It was about one and a half year later when the Stealth Assassin returned to the clearing in the forest. It had taken way longer to find his enemy in the first place but he had always been on his track and so he hadn't wanted to quit the hunt or even get a break. And he had been right. After about seven months he had found the creature and had been able to kill him. In the process he had learned about four others who had taken part in the crime that made Rikimaru chase them now. So instead of heading back to his girl, he had moved forward on his path of vengeance, finding all four of the mentioned creatures as well. It had only taken him the rest of those one and a half years.
So now he was walking through the forest after having killed five of his enemies in the last year. And though there were five less of them, this was the first time in all this time that he felt happy. Now that he was going to see his girl again. He felt giddy, anticipation running through his body. He had to admit, he had missed her.
He had been about to end his hunt more than once just to be able to sit on the clearing and listen to her singing, to see her and to have her talking to him. But since he had wanted this vengeance for so very long and since he somehow felt indebted to the dead to carry out this act, he had kept going. But now it was over, he had completed this mission. It hadn't nearly been as satisfying as he had thought it would be, but at least it was out of the way now.
And he had not taken any other job so he was free at the moment. Free from any obligations. And he was really looking forward to this free time.
Rikimaru was grinning like a fool as he ran through the forest. Damn, he had missed his girl more than he had thought and he wanted to be with her as fast as possible. He slowed his steps when he was near the clearing. He loved to her voice before he saw her.
It was silent under the trees and the Assassin stopped. He waited for a minute. Maybe she had just stopped singing or she was inside the house. But the absence of any sound that indicated someone was living nearby was stirring a horrible feeling of dread.
Drawing his weapons, the Stealth Assassin went into full battle mode and crept forward. Something was absolutely wrong here and his assassin training kicked in. He heard nothing but his senses told him to be careful, to watch out.
When he could look through the last trees onto the clearing, he stopped in complete and utter shock. The house was burned down, only the blackened foundation remaining. The garden was destroyed, the fence pulled out and all plants trampled. The orchard looked almost unharmed but there was no fruit on the trees. The lake looked muddy and dirty and smelled bad. And in the middle of the grass on the clearing lay the half rotten corpses of two small animals. Rikimaru knew that it had been the fox and the cat.
Someone had been here and they had destroyed everything.
Frantically and close to panic the Assassin began to search the clearing and the vicinity for any sign of his girl. At least there was no corpse, which meant she had to have been alive when she had left the clearing.
Rikimaru wasn't sure if he should be grateful about that because he didn't know what the creatures, who had been here, had done to her, then. Maybe a quick death would have been more merciful.
The panic was slowly fading now, being replaced by cold determination. Whatever had happened here, he would find out. Whoever had done it, he would find and kill them all. And wherever his girl was, he would get her back.
The Stealth Assassin was more than aware that he had left her, here in the woods, totally alone and unprotected, to go on a mission for over a year. He felt unbelievably guilty and he wished he had listened to his heart when it had told him how stupid he was for leaving his girl alone for such a long time. He could have resumed his hunt at any time.
Now he had to follow a trail that was at least half a year old, in the worst case older than a year. And it could lead anywhere by now.
And so the Stealth Assassin was on the hunt again. He pushed every feeling of rising panic aside and concentrated on the things he had to do. Since he hadn't been able to find any trace of either the girl or the ones who had been here, he needed to get someone to help him. And he knew just the right creature. He was the best tracker and the best hunter he had ever met and if on the clearing or around it was someone or something to be found, he would find it.
He ported to the inn and sent a message to the Bounty Hunter. He made clear how urgent it was and hoped the Hunter would read the message soon. For the tracking a few days would make probably no difference after such a long time but Rikimaru would go mad if he had to wait for more than a few days. And how could he not? His girl was who-knows-where and he could do absolutely nothing at the moment. He sent a few more messages and tried to get some information about a group of creatures with a girl that was maybe a slave or something like that. A girl that didn't seem to fit with the group. It was extremely vague a request but if there was only the smallest chance for him to get a lead on where his girl was, he would take it.
After he had sent those messages he could again only sit and wait for the answers. He went into town and interrogated every merchant and everyone who came from outside of the town about the same. He got nothing.
When he crashed for the night he was exhausted. Not only his body but his mind as well. He woke too early, still tired. But his mind was running in circles. He had to go and do something. On the other hand he had to stay near enough to a post box to get the answers to his messages as soon as they arrived.
So he did the second best thing after actually hunting: he cleaned and sharpened his weapons and checked his equipment. He made sure everything was ready to head out as soon as he got any information that would help him. That would give him a clue as to where to start his hunt.
The first messages begun to arrive in the early afternoon. They didn't contain anything helpful but for assurance that he would get any information they would receive on that matter.
Rikimaru sat down next to the post box, his head in his hands. He felt desperate and unbelievably lonely. For a minute he wallowed in his sorrow. Then he took a deep breath and stood up. He wasn't one to give up that easily. He would go to the clearing again, maybe he had missed something. And he would search in a bigger circle around it, if he had to he would even search the whole forest. He would go to the towns on the edge of the forest and ask questions there. He would get a message from the Bounty Hunter, the only one he was still waiting for, at the post boxes in others towns just as quickly.
He got everything he needed from his room. Before he went to the flight master, he stopped one more time at the post box. He held his breath as he found a letter from the Hunter.
It said: Turn around.
The Stealth Assassin smiled. When he turned, he saw nothing. The Bounty Hunter could go invisible, just like Rikimaru. The difference was that the Hunter had to trigger one of his abilities to do so and Rikimaru only got visible when he did something to dispel it. To get invisible again he just had to wait for a few seconds.
"Hey Gondar, thanks for coming so quickly."
The Bounty Hunter went visible in front of him. He was clearly amused. "Man, you are not very attentive today. I have you tracked for almost ten minutes now! What's up that you need my help? I remember your tracking skills weren't that bad."
Rikimaru told him as much as he needed but not all. They began to walk towards the flight master meanwhile. The Bounty Hunter flashed him a strange glance from the side. "You want to find a woman who has been abducted, maybe a year ago? I'm not sure that I'll be able to help. But I'll do my best." With that they had formed an alliance for the time being.
On the clearing the Assassin stood back and watched as the Hunter did what he did best. And Rikimaru was sure that if he found nothing, there was nothing. The Bounty Hunter vanished into the forest and since the Assassin didn't want to trail behind him all the time, he stayed on the clearing. And though it was probably an absolutely futile thing, he began to tidy up.
The first thing he did was digging a grave for the fox and the cat. There wasn't much left of them but he thought they needed a grave, maybe something the girl would want to come back sometime.
Not much was left of the house so he left it as it was and went to the lake. He found out why it was so dirty (the creek was blocked) and he did what he could to get it back as it had been. Next was the garden. It would probably never be used again so he just got it to look not like a destroyed garden anymore.
The Bounty Hunter found him walking through the orchard. "They were undead. A group of five or six, probably a goblin with them."
Rikimaru frowned. Those were extremely detailed information, especially compared to the fact that he had found absolutely nothing. "How do you know that?"
"You don't really expect me to tell you that, do you?" The Hunter smiled and though his mouth was hidden under a half mask, it showed in the lines around his eyes. "I'm extremely sure, though, and I think I know to which town they went first. We can go there and ask some questions. If that doesn't work, I will try to track their movements. But that could take days and I can't promise that I'll be able to do so after so much time. It was actually about a year ago, by the way."
The Assassin nodded. "Then we go to the town first."
Since he knew what he was looking for and could ask more detailed questions, he indeed found a merchant who had seen a group of six undead and a goblin coming through about a year ago. He couldn't say if they had had a woman with them, though. But the timing was right, as well as the race of the creatures and their number. Now they were on their trail.
The hunt had begun. Maybe alone the Stealth Assassin would have lost them on one point but together with the Bounty Hunter no one would be able to hide from them. Not even with a lead of one year.
Rikimaru made sure to pay Gondar well, especially because it took them almost a month to get near the group. But it meant that in one month they had made up eleven months of time. The Assassin was extremely impressed by the skill of the Hunter. He had known that he was good, but this was really awesome.
The closer they got, the more impatient the Stealth Assassin grew. He wanted to see his girl again, to hold her and make sure that she was okay. And he wanted to kill the bastards who had taken her and destroyed everything that belonged to her. They knew that she was still alive because she had been seen with the group. And they knew that she at least looked unharmed.
They were in some smaller mountains now, a few trees and bushes growing on the red earth, the ground dry and stony. They had left the last town about an hour ago with extremely precise directions about where the group had headed. They seemed not to want to get to a specific location but were travelling around, doing jobs here and there.
It was growing darker slowly as the sun was setting. Rikimaru would normally have made a break now but first, the Bounty Hunter could see extremely well in the dark and second, they were so near to his girl that the Assassin knew that he would never be able to sleep. So they could as well move on. And use the dark of the night to their advantage.
The sound of voices and laughter guided them as they ran through the mountains towards the group of undead. They didn't understand their language.
Slowing down, they silently crept the last feet to the camping creatures. Then they watched. The group they had been following had met another group of undead and now there were almost twenty of the ugly creatures, in parts sitting around a fire and talking while others build tents or lay on the ground sleeping.
The Stealth Assassin would have liked nothing more but to charge in and kill them all. But twenty of them were definitely too many. He was good, but there was always the chance that they had some way to detect him even when he was invisible and they were probably all stronger than him when it came to pure strength. If only one of them got hold of him and he wasn't able to get away he would be screwed. And the Bounty Hunter was like him, assassinating his victims from the shadows when they didn't expect it and not challenging them in an open fight.
They could try to get them one after the other but they still had to be careful and only take those that were on the edge of the camp. It could take them days. So for now they waited and watched. Rikimaru scanned the camp for his girl. She had to be here. There were a few smaller creatures between the undead and two of them were women. They were filthy and ragged but the Assassin was sure that none of them was his girl. He was growing a little frantic with the thought that they were too late, that something had happened and he would never see his girl again.
The Bounty Hunter laid a hand on his shoulder. His fingers squeezed and he did something completely unexpected: he reassured him. "Relax. If she isn't here maybe they brought her to another place. We will find her."
And just then two women left one of the tents already standing. They were as filthy as the other two but Rikimaru recognized his girl immediately. Jayne looked nothing like the woman he had left in the forest. Her hair was cropped short, her dress was dirty, as was her whole body, and tattered. She moved carefully and looked at the ground all the time. She was someone, who didn't want to draw any attention and who would prefer to be invisible.
Every time one of the undead wanted something, she did it without hesitation. And she never raised her eyes to look at someone. She was obviously a slave. The Assassin kept watching her, looking for injuries on her body. From what he could tell she had none and for a slave she looked relatively good, especially given the fact that she had been with the group for about a year now. He had seen slaves that had looked worse after only a few weeks.
He was unbelievably relieved when he saw that she was alive. They had finally found her. Now he simply had to get her out of that camp and then he could kill the entire group of undead, one after the other, bringing his wrath down upon them and avenging the horrible treatment his girl had had to suffer. He didn't care how long it would take him and if he had to follow the group for weeks to be able to get the ones that were dump enough to veer away from the rest. He would kill them all. After he had freed his girl.
It grew darker. Rikimaru had to rely on Gondar for vision because he couldn't see any better in the dark than a normal human. The Bounty Hunter kept watching the camp.
"They are putting all the women in the middle of the camp. They are binding their hands and feet and they seem to be very thorough."
After about another hour, the Assassin was growing more and more impatient, the activities in the camp had died down.
"There are five undead on watch tonight. Four are always on their posts while one is circling through the camp. If we move at the right time we can kill one, go in, get your girl and be out before the one circling realizes that one of his companions is dead. We have to be real quick and quite, though. I know that this isn't a problem for you, but think your girl will be up to it? Think she will follow us without making a fuss about it?"
Rikimaru wasn't sure. She had only seen him once and that had been a long time ago. But they had to try.
They crept through the dark, weapons ready, as they neared the camp and the first guard. Killing him was easy, so they didn't seem to have anything to detect invisible creatures, at least not on the edge of the camp. Still the two remained in the darkest shadows whenever possible.
The women were all asleep. The Bounty Hunter remained standing, watchful, while the Assassin knelt next to his girl. He put one hand over her mouth to keep her from making a sound. Then he leaned as close as he could. "I'm here to save you. Be quite and I will get you out." Looking down at her, he saw that her eyes were open, fixed on him. He didn't know if she recognized him but he didn't really have time for that now. He cut the ropes between her hands and feet quickly, not moving his own hand from her mouth. "Don't make a sound. And follow me. Okay?"
The girl nodded, her eyes now cast at the ground. "Good. Come."
Standing up, the Stealth Assassin pulled her with him and then guided her into the shadows where the Bounty Hunter was still standing. The girl wouldn't be able to see him, but Rikimaru could and without another word he followed the Hunter. He had taken her by the hand and guided her from shadow to shadow. They had to be even more careful now, since she was visible, as was the Assassin.
At one point they had to wait for one of the guards to pass them. Rikimaru felt the girl at his back. She remained silent throughout it all, coming with him without giving any resistance.
They made it out of the camp without any problems. When they were far enough away the Bounty Hunter circled back to hide any tracks they had left and to check if someone was following them.
Rikimaru looked at the girl, still holding her hand, and didn't know what to do or say. She wasn't looking at him but at the ground in front of his feet. She didn't move and didn't say anything. Gave no indication that she had recognised him or that she realized that he had just freed her from the undead.
"Ahem, are you okay?" She nodded once, nothing in her posture changing. The Assassin frowned. She was nothing like the girl in the forest anymore, not that it was any surprise after a year as a slave. He just hoped that maybe time would bring his girl back. Probably lots of time.
He would have liked to hug her and to hold her close but since he didn't know what the undead had done to her he thought it would be better not to. So he just held her hand.
Gondar stepped out of the shadows. "No one was following us and now they won't be able to anymore, no tracks left to find us. I'm glad that we found her and I wish you good luck. If you need me again, call for me. Bye." With that he ported out, leaving the Assassin and the girl alone now that his job was done.
"I will port us into an inn now to get a few things. Then I will take you to a house, which I know is safe." The girl didn't respond to his explanation.
And she didn't respond to anything the Stealth Assassin did over the next hour, except when he asked her a direct question, but even then only with a nod or shake of her head, or when he told her to do something. It hurt him almost bodily to see her like that, to see his girl reduced to this quiet and obedient creature.
Before he could deal with it, though, he wanted to get her to a safe place. He knew of a few houses that might be good and chose one that was least like hers had been. It was in a swamp, only accessible by a small path. The air was hot and filled with insects but the house was nice and since it was under some kind of spell, the inside was always cool and no bug, flea or mosquito was able to get inside.
It hadn't been used in a while and Rikimaru had to put a few things in order. He started to move around but the girl kept standing beside the door, right where he had left her. "You can sit down if you want." That got him no reaction and the Assassin sighed. "Go and sit on one of the chairs."
She moved, obeying his command. Gritting his teeth, he turned away from her. He would make something to eat and then he would try to talk to her. He didn't have very high hopes about the outcome but he had to do something.