((A/N: Happy late birthday, Ishmael and Time!! And happy early birthday to everyone else! :') ))
Chapter 1 ~ Kill the Opportunity

It was 1024 years since a beginning and an end: 1024 years since a man had donned a headdress that crowned him as the ruler of a land, and for some reason, 1024 years later, there were people of the Empire who still cared about an achievement that wasn’t theirs.
To be fair, the celebration they held wasn’t as great as it would have been ten years earlier. He recalled there once having been boisterous firecrackers that rang out from every crack and crevice and shouts of drunk men that resounded throughout every inch of the Imperial Capital. Now, it was only an occasional crack from somewhere behind him, though even just that made the assassin flinch. Daggers spun out of his hands in one swift motion—he dove to his left, one blade slung backwards, then his stance changed to be poised for a swift spring, two other blades ready in his hands again.
A brief and too-loud thump of the thrown weapon resounding against the carpeted floor and then the following sound of one brushing against the body of a guard made him realize that there was no further target there. Only then did he lower his weapons warily and go to carefully retrieve the object, his hand barely brushing the fabric of the guard’s clothing as he swept it up to return it to its original position.
Even though he was sure no one would be around, he still glanced back at the many bodies of the corridor, his lips pursed with distaste. He had violated the order to leave the guards be, but they would have been large obstacles if left alive. He had been ordered to kill not one of them. Having killed three, he had technically violated the command three times, and that detail irritated him along with some others.
Like the fact that this was his 9th time around the entire residence. He’d been around the place so many times he thought he knew more little details about this place than its actual inhabitants. The fact that he wasn’t sure what to expect except for danger. He didn’t know if gun-wielding guards were employed here. He wasn’t even fully sure if he’d taken the hint “You probably know where it is” correctly.
At least it was his final time around the place. If after this nothing yielded, it meant he failed in finding someone who could fit the description of the target.
He wouldn’t tolerate failure either. It led to consequences he couldn’t afford.
He knew better than to doubt his orders or who gave those orders. His only job was to execute, both definitions applicable. But no more, no less. Still, those given to him were questionably vague. The revolutionaries would have seemed amateurish, giving commands that made an assassin consider and decide so much on his own, but he had a feeling they didn’t care about how they seemed to him—and the fact that he had thought they might care spurred another vague wave of annoyance as he advanced, his huge bout of adrenaline unused and his paranoia very intact.
Another crack, almost like a whip, closer than any sound before. Another crouch on his part. Another flinch.
He had once been told that the sounds were those of people out to kill him and his fears, unfounded or not, were especially amplified by the fact that firecrackers did indeed bear resemblance to gunfire from certain firearms. Perhaps it was a matter of bad luck that it was the time had to be this day in the first place. After all, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the entire show if he were farther out from the Capital. People who lived in fear showed more to those they thought would be looking, becoming the ones with constant parading, cheerful lights, and cheery games, as if their inner consciousness believed somehow that lights and faux happiness could forcibly push the darkness away.
But the location didn’t depend on him. It depended on whom it belonged to and where its owner wanted it to be and, while his current location belonged to no ordinary person, the owner still needed to attend the mandatory fireworks show. The general had certainly gone above and beyond. Not only had he gone out to attend a celebration held by fellow government officials, he had also dispatched his only son and a group of his most able guards to a town nearby to hold a fireworks show, perhaps to show his loyalty to the Empire or perhaps to parade his own forces, the assassin had little idea.
The reason didn’t matter, though; after all, it meant that he had one less Teigu user to potentially deal with in the worst case scenario that they were to encounter each other. It also meant a whole lot less guards. And that was just about the end of what was convenient for him and his task.
Just about everything else made him want to pin blame on someone else, and he had a pretty good idea who he really wanted to pin the blame on specifically.
“I mean, no pressure and all,” the man who’d given him the vague mission had said with a vague smile at nothing to smile about, his vague gaze staring at that burning village in the west for a few moments before returning his eyes to the majestic royal palace in the center of the capital. “But if you don’t get your mission done right, my wonderful colleagues might not appreciate you very much.”
The implied message was the same he had gotten for the past decade and more. Failure was not tolerated. The only fact that had been made extremely clear was that this mission, given to someone who apparently hadn’t been able to even prove himself completely yet, was absolutely crucial to the biggest force fighting against imperial rule. Somehow.
“Do relax, though!” the other had proceeded say in a reassuring tone. “All you’ll need to do is to assassinate someone currently unidentified: A shadowy humanoid male who apparently has dark brown or black hair, but it also depends on what he’s doing, too, so keep an eye out for someone like that. He’s not the General, though. So what could go right, am I wrong?”
Thinking back on it, he didn’t really appreciate the twist on the saying at all either. But appreciating superiors’ senses of humor wasn’t his job either. Not that he could completely condemn himself from doing so. The more time he spent circling the place, the more he felt as if the Revolutionary Army reveled in seeing him walk on a mine field that they ordered him onto. He was perhaps the die rolling around the table. He could almost feel it, whoever oversaw his case in a huddle, making bets on which number he would roll and how long he would last.
Such thoughts wouldn’t benefit him at all. He tried to breathe calmly before starting down the corridor again. He needed to trust what he had. If he made a mistake, he would pay for it accordingly. It wasn’t as if the idea was a novel one.
All he needed was to think correctly, take a bet of his own, and keep to it. He needed to bet that he was worth more to the Revolutionary Army than it seemed. It was a bet he needed to make in any mission where failure loomed over him and the chance of success was dim; if he didn’t make the bet, the consequences would just fall upon him. He couldn’t allow that.
In that case, this mission was more important than it seemed as well. The objective’s target was likely more prominent and crucial than a random nobody whose features weren’t even identified. And in all of this was a viable mission the Revolutionary Army needed him to complete, one that perhaps they weren’t sure how to. Then, what they told him was really what they knew.
Those were the only solid presumptions he could make. He needed to act, but there was so much left that could be speculated. Had his thoughts gone too far?
Vague as the description was, he needed to rely on that and the only inferences he could make. He couldn’t stretch the case farther than it was. An assassin went by orders.
The description went: Male with dark hair, masked facial features, of high importance to the Revolutionary Army and its aims, somewhere near or in this residence, and he wasn’t the General, the most important figure in the mansion, far more so than any supremely trained guard.
He had presumed that someone so close to the Empire’s First General would be someone in charge of protection, but they had never said the target was a guard. 
Then it was just someone close to the First General. Someone very, very close.
“You’ll have one opportunity,” he had been told.
Thinking about it, one opportunity didn’t just mean that he had one opportunity to be here on this particular day to see the target. No, guards were always here in some way or another. It would be harder, that was all, and if a target were of such prominence, a retreat would technically be in an option if conditions were judged to be unfavorable. The words “one opportunity” meant that the target’s actions were only clear enough for him to gauge one time at one place. One opportunity to see that the other was important in some way, and that way…was to approach the general.
There was a final indistinguishable fact in his mind he couldn’t seem to wrap his head around. What had he assumed by a leap to a conclusion that hadn’t been told directly to him? His mind ran over the circumstances. Some components had needed to be estimated. He couldn’t doubt his inferences for the location now.
If identified correctly, the one window of opportunity was allowed because of the lack of one group of guards. Had they been here, there would have been no window to see through the situation. However, in the time that he arrived here, he would have no time to eliminate all of them silently and hide all of their bodies as well. He had interpreted all of that as the fact that someone needed to eliminate them in advance, much earlier on.
That someone, he had speculated, would have been the one who had eliminated the other guards, causing him some inconvenience. He hadn’t thought much of that—assassins, after all, were made to fend for themselves, not others. He had taken it as the doings of someone supervising him; it was a test, after all. Supposedly, that someone would have been the one to provide both aid and inconvenience.
But they had never said he would be supervised, and the circumstances weren’t just helpful for him. They could easily be helpful for someone else. Someone who was very alike to him.
The rest of him had realized the implications long before he himself did. He was running, and he was beginning to realize a new feeling surfacing from the initial uneasiness: Fear.
He had thought it was an opportunity given to him. Instead, it was the opportunity given to his target.
He didn’t dare pause at the corpses outside of the general’s quarters. Approaching footsteps rumbled somewhere in the mansion, but his focus was solely on the open door and the room and scene inside it, a man sprawled across the floor in a manner unsuitable for one of the most important military officials of a thousand-year-and-twenty-four-year-old empire.
Someone else was there as well, a cloaked silhouette with a weapon dressed in blood from more than one person, yet his vision focused in on those shadow parallel to his own as his mind swam with letters that could barely form one word.
Failure.
His failure drummed in his ears as a sentence he had been trying not to recall surfaced.
If you are a sinking battleship, sink another before you capsize.
He knew what was coming—a count of three, silence, and then footsteps of the guards who would be coming, their own opportunities having come. Then he would take it away from them by his own hands. He wasn’t very sure what would happen after that. He had never thought of what happened after his own opportunities were no longer.
A cornered animal always claws the fiercest because it had no further chance. The last thing it could do in the world was inflict as much harm as it could on what was cornering it. It had thought there was still a place to run to when in reality the world it thought it could see had been trapping it all along.
He couldn’t even fight back against the world. All he could do was train his gaze on his last target, the last life he would take before his own; the last person to remind him that he had made a mistake, not only in that he had failed his mission but also that he ever thought that there was a righteous side of the war. The consequences were collapsing like a ceiling upon him as he lunged towards his final chance, against the walls and circumstances enclosing him.
Then the would-be target fell stiffly to the floor with three darts gleaming on his back, and even that opportunity dropped in front of him. His own daggers sailed past the target and sank into the wood underneath the floor, past the other puppet discarded without reason.
Plunk, plunk, plunk.
He was just another puppet that wasn’t even enough to add to any numbers. The cost, his life, taunted him now from the darkness. It taunted him from that someone with dark hair and steely eyes, a simple dart gun in hand poised solidly towards him.
Until he realized that their face was too round to be of a masculine structure, the only solid description of his target resounding in his mind.
“Shadowy humanoid male”. Well, specifically, the “male” part.
She was no male, even if she was certainly one with the shadows, a lithe figure almost resembling a black cougar of the night in her stature, with her intent to kill masterfully hidden or perhaps having already readily vanished. His lack of recognition towards her meant that she was someone on the revolution’s side—someone skilled, judging from how she wasn’t moving at all, whether that motionlessness was in her hand or in her entire body, not shifting at all as she regarded him.
Of course, it wasn’t his job to evaluate an executioner.
He had been wrong the second time around, even if the presumption had aided him somewhat. They had sent a supervisor after all—that person whose gun was trained on him. And he wanted to laugh despite it all. He had come in here knowing that he was a failure, just like the formerly elite guards outside whose collars bloomed distorted red, their tales only to be summarized as mere failures to protect both themselves and whom they had sworn to protect. A similar end had seemed fitting to his own life, perhaps second only to the honor that would befall upon his corpse once he was framed as the assassin of the Empire’s First General and then mutilated in front of the public. It would, after all, be the first time they saw of him.
Now, he realized that no matter how righteous of a light the Revolutionary Army painted itself in, they wouldn’t take a chance with someone who had failed and could potentially leak any information to the Empire. He would just be forgotten, killed and disposed of. His fantasies about even common citizens seeing his body had been for null except more disappointment. 
“Put away your daggers unless you actually want to throw them at me.”
It wasn’t him who had spoken. It was her, even if her voice was quiet and her mouth had barely moved, and his hands went to complete the action immediately. There was no use being confused, since the reason wouldn’t matter after this.
She considered him, seeming to decide that he had in fact followed the command. And then she dropped her hand that had held the gun.
Despite his former thoughts that condemned him from feeling the emotion, some confusion surfaced within him.
“I’m not going to kill you,” she spoke again stiffly, leading to yet more confusion.
Why not?  
He knew she was still considering him, but for the first time, it began to feel like her gaze was one of disapproval. And somehow, she continued as if she saw his question. “You eliminated the target successfully. So before they realize what’s happening, follow me.”
She turned, tearing her gaze away towards the entrance and exit. Then, she paused, frowning almost scornfully before meeting his gaze again, speaking simply in a way she didn’t seem to recognize.
“Welcome to Night Raid, Yuutsume.”
There wasn’t time for him to be more confused, for the woman with sepulchral eyes had started off and he only followed without looking back, leaving behind all that had sunk too far into a deep sleep and become ignorant of how suffocating the night had become.
                                                                                                                          ~|-O-|~
There was no way that he could have said that he was having the time of his life here in a small town celebration, but Ishmael enjoyed being with the townspeople, much more so than one might have expected that a son of one of the most prominent government figures would have. The source of his discomfort was actually mostly the fact that it was a party, one of the many events that he tended to have a sort of paranoia towards. It was an unfounded fear, a phobia, so once he had gotten past that, he could find a sort of sincere happiness that was separate from his formal duties. There was a sort of appeal in that—and also in the fact that these townspeople had potted plants they actually took care of themselves.
He was supposed to leave before it actually ended, and he realized that he had stayed a tad too long. The clusters of people were scattering into the night back into their homes, leaving some parts of the town eerily silent.
The good side of having come to his senses was that he wasn’t as startled as he might have been by the approach of someone, but the recognition of the other as one of the elite guard drew enough fear in him to make up for his lack of surprise. He was also able to recognize the other immediately as someone who was almost constantly by his father’s side, someone who had recently tamed a Class 2 Danger Beast for a mount. His former jubilance faded further into something more than impending disappointment.
He wasn’t the one the elite guard acknowledged. The elite guard didn’t come to him unless...something terrible happened. Specifically, to his father, the only one they recognized.
He didn’t respond when the guard dismounted and told him what he already knew. More like a small child in denial than an adult man, the son of a dead man watched the people who clung to the bits of cheerfulness they had had moments before as they took down the lanterns and retreated into their homes. Only a bit of light remained, sheltered by all the darkness the lack of it left behind.
“He was found dead in three places,” the guard informed, “along with multiple guards across the residence.” Veering to the young man’s side, he added, “The assassin has ventured free.”
Ishmael didn’t feel angry, but he usually was able to find words for just about any situation. This time, he couldn’t find any by himself, but the rage was there and it frothed up to form poisonous words.
“Night Raid…”


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