Finding himself with a message from Pantasilea, calling him to meet with Bartolomeo's wife at the barracks where the mercenary captain himself lived, worked, and fought either when the mood came to him or when he was called upon to do so, Ezio wondered just what he was going to be getting into. As it turned out, however, all that she'd wished to do was to personally update him on the progress of their struggle against the Borgia. She also sent him out after a pair of couriers that Cesare had dispatched with messages of some import.
He was to bring the messages back to Machiavelli, or else to destroy them if such a thing proved to be impossible.
As he made his way back out into the open fields and wide streets of Roma once more, taking to the rooftops once he found a place that was free of the nigh-omnipresent threat of discovery from either those who had no part in the struggle that he'd taken up – or else stood on the opposite side of it – Ezio took a moment to call up his second-sight again. Some of those standing about in the streets glowed with the hostile red hue of those who had made themselves his enemies, but none of those present moved with the kind of purpose he'd grown so used to seeing in the couriers he'd encountered.
Or those he'd been forced to hunt down.
Making his way back down to the ground, pleased to know that he would more than likely be able to intercept said couriers before they managed to make their way inside Roma itself, Ezio briefly stopped by a nearby stable to obtain a horse so that he would be better able to intercept the pair of escorted couriers that Cesare had thought would have a better chance of delivering whatever messages he desired to have in the hands of whoever it was that he was sending them to.
Once he'd managed to catch up to the first of the groups he was hunting, Ezio primed his crossbow, firing just as the thickly-armored brute riding at the head of the column. The bolt, under his steady hands and guided by vision that he'd honed to be precise during the course of the long battle that he'd fought against the Borgia and their Templar masters, flew without obstruction into the eye-slit of the brute's visor, killing him nearly before the rest of the group that Ezio had confronted could react. Drawing his sword, even as he rode into the midst of the remaining two men – the courier himself, as well as another man who had clearly been dispatched alongside him as a last line of defense – Ezio cut them down with a pair of strokes to the neck.
Climbing down from his horse once the last of the Borgia men had fallen, Ezio quickly fetched the parcel the messenger had been carrying before one of the horses could trample it into the churned-up soil of the road, Ezio quickly made his way back up, soothing his horse and turning to grab the reins of the other horses so that he could at least tie them up before he departed on his way to come to grips with the last of the two groups he'd been sent out to deal with.
Once he'd finished gathering up the documents that he'd been sent out to claim, Ezio mounted his horse and made for the nearest tunnel entrance so that he would be able to deliver them to the Brotherhood so that whatever information was contained within them could be put to use. Once he'd made his way back to the section of the underground tunnels that led to Isola Tiberina, Ezio gratefully left the messages that he'd captured from the Borgia in the hands of Ottavio Olivieri as his brother Assassin came to meet him at the entrance.
Turning to make his way back out into the streets of Roma once more, Ezio allowed himself to relax slightly once more; there was no question in his mind that he would be called upon once again, until the Borgia had been ousted from Roma not a one of the Assassins would truly be able to rest, but Ezio knew also that keeping himself tensed with anticipation wouldn't do anyone any good. Best he tended to things as they came up, rather than attempting to anticipate anything and everything that might occur.
Sometimes, Ezio found himself wondering if such a tendency rested at the heart of the Templars' desire to simplify the world as a whole.