The Eternal Assassin

Dozens of white-hot stabs of pain shot through his calves as Asher's unknown assailant lodged itself into his legs and yanked him under the water. His head slammed into the tile floor of the bath, disorienting him for a moment before he was suddenly dragged at high speed through the grate he'd just been inspecting. As he was dragged through the water, blind and in pain, he had just enough conscious thought to stop himself from reflexively slipping into the astral.

While he was in the astral, if he returned while overlapping objects from the material realm, whatever was overlapping would be erased. He'd never tested if overlapping with liquids worked in the same way. If it did, and he tried to return while submerged underwater…

He might simply cease to exist.

With Astral Dip off the table, Asher was in a world of trouble. Presumably, whoever or whatever he was fighting could breathe underwater, which put him at a huge disadvantage. He was effectively blind due to the green water, had no idea where he was being dragged off to, and completely naked.

Still, that didn't mean he was defenseless.

Deciding he'd been dragged far enough, Asher snatched his daggers out of his Personal Rift and, after growing one into the size of a sword, blindly stabbed in the direction of where he thought his opponent was. A deep, echoing scream reverberated through the water as whatever was latched onto him finally let go with a jerk, and he suddenly found himself floating freely in the rushing water.

Damn it, I can't see anything!

Asher couldn't even tell which way was up or down, which wasn't fantastic seeing as his lungs were already beginning to burn a bit from a lack of oxygen. While Complete Resilience would no doubt let him fend off suffocation for longer than the average person, he'd had most of the air in his lungs knocked out of him when his head hit the tiles. Fresh blood from both his own punctured legs and whatever he'd just stabbed drifted around him, clouding his vision even further.

Part of him was tempted to simply Recall to Samantha and get the hell out of this situation. Fighting blind and underwater were just about the worst conditions for a battle he could possibly ask for, and it wasn't like he had to stay here and struggle. While appearing in the middle of the woman's bath was probably not the best idea, if the men's half of the bath had been compromised, there was no guarantee she wasn't also being targeted. Only the fact that he didn't sense any sort of pain coming from her mark stayed his hand.

There was also the fact that if he ran, he'd have no idea when his mysterious attacker would try their luck a second time. He'd managed to inflict at least a minor wound that was now permanent, thanks to Sever the Thread, but he had no idea how effective his strike had been. It would be one thing if it was just his life on the line, but his opponent had attacked him with Brian right in the line of fire.

Asher wasn't letting his opponent get out of here alive.

Sensing something coming at him through the water from behind, Asher struggled to turn around and meet his enemy with his daggers, before realizing he still had one card left to play. With a grin, he activated Spatial Lock, forming a bubble around him with a few critical rules.

Water was allowed to flow out of the barrier, but it wasn't allowed to flow back in.

Immediately, the space around him began draining as water rushed out of his spontaneous bubble. Unfortunately, it didn't flow out fast enough to save him from the next attack.

Something long and sharp cut nearly halfway through the back of his thigh as his opponent shot past him in the water, the blade scraping against bone and causing him to involuntarily gasp and start choking on water at the unexpected pain. It was far from the worst injury he'd ever suffered, but not being able to see when or where the attacks were going to land added a terrifying new element to being wounded.

Thankfully, before his opponent could swim back around for a third strike, the water level drained enough that he could see. As his head broke out into the air-filled top section of the bubble, he gained his first look at his attacker.

Or at the bladed dorsal fin jutting up out of the water, anyway.

Am I fighting a god damn Shark element user? he blinked, coughing the water from his lungs as he treaded water.

While most animal-based elements gave their users a partial-transformation skill that many referred to as their battle forms, it wasn't entirely unheard of for a person to gain a skill that was instead a total transformation. He thought he recalled that such skills were more frequently given for the aquatic-animal elements, so the Shark guess was most likely a good one.

With every second he waited for the next attack, more of the water flooded out of his bubble. Yet it seemed wherever he'd been dragged, the water level here was significantly deeper than the bath. While he freed his lungs of water and waited for his opponent to come back around for another attack, he was struck by a strange thought.

Actually, how am I even able to breathe here? If water flowed out of my Spatial Lock, why is it leaving air behind? Wouldn't there just be 'nothing' in its place?

Sadly, he didn't have time to ponder the oddities surrounding his Spatial skills. The unusual element had displayed plenty of strange things before he hadn't fully understood, and as his opponent turned around and made another beeline for him, Asher decided trying to understand the inner workings of what was clearly complex magic was beyond him.

While it was pitch-black within his bubble, that didn't faze him in the slightest thanks to his evolved darkness resistance. Wanting to end this battle right here and now, he used Distortion to lengthen his dagger once again. As he couldn't really dodge in the water all that effectively, he braced himself for more pain as he readied his blade and prepared to trade hits.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Unfortunately, with his inability to truly see his opponent and Identify them, he'd forgotten one of the most crucial rules of battle in this new world.

Most warriors worth their salt had more than one element to their names.

As Asher raised his dagger over his head for the killing blow, he felt a stinging pain land on the top of his shoulder, quickly followed by a second, and then a third. Fearing a second opponent, he risked a glance at the cause of the pain, only to stare in shock at the beads of molten metal falling on him.

His elongated steel dagger was melting.

Even as he watched, the rate of which his dagger was melting increased dramatically, and the entire blade turned to a boiling liquid within seconds. It was all Asher could do to shift the blade to ensure half his shoulder wasn't covered in molten steel.

When the shark reached him again, he was left holding nothing more than a useless hilt.

His opponent twisted in the water at the last second, slashing its razor-sharp dorsal fin across his side and probably cutting through something rather important if the fresh wave of pain was anything to go off of. Despite the fact that water was still rapidly draining from his Spatial Lock, Asher was still treading water, which meant he couldn't see exactly where he'd been struck.

Unfortunately at this point, after having first his thigh sliced open and now this new injury on top of that, he had lost far too much blood.

"Damn you," Asher grumbled, grabbing a potion of Lesser Restoration from his rift and downing it before the shark could attack again. He hated having to rely on the potions both because his supply was rapidly diminishing, and because that meant his Eternal Regeneration wouldn't gain as much experience and would level far slower. At this point, he only had one of the potions left, which meant he'd have to go restock in the near future.

He almost pulled out another dagger, before thinking better of it. Now that he knew his opponent could melt steel somehow, he'd just have to wait until the last possible moment before pulling another dagger from his rift. The fact that he didn't keep his weapons on his person made him quite possibly one of the hardest counters to his opponent's fighting style.

I suppose that explains how it managed to get through the grate and attack me in the bath, he realized, part of him happy at the very least that it was looking like Eddie wasn't complicit in all this. He'd found the elderly man sweet and friendly, and he would have been rather distraught to discover the man's bathhouse was really just a trap for the Assassin's Guild or something similar.

"Come on then!" he goaded, unsure if the shark could even hear him with most of its body underwater. "Let's finish this!" Enough water had drained from his Spatial Lock that his feet finally touched against the tile floor, and he grinned as he was at last able to stop treading water for the first time that battle. His opponent must have noticed how low the water was getting as well, as it seemed to jerk around and began rushing toward him with far less precision than the previous attacks. He had no doubt that once the rest of the water flowed out of this space his opponent would be dead to rights, and they probably figured the same.

Realizing he had one more card up his sleeve he could use, Asher yanked his living wood dagger out of his rift early, using the extra few seconds to instead lengthen the wooden blade into that of a longsword. Even if his opponent could melt their way through solid metal, the strange skill shouldn't have any effect on wood.

In their final clash, both he and the shark went for the killing blow.

At the last second, the shark erupted out of the water like a living torpedo, suddenly gaining a massive burst of speed as it opened its jaws and shot directly at Asher's head. Unfortunately for it, now that he finally had his footing, Asher was more than ready. A simple tunnel of compressed space to the side allowed him to move sideways out of the desperate attack, and Asher brought his elongated wooden blade down hard on the flying shark in retaliation.

While he didn't quite cleave his opponent in two like he'd hoped, his blade bit deep into the shark's flesh, sending blood spraying everywhere. The shark jerked violently in midair, before landing hard on the surface of the water and going still.

Panting, Asher withdrew his living wood dagger and trudged over through the now waist-high water to the shark. Before he could even reach it, he watched the animal's body morph and transform back into that of a middle-aged man. By the time he got close enough to grab the floating violet orb of shards, the last of the water had drained from his bubble, and the man's corpse lay unceremoniously upon the ground.

"Who the hell are you?" Asher muttered, crouching down and sifting through the man's belongings. Unlike Asher, who had just won his first fight where he was entirely in the nude, his opponent was still wearing clothes. The dark, tight clothing reminded him of what the Guild usually wore, but it wasn't like the man had a nametag on him or anything like that. His pockets were entirely empty, and he didn't have so much as a single artifact on him.

Realizing he wasn't going to get any information out of him, Asher went to toss the corpse into his rift before stopping himself at the last second. He'd almost completely forgotten in the heat of the moment, but Brian was currently sitting in there. The last thing the twelve-year-old needed was to have a stranger's corpse dropped into the rift beside him. Still, he couldn't very well leave him here to float over into the bath and scare the living daylights out of everyone.

Scratching his chin, Asher came up with a simple solution. Leaving its contents in his rift, he summoned one of the crates he'd taken from the Guild's safehouse way back when. Shoving the corpse into the crate, he resealed it before storing that into his Personal Rift. While he wasn't a huge fan of Brian being in close proximity to a corpse at all, even one hidden away within a crate, it would only be for a few seconds.

Taking a deep breath, Asher finally let his Spatial Lock dissipate, eyes widening at the last second as he was suddenly slammed into by a hard wall of water that sent him tumbling and smacked him into the tile floor yet again.

Ow… he thought, shaking his head at his own carelessness. After reorienting himself, he began swimming toward what he was pretty sure was the exit. Luckily, the water was still actively flowing, which meant he just needed to follow the flow to find his way back to the actual bath.

Assuming both rivers were fed from the same source, there was a chance he'd accidentally find the woman's bath first. But seeing as he should run into a fully intact metal grate if he went that direction, he wasn't too worried.

Thankfully, he found the melted grate fairly quickly, and he popped back up in the men's bath, trying not to gasp for air too loudly. He looked around, half expecting to see everyone running about in an uproar, only to blink at the realization that it looked as though nobody had even noticed their disappearance.

In fact, now that he thought about it, the entire ordeal had probably taken less than five minutes.

Making sure nobody was watching, Asher pulled Brian back out of his rift, dropping the surprised boy right back where he'd been a few minutes ago.

"Asher?" Brian asked, blinking at the sudden light. From his perspective, he'd been randomly shoved into Asher's Personal Rift for seemingly no reason, only to be yanked right back into the bath a few minutes later. "What happened!?"

"Long story," Asher sighed, already beginning to wade through the water over to their baskets they'd left on the side of the bath. "First, let's get cleaned up. Then we need to grab Samantha and get out of here."