Jacob POV
Jacob, with the grace of a dancer and the sound of a falling feather, stabbed the guard in the throat and stuffed the lifeless body into the satchel given by Malvek. Vess'ri would take care of the bodyguards afterwards.
As he slinked into the academy, so very quietly, he could hear the sound of silence. Under the dim phosphorus mushroom light, he made his way towards the academy's headmistress's quarters.
E'nathyr city needed chaos; kidnapping and handing over the headmistress to the orchid cult would do that. He focused his attention on the task at hand. The headmistress was an old relic, over thousands of years old. She was even more arrogant than the lich. Nonetheless, he had one shot and one shot only.
He planned on changing the incense of her prayers, then waiting until she fell over. The incense was sponsored by the orchid cult.
As he made his way into the private shrine of the headmistress, he pulled out an orchid seed, casually planted it on the closest mushroom, and made a small prayer. The mellow smell of orchids let him know the goddess was listening.
The seed would ensure that his actions went unnoticed even under the gaze of the Mushroom Queen.
He counted fifteen mortal-limit dark elves in the shrine. He would assassinate them one by one. He entered where the supplies were held and replaced just one incense stick, paying attention to every detail. The old relic, despite being arrogant, was an experienced fighter and priestess.
A poison needle was not his choice of weapon, but this one was laced with the strongest neurotoxin in existence and was a gift from Sum'gial. It was ironic that the very same weapon that killed the necromancer would be gifted back to him. Somehow, the needle was more dangerous than before. It made his heartbeat slow down; even his breathing was done once every thirty minutes.
The door to the shrine opened. A weathered and kindly smiling drow grandma walked in. She moved very slowly, with the assistance of a young female drow. This extra drow complicated his plan. Why was Oryndra helping this old crone?
This female drow was unstable; she might screw up his plan.
He knew the look she gave him when he took the Baey'Ra estate: madness, and the look of someone stuck between nothing but bad choices. Oryndra was heading for the supply closet where he had switched the incense.
He decided to activate the backup plan: kill all the witnesses. Moving like a shadow, he pounced on the first bodyguard from his blind spot. Within the domain of the silence ring, no sound was made—but the killing intent he radiated when someone died couldn't be hidden. He was not an assassin, after all.
From his peripheral vision, he saw the old crone looking directly at where he was.
"Another fool, TAKE THE ASSASSIN DOWN!" the headmistress shouted.
He took out the cursed daggers; a needle was not a weapon for melee. An arrow shot at him, ten bodyguards lunged at him. Oryndra was nowhere to be seen.
Jacob twisted his body sideways. The arrow brushed past his cheek, cutting a thin line that didn't bleed. The daggers in his hands hummed, hungry.
The first two guards came at him with hooked blades, one high, one low. Jacob stepped into them instead of back, letting their blades pass by his ribs as he turned. His right dagger slid under a ribcage, his left opened a throat.
No sound. No scream. No clatter of steel.
The ring of silence drank every noise, leaving only the sickening absence of sound as two bodies toppled in slow motion.
And then moved.
Their eyes glazed, then clouded over with a grey sheen. Black veins crawled under their skin like spiderwebs. Before the other guards even registered what had happened, the two fresh corpses straightened up and turned their blades on their former comrades.
Jacob felt the familiar tug of control in the back of his mind. Good. Two down, thirteen to go.
"Cursed weapons!" one of the guards mouthed. Jacob didn't hear it, but he saw the shape of the words on the drow's lips.
Three rushed him at once. One aimed for his legs, one for his heart, one tried to tackle him down.
Jacob dropped his weight, letting the tackler crash into the first undead guard instead. The undead took the hit without a sound, twisting its sword into the attacker's exposed armpit. Jacob rolled across the shrine's slick stone floor, phosphorus mushroom light smearing into pale streaks above him.
He came up from the roll inside the guard's reach, almost chest to chest. The drow's eyes widened.
Jacob smiled without humor and buried both daggers into the soft place just under the sternum.
Third corpse. Third puppet.
Outside the ring's domain, he saw the old headmistress move. Her kindly grandma smile had vanished. Her lips were pulled tight, eyes narrowed, hands already lifting into the familiar shapes of a priestess's blessing.
The light of the mushrooms brightened around her, bending, gathering. The scent of damp earth and rot intensified. The Mushroom Queen was listening.
Jacob took a sharp breath through his nose. Sweet orchid clung to the air around the altar, faint but steady. The seed he planted pulsed once, like a heartbeat.
You're late, he thought at the invisible orchid goddess, pushing one of the fresh undead between himself and a volley of arrows.
Three arrows thudded into the corpse's chest, shoulders, and eye. The body didn't even flinch.
More guards flooded in from the corners of the shrine, blades drawn, some with crossbows already loaded. Fifteen was not an exaggeration. If anything, he had undercounted.
Jacob threw a dagger.
The cursed blade didn't spin; it flew straight, as if dragged by its own hatred. It sank into the throat of a crossbowman trying to reload. The drow staggered, hands going to his neck, then dropped to his knees and went still.
Another puppet stood up.
The shrine devolved into a silent chaos.
Undead guards clashed with living ones. Blades bit into flesh, but there were no screams, no clash of steel, no shouted orders. Only the flicker of mushroom light, the spray of dark blood, and the unnatural quiet, like someone had pressed mute on a massacre.
Jacob moved through it all like a shadow with a purpose. He didn't bother with fancy footwork. He let the undead take hits meant for him, let them jam up the front ranks while he hunted the gaps. Whenever a guard turned his back to him, Jacob's daggers found spine, kidney, heart.
Each death was another soldier on his side.
Four. Five. Seven. Nine.
The headmistress watched it all, her expression shifting from contempt to cold calculation.
She took out her favorite weapon, a whip with thirteen metal mushroom heads, and started to chant at the same time.
Jacob didn't hear the words, but he saw the way her lips moved, precise and sharp, the way her fingers drew holy sigils in the air. Mushroom caps all over the shrine quivered, then split open, releasing thick, hazy spores that started to drift down like slow purple snow.
Ah. That's bad.
He felt the spores wash over his face, cold and damp. His lungs refused to inhale. His body had already decided—he breathed once every thirty minutes now, whether he wanted to or not. The magical artifact of a needle made sure of that.
The living weren't so lucky.
The front line of dark elves coughed, eyes watering. Two stumbled, blades wavering. One shook his head like a drunk trying to sober up. Their movements slowed just enough.
Jacob took advantage.
He slid under a clumsy horizontal slash, hamstringed the attacker, then shoved him face-first into a spore cloud while dodging an attack from the whip. Another guard tried to stab him from behind; one of Jacob's new undead dragged the attacker down in a tackle, snapping his neck with a single twist.
More bodies. More silence. More puppets.
But the headmistress didn't stop. The mushrooms around her altar swelled to twice their size, light blooming into an almost painful glare. The spores near her turned a hard, crystalline white. Her goddess was force-feeding power through her.
Jacob needed her alive. Half-conscious and drooling was fine. Dead was not.
He saw a flicker of movement near the supply closet.
Oryndra and Vess'ri were fighting each other, both chanting and throwing hidden weapons in the cramped space.
Jacob threw the needle at breakneck speed while dodging the thirteen-headed whip. He failed to dodge for the first time; a mushroom head slammed into his left arm, but the needle landed right on the headmistress's thigh.
Her next word slurred. The holy whip in her hand trembled.
Jacob didn't waste the opening.
He stepped onto a bench, then onto the back of a kneeling undead, jumping from shoulder to shoulder like stones in a river of bodies. He crossed half the shrine in a heartbeat, nicked by a stray blade, an arrow grazing his ribs, but never stopping.
A living guard tried to meet him near the altar with twin swords. Jacob didn't bother to parry. One of his undead slammed into the guard from the side, taking both blades through its torso, pinning the living soldier in place.
Jacob vaulted over them and landed in front of the headmistress.
Up close, she looked even older. Deep lines carved into her dark skin, silver hair in tight braids, eyes that had seen more centuries than he had years. Those eyes tried to focus on him and almost did.
"You—" she began.
He caught her before she hit the floor.
The goddess's light around her shattered like glass. The mushrooms dimmed back to their usual ghostly glow. The orchid incense on the altar burned steady and smug in its holder, smoke curling up in a soft pink trail.
All around them, the remaining guards were dropping—some dead, some simply falling into deep, unnatural sleep as orchid smoke and mushroom spores wrestled in their lungs. The undead under Jacob's control calmly finished off the stubborn ones who still tried to stand.
Silence pressed in, thicker than the ring could account for.
Jacob slung the unconscious headmistress over his shoulder like a sack of grain. She weighed less than she looked. Too much magic and too much age hollowed people out.
Jacob whistled out of habit. No sound came. Still, he felt the pull of the satchel Malvek had given him, the enchantments inside hungry for new cargo.
"Time to nap," he told the unconscious headmistress, adjusting her weight on his shoulder. "For all of us."
He looked at Oryndra lying dead, nodded at Vess'ri, and took out five orchid seeds, crushing them in his palm. These seeds devoured every lingering scrap of his magic, leaving behind nothing but the cloying spiritual scent of orchids. Combined with the altered incense still burning on the altar, the crime scene might as well have been signed with the orchid cult's holy symbol.
As the sweet scent of orchids spread through the shrine, any trace of Jacob and Vess'ri vanished. What would remain for any divination or priest to find was orchid smoke, orchid seeds, orchid blessing.
One by one, the bodies—living and dead alike—began to vanish into the satchel's mouth as he passed, the shrine emptying behind him. When he deactivated the ring's domain, sound rushed back in all at once: the distant drip of water, the soft crackle of burning incense, the faint rustle of orchid petals growing where mushrooms once ruled.
E'nathyr was about to wake up to chaos.
For now, Jacob activated a teleportation scroll, leaving the academy halls with a sleeping relic on his shoulder and disappearing like dust on the wind.