The first mission
It was a day like any other; the sun shone in the sky and the sky was still blue, while my two friends and I were still training, as we did every other day. We all wanted or had to be assassins, after all. The only difference today was that we were called out by the commander.
As we entered the door to his room, we could see our angry commander, Jackson. He seemed to be angry about something again. I gave my greetings and asked why we were called here. The now seemingly calm commander answered that he had assigned the first ever task to our team of three, that we ever received. I was assigned as the commander of this team, with Ronin, who seemed to be more of a type of knight than anything, and was one of my two friends, and Saya, who was even more of a beginner than me in the business of assassins and was my second friend here, actually she was a woman, what was really rare for an assasin, as my subordinates.
We were assigned to bring back some important documents. For this mission, we were given some equipment: 10 throwable knives; a short sword and a small shield, as well as dark clothing were for me. With this, I was ready to go on my first mission. My friends also seemed to be ready, and so we started our journey.
The first part of our journey took us through a large and dark forest, in which we had to camp for about a week until we reached our goal.
In the first two days, nothing happened and we had gotten really far already. We had enough supplies and hadn't encountered any monsters. However, this changed on the third night, as we heard a howl of wolves in the middle of the night and had to defend ourselves against some wolves coming from the woods nearby.
The next few were safe again, and we reached our goal in time. In front of us was a big gate, and behind it, only one big mansion. At the gate were two guards, who were equipped with really good armor. We had to get through them somehow, so I came up with a plan to bring the enemies away from the gate while the other two went in quickly and quietly.
For this plan to work, I went to the two guards and spoke with them. I tried to get them to let at least one of them follow me and it worked; this guy followed me quite easily, though the reason seemed to be that he was attracted to me and didn't think too much about what I said. I then said we could go into some bush and he followed me. While I did this, one of my friends, Saya, could sneak in, while the other one just climbed the walls around the gate. They weren't very high, so he made it quite easily, but at the moment he seemed to have touched the top of the wall, I could see that he felt some pain; it seems like there were some metal spikes on top of the wall. Luckily, my friend Ronin could control himself and didn't scream, and he was able to get in.
As I was in the bush with this guard, I took out one of my knives and tried to kill the guard right next to me without him noticing. I was lucky and hit a spot where there wasn't any armor, but I also didn't hit any vital spot and he only bled a little. I knew I had failed and, as this happened, I ran away as fast as possible, knowing he couldn't even touch me because of the heavy armor he was wearing. I ran a little nearer to the walls of the mansion and tried to climb a tree in an attempt to avoid the same problem as my friend had when he climbed the wall.
I climbed the tree slowly and reached where I wanted to go quite quickly. However, I lost my balance and fell back down. I hurt my back quite badly, but I had to ignore the pain in order to not attract the attention of a guard nearby.
This time, I went a little closer to the wall and climbed another tree that was nearer to it, and its branches hung over the wall. I climbed and climbed until I reached the perfect position to go over the branch and reach the inside of the wall. This time, I made it and balanced over to the other side, still with pain in my back.
As I finally returned to the ground, I found myself inside the mansion and saw my friends waiting to cross a river in the middle of the area with the help of a bridge. Being the good friend that I am, I jumped into the river to attract the attention of the guards around us, and surely not because I had failed to jump over the river to cross it...
I was helpless in the river as I couldn't swim, and I could barely grab the bridge that was now over me, to save myself from being seen. I could hear my friends crossing the bridge quietly enough not to be seen by the guards, who all seemed to be higher than us in grade; as all of us were in the fourth grade, while these guards all seemed to be at least in the sixth grade, which shows how strong they are.
I had slowly lost enough strength to hold myself up on the bridge, and eventually fell into the river once more. This time, I was quiet enough that I didn't attract the attention of any guards. Unfortunately, I was unable to save myself and was pulled further along the river until I could hear an incredibly loud noise - an enormous waterfall. The water was getting faster and faster until, just in the nick of time, I spotted a large root in front of me. I jumped, and luckily the root was strong enough to hold my 65kg weight.
I struggled quite a bit as I finally managed to climb back up and save myself. I was exhausted after this, but still had enough energy to keep running and finish our mission. When I looked at my friends again, I saw that they were on the roof of the second floor at a window. This mansion was built in a Japanese-style, so it was easy to climb onto the roofs and look in the windows from up there.
After seeing this, I also tried to get up there and went to them to support them while sneaking around to not attract attention. I took a few steps and just as I finally felt a little bit safer to move around, the floor beneath me cracked a little bit and my foot got stuck.
At this moment, I could see a crazy man in green, glowing armor, seemingly made of wood, jump out of the window where my friends were. He quickly grabbed Saya and jumped down towards the ground. Both of them hit the ground quite harshly, and I could hear and see my friend screaming in pain. Both of them seemed to have sustained quite a bit of damage from this move and I couldn't understand why this old man would do something like this.
I finally made it out of the hole with my foot and instantly thought about the wellbeing of my friend. I threw one of my throwable knives at the old man, but I missed and hit a random tree a little further ahead.
As I saw something really weird, and I don't mean that this crazy man was wearing some glowing armor made of wood, but that as he put his hand in the air, there were some black things flying around it and you could slowly see a sword forming in his hands. My friend also saw this danger incoming and tried to flee. Luckily, he made it and came back up to us.
The old man suddenly put out some kind of potion and tried to drink it; it seemed like he had hit the ground hard, as I could recognize that this was a healing potion, and I knew how expensive these things were.
I looked around me and saw that both of my friends had gone into hiding around the next corner of the mansion. As I was about to do the same, I heard something behind me. I had forgotten that I was still standing in front of the window and inside were two guards, who grabbed me and fettered me before I could do anything.
They put me in some kind of wardrobe and closed the door. I tried to free myself, but I wasn't strong enough. It felt like hours had passed, and then I could finally see something again. There were now two possible things: either I would be questioned or my friends would free me. Just in case I would be questioned, I made myself ready and tried to think of ways to escape while being questioned, or, if I couldn't, to make myself ready to never answer their questions. Firstly, I didn't know much about the organisation that sent us, and secondly, because I didn't want to betray my friends or the organisation.
I could hear the steps getting closer and closer, and my hope grew, but to my disappointment, it wasn't my friends. Instead, it was some kind of woman, looking exactly as crazy as the man from before. She seemed to not care the least about how she looked, wearing clothes that were probably months old. Behind her were two guards, making it impossible for me to escape, so I didn't even try.
They brought me to a strange room, inside of which I could see an altar made of stone with metal chains around it. It seemed like they wanted to torture me to get some information, but I would never give in. They brought me onto the altar and tightly bound my hands and feet with the chains. They pulled them tight, making me very uncomfortable.
They started to question me about the organization behind me and how many people we had come. Strangely, I always said the truth; it seemed like they had put some kind of magic on me. I gave them answers to questions I would never have wanted to answer, but it strangely felt good to answer them and my mind was worry-free.
This changed suddenly as the woman left and I finally realized what had happened. It seemed like I had been under some kind of spell to have answered all these questions. I suddenly heard footsteps again and I panicked, thinking that they wanted to ask me questions again. But this seemed like it would have been the better option, as I could see a glowing mark of metal. It seemed like they wanted to mark me with the help of burns, and I couldn't do anything to stop it.
It was really, really hot, but I somehow managed to survive. A sign of a snake was now near my belly. When they were done, they brought me back to the wardrobe and put me back inside. It felt like hours had passed and I could still feel the pain near my belly when I suddenly heard footsteps again.
This time it was my friends who freed me from the wardrobe. As I could finally see my friends again, what felt like days had passed since I last saw them, which made me happy. Though I could see something different about them. My friend Saya seemed to have found some kind of treasure, as all her pockets were filled with gold. I also wanted some of it, but I held myself back, as this was a precious friend of mine.
Behind these two friends of mine, I could see two corpses of human beings. I recognized them as the guards that had been by the side of the women earlier. I silently thanked my friends for this and we moved on.
We moved to the room where I had been tortured just a little while ago, and we could see the woman again. Saya and I both sneaked up on her and tried to kill her in one strike, but as we weren't a very experienced team, we hindered each other and both failed to hit her. We were lucky though, as Ronin was ready and attacked at the same time as well. He hit her with a really good hit and we could see how she bled. But this wasn't enough to bring her down and she did the same thing as the old man from earlier had done: she held her hand up and some black things flew around her hand as a sword formed itself in her hand. This time it was much faster and could instantly attack us. She hit Ronin first, piercing his shoulder armour which was normally pretty strong, which was why I would call him more of a knight than an assassin.
It was absolutely terrifying, as she was strong enough to make a hole in Ronin's armor and even make him bleed. All of us then attacked her again, and this time, everyone of us hit her, causing her to bleed in even more places than before.
As she attacked again, it was Ronin again, and with a terrifying precision she hit exactly at the spot where there was a crack in the armor, damaging Ronin even more. This time, we were all really angry and decided to attack her with everything we had and finish her off.
Something weird happened. A light appeared and we could see the crazy old man from before lying in front of us instead of the woman we thought we had attacked. The man died as he should have, and we obtained his blade. Ronin got it, as we all thought it made the most sense, and he already had to pay for his destroyed armor.
After having done all this, we decided to go back and bring the documents which Saya seemed to have obtained by accident as she searched for useful things in the mansion.
After another ten days, we returned and reported everything to the commander, giving him the important documents and receiving a little reward of 100 Gold coins, which normally is quite much.