Chapter 5

Well, I suppose it's for the best that I use first-person. It will help you get a better picture of what's going on entirely. This story has so far been rather vague, but you need the facts, and as such, let me introduce myself as Takeshi.

That's not my real name, but I've used it as such for so long, it's how I prefer to be addressed at this point, instead of Tyler. It's the same with Nyan and Teru; they were once Taylor and Drue. That isn't the case anymore, all because of the path we chose to walk.

What I said before was true, Sicarius is a group of assassins, but we only kill to help the people. We don't normally kill for personal gain, unless it's for survival. "To us the law holds nothing, we have long since decided to follow right and wrong instead; even though they will never know it, we've saved many being's lives from behind the scenes." That's what I told Ryan and Yanni, along with the history behind Sicarius.

Sicarius has been around for centuries, though it only came back recently, with the help of me, Nyan, and Teru. The Sicarius of old did the same thing we did, until of course a crusade was made against them and they fell to a conspiracy. Now only the storyteller's of villages truly know of the Sicarius of old.

Here's where our story; meaning myself, Nyan, and Teru, began. We used to be as untrained and unaware as Ryan and Yanni. But that changed when our own village was attacked. The three of us had only barely been able to hide in time. Actually, they still found us, and it was only our own quick thinking that saved us.

I'd prefer not to get into details, because it wasn't pretty, but I'll just say they 'accidently' got torched. We had to leave, and for a time, we just traveled aimlessly, until we came upon a small town. We were able to swipe books for learning, but what we found most interesting was the history book, that told a brief history of Sicarius.

It also detailed a map that led to a mysterious old villa of sorts that was said to have been the hiding place of goods and information for the organization. It wasn't much for me, but hey, we had to find somewhere to stay, or we'd probably have died. Needless to say, I'm still around so I'm sure you know whether we succeeded or not.

It was very clever, because not only was the map encrypted, but the entire area was cloaked to avoid detection. It was only by luck that Nyan stumbled and fell right through the cloak, revealing the location. We hadn't figured out that magic was the culprit behind our seemingly hopeless search until we read the books that were in the house, refurbishing it over the course of a few months while we were at it.

Our first assassination was one of our less quiet jobs, as we had to do it in broad daylight, without training except for what we had found in ancient books. We killed the one who had staged the attack on our village.

Nyan, who was still called Taylor back then was the last to recover from killing the man. She's a sweet soul, and in the end, it took a lot of time for her to harden herself to the facts. We were only about 10 then so...

Needless to say, we soon decided to settle down, that is until we heard of a small town having been massacred. It didn't take us long to realize that it had been yet another conspiracy. We again, knowing the law was beginning to catch up to us. Still, we looked at the idea of Sicarius to ignore the law, and listen to right and wrong, and as such, we decided to, after much discussion, restart Sicarius.

We tried to keep to the organization's original ideas as much as possible, but we still edited a few things. With that, we took on new codenames for security purposes, and our old names began to fade away.

That's what we told Ryan and Yanni once they said yes, and in the end, all they could do was stare at me, speechless. I couldn't blame them; our story can seem unbelievable at a lot of points.

Later that night, once Ryan and Yanni were asleep, Nyan, Teru, and I were chatting the night away, and also trying to figure out what the next step was. You may be asking where the other 5 or so members came from, but really, they came as volunteers. They had heard of Sicarius, and had sought to join us, which of course meant they were already partially educated. In the end, I think they worked out why we were there.

Nyan interrupted my train of thought by saying, "I think there's only one chose of action," she smiled with a little bit of humor there too, "We take them to Mr. Johnson."

Now that was something we had to think about. Johnson is one of our various allies, and is the leader of a large faction of mercenaries. He had helped us perfect our combat skills, but he was a brutal trainer. I raised my eyebrow, "Do you want to torture them along the way? Our training was rough, and we we're already partially skilled at fighting."

Nyan and Johnson shared a sort of brother/sister relationship, proved by the fact that she is the only one who can get away with calling him Mr. Johnson. Nyan laughed, "We need this to go fast, it's the only way... and personally, after they brandished weaponry, shouldn't they have to face some punishment?"

I couldn't help but grin at that, and neither could Teru. Teru then nodded saying, "We do need to move fast, or otherwise we might have problems, this safe house isn't totally secure."

That was true; this was one of our newer safe houses. I sighed and nodded, "Fine, now onto one last matter before we can go to bed..." I pulled out the envelope that I had pulled off of our latest kills. It was encrypted, but it was also what I like to say very important. These envelopes are carried by those who are well trusted and are important to the true master's quest. You may be wondering who this master is, but I can't tell you who yet, because I didn't know either.

Nyan and Teru began to edge away; they weren't fans of code cracking, which was why I usually ended up decoding them. Nyan and Teru were just as talented as I was at it, but preferred sleeping or doing other things than doing so.

I waved them away, knowing they would have gone whether I had asked them to or not. I grinned at them as they went to get some rest, while I was left all alone, to crack the code.

I sighed and began to mutter, "E probably equals... Z..." E was the easiest to solve, as normally, the letter occurring most in a coded message is E. I sighed; the rest was going to be much harder. As such, I prepared myself, for a long night.

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