The Shadow Assassin

Chapter 9

Anya stood on a tree overlooking the Ichinose mansion. It was surprisingly intact, considering what had happened to her own mansion. But it could have something to do with the fact that the Ichinose mansion was more remote than hers had been and was still a branch family in service to the Hiragi line, lowly as they were, while her family had nothing to do with them, aside from always gathering all the Information that they could.

But in the end it didn't matter and all she had to concentrate on, was infiltrating the mansion in search of information.

The Officer library had held quite a lot of information, but ultimately her curiosity had been drawn by Guren Ichinose.

There was something about him that she couldn't quite grasp, but she had decided that she would infiltrate his family mansion next, as her instinct told her that that would be the next source for information.

So she had gone and researched all that she could find on the mansion in the normal library and then determined that it was actually plausible as her next destination.

So here she was now, looking at the mansion and waiting for the moment where she could enter unbidden.

A lot of the stealth work of an assassin came through instinct, her parents had taught her. It does not matter how good you are at going unseen if you cannot find that one moment in which you have to move. And you can only find that moment through well honed instincts, to immediately know when you need to move and to listen to that instinct. No amount of technology can overcome these important instincts.

That was what her parents had taught her and even against the vampires superior senses it had worked. Her instincts had yet to fail her, and as such she would continue to rely on them. Of course it was also important to know when not to act on instincts, as your instincts usually tell you to run in front of a dangerous predator stronger than you, but if you have to pretend to be as strong as them, you can't be culled by your instincts.

It was a precarious balance, one that she had learned to walk upon her entire life, such much so, that she knew no different way to live.

And now the moment to enter the mansion had come, and so she did.

It was dark in there. Barely any light reached the bottom and if she had not memorized the blueprints, she would have been frustrated ages ago.

The place was a veritable mace of rooms that was created by the different levels and half levels, stairs, slide doors and the lack of any real corridors and everything was only amplified by the shadows of the night with only occasional flecks of moonlight that due to the trees outside were all both very similar and constantly changing their shape, making it neigh impossible to use these flecks of moonlight to differentiate  the different rooms.

The Ichinose Mansion was a Mansion that vaguely followed a traditional style as opposed to her own, which had been build in a heavily western style, meaning that this was the first time that Anya was in a place of any such Layout.

Searching through each room it took a while before she found anything substantial, only when she was searching through the Library did she find anything worthwhile.

The family records.

Now she stood before a for her rather common problem. Her inner informant was screaming at her to take this treasure trove of information with her, but the problem was, that she didn't have the space to take all of it with her.

At some point she would have to do something about that.

But not now. Now she had to scan over all the information and see what she could use. Going over all the information took several hours, but at the end she was a lot more informed about the Ichinose.

After having compiled all the information she came to a surprising conclusion.

Guren Ichinose was a Namanari.

The process of turning from a human to a demon. It explained why his room reflected a deeply controlled person. He was trying to hold onto his humanity and could not afford to be distracted by personal feelings and problems. But what his goal could be, still eluded her.

Putting that aside for now, she got up again and started the search for the hidden spaces, that she knew existed. Her own mansion had had them as well, and a family like the Ichinose would have them too. The only thing was to find them.

That search took nearly one and a half hours, of looking around for any hidden switches and compartments, but ultimately  she found a hidden elevator, hidden behind the classic of a sliding bookshelf. She had also found several hidden compartments with various different weapons. Those she left as they were.

Using the elevator to descend into the basement she got to the hidden labs.

Labs filled with remnants of human experiments.

Anya had seen a lot of different things in her life as an assassin, a lot of it through both the hands of her parents and her own hands, then a lot through simple human nature and again through the vampires, but this still made her pause and center herself. She knew such things existed, was actually intimate aware of the dark sides of humanity through her life, but that did not make seeing such things easy, especially not when it was for the first time.

After having collected herself again after that pause she went around inspecting everything around her with almost clinical precision. After all, just because it wasn't easy to see did not make it less important.

After the first look around she concluded that it had to be experiments regarding the Seraph of the End, but she did not have enough information to be sure.

Going further into the underground lab she came upon a reinforced door with a looking glass. Loocking through the glass, she saw an underground garden and what loocked like an angel with a trumpet chained in the literal middle of the room. And while Anya was nearly overcome with a sort of morbid curiosity, she had enough sense to first look around the rest of the underground facility if there was anything else of note.

There were more deformed and still bodies floating in even more tanks, but nothing worth noting after what she had seen.

Satisfied with her observations she turned back to the chamber with the angel.

Carefully opening the door she entered, her guard up and her body tensed to dodge should an attack come.

It did not.

Curious she looked around, all the while making sure to keep the angel in her field of vision and on the look out for any sort of hostile action.

None came. Instead the angel was looking at her with a strange look in his eyes, that she couldn't identify before shifting into a mixture of curious and neutral.

No, he wasn't just looking at her, he was looking at her weapons too, she realised with a jolt.

Coming to a stop a bit of a distance away from the angel she look at him while he looked at her.

There was a pause before she decided to bite the proverbial bullet and break the silence, speaking up with a simple: „Who are you?"

I am very sorry that it took so long to get another Chapter written and uploaded, but I was sick and miserable for a week and then I had two exams with which I was absolutely swamped with having to study and so everything took a lot longer than it should.

Again, very sorry for that.

Then while I was writing this Chapter it in the end ran away with me and I had to split the Chapter as it would otherwise have been more than twice as long as the usual Chapters.

But on the up side, the next Chapter should be finished and uploaded pretty soon.

So with that, I hope you enjoyed the Chapter.