-=[Gaika Bell, LV 97 Hunter]=-

No. If she killed the sleeping target, then the geisha would likely yell out, notify one of the human guards outside that something was wrong.

Even if Gaika was completely invisible, she still didn’t want to cause an immediate commotion. She needed several seconds to drain a bit of brain matter from her target. The target’s blood and flesh from the brain was proof that Gaika was the one to execute the girl. Plus, she wanted to steal the big pile of cores. She knew an underworld brothel where she could fence them. Such a big pile of cores would buy her a lifetime of high grade cultivation pills.

Her greed for the cores won. The huntress reached a decision - the geisha would have to die first. Gaika knew that the servitor dummies wouldn't do a thing if she attacked the geisha. The huntress killed her targets in front of servitors before and they did nothing at all - servitors performed their jobs one order at a time, completely ignoring whatever else was happening.

Gaika took a breath and thrust her invisible knife-like bone finger through the eye of the geisha. The kitsune girl barely made a noise as her eye burst and the needle struck her brain. The huntress released a spray of poison into the brain from the needle, instantly killing the geisha.

For several tense heartbeats Gaika held the dead kitsune with her left arm, so that she wouldn't fall over, aiming the needle at the closed left eye of Ash Sparks. The huntress pushed Qi into her muscle to make the strike swift and…

The dead geisha suddenly moved, sharp fox teeth biting into the invisible arm that was holding her upright. Gaika yelped as the teeth sunk deep into her arm, shattering the invisible scales. Her servitor made her invisible, but its scales weren’t that strong. She wasn’t immune to a direct attack.

Gaika felt her arm turn completely numb. Aghast, she tried to wrestle her arm away from the undead monstrosity, but it was useless. The kitsune’s teeth held the arm of the huntress like a steel vice, to her ultimate horror draining away her Dantian! The invisibility scales on her body started to shear off as her Qi quickly depleted. They flaked off and turned into sparkling dust, revealing the exposed, human huntress underneath.

Oh qi-ss, oh qi-ss!

Gaika desperately swung her right arm and struck the bone-needle through the other eye of the geisha. It didn’t do a damn thing. The dead girl grabbed the needle and broke it off with an inhuman growl emanating from her throat, breaking the finger of the huntress in the process. Gaika choked as the geisha’s other hand closed over her throat. She knew it then - she made a grave mistake, misjudged the weak-looking geisha.

The eyes of Ash Sparks flashed open. She evaluated the scene above her in seconds.

A dummy leapt across the space separating trio and swung its celesteel-gauntlet into the head of the huntress and Gaika Bell knew no more.

-=[Ash Sparks]=-

“You know, for some who supposedly doesn’t want to interfere in the affairs of mortals, you sure came to my rescue pretty quickly, Dreamer,” I commented.

“I… do not appreciate my host being murdered,” the Dreamer rasped back without opening her mouth. The fourteen-thousand-years old alien creature wasn’t tender with the half-naked hunter. Strange, shimmering scales flaked off the half-invisible human girl, slowly exposing her body. The steel-like kitsune teeth weren’t gentle like they were with me. Her chompers closed over the arm of the invisible girl nearly crushing the wrist in her jaw, blood dripping all over me. The assassin's arm rapidly turned gray as the Tardigrada drained life out of it to repair her injuries.

“Don’t eat all of her,” I commented. “Leave some for me, would you?”

“You are not injured and I am hungry,” the Tardigrada hissed, bleeding from her eyes. “She knows I exist. I will consume her life.”

“A solid point and thank you for watching out for me. However, I would really like to add Miss invisible girl to my collection of minions... before you turn her into a lifeless husk. Someone like her could be very useful, serving our shared goals of survival. If you’re that worried about being remembered, I can simply ask the Magistrate to snip out her memories. She won’t remember the unkillable geisha at all. Bite me if you need more Qi - I’m full of it.”

“Fine.” The Tardigrada let go of the bleeding, gray wrist of the hunter and gently bit into my wrist that I offered her. In about ten minutes the bleeding eyes closed and opened again, gold rims looking up at me.

“Damn it,” Celes muttered, letting go of my arm. “Life around you is dangerous.”

“It’s a good thing these idiots keep trying to kill you like a human,” I winked at her.

“I got stabbed right through the brain this time,” she growled in response. “That was extremely unpleasant!”

“You’re my bestest, cutest, zombie bodyguard,” I nuzzled her and she smiled back.

The Pharmacist controlled dummy snapped celesteel manacles over the arms of the hunter. We had found a whole hoard of these in the catacombs. Apparently they were used to bind disobedient nobles.

A metal hand slapped our newest prisoner across the face.

“Erghhh?” The girl woke up, blinking at us.

“Good tomorrow, future friend!” I smiled. “That was an excellent attempt at murdering me! Ten out of five, would almost die again.”

Hazel eyes filled with fear looked up at me. A celesteel sword sat across her neck, held aloft by the steady hand of the servitor dummy nearly cutting into the skin. The half-naked hunter gulped.

“That was quiiiiite impressive how you went through literally all of my incredible defences. Didn’t think that the Deathstorm Convergence Ward could be bamboozled that easily. Oh well, live and learn! I’ll have to hang up some strings or something. Gota watch out for more invisible idiots,” I ranted.

I spared the girl held by her hazel hair a curious glance. “So, what’s your name, my invisible pal?”

“...Gaika Bell,” she choked out, shivering.

“Nice to meet you, Gaika. I’m Baroness Sparks-Manning. What were you doing in my lovely Citadel, roaming around naked and invisible? Perhaps you were looking for a bathroom and you accidentally tripped on my pile of treasures and fell into my geisha, accidentally stabbing her eyes out?” I winked. “Oh and… please don’t lie to me because if you do I’ll have your head chopped off. I don’t appreciate liars.”

“I am a hunter... I accepted a contract in the Hunters Guild.” The girl gulped, not even smiling at my excellent sense of humour. “Five hundred gold for your life.”

“It’s nice to know that I’m valued as much as a small house,” I sighed. “Do you know who made the contract?”

The hunter shook her head. “It’s anonymous.”

“Hrm.” I tapped my chin. “I’ll have to tell the Head of the Hunters Guild to take it down. Naugty, naughty.”

“There are copies of the same contract in numerous catacomb brothels,” Gaika said. “Others will come to kill you.”

“Was that a threat?” I raised one of my eyebrows at her.

“No. A mere note, to be wary of further attacks on your life. Sometimes noble families place head-hunts on each other. Nobody has managed to terminate a hunting contract completely. I don’t even know how many places it’s replicated in. Whoever your enemy is, they seem to be very determined. I wouldn't dare threaten you,” Gaika said, glancing down at the celesteel sword across her neck. “My life is currently at your mercy, Baroness. You are already untrackable by your Dantian. I would suggest becoming invisible to the hunters.”

The sneaky hunter was right. I’ve made powerful enemies and I didn’t have the manpower to destroy the Gold city underworld. Even if I executed all of the Barbers it wouldn't stop the contract on my head. I had to approach the problem of the hunt from another angle.

I glanced at grumpy-looking Celes who was rubbing blood streaks from her cheeks. “Want your first drone, fellow Baroness?”

She nodded, eyeing the chained hunter girl as a tasty piece of meat.

“Also… do you know anything about makeup?” I added casually.

-=[Arianna Manning]=-

Arianna spent around seven thousand heartbeats terrorising about half of the Guilders into total submission to her and her Barony. She left the most difficult cases to the kitsune geisha - perhaps the little monsterling could bend their minds with her freakish friendship-field magic. Her grandfather had officiated the oaths, binding the Guilders to Arianna. He wasn’t too happy about it.

Power, incredible, fantastic power of Qi taken from the Guilders flowed through her body. She felt unstoppable, invincible. She finally understood why the Eternal Flames prince had so many gods damned concubines. The one-sided oaths gave her more power than years of cultivation did! Arianna felt like she could break celesteel with her bare hands.

Grinning victoriously, she decided to check on Ash and the geisha. She merrily marched into the main tent with Alexander’s dummy body following her like her personal, unkillable knight. It was nice to have her own, perfect General.

As she entered into the large tent, Arianna failed to spot the familiar silver-blue hair. She walked closer to the large couch and discovered that an adorable redhead covered in freckles was sitting next to Celes. The redhead was wearing the same celesteel armour that Ash had worn.

Wait a heartbeat.

“Ash?” Arianna squinted at the redhead. “Why do you look like me? What’s going on?”

“Oh?” The redhead turned. “There is nobody named Ash here. I’m Alexa Storm!”

Arianna’s eye started to twitch. “What?”

“Nice to meet you!” Ash shook her wavy, red locks and started to giggle furiously, obviously highly entertained by Arianna’s bewildered expression. “What’s your name?”

“You know my gods damned name, Ash! What is this?!”

“I already told you,” Ash punctuated her words, suddenly looking very serious. “I’m Alexa. Please refer to me as such.”

“Why?” Arianna rubbed her face in exasperation.

“Invisible assassins!” Ash declared with a smirk, waving her hand in the air.

“Invisible assassins?” Arianna blinked.

“Yep. There’s one right behind you. Can you spot her?”

Arianna spun. She didn’t see anyone behind her. “Are you screwing with me…” Arianna inhaled. She smelled something in the air. A person. A girl that was there but also wasn’t. In seconds Arianna’s celesteel sword was out, pointing approximately in the direction of the invisible assassin. “Reveal yourself!” She barked. “I know you’re there!”

“Go ahead, Gaika. Show yourself to my lovely fiancee before she stabs you.” Ash laughed.

Arianna’s eyes bulged as a hazel-haired girl appeared out of thin air in front of her, shimmering scales folding away and weaving her into existence. The girl bowed. “Gaika Bell, Hunter… at your service, Baroness.”

“Qi-ss!” Arianna swore. “I didn’t even smell her until you told me about her!”

“Yeah. She almost put me out of existence. Luckly, she killed Celes first.”

“She killed Celes?!” Arianna spun back to Celes who was sitting there and smirking.

“Yeppers.” Ash smiled. “It’s okay though, we’re best friends now. Aren’t we?” The Baroness winked at Hunter Bell.

The hunter quickly nodded her head. She looked very nervous.

“Riiiiight,” Arianna slumped down onto the couch. “How did you change your hair like that?”

“Got a bunch of carrot and beet juice from the kitchens. The perfect ingredients to make it red,” Ash grinned. “They’re natural color changers. Also I found some old henna war-paint in the catacombs storage. Celes painted the Manning-style freckles on my face. Aren't they cute?”

Arianna sighed, looking at the familiar, yet different face of Ash Sparks. Then she glanced at the hidden assassin. “You bind her already?”

“Yeppers. She’s now a drone of Baroness Rada-Sparks! I officiated the binding.” Ash nodded at Celes.

“Why use the name Alexa?” The ginger redhead inquired tentatively.

“You kept calling the Pharmacist Alex,” Ash shrugged. “So I’m Alexa. Isn’t it obvious?"

“Ah, so you know.” Arianna blushed.

“About your little date?” the fake-ginger-haired girl smirked. “I know everything!”

“It wasn’t a date!” The highborn protested, blushing even more. “We just walked around the cavern for a bit making plans and then spent an entire HC-beat binding Guiders to me. I thought you were asleep!”

“I was indeed asleep until Gaika killed Celes.” Ash shrugged. "I was dreaming of walking together with you as... Alex. It was nice.”

Arianna groaned.

“Don't forget that the Pharmacist and I are one.” Sparks added. “I was only able to give 'Alex' increased functionality outside of me thanks to eating some of these extra beast cores." Her celesteel-armoured glove pointed at the pile of beast cores on the table. Another dummy walked into the tent and added three cores to the pile.

Arianna whistled. "This is a lot of cores. I didn't even know we had this many!"

"Grandfather Manning might have misplaced a lot of the family's gold, but the Citadel is rich in mostly useless artifact-trinkets that aren't tied into the Deathstorm Wards. I've been destroying them to extract these low-level cores."

At these words Arianna gritted her teeth. She still remembered how aghast she was when she saw the mostly empty treasury.

"The Barony will require a lot of money to run. Would it not be more reasonable to sell these artifacts at the market?" She inquired.

"We need to survive the night," Ash shook her head. "The Immortals are coming. The Temple of Inquiry is just one branch of the compound. There's a five hundred gold price on the head of Ash Sparks as well."

"If this contract is from a wealthy party then the initial price is likely to increase. Nobles often outbid each other this way. I was going to wait a few days with a vial of your brain-matter until the price maxed out." Hunter Gaika commented.

"Damnation! What are you going to do?” Arianna ground out. “Hide forever?"

"No. Ash Sparks needs to exist to lead the revolution as Vox Populi. What I can actually do is... make money obsolete." Ash smirked.

"What?!" All three girls glared at Ash, their mouths wide.

"How?!" Arianna finally interjected after a few heartbeats of silent bewilderment.

“Well,” the pharmacist spoke through the mouth of Ash, her voice changing to a gritter, older version of itself. “I’ve been a bit of a history buff. Throughout human history there had been a lot of economic collapses which had completely ravaged economies of specific cities and even supernations. These currency collapses have been initiated through government incompetence, targeted financial attacks, introduction of too much gold into the system and pyramid schemes.”

“Economic collapse? Won’t this hurt the lowest classes of the Gold city first?” Celes asked.

“Oh, it’ll hurt everyone from richest to poorest,” Ash replied. “It’s a necessary requirement to tear power away from the rulers of the Gold city. Step one is to destroy the worth of gold and step two will be to introduce something to replace gold with and hire everyone to create a new type of servitor-based economy. We need to uplift the Gold city and at the same time destroy everyone who is keeping the class system afloat.

“What?!” Arianna gaped. “Do you think that the nobility will just peacefully sit on their butts while we do this? The highborn families are the ones with the most gold. They own the banks!”

“We will attack from multiple avenues, redirecting their anger into far too many sources. We are in possession of the Guild Heads, remember? While the Heads don’t hold that much power, they can easily topple the entire financial system sideways by making a bunch of really ‘foolish’ moves.”

“The highborns aren’t stupid… Alexa.” Arianna gritted out, not enjoying saying the weird, new name of Ash. “They’ll figure it out…”

“Let them come,” Ash declared. “We’ll turn the Citadel into an impregnable deathtrap with dummy Ash Sparks at the wheel.”

A short dummy dressed in celesteel walked into the tent. Arianna gaped at the dressed-up dummy, noticing little bits of silver-blue hair sticking out of the large face-covering celesteel helmet.

“Baroness Sparks will run the Barony from the Citadel,” Ash said, pointing at the dummy. “I have no desire to hide inside this weary castle longer than necessary!”

She stood up, and pulled yellow-tinted artificer goggles down over her eyes, turning her sapphire-blue eyes into green ones.

“I want to see MY city. I want to study everything from Alchemy to servitors and to optimise it all. I want to explore the catacombs and the dead city with all of my new, best friends! If we survive the night, we’ll register an official Adventurer party with our lovely Guild Secretary on the morrow.”

Arianna sighed. Her plans of being a high-society and warlord Baroness were seemingly thrown out of the window. She would just have to settle in finding joy in being an Adventurer.