The Young Lady is a Reborn Assassin

“I thought this was supposed to be the easy part!”

A group of men were assembled by the shed at the very crack of dawn. The darkness banished by the rising sun revealed a grisly scene. Two dead men. One shot through the chest after trying to take cover behind a thin tree, and the second beaten into an unrecognizable mess by his own bludgeon.

Darin already knew who it was though. Koch had screamed in his face the night before and boldly declared that he was going to be the one to solve their problem. Darin pushed back – saying that it was too late to stop the police from arriving if Maria had already contacted them.

He didn’t listen. He found a like-minded companion in Jonas and concocted a plan to try and kill her in retaliation. Darin was worried about the moral maelstrom caused by killing a young girl, but his concern was being placed with the wrong party from the start. Koch and Jonas were dead.

He knelt down next to Koch’s body and took his gun, inspecting it. The magazine well was empty and there was no sign of it being dropped in the fight. It was never even loaded in the first place.

“You idiot,” he growled, “You didn’t even bring a loaded gun?”

“Jonas had one. He used some of his rounds, I think,” Otis explained.

“Bloody load of good that did them! He got a shot on their back and still bit it?”

Otis shrugged, “Ripped right through that tree. Shrapnel hit him in the chest. No coming back from that.”

Darin punched the ground lightly with his knuckles, kicking up grass and dirt. This was bad. Real bad. He was on the fence about how serious Maria was when dispensing her threats – but the proof was in the pudding. She must have been the one who took out Koch and Jonas. She wasn’t bluffing. How much of what she said the day before was a lie?

It was bleak. She could have found a way to sneak a message out of the campus. The walls were extensive but not insurmountable. Finding a ladder and dodging the metal spikes, or even sneaking through one of the doors, was not an impossible task if she was willing to kill to get her way.

“Either Welt didn’t know about any of this or he’s trying to screw us,” Darin murmured.

“You think he knew about a murderous teenager at this school?”

“He seems to know everything bloody else!” Darin said witheringly, “It’s just like him to hide the most vital bit. Doesn’t want to give anything away when the cards are down.”

“What should we do with these two?”

“Get something to cover his face. I don’t want ‘em seeing him like this. We’ll...”

Darin paused, and the group of men froze along with him, waiting with bated breath to see what his final order would be on the matter. There was a sense of inevitability to the words he was about to speak. It made him feel sick to his stomach, guilt bundling up into a tight ball.

“...We’ll pack it up and go. I’m not risking having the police come by. They might have heard the gunshots.”

Otis asked the obvious question; “But we’ve lost three blokes. Don’t you want to get some payback?”

Darin stood and faced him down with a sober look, “Don’t make the mistake of getting pulled into a war with someone when you’ve got more to lose. How do you reckon we do that before the police show? We’d be playing ourselves by trying it. It won’t be three of us dead - it’ll be all of us in the bloody clink.”

Darin was stating the plainly obvious to the older men in their group. They grew up in rough neighbourhoods where a thirst for violence and revenge in turn consumed many lives before they hit their prime. Maria had gotten them exactly where she wanted them, there was no doubt about that.

“Koch wanted to make a difference. He was willing to put it all on the line, but are you?”

There was a collection of faces that had no interest in joining Koch in the grave. At the least, they wanted to see the future Walser they were fighting for. Koch’s dogmatic approach to making it happen was unique. None of them had been radicalized to the same extent that he was. It was a tragic end to a life that gave him nowhere to go.

No one objected after that. They picked up the bodies and silently hauled them back to the old schoolhouse so they could arrange their escape from the campus. The job was too hot, and they weren’t sticking around to get burned any more. Darin hated it – but his first priority was making sure that everyone else got out of there in one piece.

Welt wouldn’t be happy, but he couldn’t get everything he wanted all the time. There was a friction to the world that he was never willing to accept. The thought of other people having their own wants and priorities enraged him. He saw them as pawns to move on the board, or feckless lackeys who submitted to his whims without question.

Maria was right about that. Darin and the others knew what type of man Welt was, but they believed in his vision regardless. Making strange bedfellows was how change came about. He was a nobleman and politician, their alliance was uneasy from the start, but Welt needed dedicated men and women who were ready to do the hard work.

Welt declared that this leg of the plan was load-bearing and that the outcome wouldn’t be certain without it. That was his ego talking. He thought that nobles like him were principled enough to stand up and fight back when things were going to hell. The reality was very different. They were craven.

They would go in whatever direction the wind was blowing, loyalties be damned.

---

For all of their efforts to beat a hasty retreat without anyone spotting them, it was plainly obvious to everyone with a working pair of eyes that the men holding us hostage had flaked at the slightest possibility of the police arriving and placing the place under siege.

The blockade was lifted. Darin’s men didn’t think twice about the fact that they weren’t met with a police ambush the moment they left the campus. They scattered into the woods and started the long journey to the nearest town so they could fly the coop. The kitchen got too hot for their liking, so off they went!

This wasn’t going to be the last of them. Welt was going to his fair share of their blood, sweat and tears. I was not going to show them any mercy when we came face-to-face. It was kill or be killed, and nobody was waiting to hear a sob story with a gun pointed at their head.

With our newfound freedom came the opportunity to get the hell out of there and head back into the city. It was obvious that all of the trouble was going to start around the theatre and royal palace. It also posed a new problem that I didn’t have a good answer for.

I didn’t know where to start.

What was obvious was that Welt wanted to be in close proximity to the Van Walser’s estate and the parliament. It was where the levers of power for the nation rested, but how did they weigh up against his desire to avoid being captured by Veronica and WISA?

Walser was a big place. He had the money and connections to hide out anywhere he pleased, and this wasn’t an age of being tracked by every gadget and device in the house, and by CCTV cameras on every street corner. A search would have to be performed manually – with boots on the ground and wanted posters on the walls.

Gertrude would know some rumours, but not where the big man was hiding. Veronica probably had her hands full juggling all of the chaos that he was trying to unleash, and I couldn’t walk up and ask her for information regardless. She wanted to keep me out of the way.

I was in the dorm packing my things. The school term was going to be suspended again, either due to the recent events with the campus invaders or the upcoming chaos from Welt’s attempted takeover of the nation. Getting a good education was going to be the last thing on most noble’s minds. They were going to pull their kids back home and hole up until the storm blew over.

Claude, Adrian and Samantha came calling. Max had somehow missed the entire ordeal while waiting at the hospital for news about his brother. They hovered by my door, unsure of whether to step inside and have a candid discussion about what was going on. Samantha seemed especially uneasy. She made a bold assertion about my character the night before, I didn’t believe a word of it.

That was the face of a person with an emotional hangover. She was second-guessing her own declaration. Had she discounted what I’d said about my real identity as a ploy or a game, or did she accept that the situation was what it was? A crazy theory like that was the only way to square my willingness and ability to kill with Maria’s stated history.

“Uh. Maria – I thought about what you said and...”

“And?” I repeated.

“...Does that mean that the thing with your Mum is all just a coincidence?”

I paused packing for a second and looked at her.

“Yes. It is a coincidence.”

“I’m just saying – I swore down that she was the one who taught you all that stuff.”

“When I said that I had never met her in my entire life before that incident, that was the honest-to-goodness truth. She’s never visited the manor as far as I know. She had me and left me with my Father. I think she was afraid of what would happen if WISA found out.”

Claude and Adrian were pretty lost. They didn’t understand the prior context of what Samantha was asking me.

“And it’s not something that runs in the family either?”

“How would that even work? Parents don’t pass down their knowledge to their children.”

Samantha shrugged, she thought it sounded like a possibility.

I turned my eyes to Claude and Adrian, “What do you two want? Say your piece.”

Adrian nodded, “You’re planning on going after Welt, right? I was thinking of tagging along with you.”

“You do not have a good reason to get involved with this,” I asserted, “You didn’t like your uncle anyway. He tried to murder you, multiple times!”

Adrian waved it away, “I know! That arsehole’s given me a lot more work to take care of. Besides – I don’t want to be the only one left out.”

“This isn’t a bloody field trip, Adrian. The only outcome I can see with this is that it’ll turn to violence whether I’m around to see it or not. Do you want to stand there when the bullets start flying?”

“What are you planning on doing exactly?” Claude asked.

“Seems rather obvious to me. I am going to locate where Gerard Verner Welt is hiding and ensure that his plan does not come to fruition.”

“You’re going to kill him,” he replied with an accusatory tone.

“Probably, if someone else doesn’t get to him first. Do you expect me to be swayed by that kind of moralistic rhetoric? Welt seeks to plunge this entire country into another civil war. I’ll be doing a lot of people a grand favour by making sure it doesn’t happen.”

Claude shook his head, “I really can’t believe that you’re still talking like this. Don’t you ever stop and think about what you’ve done?”

“I normally do all of my thinking before doing any harm,” I fired back, “It takes a long period of consideration and planning, and I do my best to ensure that the person on the other end is thoroughly deserving of it.”

“You say that like you’re the one who decides what’s right and wrong. Why don’t you just leave this to the police?”

I slammed the trunk shut and faced him, “I never said I was faultless, and besides – the police consist of men and women who are every bit as prone to bias as I am.”

“But there’s a process.”

“When did you suddenly begin to care about the process? Was it after you ran off at the theatre and got shot in the pelvis? You keep talking about being a detective like in those novels, but you’re the type to chafe against rules and regulations because you believe you know better.”

Samantha clapped her hands together and stopped the argument there before it could proceed any further. She’d figured me out. All of the prickly insults and long-winded philosophical discussions were simply layers of armour I used to keep people away, and the important people out of danger.

“That’s enough of that, Maria. We’re well past due some honesty here. What are you planning on doing?”

I didn’t have a plan. Welt was already in the process of taking over. I couldn’t find the time to collect information and do my usual process. It would have to be off the cuff and adapt as circumstances changed.

“My best idea is to find Veronica and ask her very nicely for information about where Welt is hiding.”

“There’s no way she’s going to tell you that,” Sam observed.

“I said it was my best idea – not that it was a good one. The harsh reality is that this plan is far too great in scope and complexity for me to unfurl on my own. The simplest answer is to decapitate their leadership structure. Welt primarily, but also the other individuals he has recruited to assist in asserting control over Walser’s means of governance.”

Taking down an entire government was the stuff of action movies and explosive video games. That wasn’t going to happen even though I wished my life could be that simple sometimes. I had the inexplicable ability to get out of deadly situations but not the superhuman durability and stamina to run around with two machine guns.

“Shouldn’t we at least take a break to have your leg taken care of?”

“No time for that now. It’s not that bad anyway.”

It was pretty bad, but it didn’t matter what my opinion on the sharp pain I kept feeling was, or the risk of it becoming dislodged and causing trouble. There was no time for me to go and find a surgeon who was both available and unwilling to ask questions about why I had a mysterious bullet in one of my legs.

There was going to be an announcement about what would happen at the academy within the hour. Once they figured out what was going on, they would conclude that it was safer to send everyone home to wait until it blew over. That was ideal. I could step away for a while and put a bullet between his eyes, tie it all up with a neat little bow, and maybe earn a stay of execution from Durandia for another few months.

Before the next disaster struck.

Despite all that was going on and the scale of the problem, at that moment I was unsure of how this could have possibly been the crisis that Durandia anticipated when she summoned me to this world. It was a human conflict driven by a handful of ambitious men. The only avenue through which I could see the matter rising to a ‘world-ending disaster’ was the magically enhanced soldier program he created.

They didn’t have the power to crack continents and kill millions though. Durandia wouldn’t bring my mortal soul through a crack in space and time, inhabit it into a dummy body she’d created using two real people, and then send me out to meddle with it if that wasn’t the case.

A Goddess would not intervene in her world for anything less. I needed to learn more about the rules that they followed. Durandia and Xenia both alluded to ‘free will’ being a defining factor in whether they were permitted to intervene. Was there a force at play that existed outside of the normal boundaries that justified this?

I wasn’t so cynical as to declare that neither of them was doing this for a reason they cared about. Sometimes intelligent beings liked to put their heart into an outcome that didn’t directly benefit them, even though a lot of people would disagree with that assessment.

Durandia wanted me to save ‘her’ world, and Xenia was at odds with her for interfering to do so. The real mind-melting loop was considering that Xenia may not have wanted to go any further than speaking with me because of that desire to preserve my free will.

I was certain that the politics behind it in their world was a complicated subject, and I did not have time to consider the implications fully. I picked up my trunk and hauled it up and onto the bed, ready to go when the Principal dismissed the students and arranged for them to go home.

I frowned; “Hold on a moment. Claude – your father is a high-ranking police officer.”

“He is,” Claude nodded, “What about him?”

“That means he is probably uncomfortably close to all of the chaos unfolding in the capital right now.”

Claude was unperturbed, “How are you so sure that there’s chaos over there?”

“I don’t mean ‘chaos’ as rioting in the streets and firefights happening between the buildings. There’ll be many conflicting parties. The ministers, the royal family, the nobles, the MPs, the police, the military, and WISA. All of them will be trying to assert control or pick the correct side to be on.”

I paused my train of thought.

“Never mind. I forgot your Mother was back at home.”

Claude glowered, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well – a lot of us are in the absentee slash dead parent club, but I wrong to worry about nobody being there to babysit you when you go back home.”

“I’m not going home!” he seethed.

We'd see about that.