Path of Dragons - A LitRPG Apocalypse (BOOK TWO ON KINDLE SEPT. 2)

Gunnar wanted to shoot someone.

Or maybe more than one. Over the past few weeks, he’d added multiple names to his list. Not only were there the ones he’d expect – like Lefevre and Kaffey – who’d more than earned their placement, but there were plenty of others as well. At times, it felt like everyone who lived on the surface was a terrible person who deserved a bullet to the chest.

They didn’t.

Gunnar knew that. Most of his anger came from frustration. But awareness of its origin did nothing to negate his simmering hate. To mitigate its effect, he’d retreated to the safehouse, where he sat on the concrete bedframe. He leaned against the wall, his entire body tense as he forced himself to take one deep breath after another.

It took a while to get his frustration under control, but as always, he managed it. Once he reached that point, he turned to an analytical analysis of the past few weeks. And no matter how he looked at it, it wasn’t good.

Everywhere he’d turned, he had been confronted by dead ends. First, it was with Lefevre, who turned out to be nothing more than a greedy arms dealer who was entirely focused on making as much money as possible while building bigger and bigger weapons. Far from laudable, but he clearly hadn’t hired Gunnar to assassinate Elijah Hart.

His wife had been a brief suspect. From what he understood, she had personal reasons to hate Hart. She’d made no secret about that enmity, and for a while, she would tell anyone who would listen how much of a monster he was. Those days had long since passed, but the effect lingered. Rumors persisted. And most of the gossip said that the Druid had once turned her down.

For someone like Victoria Lefevre – or Brockerton, as she’d been known back then – that had to be quite jarring.

But she wasn’t the culprit. For one, she didn’t have that much money. Her husband did, but she didn’t have access to those funds. Instead, he kept her on an allowance. Generous, sure. But not enough to hire an assassin like Gunnar. And for another, from his surveillance, Gunnar had found that her feelings toward Hart were more of the love-hate category than outright revulsion. If the Druid came back to Seattle and asked her to run away with him, she’d have gone in an instant.

Fortunately, Hart didn’t seem the type to fall for that. She was a jackal, and not a subtle one, either. She’d rip him apart in a matter of weeks.

Next was Kaffey, who had both the means and the will to have hired an assassin. But aside from what he’d heard after infiltrating the military compound, Gunnar believed that if Kaffey truly wanted Hart dead, he’d have sent one of his own men, rather than hire it out.

Some of those people were fairly capable, too. They wouldn’t be successful, but they were strong enough that Kaffey would think they could get the job done. No – he wouldn’t have hired an outside contractor. Of that, Gunnar was certain.

He’d also surreptitiously investigated the city’s government, and he’d found nothing to suggest that Isaiah Roberts was the source of the contract against Hart.

To put it simply, Gunnar was out of leads.

Sure, there were a few other people in Seattle with the means to hire him, but that wasn’t evidence that they’d done it. Still, Gunnar would move to those second-tier suspects if it came down to it. For now, he had one more long-shot idea to chase down. To that end, he’d bought a few dozen small surveillance cameras from a black market dealer he’d used before. They were incredibly expensive, extremely limited in the range and life-span, and very sensitive to ambient ethera.

But they got the job done.

Gunnar had connected them to his laptop, which he retrieved from the safehouse’s stash. He opened it and began his surveillance of the city’s various criminal organizations. From the Ballard Syndicate, which were headquartered near the old docks, to the Union Street Saints, who’d taken control of an entire Undercity block, he watched them all.

There were half a dozen other second-tier gangs, with innumerable smaller groups scattered through the city. But most of those minor bands were subordinate to more powerful organizations, so Gunnar’s cameras gave him a good picture of everything.

Idly, he wondered why those criminal groups would have hired him, and he came up blank. Killing Hart wouldn’t benefit them at all. In fact, none of them would really benefit from that. The reality of it was that the Druid was necessary for the world’s response to the threat of excisement. Killing him wouldn’t serve anyone’s interests.

That left two other inciting factors.

The first was personal enmity. Perhaps Hart had killed a loved one. If that was the reason, then the options for that were nearly endless, largely because the Druid had killed quite a lot of people.

Then there was business.

If Gunnar assumed the goal wasn’t necessarily to kill Hart, then it made a little more sense. If he’d been meant to fail – which seemed likely, now that he’d gone down that road – there was a chance that whoever had hired him wanted to point the weapon that was Elijah Hart at Seattle.

Or specifically, at Isaiah Roberts, with whom the Druid had a turbulent history.

So, the real question was who had it out for Seattle’s leader? That list was much, much longer. Not only did he have political rivals, but there were also plenty of people who’d been hurt by his policies.

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People like those in the Undercity, who’d suffered the most under his rule.

And of those people, the criminal organizations were the only ones who could afford to hire someone like Gunnar. His skills didn’t come cheap, after all. Even if he’d been meant to fail, he needed to be a credible threat just to get a good shot at Hart and prompt the proper response.

The more Gunnar thought of it, the more he felt certain he’d never been meant to succeed. His failure was supposed to be the spark that ignited Hart’s fury. They were playing with fire, though. The Druid wasn’t just unpredictable. He also had the power to destroy the entire city.

Gunnar had seen that during the encounter with the war elves.

Aiming that kind of a weapon at Roberts was like trying to kill a single man with a nuclear weapon. It wasn’t just overkill. It was irresponsible and self-detrimental.

He continued to consider the problem as he maintained his surveillance. Locked in the safehouse, he could relax – slightly – but he refused to let himself completely unwind. Doing so would cost him his edge, which he could not allow.

So, he sharpened his focus and watched. Like that, two days passed until he caught sight of something surprising. The camera in question was focused on the headquarters of the Night Rooks, a small-time gang that had so far managed to remain mostly independent. So long as they were paid, they worked for whoever hired them. And in that endeavor, they’d become moderately successful – enough to support more than fifty members.

He didn’t care about them. They were both too small and too poor to have hired him. They did do a brisk business selling information, though. Mostly, they used that to connect people and mediate deals within the Undercity, but Gunnar had seen them work with a few recognizable assassins.

And through a stroke of luck – or perhaps it was sheer persistence – he saw a face he recognized. It was slightly different from the one she’d worn when she had hired him, but Gunnar saw through those tiny differences straightaway. She moved the same. She looked mostly the same. And if she was dealing with the Night Rooks, she moved in the same circles.

No – he was sure of it. He’d finally found the woman who had hired him.

Certainly, she was just an intermediary. He knew that. But it was the first solid lead he’d found since arriving in Seattle, and he couldn’t help but feel a surge of adrenaline at the prospect of making verifiable progress.

Still, he didn’t immediately leap to his feet to confront her. Instead, he remained in his safehouse, following her through the cameras as she left the Night Rooks’ headquarters and strolled through the Undercity. She walked with that same easy confidence she’d displayed when she’d met with him, which was the only reason he managed to track her after she again changed her face.

It was obviously a skill. One second, she looked like the non-descript woman who’d hired him, and the next, everything was different. She looked a little taller. A lot slimmer. Her skin tone changed. And her facial features morphed into something far blunter.

Was it an illusion?

It had to be. There were people who could morph flesh, but the process took time and skill. In this instance, the transformation occurred instantly.

But then again, Elijah Hart routinely transformed into various beasts. So maybe the notion that it wasn’t an illusion wasn’t nearly as far-fetched as it seemed.

Regardless, the woman did nothing to hide her mannerisms, so Gunnar had no issues following her progress through the Undercity. Until she stepped into a non-descript building from which she didn’t emerge even after an hour.

Gunnar continued to watch for an entire day until she left. She wore an entirely different face – this time, a young woman, no more than twenty years old and of Mediterranean descent.

He watched. He waited. And over the next week, he saw her meet with dozens of other people. Most were members of various criminal organizations – mostly women, but with a scattering of men as well – though she did rendezvous with some poorly-disguised topsiders as well.

But it wasn’t until he saw her meeting with another assassin that he decided to make his move.

By that point, he knew her routine like the back of his hand, so it was easy to set himself up outside an alley she routinely used as a shortcut. Most wouldn’t have dared, owing to the chance of being waylaid by Enforcers, but she didn’t seem worried about such things.

When she exited that alley, he followed her through the crowd.

And without the distortion of the cameras – they weren’t perfect, after all – he got an eyeful of her larcenous activities. In the space of a few blocks, she stole nine coin pouches. Mostly from the wealthier among the Undercity residents, but she managed to target a few slumming topsiders as well.

It didn’t make sense, though.

Why would she risk petty thievery when she clearly had more important – and profitable – activities afoot? It almost seemed compulsive, like she didn’t even notice she was doing it. Certainly, her victims didn’t.

Vaguely, Gunnar sensed that she was using a couple of skills, but he couldn’t determine their nature. In any case, he wasn’t concerned with her pickpocketing ways. He just needed an opportunity to corner her.

After almost an hour, he got his chance.

She slipped into another alley, this one in a mostly deserted part of the Undercity. Only a few months before, it had been a bustling neighborhood, but that was before a plague had swept through. The city’s people had contained it, but not before it had destroyed that population. The few survivors had moved on, leaving it almost entirely empty, save for a few homeless people who’d taken to squatting.

Nobody stopped them because no one else wanted to live in the area. Soon enough, the diseased stigma would fade, and people would move back in. But not yet, and Gunnar used that to his advantage, taking a different route to get in front of the woman.

It worked just as he’d intended, and when she stepped past him, he slipped in behind her, put his pistol to her head, and said, “I think we need to have a little talk.”

“Mr. Lindstrom. Nice to see you. I do hope you’ve stopped by to inform me of your wild success. Otherwise, I might ask for a refund,” she said, using the same affected voice she’d employed when she had hired him. It was urbane, with a British accent. It was also fake.

“No need for airs. I know that’s not who you are.”

“Do you?” she asked, entirely nonchalant.

“I do. Now move. Two doors down on your left. Make a move, and you’ll lose a head.”

“So aggressive.”

“I think it’s warranted.”

She didn’t respond to that. Instead, she followed his instructions without deviation, even sitting on the floor so he could bind her wrists and ankles.

Squatting in front of the girl, he said, “Those are enchanted ropes. Got them special, just for you. No abilities. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions. If I like the answers, you’ll be safe enough. If I don’t, I start carving pieces out of you. Do you understand?”

The woman stared him directly in the eye, her confidence unwavering. “You don’t need to do that. I’ll answer your questions. But know that if you harm me at all, the Daughters of Deianira will have their retribution.”

“I’m good with that. Now, who are you? Who hired me? And why?”