Talon awoke, yet again, feeling as if all he did was wake up. He could not move since he was still being bound to his bed with his back facing upwards. It seemed to him that his wound had healed significantly, but he had no idea whether or not he would be capable to move around on his own in his current condition. He felt like a dog with a bad leg, left on the street to die, just to be picked up by some disgusting filth of a person, too lost in their own self pity to feel use in the world, and choosing to care for something else to permit themselves the ability to feel valuable.
Talon turned to face the doorway as he heard heavy, awkward footsteps resonate from the hallway behind it. After a few moments of staring at the entrance to the room, Yorick entered the scene. The large man walked over to Talon's resting spot and repeated the same tasks he had done what seemed to be hundreds of times; removing the bandages from Talon's back and applying a bone chilling ointment into the wound. He finished quickly and went on his way towards the exit of the room.
"Yorick," Talon called out before the brute had left.
"What do you need, warmskin?" Yorick replied.
"I was just wondering if you had any idea when my wounds would be healed," he asked.
"I doubt it'll be anytime soon. The cut you received was grave; it very easily could have sent you to the grave itself. You're lucky to be in the hands of someone who can make sure that you aren't dying anytime soon." The grave digger seemed to be quite full of himself in his statement; however, it was a well deserved claim. The man was keeping Talon alive, even though he was not quite sure how or why. Presumably the vile liquid he kept pouring on the wound had something to do with it.
"Do I have to remain tied up?" Talon snorted at the man. "It is quite an unenthusiastic existence to remain face down on a bed for eternities." Yorick actually laughed at this. It was a dull roar that lacked any sort of emotion, but it was a laugh nonetheless.
"You have no idea what eternities are warmskin," Yorick shot back. "I would sooner give up my shovel than allow my existence to persist, had it been my choice." Talon looked at him, very puzzled by this statement, while noticing that Yorick was, even now, grasping his shovel in one of his hands. Once Talon thought about it, the man had never once let go of the shovel in all of the time he had seen him. He was also a champion of the League of Legends. Talon had no idea how he had managed to earn that title by digging graves and wearing rags, but the question was not all that important; what was curious to Talon was why the grave digger would fight in the League with a shovel. He would also summon ghouls to his aid; a strange and yet somehow successful fighting style.
"Just how long do you plan to hold on to that grimy old shovel? Wouldn't it be easier to dig with a spade that didn't have a handle more crooked than your spine?" Talon snarled, referring to the hunch in Yorick's back.
"A mind that belongs to such a petty fool would never understand the meaning of my tool. It does far more than just 'dig'. It creates the resting spot for those who need passage to the afterlife. Without someone with the dedication to bury the deceased for the decades that me and my family have, there would be so many souls just floating in space, tormented for eternities. Every member of my family, since the dawn of time, has served this world in the act of burying its dead, just to sit here and receive harassment from the thick headed warmskins like yourself, who cannot even comprehend the importance of my existence. But do continue. Your lack of intelligence amuses me." Talon glared at him, quite aware of the fact that he was being mocked. If he was in any better state than he currently was, he would leave the ogre face down in a ditch, having not only stabbed him to death, but having found his soul and banished it to the afterlife to insure he never came back. Regardless, he knew verbalizing such a threat would only provoke the same response as last time, a laugh and some comment about the undead. He decided to lay there silently in hopes that Yorick would take his leave.
After a brief moment, Yorick had realized that his big mouthed guest had decided to keep it shut, and turned to make his way of the room for a second time. However, he was interrupted by yet another shout from Talon.
"If your family has dug graves for generations, than why are you still doing so? Shouldn't the task have been passed on?"
"I made a mistake. One that I pray no one else makes," he said with a more than usual amount of glum in his voice. He left the room, closing the door with a thud. Talon continued to stare at the wall, wondering how in the world he had ended up there. The most recent time that he had tried to remember what had happened on that night when he had last talked to Katarina, he was interrupted by the hulking grave digger entering the room.
"Where did I leave off..." he muttered to himself. "Oh yes, I was walking through the halls of the Institute of War..." Talon's memories slowly began to come into a clearer vision as he thought back to that fateful night that seemed to take place so long ago.
Talon entered a room at the end of a long corridor which stood in an isolated and forgotten area inside of the Institute of War. He had been guided to the room by following the audible path of fighting as it resonated through the halls, in his search for Katarina, who was missing from her living quarters. Arriving at the room, he looked inside, noticing that it was fairly empty omit a few decorations in the corners, and its walls and floor were a pale blue colored marble, with a hallway extending out from every wall of the room.
There were two people in the room; one of them was the woman he had been looking for, Katarina. She was slim and agile, almost a foot shorter than the man she was fighting, and wore her long red hair out, flailing about her face as she fought. The man with her was a giant in comparison; he went by the name of Garen. He was bulky and clad in armor bearing the crest of his home country, Demacia.
When Talon approached, the two warriors were not exactly as locked in combat as he had expected them to be judging by the sounds he had heard resonating throughout the hallways. Talon slipped around the corner of the entrance and stood amongst the shadows along the side of the wall, watching the scene in front of him.
The two seemed to be performing a ridiculous dance; perhaps a tactic one was passing on to the other or some sort of absurd method of bonding. He watched as a man of great size spun around in circles with his sword extended, creating a whirlwind of razor sharp death awaiting a victim. He was not aiming the maneuver at anyone, but more so showing it off or exemplifying it. Katarina stood more still than Talon had ever seen her, watching Garen's every movement. After he halted his spinning, he allowed Katarina to try to mimic the maneuver. She begun to do so but was stopped as soon as she became overrun by a feeling of dizziness. The two exchanged a few words and then launched straight into combat. Talon rolled his eyes. He had assumed that the two had been fighting, but needed to see them doing so before he could make the conclusion. And yet neither of them had managed to notice the assassin standing along the side of the room watching them. Obviously the two were more engaged in their combat than they were in keeping their discrepancy.
A few blows were traded back and forth between the two until Katarina managed to knock the brute to the ground with a dramatic dive, digging her daggers into his armored side and physically thrusting him to the ground. The stunt was awfully impressive, but Talon needed to move quickly. Fighting inside of the Institute of War was strictly prohibited, and Talon did not want to think of what kind of consequences could arise from any sort of injury or potential death that would ensue if the assassin did not move swiftly enough to save Garen's life. Within an instant, Talon found himself face to face with Katarina, Garen on the ground behind him, and one of Katarina's throwing knives held firmly in his own finger tips as a light trickle of blood seeped out from around the metal's sharp edge. However, his maneuver was in vain. While he had succeeded in blocking the potentially lethal dagger toss from striking Garen, it was not needed. The Demacian clumped in the corner had reacted to her attack, unlike Talon had expected. He heard a slicing of flesh and few light clanks as the tattered ends of his metal tipped cape hit the ground behind him, having been severed from Garen's sword.
"Talon…" she said to him, in a very soft and quite voice.
"I thought I told you to stop fighting before the League exiles you," he replied, attempting with all of his might to retain a calm tone despite the severe pain he endured.
"I… well…" she started before turning and leaving the room.
The memory started to fade out and all that Talon could remember was falling to the floor and hearing the sounds of shouting and screaming around him. He had been told to trust the ones who he was left with, and was hoisted upon the shoulders of the mighty Demacian man; not much was remembered past that. Talon did have a reoccurring dream of flying through the night, over the ocean, intangible; almost as if he was a ghost. It was a strange dream and he had no idea if it was linked to the further events of that night or if they were just random dreams occurring in the consciousness of a restless soul.
Talon lay in his uncomfortable bed, tied down with an open wound exposed to the sky, and wishing that he had something else he could do with his time. He sighed. The last thing that he remembered was confessing to Katarina that he loved her. He was not sure why he had said this, or even if it was true; but he did know that he genuinely thought he was going to die that night, and perhaps those were the words he wanted to leave Runeterra having said. He never had been one to reminisce on the past, but in his situation it was about all that he could do. He shifted his head to the other side of his rock-like pillow and closed his eyes, allowing yet another memory to reemerge for the first time since it had taken place, many years ago.
"Why are my skills being wasted on puppy guarding a beginner? Aren't I considered more valuable than that?" Talon spoke to himself, thinking aloud his anger at his new assignment. He sat high up on a perch around a Demacian camp, waiting for General Marcus Du Couteau's daughter, Katarina, to execute her first target. It was the simplest of simple tasks; assassinate a low ranking Demacian officer. Talon could not fathom why the General would be concerned about his daughter, aside from being his daughter. She had been trained by the man himself, so if he had any concern for her it would be due to a lack of training on his own part; however, he was the best assassin in the land; he even trained Talon half of what he knew about the art of the blade. If this was Marcus' only concern, then it was a misplaced one. It was more likely that the General had a different reason for posting Talon there, but that particular reason was not arising soon enough to keep Talon's interest.
"This is colder than the intestinal track of Freljordian soldier... I would know," Talon stated, referring to frozen wastelandish country on the northern side of Valoran, the largest continental mass in Runeterra. The temperate was low, the winds were strong, and it was in the middle of the night, while the assassin stood absolutely still on top of a perch along the outside edge of the Demacian camp, peering down to the inside, awaiting Katarina's arrival to carry out her mission: the combination did not make for a warm circumstance.
While he stood at his post, attempting to refrain from shivering away his position, he noticed a woman, dressed in slick black leather with long flowing red hair, enter the camp.
"Someone ought to give her a damn map next time. Not that it would have made a difference. I've never met a woman in my life with a sense of direction." He shifted to a sitting position and continued to watch her actions with his hawk-like eyes as she infiltrated the camp below; slipping from shadow to shadow, being sure not to get caught. "There must be a mastermind at work here," Talon started. "Someone has managed to accumulate the largest number of mentally deficient soldiers ever seen, from throughout the lands, and posted every one of them on guard tonight, in the same camp, and has not bothered to have a single well capable man watch over them to ensure that they don't spend ninety percent of their time sleeping."
Talon began looking over the camp, counting the number of soldiers that were currently asleep or occupied with some other pitifully useless task, when he noticed a new arrival to the carnival scene; a Demacian general had entered the camp. "Perhaps someone noticed the massive lack of brain matter and decided that someone should babysit them." However, Talon was not the only one to take note of the new arrival. Katarina was about to enter the tent of the low ranking Demacian officer when she caught sight of the most recent clown to enter the camp. She grinned with a sharp spear of evil penetrating into her cheeks. Talon knew the stupidity of what she was about to do, judging by the grin on her face, long before it happened.
Katarina slipped away from the tent and slid through the camp, making her way to newly arrived general's quarters. She stalked him through the night, waiting for him to arrive at his destination and become comfortable with his surroundings. After a relatively short amount of time, the general and all of his guards had made their way into the tent and settled down. Along the way, Katarina made sure to count the number of guards. She walked around the tent, checking to location of their shadows outlined in the cloth that made up the tent's walls. When the time was right, Katarina walked into the entrance and stabbed the door's guards in the hearts with one dagger in each hand. She then used a skill she had been taught from her father, passed down for generations, which allowed her to vanish from one location and appear in another, a sort of short ranged teleport: the technique was called shunpo. She quickly moved from guard to guard, slitting their throats and using shunpo to appear at the next and mimic the assassination. She then stood in the room with no one but the general, as all bodies hit the ground in unison. The general looked at her with eyes wide open, quaking in fear. That same sinister grin eroded over her face as the man called into the night, seeking help. His cries were cut short as Katarina's blade found its way to his throat. She slit the back of the tent open and slipped away through the gap. By the time reinforcements had arrived, she was far from the camp.
Talon had seen enough. He left his perch, half frozen and still upset with his assignment, to return to Marcus and report what had happened. He traveled quickly back to Noxus by horse, where he found General Du Couteau to be fairly unaffected by the news he had been presented. He handed Talon an envelope that seemed to be prepared quite awhile ago.
"Take this back to that Demacian camp. Leave it on the desk of the man Katarina was sent to assassinate originally. I'll have a new horse waiting for you. It is fast enough to get you back there before daylight appears. Move quickly, Talon." The General spoke softly, but firmly. While confused, Talon did as his master had asked and sped off back to the small camp on the outskirts of Demacia while cursing at himself for having forgotten to grab a coat while he was at home. The night's crisp air cut into his skin, sending shivers straight to his spine. Once he finally managed to arrive at the camp, his century long ride was matched with a few minutes of infiltrating it with ease – despite their high alert from the previous assassination that night – and placing the letter on the Demacian officer's desk. He slipped out quietly and remounted his horse to ride back into Noxus for the second time that evening.
As Talon rode, he watched the sunrise on the horizon. He could not stare at it for too long because every ounce of his body prayed for it to rise faster and provide the wretched terrain with some warmth; however, the more he watched it, the more he swore that it was actually setting back into the hills around him, taunting him and his lack of heat.
Talon arrived at the house of Du Couteau. His hands were blue from the cold and face blanked of emotion due to every ounce of his energy having been spent on keeping himself conscious and warm. The first thing he did on arrival was light up a fire place and sit in front of it planning to doze off momentarily. Before his mind slipped away into a journey of dreams, Marcus entered the room.
"I thank you for your work, Talon. You have done well," he told the man warming himself in the fire's glow. The words were spoken to a pair of icy blue hands – looking steps away from having been frost bitten to the point of needing amputation – being held into the air in front of the fireplace. Marcus replied with a grin; however Talon's back was turned to him as he kept his face as close to the warmth of the fire as possible. "You may wanna listen to the word on street when you are up to the task. But in the meantime, get some rest. I will need you to go with Katarina when she sets off on her next assignment."
Talon growled in annoyance. "Baby sitting again..." he snarled quietly, half because of his lack of energy and half because he did not want to show disrespect to Marcus. "When will she be given her next assignment?" he asked.
"It will not be given. However, you will know when the time comes." Marcus left the room with that sentence, leaving Talon slightly confused, but too tired to care. He dozed off in front of the warmth of the fire, not to wake up until late that afternoon.
When he awoke, He set off to the town square to get some food. He hardly planned on buying anything, seeing as it was much cheaper to steal it. As he pilfered a loaf of bread off of a distracted baker's cart, he overheard the conversation that had diverted his attention from his goods.
"Is that so?" the baker said to a townsfolk person.
"Absolutely," the man replied. "Not a single one of the soldiers survived."
"And you say it was an ambush? It seems so strange to see a Noxian army get ambushed, even if it was a relatively small one. Makes you wonder how such a lowly ranked officer managed to get a holda such information and get the orders to pursue it! Why wouldn't they let a general take on the task? I'm sure he'd have more strategic knowledge to do it better."
"Well I had heard that he was upset one of his higher ranking officers, and a close friend of his, had been murdered in his sleep in the dead of night. Perhaps he had just..." Their conversation continued but Talon had lost interest. He began to think about the contents of the note he had slipped onto the desk the previous night. He walked through the streets aimlessly, munching on his stolen loaf of bread as he spoke silently to himself.
"They must have been rambling about the same camp Katarina and I had entered last night. All of the facts line up, assuming any of it was true. What if Marcus set it up himself? What if I gave them the coordinates of the Noxian party that was ambushed? Not that it bothers me. Those filthy honor suckling hogs got what they deserved, and if it was something to be worried about, Marcus would not have sent me out to perform such a task." Talon finished his free food, along with an apple and chunk of meat that he managed to swipe from the conversational barterers about the town square, and made his way back to the house of Du Couteau.
Once he arrived, he immediately noticed that there was a problem. The walls were decorated with daggers, stuck so deeply into them that one would have thought their wielder was aiming for a demon on the other side. Marcus was in the hallway, wrenching the blades out of his walls as best as he could. He caught sight of Talon, gave him a grimace, and nodded. After grabbing a pack from his room, Talon exited the house and mounted one of the horses in the stable. He galloped towards the Demacian camp, once again, to go watch over Katarina. Clearly she had found out what the man she had failed to assassinate had accomplished, being allowed to live.
"But just what was Marcus attempting to achieve with this?" Talon thought aloud. He would find out soon enough. Luckily for him, it was daytime during this journey across countries, and he did take the time to pack a coat in the event that his return trip was made at nighttime. He rode in silence, as he was used to due to hardly ever spending time with others or going on missions as a pair. Partners were just a liability to Talon.
He showed up at the camp just in time: Katarina was already there and was sprinting towards the tent housing the Demacian officer responsible for the ambush. Talon leapt off of his mount in a dead bolt after her. The tent was clearly much better guarded than the one she had snuck into the night before, and this time it was broad daylight. Stealth was still plausible to a highly skilled assassin like himself, but to someone sent out in a blind rage who had assassinated a total of one man – of whom was not even an assigned target – an unseen murder attempt would be suicide. Not that carelessly rushing an encampment was a better idea, but it would definitely feel better to the one committing the act.
Talon's pace was much faster than Katarina's, but she had quite the head start. By the time he was at the entrance to the tent where the officer was, Katarina had been inside for a few seconds. Talon knew that the situation could not be going well and prepared for the worst. He drew upon his power of mana and vanished from sight. He was invisible, capable of moving as he pleased, but only for a few moments until he would lose control and would be forced to reappear.
He entered the tent to see Katarina completely surrounded by guards, armed and armored to the teeth. She spun around while standing in place in the center of the room, quickly grabbing dagger after dagger, throwing knife after throwing knife, and hurling them towards the soldiers standing about the room. While her efforts were successful, not every one of her projectiles was aimed as well as she would have liked them to be. Many of the more heavily armored foes just deflected the incoming blades and continued to approach the visible intruder.
Talon acted on instinct, knowing that she was in peril. He flew to her side and crouched down so that he did not get hit by her whirlwind of cold steel. He took out a bundle of small circular blades and held them in a stack. He carefully analyzed one of the soldiers approaching Katarina's position and noted that there was a distinct gap between the helmet and breast plate, exposing the neck's soft flesh. Talon made the quick assumption that the soldiers were all armored similarly and with extreme speed and precision, he rotated around three hundred and sixty degrees while propelling a blade from his stack directly towards each of their exposed necks. He nailed nearly every one, leaving just a few alive in the group; one of the living soldiers was Katarina's initial target, the Demacian officer. Talon figured that he would allow her to do the honors. A few of his thrown blades ricocheted off of the armored opponents, and one of them came whizzing towards Katarina's head. She saw the projectile and quickly doubled back to avoid fatality, but the razor edge managed to cut across her eye vertically. Talon felt that even with a slight wound, she was still in good enough to shape to finish off the few remaining soldiers, and he shifted out of the tent, allowing his camouflage to wear off as soon as he was out of vision range of any of the combatants inside.
Talon ran towards his horse, trying to make it out before anyone caught on to his presence. He was not supposed have fought alongside Katarina but he was meant to make sure she was safe, and the easiest way for Talon to do so was to just kill off those who posed a threat. Katarina had not managed to notice Talon's presence in the battle having been preoccupied with her own tornado of flinging daggers and the fact alone that Talon was invisible. Presumably, she thought that the ricocheted blade had been one of her own.
Talon climbed atop his stead and set off down the same path towards Du Couteau's manor for the third time in a day. The intense usage of mana had taken a toll on Talon and while he was not cold on that return trip, his body was exhausted. All he wanted was to get home and assure Marcus that his daughter was on the way and safe from harm. The horse trudged onward, clearly just as tired as Talon was, but devoted to its cause for reasons its rider could not fathom.
When Talon arrived back at the house, he immediately went to Marcus, who did not even need more than to see Talon's presence to be reassured that everything went well. He dismissed Talon with a nod, and the assassin crept back into the room where Marcus allowed him to sleep, where he collapsed and remained for quite some time.
Talon lay in Yorick's bed shivering lightly at just the thought of how cold he had been that evening. There was one other time where he remembering being so cold that he could not believe his fingers made it out attached to his hands. He had been sent deep into Freljord, the icy desolate region in the northern part of the continent.
It was strange for Talon to spend so much time reminiscing on the past; usually he planned to forget who the man he killed was as soon as he pulled his blade out of their flesh. But being stuck tied down to a mattress with nothing to do but think to himself, he found it easiest to spend his time resting, dreaming, and remembering the life he had lived. So he shifted his position as much as he could to try to get more comfortable, and lay there thinking about the miserable frost bitten lands that only the insane could consider to be comfortable.
Talon stood at the entrance to a rundown factory in the middle of Zaun, a small industrialized scientifically advanced city. Marcus had requested that he steal a schematic from the factory on his way to Freljord, where he would assassinate a king-to-be. While Zaun was a little out of the way, it contained an underground tunnel system that would bypass the body of water and mountainous terrain he would have had to cross otherwise to gain access to Freljord. Plus, the schematic information seemed to be a little sudden, seeing as Marcus assigned him to the task as he was on his way out of the door. It must have been decently important that it be obtained quickly if he did not bother to just get a different spy to retrieve it, but too urgent to wait until after Talon returned from Freljord to receive it.
The assassin walked towards the factory and entered it through a broken out window after he vaulted the nearby barbed wire fence. Once inside, he quickly began to realize that while it looked like a factory on the outside due to its large smoke stacks and square structure constructed from primarily bricks, the inside was a lot more reminiscent of a laboratory.
Once he set foot inside of the small room, he immediately heard voices. Perhaps it was not abandoned like he had initially thought. Talon was not quite sure where these schematics that he was looking for were held, so he stood in a shadowy corner of the room while he contemplated what his options were. He could search the entire building, even if it was much larger than he would have liked it to be, he could interrogate one of the employees, or he could try to get onto one of the hextech computers nearby and break into their database. Talon was not very much of a hacker, so he decided to scrap that idea. That left searching and interrogating.
He walked through the hallways sliding into open rooms to hide as he heard voices approach. He managed to maneuver through the laboratory unseen for much longer than he had imagined, but none of the rooms he had searched held anything of remote importance. Rooms labeled with signs saying restroom or janitor's closet were left untouched as the assassin scanned the area. Eventually he came to a plaque with the word CEO plastered across it in large golden letters. Had the institute looked any less rugged than it did, Talon would have been much more cautious about entering such a room; however, it did look like a wretched excuse for a research facility. Talon proceeded with minimal concern, sliding around the corner of the door frame without touching the lightly cracked open door. He made his way to the side of the room and hid along the side of a bookshelf with his back resting to the wall.
There was one man inside of the room who was busy typing away on his computer at the desk he was sitting at. The man had not even looked up as Talon entered the room, being too focused on his work to allow any slight sounds to divert his attention. Talon decided that he could abuse the man's insolence and camouflaged himself, drawing on the mana from the world around him. While he normally could not attempt such an assault due to the fact that invisibility is neither silent nor invulnerable, the man he was about to attack was both unarmed and deaf from focus. Talon sprinted across the room towards the man at the desk, took the flat end of his blade, and bashed it against the back of his head. He fell forward, smashing a few keys on the keyboard, and slumped back into his chair. Talon relieved himself of his camouflage and courteously pulled the chair backwards, allowing the limp man to tumble to the floor. Pleased with his work, he searched the CEO for any sort of information or keys that would allow him access to more of the facility.
Talon took the man's badge, which was lined with a barcode, and decided to see what exactly had kept the man too preoccupied to notice the ambush. The monitor held a typed out log, which read: "Still no sign of the damned scientists who were testing our amorphous combatant. I cant believe that they just took off like that while we were so close! It was contained in the lower portion of the lab, so its no surprise that they were able to just take off like that. Our scientists are still attempting to recreate it but if the original chemical composition was never written down it has ben well hidden seeing as none of these numbskulls have managed to obtain it yet. I feel like we searched the lab where the prototype was held at least a hundred times. Perhaps its about time I just go down there and search their data logs. Maybe one of them typed it in and never bothered to put it anywhere else. The scientists in charge of it were never the brightest I bet that the computers password isnt anything more advanced than ZAC which is the acronym they used to describe the Zaunite Amorphous Combatant. But Im tired at the moment, so Im going to close out todays log with iopuhnk;lm ,." Talon grinned at his addition to the log, having inserted it with the CEO's head, and left the room with his new found information. Things were just too convenient at times.
Talon made his way to the lower portion of the lab and found a room labeled "Amorphous Prototype". While neither word meant a whole lot to Talon, he recognized both of the words from the log of the CEO. He entered the room by swiping the pilfered badge through the door lock shutting the door behind him to insure that no one became suspicious of his presence. Talon scanned his surroundings and found a cluttered room with documents thrown every which way from a countless number of workers searching for the formula themselves.
Talon approached a computer in the middle of the room and found it sitting on a screen requesting a password. Recalling the log, he entered three letters in capitals into the computer, Z, A, and C. The computer whirred as it loaded up a different screen, displaying a large number of digital journal entries, each one labeled with a different date over the course of a few months. Talon assumed that if there was a record containing the information that he needed, it would be in one of the earlier logs. He flicked through them while reading each one carefully. They – ever so slowly – unfolded some time wasting story about how a scientist couple began to grow attached to the combatant that they had created, but Talon did not come to read a stupid drama. He began to shift his reading into more of a skim and was coming to the end of the logs when he noticed one was sitting in the computer undated. Curious, he opened it up and began to read. It contained nothing more than a serious of numbers and letters, perhaps a chemical compound of elements that Talon was not aware of. He shuffled through the garbage that littered the desk until he found a pencil and a piece of paper; on which he wrote down the exact sequence that he found written upon the computer screen. He checked multiple times to guarantee that the data matched exactly, and proceeded to delete the undated log from its history.
"This is just too easy," Talon said to himself, chuckling. He folded up the paper and slid it into a small pouch that he was carrying. He logged out the computer and turned to face the doorway but it was blocked by a large green gelatinous mass, flailing about uncontrollably. Talon wrinkled his forehead, quite confused as to what he was looking at. Before he had time to ponder the confusion, the being catapulted itself at Talon. He rolled out of the way, expecting it to have splattered across the floor due to the massive amount of force that it had just unleashed in attempt to pancake him. He looked at the blob sitting on the ground to see that his conclusion was correct. He laughed and began to proceed towards the door as he had originally planned, but found it quite difficult to pick up his feet. He looked down to find that he was trudging through a greenish goo that spread out to cover most of the floor in the room.
Talon sighed at the pathetic attempt to hinder his progress, and bent down to cut his feet free. As soon as his blade touched the mass, it quaked in pain and sucked all of the gelatinous material from around the room back to a center point where it formed into a ball and began to roll towards Talon. Its speed was tremendous for having not been given any sort of force to propel it forward in the first place. It smashed desks, tables, and chairs as it steamrolled towards Talon, clearly with the intent of flattening him as well. Talon drew out a number of projectile blades and threw them rapidly in a volley at the oncoming being. The daggers stuck into its mass, receiving the same sort of pain reaction as it had before. It continued to roll forward and ended up pushing the knives even farther into its green mass, inciting more of a sting. It stopped just feet away from him to crumple down into a heap being in too much pain to proceed with its original objective.
The assassin turned away, once again, to make his way out of the room. Not to Talon's surprise, there was a loud springing sound as the blob bounced itself into the air, allowing the daggers to fall to out of its body and to the ground. It continued to bounce, crushing the obstacles in its path, as it made its way towards the assassin. He rolled his eyes and drew out another volley of blades. This time however, he threw them straight up into the air. The blob bounced towards him, flying in at an angle, en route to crush him if he stood still. Talon closed his eyes and used the same technique that he had experienced Katarina and Marcus himself perform time after time again: the shunpo. He preferred a more offensive form of the technique to the defensive one: instead of using the teleport to create an aura about himself to increase his body's tolerance to pain, he would use it to create an aura to dilute others tolerance. This skill took a large about of mana control to execute, but proved to be very beneficial.
Talon was removed from existence, just before he was crushed to submission, and he reappeared in midair besides the gelatinous creature. He kicked off of its mass and used the velocity to propel himself away from the hail of daggers raining down and landed on the other side of the room. He watched the creature slam into the ground, where Talon had been just moments before, and spread out due to the force of the impact. Unfortunately for it, it was not capable of recovering from the crash fast enough to dodge the downfall of blades. They pierced through its body in a large multitude of points to pin it to the ground. Whether or not the blob was capable of recovering from the trap, Talon was unsure. He sprinted out of the room and latched the door shut behind him.
Quickly, the assassin made his way through the hallways and towards the room where he had left the CEO in an unconscious heap on the floor, and placed the badge back on him. If Talon was lucky enough, the man would merely think that he had fallen asleep on the job and be too embarrassed to report any sort of concern to anyone. Clearly the people of the institute were not the most intelligent and their creations lacked any sort of brains as well; they were not going to get close to recreating their original experiment in the near future if their attempts were all left locked in a basement like the one Talon had just finished fighting. However, his task was done, so he slipped out of one of the windows in the CEO's office and scaled down the side of the building before proceeding to the location of the underground tunnel entrance. He found the spot that Marcus had told him of, removed the large metal cover, slid inside, and replaced the lid.
Luckily, the underground tunnel was in fact a tunnel and not a sewer, like Talon had presumed it to be; that was generally what an underground passage truly meant. Navigating it was fairly simple due to the lack of branch offs and Talon's general awareness of the direction he was heading. Obviously, the passageway was somewhat secret; used purely to get from one area to another. It would not be surprising if they reached to every country throughout Valoran. Talon had no idea who had created them or how Marcus learned about them, but he was grateful for their convenience nevertheless.
Talon walked for days, stopping occasionally for slight rests and to eat the rations he kept in a small backpack held tight against his back to insure that mobility was not hindered; however, at the moment it was quite full and clunky, having been packed full of cold weather gear to prevent him from turning into a beautiful ice sculpture to attract tourists while he spent time in Freljord. He pulled out a small portrait of his target to examine it carefully before he had to search for the man. It was at that time that he noticed the lighting of the tunnel; it was a blue luminescence that glowed upon the piece of paper in his hands, allowing the sharp lines and shadowy details to come into life. He looked around the tunnel, curious as to what was emitting the light. He saw small stones set into the walls, floor, and ceilings, providing him with the innocent touch of brightness. They were peculiar and unlike any sort of gem he had ever seen; providing a glow without any source of power or energy. He gave up on figuring out what the mystery behind the stones was and looked back down at the picture he had.
The man in the photo was absolutely ripped and contained well honed muscles on every portion of his body; including his neck. He wore bands of metal around his arms that served no purpose other than to show how much they were stretched out from the massive build up of muscle he had created since the time of the band's placement. His left arm was armored and he wore a helmet with horns protruding from the sides of the head. He did not wear a shirt, probably for the reason of showing off his physique and natural endurance of the cold. The bottom half of his body was cloaked in chainmail which resembled a kilt. His boots were plated in metal and came up high enough on his legs that the kilt covered any skin exposed by the boots. The most striking thing about the photo was the massive sword that he carried. In the picture provided, it seemed to be dragging along the ground behind him, as if the effort needed to pick the blade up was much too intense to endure for as long of a time as needed. A caption sat at the bottom of the page; the letters spelled out the name "Tryndamere". He would be a tough opponent, and a stealthy kill would be best, if plausible. A long fight would leave Talon exhausted, seeing as the man's endurance was clearly defined in the ripple of his muscles. His decision to wear no shirt would be his downfall however, as it left his stomach and the vital organs contained within, exposed, allowing them to be penetrated by one slash of a steel blade.
Talon chuckled lightly to himself and folded up the paper to reinsert it into his pouch. Eventually he came across a ladder that led back to the surface. He climbed the ladder and tried to push off the cover to the hole, but found that it was frozen shut. Groaning, he thrust one of his blades into a gap before punching it through the ice and prying it open by wiggling it back and forth for a few minutes until enough of the cover was separate from the base that he could beat his way out of the tunnel's system.
After getting to the surface, he scanned the icy wasteland that lay before him. He quickly pulled out his extra layers of clothing and dressed himself into them. He wore a coat with a thick fur hood that he pulled tightly over his head. His pants were lined with fur on the inside, but were merely cloth on the outside. The whole outfit was white to allow him to be invisible at a distance. His usual blade tipped cape was replaced by an L-shaped cloak, with a sharp blade creating the bottom of the L. It tied around his neck at the top of the L-shape, and the straight line held it along his back. This allowed for Talon to use the rear blade as a weapon, while the fierce winter winds would not blow into the cape and hinder his movement. His boots had a spike blade along the heel that dug straight into the icy ground. Cleat spikes ran along the bottom of the front of his feet to give him a gripping surface to pry the heel blade out of the ground as he walked. Plus, the spikes could double as a weapon.
Talon slogged through the barren cold, unsure where to begin. A storm was whirling about him and decimated his vision beyond a fifty foot radius. He did not quite have a sense of direction, but he kept to a straight path, being sure that his visible footprints made a straight line, insuring that he was not straying from a linear trail. He walked through the ice, feeling the freezing watery snow as it sloshed into his boots and around his legs. The cold was digging into his calves, hindering his movement to the point that he felt he was just going to collapse and die where he stood due to its sharp sting stabbing in, just as his blade had done to so many individuals in his past.
When Talon felt that he was about to just cave into the cold, he saw a light glowing in the distance. The sight inspired him to such extremities that his plod became a run and he was hindered only be the bladed traction of his boots. As he drew near the light, he found it to be emanating from a small village of three or four huts of some sort, with a fireplace in the center. His pace slowed to a walk as he came closer. Inside of the village's borders, a fat man with an orange beard reaching his waistline accompanied by an obscurely bald head and very large hands and feet, stepped out of one of the huts. He immediately greeted Talon with a warm smile and huddled him back into one of the tents.
"Lad, you can't be walkin' 'round a place like this when it's storming mightier than a drunkard who is outta cash! You gotta be settin' inside where it's warm, drinking some grog and waiting for the time to pass! Here!" The fat man smiled broadly and handed him a flask containing a purplish colored liquid. Talon took the flask and examined its contents intently, as if it were potentially poisoned and he would be able to see it inside of the drink. The man laughed at his actions and took a sip from his own mug. "But hey, where are my manners! Name's Gragas, I live in these hellatious lands and make myself some grog, best you'll find all around!" The man spoke much louder than he needed to and with an occasional hiccup. He was quite clearly at least lightly intoxicated; however, this could be used to Talon's advantage. He took a sip of the concoction in his hands and found it, to his astonishment, to be quite tasty. He did not intend to chug the alcohol but he was glad to have something less bitter than the cold outside to consume. He sat in silence, drinking his liquid and warming himself to the large fire pit burning in the center. "So, what in the name of Avarosa where you doing way out here, eh? Musta been brutally important if you couldn't wait for this storm to pass!" Talon continued to stare into his mug, but decided that speaking to him would at least get him to shut up a little; and being drunk, he may have valuable information to spill quite easily.
"I'm looking for a man by the name of Tryndamere. Have you heard of him?" he asked the fat drunkard.
"Ah, yeeas. I have heard of him a bit. I know he likes to roam from tribe to tribe and spar with the toughest of warriors. I haven't seen him around these parts lately, but I'm not here all that often. However! Queen Ashe is living in one of these tents at the moment, residing until the storm dies off. She may know a bit of information as to where he may be. In the mean time, I need to get some people to test out my ale with me! I just made this batch using an icy shard that I had found deep within this frozen pile of rubble. Let's head outside and see if anyone wants to join in eh?" The large man blundered out of the tent, just like that. Talon, a little dazed from his actions, stood up and followed him outside as a sharp pain streaked through his legs to remind him that he was still half frozen.
The assassin lumbered out of the tent and saw a five or six people gathered about and discussing some insolent matters about peace and unity among the tribes. Talon did not bother to pay attention, but he did notice Gragas approaching the group, quite dissatisfied that he was being ignored. The bearded man did not take being ignored very kindly, and grabbed the sturdiest and loudest mouthed man amongst the group and smashed his forehead into the other's skull. The headbutted man was about Talon's height, but much more largely built with thick blonde hair setting atop his head in a mess that came down to form a beard that was kept in a similar manner of uncaring. The melee attack did not seem to hinder him at all, but more so enrage him. He lifted his fists and demanded Gragas fight him, then and there. The massive man laughed and slugged him besides the head with a club like fist that knocked him sideways to the ground. A few of the members standing around in the previously diplomatic debate jumped in at the arisen opportunity to start swinging fists.
Talon remained on the outskirts and allowed the petty fools to duke it out as they saw fit. He seized the distracted opportunity to go talk to Ashe, who was also standing beside the brawl. She was a strong, skinny woman with a black cloak cut off at the sleeves and ended in a skirt. She wore boots that came up midway through her thighs and was equipped with gauntlets that appeared to be emitting a frost of their own. Her eyes were a frost blue with her hair as silver as the snow on the ground around her. On her back, she carried a bow unlike anything Talon had seen before. It appeared to be made purely out of ice with a chilling mist rising off of its surface. To his confusion, she did not wear a quiver around her back, just a hood that branched off into a cape; both black and lined with gold. She did not wholly resemble a queen, but perhaps that was the idea. Most would not mistake her for one, nor would Talon himself, had a drunken man not so previously informed him of her title. He approached her, still in half of a limp and colder than a lizard's blood. She looked at him with despair as if she was genuinely hurt to see a man in pain. He abused this concern and gave her a look of innocence, pulling back his hood – despite the sheer cold – to expose the look of sadness being faked into his eyes. He smiled weakly and pulled out the picture that he had been given to identify his target.
"Excuse me, ma'am," he started. "Would you happen to know where this man is? I have been sent to deliver something very important to him and I must find him right away." Talon spoke with a sense of lust and anxiety. She fell for the act, just as Talon had planned.
"Why yes, that man is Tryndamere. Last I saw him he was heading to a tribe to the west of here, not too far out actually. You'd be best to wait until this blizzard clears out though. You clearly are not from around here; the cold will tear you to pieces," the woman replied softly.
"Would he be travelling in this weather?" the assassin questioned, seeking to see if he would be losing a lead by remaining in place. She replied with a kind hearted giggle.
"Yes, I'd imagine so. The man is of an endurance like no other. He seeks to fight the strongest of warriors and will stop at no end to accomplish this task. But here, I am going to my tent for awhile, these men will have to recover consciousness from this drunken brawl before I can try to talk some sense into them. Won't you join me? You ought to rest. You look awful." Her alluring voice alone was enough to compel him to accept the offer, but he had a mission to accomplish. If Tryndamere was on the move, he needed to be too.
"To the west you say?" he asked, pretending to have ignored her offer. Around him lay the massive and intoxicated bodies of the concluded melee that seemed to have finished in a much shorter time span than Talon had expected. Him and Ashe were the only two conscious members of the camp at the moment and would be for quite some time to come. At least they were lying around the campfire and would not freeze to death before they awoke. Not to mention that half of them, including the bearded man, were shirtless; they had to be used to the cold in some sort of manor.
"You can't POSSIBLY be thinking about going, can you? Tryndamere will not have gone too far, your delivery can wait, can't it?" She replied to Talon's question while bearing a frown upon her face. He could tell he was a bit more under the influence than he had originally thought; he found himself staring into her crystal blue eyes, quite tempted to just walk into her tent and lay down until the storm passed; perhaps talk to the woman as they drank the night away happily. He shook his head violently to rid the thoughts from his mind. She bowed her head and pulled a small necklace out of a pouch she wore around her waist. It was quite plain around the string but at the end sat a trinket that was very large in proportion. It held in the shape of a cross; the top part of it was a hexagonal dipyramid and there was a short pole sticking out of the one of the vertexes of the six converging points. The left and right prongs of the cross were square bipyramids, joined with the rest of the structure at the vertexes. All four parts appeared to be bound together by a wrapping, containing a small red gem in the center point.
"Here," she said while handing him the pendant. "Wear this as you travel. It is said to have some sort of magical strength to shroud its wearer in a protective veil. You will find this useful as you trudge through the storm, and perhaps on another day as well." Talon held out his hands to accept the gift and Ashe placed the totem into his hands. He took the string's loop and wrapped it around his neck, wearing it like a necklace. He tucked the bulky pendant into his coat to make sure that it did not flap about as he ran. He nodded in approval and turned to face the onslaught of ice in front of him. Just before he stepped into hell, Ashe called out for him again.
"WAIT!" she cried out to him. "I never got a chance to catch your name!" Talon bowed his head and pulled the hood tightly over it, never bothering to turn around to face her.
"Don't worry about it. One soon-to-be dead courier is not a matter for a queen to worry her head about." And with that comment Talon set foot into the blizzard that he had just previously sought shelter from.
Talon dragged through the slush and snow to the west. He immediately noticed a difference as he marched; the cold winds were not piercing into his skin as they had been before. However, they were still blowing with just as much force as they had been previously. The winds seemed to be literally blowing around him. He stood still for a second to analyze the mess he existed among. He looked to his left, where the winds were coming from, and saw them blowing straight for his face. The assassin immediately clenched his eyelids, embracing for an impact that did not come. He slowly reopened them to see the same sight as before. His mind was boggled to think that winds could be blowing straight towards him and yet they were not touching him. He reached into his shirt and pulled out the pendant that Ashe had given him. It was glowing blue, as if signaling that its magic was at use protecting its wearer. Talon laughed to himself, simply amazed at how easy his quest had just become. He trod on through the tundra, not even bothering to pause; he had a hunt to finish and planned to stop at nothing to do so.
Eventually he saw another fiery glow inside of a camp in his line of sight. He approached the camp slowly since his movement was still cumbersome due to the terrain. He noticed a lone man walking through the snow, leaving through the northern portion of the village. Talon immediately made a leeway towards him and bypassed the collection of huts completely in attempt to reach the man before he got too far away. Talon noticed that he was losing distance so he began to pick up his pace to trot. Eventually, his presence caught the attention of the man he was pursuing, who turned around to face the assassin.
"Who dares stalk Tryndamere through a blizzard? You think you're tough do ya? C'mere! I'll slice ya in two!" The shout left Talon immobilized for a second. He had been hoping to approach him stealthily and avoid the fist fight that he was clearly at a disadvantage in. The barbarian rushed him with a bloodlust and Talon quickly pulled two bladed gauntlets out of his backpack and equipped them to either arm. He looked up in time to see a sword almost as big as its wielder being dropped down onto his skull. He rolled sideways to avoid it by using the bladed cape on his back to keep his traction as his backside shifted across the ice. The massive sword split the ice beneath it as it missed its target. Talon got to his feet and pulled out multiple throwing knives, readying an assault. The berserker was prying his sword out of the ground as Talon launched the volley of blades towards him. His vision was slightly hindered from the snow and alcohol combination, but they all flew through the air with relative accuracy. About half of them were on target, most being deflected off of the armored arm of the ripped man, and the other half finding their way into his flesh. Talon grinned as he had just succeeded in landing the first blow. Within a few minutes, his blood loss would slow him down to the point in which Talon could move in for a quick kill. He had expected a bigger fight from Tryndamere with all of the hype he had been hearing. But it did not matter how difficult the task was, all he needed to do was succeed.
To Talon's astonishment, the man replied to his wounds with laughter as he yanked all of the knives out and tossed them to the ground. Tryndamere looked at Talon bearing a grin of pleasure on his face. He proceeded to lift his sword to his side and lunging at Talon while rotating in a circle from slicking across the icy terrain and, in turn, creating a small vortex of death. Talon stepped backwards to avoid the reckless assault and followed it up by executing a shunpo to arrive at Tryndamere's backside. The assassin took his bladed heel and stomped on Tryndamere's foot allowing the blade to pass through the bone and to the ice beneath it before he pulled his foot out and stabbed into the side of his ribcage with his gauntlet blade. Then, Talon placed a foot against the barbarian's back and kicked off into a back flip, causing his bladed cape to slice across the man's back. Talon landed on the ground, expecting to see his target lying on the ground in a crippled heap; but instead, he saw a man angrier than a charging bull turn around to face him.
He smiled from ear to ear in a demented manner before launching himself at Talon. He swung his massive blade with ease as he slammed down blows onto Talon faster than he could ever do with both of his own blades at the same time. It took every amount of raw energy that he possessed to deflect the attacks which left himself no opportunity to counter attack. Blood poured from the demonic man's side, where Talon had pierced his body, and dripped to the ground to create a bloody slushy mess. Talon knew that Tryndamere's boots were not providing him with any sort of traction and decided to abuse this knowledge and use it to his advantage. Talon made a slight hop backwards and dug his cleats deep into the snow. He readied his arm blades by laying the lower portions of his arms on top of one another so that the blades lay parallel. Tryndamere jumped through the air towards him holding his sword high above his head and smashing it down unto his helpless foe below. Talon immediately thrust his body forward to allow his blades to meet his opponent's sword. The sound of metal clashing resonated throughout the tundra and Tryndamere tumbled backwards to the ground due to his inability to regain traction upon landing the hit.
Being able to concentrate again, Talon used the shunpo technique to place himself besides the fallen warrior. He took both of his blades and dug them deep into Tryndamere's stomach, twisting them about to guarantee the pierced organs were not making it out of the encounter. He looked into Tryndamere's eyes, waiting for the life to slowly die from them; however, their light grew even brighter than ever before. A fury of a thousand suns burned his eyes so intensely that Talon had to turn away from the gaze. He saw a lightly colored image of a hawk screech through the air beside him before it detonated into an array of sparkling mist. He wanted to figure out what it was but his attention was diverted when the man housing his blades spoke.
"I have lived through the hell of watching everything I love be smashed into pieces and stripped from my life, and yet you expect nothing more than a blade sharpened to the point of overcompensation to extinguish this fire? You are POORLY mistake!" Tryndamere shouted at his assassin. Talon blinked, as if the image in front of him was an illusion, waiting to die out. The brute grabbed Talon around the throat and lifted him off of his body, pulling the blades out of his stomach in turn, and threw him to the ground beside him. Tryndamere grabbed his sword and swung an uppercut into Talon as he got back to his feet. He raised his bladed arms to deflect the blow, but watched Tryndamere's sword smash them to pieces due to the sheer force of the impact. Talon staggered backwards, now practically defenseless, trying to come up with a plan to defeat the monster. Tryndamere yelled in rage as he assaulted his assassin yet again. Talon dodged swing after swing until he just could not keep pace any longer. The blunt end of the massive sword slammed sideways into the back of Talon's skull, forcing him to taste the bloody ice below, and bringing him to the very edge of consciousness. He rolled over to see Tryndamere raising his sword once again, preparing to drop the blade down like a guillotine.
An instantaneous explosion of frosted light erupted around him and blinded him for several seconds, causing the glow from the pendant around his neck to burn so brightly that it seemed to fade itself out. When the mist cleared, he saw his attacker incased in a tomb of ice, while Talon stood unharmed. Talon thought for a moment that he had been saved by an angel, but decided that everything that had just happened may very well have been some sort of hallucination from the overly strong alcohol that he had consumed earlier. Regardless, he scrambled to his feet and rushed to escape the frosted wasteland, heading towards the direction that he knew the tunnels were in. His pendant was not protecting him any longer; as if its power had been sated when the icy explosion had taken place.
He marched through the snow half conscious and heavily bruised. He was possibly cut, but also quite certain that the blood from any potential wound would be frozen solid at that point. The failed assassin marched on for hours until his legs collapsed from beneath him due to exhaustion and the bitter cold. He could not feel the lower portion of his body as he crawled through the snow, dedicated to survive. He still had the notes from the Zaun laboratory that needed to be returned to Marcus. He could not fail him now, not with such a simple task to complete. He dragged his body along, pursuing a pointless dedication, until he reached the cover of the tunnel entrance. At least he would be safe from the cold once he got inside. He reached over to remove the lid and found it frozen shut, once again.
"DAMN IT!" he cursed to the wind, half expecting it to laugh in his face as a response. Its icy breeze relentlessly bashed at his face as he banged over and over on the metallic cover to the tunnel. Just when Talon's body was about to give way, the lid opened, and a man appeared its entrance. He grabbed Talon and pulled him in before closing the lid behind them. Talon was carried down the ladder and through the tunnel, slung over his rescuer's shoulder like a disobedient child.
"You have done well Talon," his rescuer said to him.
"Marcus?" he asked, almost certain that it was his voice. "I have failed. I could not kill the man. No matter how many times my blade sank into his skin, he just shook it off as if I had just caused an abrasion on its surface."
"You did not fail me Talon. I need to apologize. I set you up. I needed to know if this man was fit to rule Freljord, or if it was some political nonsense joining him to Queen Ashe. So I sent my best assassin to attempt to end him. If you could not succeed, then I got the information that I needed; he is meant to be king." Talon was not sure if he should be angry at this response or proud to be considered Marcus' best assassin. He decided to react by allowing himself to sleep, even if he was in the most uncomfortable position in the world.
As he closed his eyes in the memory, his recollection of the event faded out and Talon found himself lying in the same bed that he had been in for much too long.