Chapter 76 October 3, 2022
Chapter 76 – Calsapa Assassin (2)
Ludger was waiting for that situation from the beginning.
He had already figured out that the assassins were hiding in the crowd and was waiting for them to get tired.
Ludger had no intention of keeping up with their rhythm.
‘If I loosen up their weakening siege and attempt to escape quickly, they will have no choice but to come forward.’
Given the situation, the assassins performed their duties in a frighteningly calm manner.
They were moving stealthily in the dark.
In other words, if he destroyed the situation that they had formed, they had no choice but to show up.
As soon as the situation was turned upside down, there were only two options given to the assassins:
They either had to step back to plan their next move…
Or they had to rush forward to complete the task that they had accepted.
They chose the latter.
Ludger did not forget to stare at the crowd that was chasing him as he climbed to the rooftop.
Indeed, as he expected, the assassins quickly climbed to the rooftop, showing their true selves as they were about to miss Ludger and Violeta.
Just like his first guess, there were three of them.
Among them, he had been waiting for the first person who rushed up and then stabbed the sword stick through them just in time.
“There are two of them remaining.”
“How on earth did you…?”
Violeta stared at Ludger in disbelief.
“How did you know they would move like that?”
“Assassins from the south are usually like that.”
The reason Ludger was convinced was because his opponents were assassins from the southern continent.
—They were Calsapa Assassins led by the Fatima Dynasty, to be exact.
They were the most famous and notorious assassin group on the continent.
Usually, assassins stepped down when things went awry, but it was not the case for the southern assassins.
In a good way, they had strong determination, and in a bad way, they were single-minded assassins.
As a result, there were almost no situations where they retreated.
It was inevitable, as they had been taught and raised in such an environment.
If they were given a mission, they would accomplish it no matter what happened.
Combined with the doctrines of the religion that they believed and followed, the brainwashing-like teaching made Calsapa’s Assassins very famous.
Thanks to the exhaustive rules, they were able to grow and become strong.
‘But it’s also because of their rules that they should never back down from their mission that their feet got chained instead.’
However, it was not possible to criticize that they were stupid with those kinds of rules.
Those assassins had just been matched with a bad opponent.
Who would have known that he was a wizard who knew how to fight in close combat and that he would even arm himself with a strange device?
“I just hit their weak point.”
“…You know a lot about the southern assassins, I see.”
“I’ve fought with them a few times.”
“Pardon?” Violeta asked back in disbelief.
Ludger suddenly recalled his past.
When he was still a child, he was once targeted by the Calsapa Assassins.
At that time, he had really thought that he would die.
‘If it weren’t for my teacher, I’d be dead.’
Because of his experience at that time, he was able to handle them easily.
Compared to the ones who chased him in the past, the ones who were after him at the moment were just green rookies.
Seeing that they came all the way to Leathevelk, they must have been kicked out for failing their mission where they were originally active, or they had come to develop their skills.
Whatever it might be, from an objective level, they were also professionals.
But they still fell way short when compared to the real southern assassins.
“Are they coming again?”
Ludger, who was standing on the railing, turned his gaze down the alleyway.
The two assassins moved busily in the darkness where light did not permeate well into it.
Eventually, they escaped from his vision and hid in the dark.
“Is it because they’re Calsapa Assassins? Their colleague is dead, but they’re not panicking.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. What should I do, huh?”
While Ludger was agonizing for a while, the assassins who had hidden themselves in the dark made a move.
They popped out of the gap between buildings and quickly threw a dagger.
“Heung!”
But Violeta didn’t stay still either.
She spread the black parasol that she held in her hand.
As evidence of the fact that it was not a parasol of ordinary material, the sharp daggers did not penetrate her parasol.
But in the end, that only worked once.
Creaaaak.
“Ah, damn.”
“So the parasol doesn’t have any tolerance for poison.”
The poison at the tip of the dagger had corroded her parasol.
Meanwhile, the assassins hid themselves again.
“H-how did this…?”
“It is a special poison used by the Calsapa Assassins. It penetrates one’s body just by touching their skin, and it’s very dangerous since it also corrodes even decent armor.”
“They’re throwing the daggers covered in that poison, you said?”
“It’s a special dagger. To be exact, they melted Kelvantium, a rare metal from the south, and coated the poison on the daggers. Kelvantium is the main export of the Fatima dynasty and is a special material called God’s Metal. The metal is very resistant to corrosion.”
“Hah. Good for you.”
When the information came out of Ludger’s mouth fluently, Violeta decided not to ask him anymore.
She had accepted that there was nothing strange that he could say.
“So how should we respond to it?”
“We should hang in here until they run out of daggers to throw.”
“Can we do that?”
“Your parasol has melted, so it’s practically impossible. It’s also impossible to cast any spells right now.”
In other words, if they couldn’t avoid the next attack, they would die.
“Then we must move first.”
“Where?”
“To the ground again.”
If they stayed still on the open rooftop, it was a perfect location for them to be prey for the assassins.
Ludger reached out his hand to Violeta in silence.
She held his hand, albeit hesitantly.
“Hold it tight.”
“…”
Ludger jumped down into the alley while holding Violeta with one arm.
“Oh?”
Smash!
One of the members of the Crimson Society who had scattered to chase Ludger and Violeta had his head smashed in from Ludger’s shoes.
Ludger, who landed safely in the alley using a person as a buffer, ran thoughtlessly without estimating the opponents’ position.
‘Are they trying to hide?’
The assassins did not understand Ludger’s behavior at all.
He had just been evacuating to the rooftop, why did he suddenly come down again?
‘His motives are unpredictable. We need to be careful.’
One of their colleagues had already been killed. They couldn’t afford to lose anyone else.
The two assassins exchanged glances in the dark. Such glances alone conveyed meaning.
One immediately chased from behind, and the other one ran from above and blocked the path.
‘I’ll catch them before they’ve completely escaped.’
With that thought, the assassin, who stealthily chased Ludger and Violeta, stopped after discovering a black shadow in front of him.
He had discovered his target.
But something was wrong…
‘It’s only the woman alone? How about the man?’
No way, did he leave her behind? Obviously, the woman seemed like a burden to him just by looking at her combat skill earlier.
“W-wait! How can you leave me alone like this?”
Maybe she was actually abandoned, as she was standing there and stomping her feet.
The assassin had to make his judgment.
‘There’s no way he really left her alone and ran. This may be a trap. Is he aiming at us instead?’
Running to the rooftop a while ago was also a trap to catch them off guard.
The assassins weren’t stupid, they were also learning.
He was thinking that maybe the man named James Moriarty was waiting somewhere nearby.
The assassin slowly approached Violeta while holding a poisoned dagger in his hand.
His eyes turned to Violeta, who was left alone, but his ears were straining to catch any sound around him.
Sraak.
At that moment a small sound was heard from his right ear…
‘There!’
The assassin decided that it was where Ludger was hiding and threw his dagger without hesitation.
But there was nothing in his sight.
‘What?! I’m sure there was a sound there.’
He had been highly trained to cope with such a situation. There was no way he could have misheard it.
“It’s a shame, huh.”
But it was from behind him that he heard a voice.
There was no sound or sign, it was as if he had suddenly showed up from the air.
Ludger was standing behind him.
How and when was he standing there?
Rather than having such questions, the assassin unconsciously moved his body based on the training he had received so far.
He held the dagger and swung it to his back…
Staab!
Before the assassin responded, it was faster for the sword stick that Ludger held to penetrate him from behind.
“Cough! Ho-how…”
The sound came from the right, but he appeared from the other side?
The assassin couldn’t see him and there was no sound as well?
“It’s that kind of magic, you know.”
Ludger said so while pulling out the sword stick that he had impaled through the man.
It was a situation where there was still a vestige of the diffusion scent.
However, Ludger had utilized the diffusion for his own needs instead.
Sound Magic…
As soon as the fine sound was cast through the coordinate setting magic, the sound spread through the diffusion.
In other words, it became difficult to distinguish the direction of the sound.
Thanks to the fact that the assassin was extremely trained, he might have figured out the direction of the sound roughly, but even that was trickery.
It was a surprise attack that was impossible to avoid.
“Did you kill him?”
“Yes.”
Violeta looked back.
How confused she was when she was told to act like she was being abandoned out of the blue. She did what she was told to do, but she didn’t expect him to kill an assassin using that method.
Of course, he didn’t kill him in a simple method.
—Because the assassin knew that it was a trap.
However, it was highly likely that he didn’t know that Ludger would set a trap in the middle of another trap.
‘Well, I can’t believe he’s using the magic of dropping sounds from a different direction. I’m sure I would also be flustered from his point of view.’
However, there was absolutely no need to be considerate of the opponent in a fight with the risk of each other’s life.
It would be really unfair for the one who died, but what could they do?
If they didn’t know, they needed to die.
‘There’s only one left now.’
Just in time, a cool wind blew between the alleys.
‘The diffusion scent already washed away.’
Even if it was a diffusion scent, it didn’t last forever.
In the end, the scent worked only when someone stayed in the same atmosphere, and the scent had lasted for a long time because it was in an alley, and even the scent would disappear when the wind blew like it was.
Time had turned the tides to Ludger’s side.
At that moment, a black shadow fell over Ludger’s head.
“Ah! Above!”
Violeta reacted to it, but it was too late.
The assassin threw something at Ludger.
“Hmm.”
Ludger lifted the sword stick as if he knew it would happen, but what the assassin threw was not a poisoned dagger.
It was a chain hook.
The hook caught the middle blade of the sword stick and the assassin pulled it with strong force.
Tap!
The sword stick escaped helplessly from Ludger’s hand.
The assassin, who dropped down to the ground, threw the blade that was caught in a hook on the ground and rushed toward Ludger.
A sharp dagger was pulled from his waist.
“It’s dangerous!”
Violeta screamed.
The assassin was confident of his win.
There was no time for him to cast any magic. The assassin had also taken away the cane blade that had been used for self-defense.
All that was left on him was his defenseless body.
Two of his colleagues died, but he still needed to complete his duties.
The assassin saw it as he thought so.
Ludger’s eyes were still peaceful, even on the brink of his death.
‘What? Why the hell did he make that face…?’
Was he too taken aback that he was not able to figure out what was going on? The assassin didn’t think that the man was that slow to respond, though.
But he couldn’t carry on with his thoughts any longer.
The moment he rushed in, both of Ludger’s hands moved faster like lightning.
Whoosh!
“Oh?”
Ludger was faster than the assassin, who was already wielding a dagger.
The assassin, who was exactly cut on the neck, collapsed in his spot as he loosened the strength in his body.
“He let his guard down at a crucial moment.”
Ludger lightly wiped the blood off the karambit dagger in the form of a crescent moon in his hand.
The assassin in front of him had revealed a gap because he was confident he could kill Ludger at the end.
If you were going to kill someone, you should never let your guard down and do your best with a resolute mind.
“That moment of complacency killed you.”
Ludger picked up his sword stick that had fallen onto the ground.
After checking whether the blade was damaged, Ludger thought that it was still fine and immediately put it in its sheath.
Whiirrrr tak.
Ludger lightly opened his collar as he grabbed the cane.
“…Did you just kill assassins from the south in close combat?”
“Why are you like that? Are you curious about something again?”
“No. Even if I’m curious now, I’m not going to ask you.”
It was hard to count how many times Violeta was surprised that day.
She was always a woman who played the others according to her will, but as expected, she was still lacking a lot in front of a real opponent.
There was a shout heard from afar from the Crimson Society.
“Here! There was a voice coming from here!”
“Hurry and kill them! If they run away, it’s the end for us!”
Violeta stared at Ludger.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Whatever I want to do.”
Ludger shrugged his shoulders.
“The diffusion scent is all gone.”
“Ah, is that so?”
“Yes. So I will leave the rest to you.”
“I can’t help it.”
Within the black cotton yarn, Violeta smiled seductively.
The fact that she could use the magic that was banned for a while again meant that she had the opportunity to play her part.
She lifted a parasol with only its frame left.
It was her weapon of self-defense, but at the same time, it was also a wand to help her concentrate on her mana.
“I’ll take care of the rest.”
There were sounds of footsteps gradually coming closer.
A busy group of Crimson Society members emerged from over the alley.
“There! There are those bastar—!”
And what greeted them was…
A blade of the wind cut sharply through the darkness.
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