noVe)lb/1n
1377 Final Stage
Time passed on, one way or another. Rui continued to prove the threat that he posed to the various Martial Seniors of the Shadow Isles. The ones that refused to pair with even a single person, let alone an entire army, simply died.
Rui hunted them all, one by one. Whether they left their homes or not, as long as they were alone, they turned into targets for Rui. Once every five days or so, a Martial Senior fell without fail.
The SITF kicked into full force as the investigative body scoured through the Shadow Isles and the Derschek Region, looking for any clues about the mysterious Martial Senior that had been eliminating the assassins of the Shadow Isles.
And yet, they failed at every step of the road. They were unable to discover the means by which their Martial Senior assassins fell. They were unable to discover a smidgen of the identity of the person who eliminated their assassins.
The individual Martial Seniors who didn't partake in a pairing system all died. The only exception applied to those who left the Derschek Region permanently, which a few of them did. It appeared that leaving the Derschek Region was a clear-cut way of escaping being a target of the mysterious assassin.
When they learned of that, the Martial Seniors of the Derschek Region would have been lying if they hadn't considered it.
A few months had passed and it wasn't long before every Martial Senior who didn't rely on the pairing system had passed away. Half of them disappeared.
The other half died inexplicably.
No clues in the surroundings of the corpses. No sign of resistance, conflict, or struggle. No clue about the means of assassination.
Nothing.
The Martial Seniors who had hoped that the SITF would uncover the truth about the force that was targeting them had their hopes crushed. The truth never came out, and ultimately, nobody ever found out.
It was truly the ideal killer, and they were truly the ideal murders.
The impact of the death of the various Martial Seniors on the Derschek Region was immense.
For the first time in decades, the region experienced momentary stability and peace as the prices of assassination services rose significantly.
The reason for this was that while some Martial Seniors didn't have the courage to be around any longer, the same was even more true of Martial Squires and Martial Apprentices.
The logic was simple. If there were threats to their kind that even Martial Artists of a higher Realm were unwilling to face, then they had no business sticking around. If the Martial Senior ever decided to wipe out the Squire or Apprentice populations, they stood no chance.
The event was so significant that it even got its own name.
The Shadow Boycott.
Word of the Shadow Boycott spread through the Derschek Region and even beyond. The assassin that had reaped so many of his kind drew even more attention.
The assassination community beyond the Derschek Region grew interested in a powerful figure that came out of nowhere. Because of how few Martial Seniors reached high grades, many organizations and groups within the assassination community that documented the powerful and prominent assassins that had a particularly notable impact created a new profile for the latest assassin to join those ranks.
The Voidreaper. He who reaped and left nothing behind.
Rui narrowed his eyes when Professor Carl informed him of that name.
For some reason, he always got hit with an epithet that had the word void in it. When he was in the Kandrian Empire during the Martial Contest, he had been dubbed the Voidbringer.
When he was in the Shionel Confederation, he had been dubbed the Voider.
And now, he was being called the Voidreaper.
In this case and perhaps even the previous one, neither of those names even made sense when people didn't know about his Martial Art in both cases. If people didn't know that his Martial Art was called the Flowing Void Style, there would be no reason to call him the Voider or the Voidreaper.
Yet they did.
It was a strange phenomenon.
Almost as if somebody ordained it to be that way.
Still, he wasn't complaining. He didn't mind it given that it did match with the theme of his Martial Art.
Regardless, he didn't have time to focus on such matters. Three months had passed and he had executed his plan with perfect accuracy and precision like a well-oiled machine.
Develop a predictive model.
Discover the innate resonance frequencies.
Eliminate.
Over and over.
He came to discover that every Martial Senior had different a unique set of innate resonance frequencies, much to his dismay. However, humans possessed very similar innate resonance frequencies due to the relatively minimal divergence in human bodies compared to Martial Bodies.
That made his job more challenging, but he didn't let it hamper him nonetheless.
At the end of three months, he had killed eighteen Martial Seniors. They were the stubborn individualist types who refused to be intimidated to leave the Derschek Region or pair up with their peers.
He had reached an important stage. Taking out the paired-up Martial Seniors would be necessary for eliminating the competition and cleaning up the assassination industry.
If he couldn't, then as crippled as the assassination sector was, it would still survive.
However, if he did successfully assassinate them despite the pairing security system, then he would push them beyond a certain limit.
The limit that they were willing to tolerate to stay within the Derschek Region. If he could prove that not even a buddy system was protecting them, then he was sure, based on the models that he had created from the intelligence profiles that the Beggar's Sect had on them, that they would leave the Derschek Region, unwilling to take even more unpleasant measures to survive, and unwilling to die.
Having purposely left the option of leaving open, it would seem like the only option.
But only if he could succeed in this final stage. The most difficult part.
