Which meant tonight was Vir’s only opportunity. The prince had panicked at the suddenness, but eventually agreed to Vir’s terms. Tonight, he would eliminate both Princess Mina and the head priest in one fell swoop. For better or worse, it would all be over soon.
The plan was simple, as most good plans were. Prince Sanobar would have a sedative sprinkled into Mina’s food. Vir would wait until the dead of night, entering through the secret passage. He worried a bit about whether he could bypass the hatch’s lock, but if he couldn’t, Dance would allow him inside.
With luck, Mina’s death would go unnoticed for hours, giving Vir free rein to infiltrate the royal temple where the head priest slept.
The priest was the main reason Vir went along with this. He’d seriously considered ambushing ‘Amin’ when she was alone. Ideally in the sewers, where no one would notice. But if he offed the princess, what of Harak? Castle defenses would be bolstered, and his chances of taking down the priest would plummet. It was safer to kill both simultaneously.
According to Sanobar, Harak retired early and snored up his entire quarters. Killing him should be a simple matter. Vir would then escape—either back through Mina’s room, or to the District of Internal Affairs, whichever was more readily accessible.
Vir smirked. Since when did things ever go according to plan?
Riyan was right. This would take everything he had, and then some. He’d have to transcend his limits and step outside his comfort zone.
Worrying about it wouldn’t change a thing. Preparations withstanding, there were several actions he could take today to ensure his success tonight.
Vir stepped off the fourth-story roof and fell into the alley, leveraging Light Step to turn his fatal fall into a small hop.
The veiled receptionist waved Vir down as he entered. “Acolyte, a package for you, just this morning,” he said, passing a rectangular object to Vir.
“Thanks,” Vir said, leaving the package sealed until he’d reached his room.
Neel woke up at the noise and lazily sauntered over, brushing up against his leg.
“I feel like you keep getting left behind on these missions, boy. Don’t worry. That’s gonna change.”
Vir was hoping to be rid of this assassin role he’d somehow grown into.
Arooo!
“That’s right. It’s all gonna change soon,” he whispered, unwrapping the cloth to reveal a wooden box.
Inside, he found ten silver coins, a velvet emerald and gold robe, and a folded piece of paper. The robe was the same one Mina had given him weeks ago when he’d first arrived in the city. San had altered the garment, removing the insignias marking it as a royal heirloom. Now, it made the perfect disguise to infiltrate the royal grounds with. He would become someone of prestige, trusted by the royal family.
The coins were downpayment. He’d receive far more upon completion of the task. It was a nice show of faith from the prince, but what interested Vir more was the paper.
It was a map. A detailed map of the castle grounds. Every floor was there, including the basement floors and the temple building. And marked with an X was the royal priest’s room, on the tenth floor of the tall temple building.
Of course it has to be all the way up.
The robe was his backup disguise. Another tool he might use to keep himself hidden.
Vir spent the next hour committing the layout to memory. It helped that he’d already visited once, allowing him to link the halls from his memory to the lines drawn on the map.
The money, while appreciated, wasn’t immediately useful for him. With the new coin, he could afford that brigandine he’d been eyeing, but there wouldn’t be enough time to have it fitted. Going on a high stakes mission with unfitted armor he hadn’t grown used would be worse for him than going without it.
It was the same for his chakrams. Though he’d longed to upgrade his rusted iron ones for superior steel, chakrams weren’t widely available weapons. They’d be a custom order, which meant waiting a week or more.
Instead, Vir spent his time on the upgrade that would bring him the most benefits.
“Feel like some exercise, Neel?” he said with a grin. “I’ll race ya!”
Woof woof!
It was time to remove the thorn in his side. It was time to master Empower.
It took some time to find an ideal spot. The rooftops made prana channeling more difficult, so he’d opted for an alley in the Upper West Side district, far enough away that his experiments wouldn’t drain the prana near Mina’s secret hatch, which was also in the same district.
The area was defined by its larger homes, which meant a lower population density, allowing Vir to practice in peace while Neel roamed, poking his nose into everything he found.
Empower would serve him well for his upcoming operation. It was an ideal counterpart to Toughen, which was another side of the same ability.
With Toughen, Vir supersaturated his blood with prana to improve his resilience. It was essentially natural armor, but it had to be activated manually.
For Empower, Vir relied on the same technique, except instead of focusing his will on tanking hits, he surged the prana in conjunction with a strike. Now that he thought about it, Leap and High Jump worked similarly.
He was learning that what appeared to be unique Talents were really just different applications of the same underlying principle. Just that they appeared distinct since no one understood how Talents really worked.
The issue with Empower was the prana he sucked in from the ground would dissipate into his bloodstream as it traveled from his legs to his arms.
By the time the supersaturated blood reached his arms, it was no longer supersaturated.
Until now, Vir relied on a crutch to make up for this. Since he lacked the skills to conduct ground Ash Affinity prana up to his arms, he’d been forced to charge the Talent by placing his hands on the ground.
This was less than ideal. In combat, he’d rarely have that luxury, and Empower was uniquely suited to combat. He needed a way to charge it as quickly as he charged Leap.
Which meant conducting the prana through his entire body, and on that front, he’d made progress in two areas.
The first was a continuation of what he’d been doing the past several months—mapping out his body’s blood pathways. Prana and blood were inseparable. Which meant if Vir wanted to optimize the flow of prana from his legs to his arms, he had to understand how blood traveled through his body.
Mapping out the largest arteries hadn’t taken him too long. After all, they contained the most blood and prana, making them easy to detect. It was the smaller pathways that had taken him forever.
Vir retrieved a piece of parchment from his sack and unfurled it. It vaguely resembled the human body, but instead of showing flesh, it showed the pathways he’d been mapping.
The sheer number staggered him. Many were so tiny, he only found them by intentionally diverting prana and seeing the motes travel through the tiny tubes. They were otherwise invisible.
Ordinarily, such small capillaries would be useless—even if he could shortcut blood up his body using those, they were too tiny to carry a significant amount of blood.
But he’d been working around that. After trial and error, he’d learned to expand the pathways. By regularly shunting prana-soaked blood through them, they’d expanded. The process took weeks, and Vir had only stumbled upon it by chance as he practiced his prana control. After months of practice, he’d finally expanded the proper blood pathways to streamline the prana flow from his legs up to his arms.