Chapter 177: Chapter 160 – Lives Paid For

"The Bounty Hunter is considered a remorseless, cold-blooded killer for hire by most, but whoever they are, their activities have shown that they followed a certain moral code of their own. The most renowned case was probably the one that involved the last emperor of the Clangeddin empire, which stood where the current Union of Free Nations was at.

 

Legend has it that a peasant waif had been crying out loud over the suffering the poor folk was subjected to under Maglos the Tyrant, and that the Bounty Hunter had appeared before the waif and asked what she would pay to remove the Tyrant. The waif had offered what scraps of hard bread she had left in her pocket, and a single copper coin.

 

It was said that the Bounty Hunter had just taken the coin, and several months later stood right before the gates of the imperial palace, slaughtered their way in, and beheaded Maglos the Tyrant in broad daylight. The Clangeddin Empire fell into civil war from that mess, and splintered into many smaller nations that later became the Union.

 

Supposedly, the waif whose unsuspecting words had triggered this cataclysm, later led a peasant rebellion and established what became Levain." - Shaqwal ibn Ordun, Historian and researcher of historical figures.

Where Cal had kept a distance to ensure she wasn't spotted, Kino kept a far closer watch on Ying Xiao, skulking from the rooftops, draped in a cloak enchanted with mist magic to make her practically invisible to the naked eye.

 

The enchantment was far from perfect, with noticeable ripples when viewed up close, that amplified when its wearer moved too fast, but combined with her own experience and skills and training picked up over the past seven centuries of her life? Very few would be able to notice her at all.

 

Because of that she noticed right away when the plan finally worked and two thugs "kidnapped" Ying Xiao in an empty alleyway, and followed them very closely, noticing that Cal also did so from a distance.

 

When the thugs strolled towards the Sultan's mansion and the guards let them in without a fuss, she knew that her guess was confirmed. While slavery is indeed legal in many areas of fhe Caliphate - Oajib was merely the biggest market - for there to be repeated cases of missing travellers who later ended up being sold as slaves meant only one of three things.

 

Either the Sultan and his guards were so incompetent they either couldn't of failed to root out the criminals responsible, or they were generously bribed to turn a blind eye to the activity, or - the most likely case now given how all the remaining merchants had received the Sultan's own protection and how the thugs had went to his mansion - he was straight up complicit and collaborating with the operation as a whole.

 

Having seen all she needed to know, she went down from the rooftop in a secluded alley, where nobody was around, and removed her enchanted cloak, trading it for her more renowned getup a jet-black hooded cloak, the rest of her outfit already worn under the cloak, and she pulled the mask that obscured the lower half of her face up to her nose.

 

Then she strode out and headed straight towards the Sultan's mansion. Passersby gave her a wide breadth, and even the four guards by the mansion's gate were visibly nervous. Two were too scared to act, but the other two crossed their spears and barred her path, apparently believing that not even the Bounty Hunter would want to anger the Sultan.

 

It was a very mistaken assumption to make, and they paid for it with their lives as a sphere of void formed between them, then enlarged to engulf the gate behind them. The upper bodies of the two guards had not escaped the devastation, and only their lower bodies were left to slump and fall even as a neat, perfectly circular hole formed in the middle of the gate. The other two guards had jumped back in fright, and she left them alone.

 

As she stepped through the hole she made in the gates, she saw what awaited her inside. Arrayed in the courtyard itself were over a hundred soldiers, clad in ornate armor and the Oajib Sultanate's color, likely the Sultan's personal guards. They wordlessly charged at her in a neat formation at the command of their officers.

 

She was impressed by their ferocity, and by their doubtlessly hard training to be able to keep their formation so seamlessly as they charged. The armor was definitely far too ostentatious though, more for display than practicality. As for what she was about to inflict to them, she didn't think about it. They had chosen to put themselves in her way, and as the Bounty Hunter, there was only one response to deliver.

 

Kino focused her magic for a moment, well aware that what she was about to do was more to keep an unfathomable image about her other persona than for practicality, but some things one must do after all. A moment later, a paper-thin line of void formed, then lashed out so fast the eye could not follow.

 

The soldiers took another two steps, before they collapsed in unison, their heads rolling away from their bodies as they fell, still in formation, with an all too neat cut where their neck ended in a bloody stump.

 

Kino walked between the corpses, eyes trained at the officer who had stood behind his soldiers, and was now looking at her with dread and despair. The man dared not move even as she walked right next to him, and playfully, Kino poked his head with one finger as she passed by.

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That little poke was enough to cause the officer's head to slide off his neck and roll down the ground, the man's eyes staring in fear at his own headless body, which still stood where it was, while the Bounty Hunter went to the mansion itself, making another hole at the locked door to pass through.

 

Inside the mansion, the guards were more sparse, and were more of the caliber of the merchant guards she had killed the past few days. She noticed the change in the magic pulsing through the ring she wore as she made her way upstairs, but left it be, knowing that Cal would be there for her student soon.

 

The trail of dead men she left behind on her road upstairs soon led to a large double-doored chamber. She opened it her usual way, and as she stepped in, over a dozen figures flinched backwards, while the two guards each of them had behind them drew their weapons and charged her.

 

Kino ignored the Sultan's litany of outrage and threats, and nonchalantly carved her way through the thirty guards charging her, even as the closer merchants fidgeted and escaped from their seats, running towards the Sultan.

 

Not a single one of them made it, as the moment they stood up, a loop of void formed unnoticed around their necks, and as they tried to run, they carved their own flesh against the loop, leaving only a headless body and a decapitated head behind.

 

It was only after she was done with the merchants, the Sultan's voice hoarse from his shouting, that one of the Sultan's guards stepped forward. She was a tall, bulky orc woman, clad in light leathers, but with spiked gauntlets that cover her whole forearm and hands, with similar greaves on her leg. The reported blood mage grappler, then.

 

While the woman looked positively ecstatic at the prospect of fighting her, Kino wasn't. She allowed the orc to strike a few times, nimbly avoiding the hits, before she struck back.

 

Small orbs of void formed all around the orc, then devoured her with great alacrity. She still tried to fight on even with a good part of her body gone, a rather strong blood mage, not quite Cal's caliber but not that far behind either, but Kino just had the orbs of void enlarge and overlap, and moment later, the only thing left of the orc was her cut-off ponytail that had fallen behind her. Every other trace of her existence was devoured by the ravenous void.

 

This time, the Sultan backed into his plush, opulent seat with a startled squeak, his face paling. He spewed a few more half hearted threats as Kino approached, and only went silent when she neatly plucked off his head after a disc of void severed it off his neck.

 

All this time, the Sultan's other bodyguard had not moved a step from his post, the dark-skinned, bearded man wearing chainmail and an elaborate turban just stood with his arms folded and watched the spectacle unfold before him. Kino eyed him questioningly, which finally got a reaction from the man.

 

"The fatso here contracted me to guard him, not to die for him," said the man with a shrug of his shoulders. "Never liked him much, nor what he did for that matter, but back then my kid caught the bone rot, and his was the best paying offer I got."

 

Kino nodded, calmly rolled out a parchment, then struck out names listed there, adding a new one, and struck it out right after, before she turned and left the room, the sultan's other bodyguard the living person left in it.

 

"Guess I'm free to go then, huh?" The man said after she left as he shook his head at what just happened.

 

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