15 years later….
I love my job, it's exciting, it's exhilarating, it's freeing, it pays very handsomely, and no two work days are the same. Despite all of that, my job is not for the faint in heart. In fact, it's not even for most tough people. What is this job you may ask? Well, I'm a mercenary. You gotta be something else to earn success with this job, let alone enjoy it. Lots of people say that successful mercenaries are not even human, we just ghost around the world looking for jobs. That we carry no emotion, no love, anger, guilt or hope. It was this notion that started a movement in the mercenary community to create titles, rather than using their real names. Something about "Joseph the mercenary" didn't sound right to the clients, and the clients are everything. Without them, we couldn't get paid! I heard many titles in my time, such as The Viper, The Cyclops, The Broken Hatchet, The Black Widow, or my favorite The Stinky Boot. Rumor has it that Mr. Stinky Boot was named that because he never takes off his favorite pair of shoes, even when he sleeps.. No wonder they call him "stinky". But me? I am one of the elite mercenaries, I have been in the game for longer than most of them. A verteren if you will, I am called The Scarlet Sword.
The funny thing was, I didn't come up with that title. I was just going to use my name, it was mysterious enough. Plus I didn't have anyone at home to connect my name too, I am the only one. No friends and no family, and I would like to keep it that way thank you very much. The name was given to me by my clients, apparently those who who are unfortunate enough to have a bounty that I am collecting, all had one statement in common. That I moved so quickly it looked like just a blurry red sword coming down on them. The Scarlet Sword was not the only name that my clients came up with, despite it being my favorite and the one that I answer to. They also came up with "The Bleeder" due to the fact that I wear all red and therefore anyone who was lucky enough to even scratch me, wouldn't see any blood as it would blend with my clothes. Yea… I don't and will never answer to that name, it makes it sound like I have some kind of blood clotting issue and I'll just bleed out and die from a bloody nose. I'll stick to The Scarlet Sword.
Let me tell you about one of the biggest perks of my job, the financial aspects. Now the way mercenaries work is that there is no office where we all work together and get an equal pay. Most mercenaries have never met each other in person and have only "met" by reading about each other in the newspapers. There is almost no way for a mercenary to contact another, we do not carry any sort of communications device. If we did, the authorities would easily track us. Mercenaries only communicate in person or through letters. These letters by the way do not come to our homes, we all have another safehouse where all of our mail gets delivered or our meetings with clients are held.
As I said there is no equal pay either. Every mercenary gets a rank that correlates with their skill and success rate. The higher the rank, the more the pay. Each rank has a specific amount of spaces that can be filled, for example if you lived in a really poor village and needed protection from a handful of bandits. You could call a level 8 mercenary who would do that for you at a lower price. Each rank only has 4 spots and there are only 8 ranks. 8 being the lowest and 1 being the highest. The top three ranks are very specialized and near impossible to get in, but once your in you are set for life. Rank 3 only has 3 spots, right now there are 2 ex military men and one sociopath. Rank 2 only has 2 spots that currently hold a crime lord and a mysterious woman who was trained in ancient hoshidan ninja arts (seriously). Rank 1 is the best of the best, any mercenary in this spot can do pretty much anything. There is only one spot in this rank and it is occupied by yours truly. I have been in rank 1 ever since I was 18 years old. I am still rocking the top spot at 24.
As you can imagine, mercenaries get more and more expensive the higher the rank, plus different jobs also have different prices. These rankings are always made available for the public to see, along with an address to send letters, and a message board to pin jobs up for any mercenary to take.
The typical day of a mercenary goes something like this, you wake up, go to your safehouse, and check your letters for jobs, if so appear at the meeting place set by the client and get to work. If there are no letters, then you can go into town to look at the message board to see if there is anything there for you to do.
There is always stuff to do on the message board, new things come up everyday. The jobs on the message board are basic things that do not really have due dates or that need to be completed quickly and since the message board is in public, any mercenary can take any job. Most of the time, clients do not meet the mercenary that answered their message until the job is done when they come to collect their payment. A letter sent to the safehouse is different. If a client sends a letter, they send it to a specific mercenary to do an urgent job that requires their skill set to complete. In this situation, the client leaves their address in the letter and the mercenary must go to their house to see what the job is (it is not written in the letter, as letters can be intercepted).
I'll give you an example of each type of job. The message board jobs are things that really any level mercenary can do for some quick cash. About $3,000 - $7,000 They usually include things such as animal hunting for cults, escorting people through dangerous areas, bodyguarding, even sending messages across the land. Which would of course require a mercenary to have some mode of transportation, me? I have a ship, a horse, and I am also an incredibly swift runner. These jobs are light work. A job sent as a letter to the safe house is something that only specific mercenaries can do, the client chooses the mercenary themselves. These jobs are where the big bucks are made, I have gotten anywhere from $10,000 to $10,000,000 for these jobs. But in exchange for the big paycheck is a lofty job. Usually involves targeting politicians, meddling with voting counts, stealing priceless family heirlooms back, protecting royalty traveling across the country, and sometimes even targeting other mercenaries.
As you can imagine I am doing very well for myself. But you will never catch me showing my wealth off. I came from nothing, when I was about 9 years old my village and nearly everyone in it, including my family and friends were massacred by the invading Kingdom of Dolhr. For many years I fended for myself, eating only a few times a week. I was humbled, because most of my childhood consisted of me wondering if I would be able to eat tomorrow.
I consider myself a good person even though mercenary jobs are often illegal and horrible. I tend to stray from the awful ones and only accept the jobs that I think are righteous and fair. For example, I will not take a life of an annoying neighbor (yes I have been asked to do that) but I will to a slave trader. I have a basic set of morals that I learned through my childhood experiences that I will never break. The biggest one being that I will NEVER harm a woman. I do not care, if she has a knife to my throat. I will never harm a woman. My respect for them and all of the sacrifices they make run deep into my core. Now do not get me wrong, if there is a woman out there that I was getting paid to target, and she was some kind of kitten eating pedofile. I would take her out, because to me that is not a woman, that's a monster. To me women are intelligent beings that selflessly sacrifice so much everyday, despite being ridiculed and itemized all the time. I could go on and on, but I won't so, your welcome.
Anyways, what I really wanted to talk about now that you have all the background was the letter I received today. It was a parchment letter and on it in beautiful calligraphy was written: "Hello Navarre, Do you remember me? - Lena" Underneath this sentence was an address and a photo.I am used to letters being very broad, but this was only one sentence! I thought this was a prank at first, that was until I looked at the photo. It was a photo of a girl with long red hair, fair skin and a silky white blouse that covered her entire body. The weirdest part was the fact that I vaguely recognized her but I couldn't place where I had met her. But I knew, I had seen her before.