( I )

What makes the perfect assassin?

The strength and courage of a man? The litheness and shrewdness of a woman?

Or the ability to strike fear into the hearts of your opponents?

But what frightens people the most? A foe that can overcome his pain and stand up each time he is hit, stopping only after he has accomplished his task? … Perhaps.

And yet such people can be destroyed as well.

What makes the perfect assassin is not being struck down and continuing the fight although wounded, but being struck down and raising with no wounds.

The perfect assassin is the one who cannot be destroyed, not because of his good training, but because of his nature.

There are two essential aspects that define the history of mankind: change and evolution. If one, however, were to examine more attentively the still clouded past of our existence, he would notice that only the material world around us has changed. People have not altered or improved their ways. The mentality of a tyrannical warlord, slaughtering a band of poorly armed farmers on a once green and flourishing plain, now altered by streams of blood and decaying corpses, for his sole satisfaction and greed for power, can still be observed in many wealthy, elegant and prosperous businessmen of today. That does not mean that murder, for example, is simply a loathsome act of pure insanity. There is an art to everything, and the art of creating the perfect assassin is undoubtedly the most difficult one. Nevertheless, since the dawn of civilization, there have been many to practice it and perhaps there are many more who practice it presently.

During the years or even centuries of their existence, many of the secret societies entrusted with the complex task of transforming ordinary men in deadly assassins have come to face the same problem. Despite their training, some of the students would sooner or later fall under the powerful influence of the past each of them left behind, forcing them to renounce, or driving them insane to a point where recovery would be impossible. Thus, the image of the perfect assassin remained only a myth, an illusion, until an old, forgotten idea was brought back to light, and put into practice by a secret organization known as the Lin Kuei. They were willing to make all the necessary compromises only to put their plan into practice and ultimately achieve what no man before them had achieved.

It is known that our actions and ideas, our beliefs and fears do not lack a logical explanation, no matter how hidden it may be. Each and every one of them is deeply rooted in a past experience. We act as we have been taught to act, we appreciate what we have been taught to appreciate and we loathe what we have been taught to loathe, all this in accordance to the unwritten laws and traditions of the society in which we have grown. The truth is that in growing up we do not actually learn anything. All we do is imitate what we see around us, this becoming an essential aspect in forging our adult personality. English empiricist John Locke based his philosophy on a simple, plausible theory, namely that at birth our mind resembles a blank sheet of paper that we will subsequently fill with various pieces of information, which will be gradually revealed to us.

In order for a master to shape his student according to his own will, to make him obey orders without questioning, the student must be a blank sheet of paper. Taking this idea as a starting point, the Lin Kuei put into practice their most audacious plan ever. Healthy infants from all over the world, whose age did not exceed ten days were brought to the organization's headquarters, hidden in the south-western mountains of China. With their parents disposed of by the existing Lin Kuei warriors so that they would have no ties to the outer world, the small children unwillingly embarked on a journey that would shortly bring most of them to the end of their passing through this world. After years of severe training, in which failure meant certain death, no matter the age of the individual or whether the reason for failing an assignment was deliberate or due to physical incapacity, few children grew up to be what the Lin Kuei considered to be the embodiment of the perfect warrior.

Of the initial two hundred students who took part in the program, only twenty passed all the difficult trials, becoming elite fighters and at the same time hollow shells with no personality of their own, no emotions, no desires, no fears and no knowledge of the common way of living. They were puppets in the hands of their masters, trained for the sole purpose of obeying orders and acting driven only by the thought that failure was unacceptable, thus punished by death, and man has always had an instinctual fear of death. At first, among the chosen infants there were representatives of both sexes, for the Lin Kuei also wanted to see if women could endure equally harsh conditions as men and prove to be able assassins as well, but in the end only one female survived. In a typical society, some people would find it peculiar or inappropriate for a woman to live in a secluded place in the company of men, given the fact that there was no other woman among the members of the organization, but here it made no difference. Both male and female warriors shared equal training, equal conditions, equal rights and equal opportunities to prove themselves worthy of continuing to be a member of the Lin Kuei. Between the warriors in training there could be no room for quarreling, envy or appreciation for the simple fact that such things were unknown to them. Contact between them, outside of the training sessions was strictly prohibited and in extreme cases, punished by death.

Sixteen years after the commencement of the program the remaining twenty soldiers had already committed a number of brutal murders that would horrify any man who has lived a normal life, given the fact that they were all mere teenagers. But this was a concept of the outer world, unknown to them. For them, life at present was the same as it had been before and the same as it would be from then on. Under the mastership of the Lin Kuei, the young assassins accomplished various missions for whoever solicited their services. It was only once that something different happened.

In the year when the students involved in the organization's special program all turned sixteen, a man who had not made his appearance for almost two decades came to speak to the Grand Master of the Lin Kuei. The two of them stood in a balcony that overviewed the training hall below, where the twenty students who survived the program were brought to show their skills, being told that the day had come for the most worthy of them to be chosen for a more special and honorable task.

The hall they were in, as well as the entire construction did not resemble the typical Asian monasteries situated high in the mountains, on snowy peaks. The Lin Kuei headquarters, which lay at the foot of a mountain, surrounded by thick woods, was similar to an ancient palace, or temple, with stone walls and tall columns, which had been there for more than two thousand years, ever since the founding of the organization. Nonetheless, the old building had at present newly built annexes, where state of the art technology and scientific research assured that the organization was as feared and powerful in the modern world as it had been in the past.

The twenty young warriors entered the ancient-looking hallway lit by torches, through the main entrance and formed two rows on either side of the path connecting the two entrances. The other one was a smaller entrance, an archway, situated at the top of a short flight of stairs. On either side of the small entrance stood two Lin Kuei Masters, dressed in long, dark-purple, ceremonial-looking robes, their eyes covered by an extension of their hood. Below them, in front of the stairs, there were three ninja warriors clad in black, everything but their eyes being hidden under dark fabric and protective armor.

On the other hand, the young Lin Kuei warriors wore nothing except for plain black pants and, just like the three ninja who could not be told apart, they were not very different from one another. They all had their hair cut short in the exact same way and they were all of almost the same height and weight. The only one who stood out in sharp relief was the girl, being the only one who also wore a black vest. Except for that, her 6 feet stature was more than enough for her to be at an equal level with the other soldiers and she occupied a random position in the row, not at an end or in the very middle.

In the balcony, the Grand Master, dressed in similar ceremonial robes as the other two Masters, stood with his guest, who wore an elegant black suit. The guest watched with interest as his three best warriors fought in turn each of the young trainees, who had to defeat sometimes with the use of a weapon and sometimes with their bare hands their always heavily armed opponents. The outcome was pleasing. Only one of the twenty warriors died at the hand of a ninja, the other ones managing to surpass the skills of their opponents, even if not all of them were able to defeat them. The one who had the greatest difficulties was the girl, whose physical capacity did not prove high enough to block a strike from the more powerful ninja warrior whose skill with a sword was superior to her own. In the end she concentrated harder and the ninja could not defeat her, but for a moment she had been close enough to failure and that was something the Lin Kuei could not tolerate.

"Impressive …… for their age. They have been trained well," the man in the suit spoke to the Grand Master in an old Chinese dialect employed by the Lin Kuei, the language spoken by the first Masters.

"Yes, the program was a success, although only very few completed it," the Grand Master replied.

"There is not always strength in numbers. One very competent warrior can defeat an army."

"True."

"So these are the best of the Lin Kuei warriors."

"Yes. Is there something the matter?" the Grand Master inquired, slightly worried by his guest's apparent lack of enthusiasm.

"Not at all. I will take number 54 and number 87," the man quickly chose the warriors he wanted to recruit, this being the reason of his visit. The numbers he spoke were the only names by which the trainees had been addressed since the beginning of the program.

"Only two? What about number 36 and 125?" the Grand Master questioned.

"Good skills, but they are not yet promising warriors."

"And number 69?"

"Number 69 has not proven to be in any way superior to the others …… and I have no need for women in my organization," the man concluded and turned towards the doorway behind them.

When the examination was over, number 54 and 87 accompanied the three ninja, while the remaining seventeen young warriors were ordered back to their quarters. They had yet to receive any word from their superiors regarding their performance but number 69 knew for certain that she would sooner or later face severe punishment, if not death itself, for the weakness she had displayed, and for the first time in her life, she would not accept it willingly. Though such thoughts would have been strange to any other Lin Kuei warrior who had been a part of the special program, number 69 had had different experiences. In the time she had spent outside of the compound on various missions, she had come in contact with the common world and their way of living, which stirred contradictory thoughts in her mind that had been haunting her ever since. Later on, she met an elderly man whose job was to supply the Lin Kuei with modern weaponry, even though he was not a member. He had not been aware from the beginning of the organization's true purpose and of their special program, but when he met the girl he felt pity for her, seeing how brutally a mere child was tortured for the purpose of learning to suppress her pain that was viewed as a sign of weakness. Therefore, he had sworn to help the girl escape and take her somewhere safe, where in time she could learn to live a normal life.

The girl had knowledge of the man's plan and although she had been reticent at first, in the end she accepted. A couple of months back she had devised a plan to escape the compound, a plan that she reviewed everyday in her mind and now the right time for her to put it into practice had finally come. Once the trainees were ordered out of the training hall, the girl wasted no time in quietly separating herself from the group and following the escaping route she had conceived a while back. She ran faster than she had ever run in her life when she saw how close she was to the exit point, close to the outer world, to freedom.

When she reached the end of the corridor she only had to take a right turn and then getting outside would not be difficult at all, but something unexpected happened. The moment she ran around the corner she froze on the spot when she almost collided with a tall man who did not look like any other Lin Kuei warrior. He was the man with whom the Grand Master had spoken previously, the one who had come to recruit the best of the twenty trainees who had survived the program, but she did not know that, for she had never seen him. She started at him fearfully, thinking that nothing could save her from death now.

The man looked back at her, his plain expression betraying no emotions whatsoever. He then noticed the numerous scars, bruises and burns that had adorned her face for many years. As he stared back at the child, his mind began to fill with distant memories that he had chosen to forget and he found uncomfortable the compassion he unwillingly started to feel for the child's suffering. He wanted to ban these ideas from his mind but the situation was too familiar and he was incapable of doing so. Footsteps and voices could be heard at the other end of the corridor, announcing that a group of men was approaching. The girl instinctively turned her head to look in that direction and then faced the tall man once again, when her hearing was drawn by a peculiar sound. She looked at him and saw that he had pushed a certain brick into the wall, revealing the entrance to a secret passageway.

"Go!" he commanded her, his face still emotionless despite everything that was going on inside his mind.

It was not that he was speaking in a different language and she could not understand him, but both the girl's mind and body were petrified. She could not possibly understand his reaction.

"It is an order, go! Now!" the man added on a more severe tone.

The confused girl stared back at him for another moment or two and then disappeared rapidly into the darkness of the tunnel, the stone door closing behind her.

NOTE:

I'm not planning on making any sort of crossover here, so if you happen to come across any familiar terms, know that I'm only borrowing certain concept that I think will go well with this story, and putting them in a whole new light.