Creak.

  A hook-nosed thug stepped outside, muttering curses under his breath. "Ungrateful wretch."

  "Won't do as you're told, will you. If you weren't still earning me coin, I'd beat the fight right out of you."

  He swung over the railing and ducked into a narrow alley, fumbling with his trousers. The slums had no latrines to speak of. The place was fouler than nineteenth-century London -- walk between the shanties and you'd step in someone else's filth before you'd gone ten paces. No noble or merchant would set foot here. Even the city guard couldn't be bothered to patrol.

  The slums were left to rot.

  "Shit."

  "I'll make you pay for that."

  The words had barely left the thug's mouth when something cold kissed the back of his neck. Before he could reach for his weapon, an arm clamped over his face, and a dagger flashed in the dark, opening his throat in a single stroke. Blood sprayed in a wide arc, gurgling out in rhythmic spurts. The figure behind him held the man's neck in a vise grip, waiting until the body stopped twitching before letting go.

  Soren emerged from the shadows. His expression was blank -- the face of a man who had turned killing into reflex.

  Once he entered combat, mercy ceased to exist.

  It was the only reason he'd survived long enough to reach the legendary tier in his previous life.

  He dragged the corpse deeper into the alley. Blood smeared across the ground behind him, but the darkness swallowed everything.

  "Where's Carbo?"

  Another thug came out grumbling. "Taking a piss shouldn't take all damn night."

  "Boss wants him."

  The man scanned the alley, and something in his gut told him things weren't right. They'd clashed with a rival gang just the day before. He drew a short blade and crept toward the alley mouth, every nerve on edge.

  The stench of blood hit him like a wall.

  His face went white. He opened his mouth to scream -- but the shadows twisted.

  A dagger punched through his back. A powerful arm locked around his throat, strangling the cry before it could escape.

  Shadow Concealment -- Success.

  Backstab activated -- critical multiplier x2. Sixteen damage dealt.

  Target eliminated.

  Soul energy extracted. Thirty experience points gained.

  Soren dragged the second body into the alley.

  Two kills in quick succession. The reek of blood was thick enough to taste now. Behind nearby doors, bolts slammed home as the neighbors sensed what was happening.

  He scooped up a second dagger from the dead man's belt and stepped back into the open, a blade in each hand.

  The blood on him was impossible to miss.

  Stealth was pointless now. They'd notice soon enough.

  Slum gangs didn't boast many real fighters, and fewer still had crossed the threshold into a professional class. Taking out these two first had been enough of an advantage.

  Soren leaped, kicked off the wall, and landed silently on the rooftop.

  Twenty points of Dexterity -- superhuman by any measure -- meant his footsteps made no sound at all. He picked up a loose roof tile and hurled it into the street below. The clatter brought three armed thugs rushing out. At their head was Garris, the one he'd marked during the day. The man surveyed the alley with wary eyes, then jerked his chin toward the side passage, sending the others ahead.

  A shriek tore through the night.

  Soren dropped from the rooftop like a bird of prey, landing on the trailing man. One dagger raked down from the shoulder blade to the small of his back; the other flashed upward, driving through the soft gap beneath the jaw and into the skull.

  No hesitation. Not an instant's pause.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He kicked the corpse aside and flicked his wrist. The dagger spun end over end and buried itself in the second man's heart.

  "You--"

  Garris barked a curse, ripped his longsword free, and brought it crashing down. His face was ugly with fury. "Have you lost your mind?"

  Steel rang against steel -- once, twice, three times.

  Soren's daggers wove an impossible pattern, catching each blow on angled edges, turning the heavier blade aside with precision that bordered on contempt. His voice was flat and low.

  "You shouldn't have set your sights on Vivian."

  "So now I have no choice but to send every last one of you to hell."

  A rogue could never afford a prolonged exchange with a warrior.

  Soren had always known that. So when Garris launched the three-hit combination of standard military swordplay, Soren was already moving -- a sidestep, a low sliding kick, and then a flash of cold steel from his off-hand that carved a line across the gap in Garris's armor at the waist.

  Garris was a cautious man.

  Ever since he'd come back wounded from an adventuring expedition, he slept in his leather armor. The hardened cowhide could turn a dagger's edge easily enough.

  But it didn't cover everything.

  Blood seeped through.

  Garris clutched his side. Numbness was already spreading outward from the wound, and his face drained of color. "Poison," he snarled.

  He remembered clearly -- Soren had never received formal combat training. How could an untrained street thief read military swordplay so effortlessly?

  The boy had found the gaps in his technique in the blink of an eye.

  The old Soren wouldn't have known. But the Soren standing here now knew Garris's swordplay the way a surgeon knows anatomy.

  He knew the advanced forms too -- the Cross Sword technique, the White Raven Tactic, the Reverse Slash, and a dozen others. A legendary rogue who'd fought hundreds of battles had to understand every fighting style he might face, or he'd never have survived to reach the legendary tier. Garris was a slum thug. Unless fortune had blessed him with some extraordinary encounter or he could afford the exorbitant cost of proper training, basic military swordplay was all he'd ever master.

  A technique that granted three points of base accuracy and unlocked the Sword Force -- Heavy Slash maneuver. Nothing more.

  Sparks flew.

  Soren's feet traced a strange, fluid pattern across the ground. One instant he was in front of Garris; the next he was behind him. The dagger found the nape of the neck, punched through vertebrae, and twisted a full rotation.

  Garris's body hit the ground.

  Soren stood over it, breathing hard. After a moment, he spoke quietly. "Dying to Shadow Step. At least that's a death worthy of a professional."

  It was a legendary rogue's technique.

  But Soren couldn't truly wield shadow force -- not yet. A real Shadow Step would punch through the shadow plane itself, depositing the user behind his target in the space between one heartbeat and the next. What he'd just done was a facsimile: raw technique and the split-second concealment of natural shadow, used to blind the enemy's eyes and slip past his guard. A true legendary rogue had grasped the essence of shadow and could channel darkness itself into spell-like abilities during combat.

  If not for his extraordinary twenty-point Dexterity, Soren couldn't have simulated even a fraction of his old techniques. And without them, he'd never have dared come here tonight.

  In less than two minutes, three more corpses lay cooling on the ground.

  Under the cover of night, every door in the vicinity had been barred shut. Behind them, the slum's residents huddled in terrified silence.

  Soren hefted a body and used it as a battering ram, smashing through the gang's front entrance. There were plenty of people in a slum gang, but the real core was small. The rest -- the hangers-on, the street toughs recruited for numbers -- were useless in a real fight. With Soren's current abilities, cutting through common thugs was no different from butchering livestock. Any true professional could take ten ordinary men single-handedly.

  A crossbow bolt thudded into the corpse he was carrying.

  He dropped the body instantly and lunged. His legs drove off the far wall, carrying him three horizontal steps across the vertical surface before he launched himself at the shooter.

  The inhuman display froze every man in the room.

  Before they could recover, two of them were on the ground clutching their throats, blood pouring between their fingers.

  Soren's reflexes were savagely fast. He swayed aside from a descending broadsword by the width of a finger, then kicked a wooden stool into the swordsman's face. In the same motion, he seized another man's wrist, and his dagger severed the tendons cleanly. The man screamed. The dancing blade flashed again, carving a gash half a foot long across his throat.

  Blood erupted.

  Soren's toe hooked a fallen crossbow off the floor and flipped it into his hand. He worked the mechanism in a blur, kicked open the inner door, and fired.

  The bolt punched into the darkness.

  A grunt. Then a cry of pain.

  "S-Soren--"

  "Don't kill me! I'll make you boss! You can be the leader from now on--"

  Kol was a dour, sullen man in his middle years. But now he was clutching a bleeding arm, his face contorted with naked terror. "Don't kill me," he begged. "I'll do whatever you say."

  A flash of cold steel.

  Soren opened his throat without expression. Then he frowned at the blood soaking his clothes and began searching the room for anything of value.

  Eleven dead in total.

  Every core member the gang had left. Three of them had advanced into professional classes.

  All of them Tier One.

  Only Garris had managed to trade blows with him for more than a single exchange. The rest hadn't even come close.

  But then, you couldn't expect masters in the slums. People here barely had enough to eat, let alone the wealth or energy for proper training. Most who'd crossed the professional threshold had done so through sheer accumulation of street violence -- brawl after brawl until their bodies adapted on instinct alone.

  A properly trained Tier One warrior could have handled two or three of them at once.

  Soren tore a bedsheet free, rolled every item of value into it, knotted the bundle, and slung it over his shoulder.

  Someone was watching from behind a cracked shutter.

  No one dared come out. This wasn't their business, and they knew it.

  The moment Soren's silhouette vanished into the dark, several men crept from their hovels. They shot vicious glares at the women cowering nearby, then stripped the corpses of anything worth taking and rushed inside the buildings to haul away whatever remained.

  The gang was finished.

  By morning, another crew would move in to claim the territory. If the scavengers didn't take what they could now, they'd get nothing later.

  This was the slums.

  Things like this were as ordinary as the sunrise.