons and that casted a deep shadow to anything beneath it. The ambushers were hidden in these shadows. And they waited for their prey's arrival.
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Enemy Contact
The assassins who had survived the initial onslaught from the beast territories came through the boundary in the specific way that people come through a difficult stretch of terrain after hours of being actively hunted by things larger than them: fast, stressed, vigilant in the direction they had come from and considerably less vigilant in the direction they were moving toward, because their operational psychology had been organized around the threat behind them.
They had started as ninety minus the ten already inside. But the beasts had reduced them. By the time they reached the boundary line between the neighboring beast lord territory and Maya Village's declared domain, they were only seventy-five. Most of them were carrying some degree of injury from the encounters that had reduced them from the initial ninety. They were running on adrenaline and the specific momentum of people who have committed to a direction and cannot stop moving without confronting what stopping means.
When they have finally reached the boundary. The large beasts of the neighboring territory stopped following them there, because the neighboring territory ended there and what lay beyond was not their jurisdiction.
The assassins registered this as relief. The chasing had finally stopped. They had finally made it through. Currently, according to the available map of Maya Village's Territorial lines, they were at the edge of the territory and the worst was behind them.
They began to think about making camp to regroup themselves and take a well needed rest before they continued to their destination.
Just as the thought from the one leading this assassin group came about, the ambush sprung into action and it came from the forest itself, which was the correct description in the literal sense because the people conducting it had been in the forest long enough that the forest had accepted them back into its pattern, and the first indication the assassins had that anything was wrong was not a sound or a movement but the specific animal awareness that something has changed in the space around you before your conscious mind has identified what has changed.
That awareness arrived approximately two seconds before the initial contact, which was not enough time to do anything useful with it.
The first wave hit the front element of the assassin group simultaneously from three directions, which removed the option of a coherent directional response before it could be formulated. The second wave hit the flanks while the front element was still processing the first contact. The aerial element — Finnester above, Kirpy at medium altitude — ensured that anything that broke upward or tried to use the canopy to create distance was addressed before it could create distance.
Within the first exchange, the assassin group had lost a third of its remaining numbers. This was not because the village's fighters were toying with them. It was because the combination of ambush conditions, force multipliers, and the specific quality of the people conducting the ambush produced outcomes at that scale within that timeframe.
A combination of Advance, Expert, Master and Grandmaster (potential)-rank combat capable individuals when applied with preparation and positioning against a bunch of expert and master-rank targets that were already confused, weakened, stressed and disorganized is not even a fair exchange.
The survivors tried to fight back and some of them were capable enough that fighting back against their ambushers produced real contact. Several of the village's fighters took hits that would have been serious under different circumstances and in this context their acquired wounds were immediately addressed by the healing support element before they became a limiting factor for the fight ahead.
It could be said that the assassins' individual skills were not the issue, they were truly skilled enough to be able to fight back even if they were at a disadvantage, not only with the terrain but by the circumstances that lead to it. The actual limiting factor they faced was their capacity to coordinate under these conditions because the Pits trained people to survive individually and to use other people as tools rather than to function as part of a synchronized unit. But against opponents who had spent years building the kind of team coherence that Talon One and Team Mandibles had developed, this was a structural disadvantage that individual skill could not fully compensate for.
"How the hell did they know we were coming!"
The leader's voice came out ragged, carrying the particular quality of a professional who has just discovered that the information they had acquired was clearly very limiting and that it didn't truly picture out the full capabilities of their targets and is currently processing everything going on around him at speed.
But the composure they had at their years of service at the Pits and years of operations they had partaken held for exactly the duration that it took for everyone still standing to understand what was currently happening, and then the survival instinct that the Pits had built to this assassins underneath the veiled composure took over, they felt fear that they have thought was no longer there. The hidden emotions that were buried deep within have now resurfaced and it came ugly to the surviving assassins.
Their bodies moved before their mind could fully process whatever mess they were currently in.
Run.
They began to scatter in every direction possible, so long as they could escape the current ambush, where the likelihood of them being wiped out was above the current parameters of what was acceptable or not.
But not everyone was smart enough to also escape. Some of them stayed and fought because running presented its own problems in a forest that was not already very hostile to them. Of the ones who ran, some were allowed to escape, because August's second instruction had been clear: do not pursue to the point of spreading thin. The ones who were allowed to escape were allowed to escape in the direction of the planned hidden camp that they had yet to establish just inside Maya Village's territorial boundary, at a later time of the day, the grimfangs would have located the place where the assassins made camp, they could t escape the grimfangs abilities to track specially when they knew this stretch of the forest better than they knew anyone else.
Fifteen had survived the ambush and had managed to regroup and retreat some twenty kilometers from the direction they had fled. They made it to what they believed to be a good place to rest and make their camp. Most of the assassins that were still alive were injured in varying degrees, missing most of their operation and all of their confidence that this mission was proceeding according to any version of its original plan.
What they didn't know was that as the hours passed they were now being watched from multiple directions by things they could not see, which was the current state of the situation outside the village and as of the morning came to be the ten inside the village were spending their second day of unanswered coded messages and the growing unease of something must have gone wrong.
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The False Surface
Inside the village, the ten assassins waited for their compatriots' coded reply.
As they had already pre-established their cover identities well and maintained them without visible strain, because they were professionals who had survived the Pits training and the decades of operational work and knew how to inhabit a role. They moved through the village at the pace of their cover identities, they bought things at the market, they exchanged the kind of brief pleasantries that strangers exchange in public spaces, and they watched and monitored the supposedly unaware targets when the situation permitted it.
What they were watching was the elders and the village leadership, conducting their visible business throughout the village in the ways that the council's decision had established the roles they were going to play. Red was at the administrative building at times and would get out on the streets to meet with the locals and solve their problems. Elder Donnel Archer was at the northern gate assessment post where he could often be found when external security matters were under review. The others were distributed across the village in patterns that communicated ordinary governance rather than extraordinary precaution.
The ten watched this and noted it and sent their coded messages and received nothing in return and noted that too.
The pattern of what they were observing was technically consistent with a village that had not been alerted to their presence. The leadership was pretty accessible; they proved it at certain times when they approached them during their routines, the security was pretty standard and there was no visible heightened state, which indicates their current operation was blown.
But what the ten assassins were reading correctly was just the surface of what the village was trying to make them believe. What they were not comprehending, because the information required to truly understand the current situation correctly was not available to them, and everything else is currently underneath the surface: the adjusted patrol composition, the Grimfang communication network that was updating the leadership and the security force in real time, the positions of Talon One members distributed through the village in cover arrangements that their forest combat suits and their operational experience made genuinely undetectable to observation that was not aided by a beast's senses.
Dragnov, who was the closest thing the ten had to a senior presence among the infiltration element, felt the thing he had felt at the checkpoint again. The animal awareness or his instinctive guts that there was something very wrong with the current setting they were in. He had been feeling it since they entered and he had no mechanism for acting on it because acting on it meant abandoning the operation and their oath did not permit them from abandoning their operation.
So he continued to watch the elders. He noted the absence of coded responses. He continued doing what he was supposed to be doing.
While the village also continued doing what it was doing, which was waiting for the right moment and watching them do it.
The conclusion of this particular operation was not yet written in its final form. But seventy-five of the hundred who had started it before they could arrive at the village proper were already accounted for in ways that could not be undone, and the fifteen outside were in a camp they believed was hidden from their enemies, but they were very much under observation that they could not detect, and the ten inside were moving through a village that knew exactly where they were and was simply waiting for the optimal moment to close the distance.
The silent battle was not over just yet. But the direction it was moving in had already been decided by the night before, in a forest that the Sovereignty of Arwen had not understood and was greatly underestimating when it sent its people into it.
That was the single mistake that had produced all the failures that were about to take place and everything that followed after this single event was the consequence thereof.