Rampage under the moon (Job)

The Job

Spoiler:

Akryn slowly and quietly walked through the town, his one eye making sure every and anything that could be locked up was. He had been hired to handled a rather interesting problem in the town tonight, a very interesting one indeed.

Deal with a small army of werewolves without killing any of them.

Most people would find this a difficult task, but Akryn had a bit of a reputation for his hand to hand prowess, and so he had been the one given the job, he and Akeya, with apparently one other coming in from another guild. Akryn had left all of his weapons at the guild, viewing sharp objects in this scenario to not be a good thing, so he had come unarmed. It would impress almost anyone for him to punch out a bunch of werewolves.

The one person it wouldn't impress was his team mate, Akeya, the shadow dragoness that had come along with Akryn. She was extremely difficult to impress, he had not been able to do it since meeting her after all, despite his best efforts. He was honestly surprised she had come along on this job really, with not being allowed to kill the werewolves. She enjoyed expediency and efficiency greatly, and despite her great physical power she was not the sort to usually use brute force. This would be a very interesting night.

"So tell me Akeya." Akryn said as he walked, stopping to tug softly on a door to make sure it was locked. "I have never once seen you throw a punch or grapple with an opponent. While I am more than certain you have the physical capabilities to tangle with some mangy werewolf, you are a half dragon after all, do you have the skill? I am not asking to offend you, merely clarifying, as I have never seen you do anything like that before." He said to the darkness.

People watching would likely think he was crazy, but he wasn't, no more so than most people were anyway. Akeya liked hanging out in his shadow, hidden away from the world and untouchable, a smart move for an assassin like her. He was betting that she was close by, there were plenty of shadows to hide in after all, and he knew that she would hear him, and perhaps strike up some sort of discussion. It all depened on her mood.

A challenge had been uttered, or at least been presented to the assassin known as Akeya Kuusai. Her youth had actually been quite normal, but once she became an adult her life had turned into one where her main objective, purpose, and goal was to become the best hunter. Not the strongest, the fastest, the smartest, the stealthiest. Her goal was to be the best. The reason being that to be the best you didn't need to be the strongest, the fastest, the stealthiest, or anything like that. People who believed that they only needed to cultivate one skill to its uppermost limits to become the best predators would quickly learn that they were wrong, and learning that lesson would have as price their life. Or if they were very lucky, they would survive to try and improve. The best hunter, the most successful predator, was the one who had whatever was necessary for the job at hand. If the job required strength they would be strong enough. If they needed to be smart they would be smart. If they needed to be unnoticed they would be like a shadow. Become the best at a single aspect? That was what fools believed would be enough, maybe because they knew that they could never be good at everything so they tried to convince themselves that they would be all right if they focused on one thing.

Akeya wasn't like that. She was born healthy, yes, with a sharp mind. She had grown up in a village high up in the mountains, which had made her more resilient than the people who lived on the plains. Because she helped the adults whenever needed she became skilled at various things, and trained her body as well. From a young age she began to practice basic rituals that were unique to the village, which allowed her to develop a level of control and skill with magic that most junior mages didn't have. This all helped when it came to have better chances at becoming good in several things instead of only one thing, like all those others who tried to be the best. But if the main differences had to be sought, one would find two causes: the first was that Akeya wasn't fully human. She had the blood of dragons flowing through her veins, and when that blood was awakened she had lost the frailty and weaknesses that ordinary humans possessed simply by being human, both mental and physical. Her body was strong, she was not bound to the earth, she had natural weapons, she wasn't limited to being part of a group, she wasn't controlled by her emotions, and as she kept on living she wouldn't be limited by a short lifespan. And the second was her sheer focus. Not the determination of heroes to save the world, because that determination usually had a specific goal. One goal might follow another, but they always had a goal. Belief was also not the right word, because belief required you to hold fast to a certain stance with nothing to confirm it. If it could be confirmed it was no longer a belief. Stubbornness was incorrect because she wasn't actively resisting anything. She was just focused. She was focused, so much that it could be considered a form of insanity. Most people always were distracted by anything and everything. Akeya wasn't. She focused on improving, on becoming stronger, becoming faster, becoming smarter, becoming more knowledgeable, becoming more skilled, becoming stealthier, becoming a better predator and assassin. That focus overrode the issues that most people had when it came to realizing their dreams. They would become lazy. Her focus made that impossible. They would lose interest. Her focus never wavered. They would lose hope. Her focus was unaffected. She would keep going, and even if she encountered a setback that just meant she had to find away either around or through the obstacle.

The fact that this time the obstacle was that she wasn't allowed to kill wasn't much of a problem to her. Sure, she preferred killing (not because she was bloodthirsty, but because killing was the best way to make sure that a living being would no longer be a problem from that point on) but that didn't mean she only had killing techniques. Werewolves were strong, fast, and dangerous, a lot more than any human warrior who wasn't legendary in their own right. But they were still living creatures. They were complex organisms, even if they were enhanced and fuelled by magic. They had organs, they had veins, they had nerves, they had a brain which controlled the rest of the body. Like a very, very complex machine. And the interesting thing about machines was this: the more complex a machine was, the easier it was to break it or make it malfunction with as little energy as possible. The reason being that the more complex a machine was, the more parts it must have. And every part could be broken, halted, hindered, removed, or otherwise made unusable. Every part was a potential failure, and a complex machine had the tendency to need every single part to function as a whole. A simple machine only had a few parts, a few ways that it could go wrong which were easy to look after. A machine as complex as a living organism as large as a human or even larger? There were over a thousand potential points of failure. And if somebody was dedicated to making such a machine malfunction, it was nearly impossible to protect all those points.

So when Akryn, her companion and teammate, asked her whether she had the skills to take down a werewolf without killing it, Akeya nearly snorted in disgust. He had never seen her disable without killing? Her always doing the sneaky work must have resulted in him only noticing what she was doing if she left corpses. Well, she had a good way of making sure he understood that she wasn't just a killing machine. A predator didn't always want their prey to die immediately, and in such a situation they couldn't afford to be without ways to ensure that they could capture the prey without killing them. Otherwise they couldn't be considered the best. Standing up from her spot in Akryn's shadow she reached around his neck, placing two fingers at the indent at the base of his throat. If she struck him hard in that spot he would become incapable of breathing, after which it would be easy to finish him off. Of course that wasn't something you could easily do while in the middle of a fight with a werewolf, but it did serve to drive the point him, even if she only poked him.

"Naturally."

With that she returned to crouching in Akryn's shadow, waiting for the last participant in this mission to arrive so they could get started.