Love Affair?

Spoiler:

The delicious scent of caramelised sugar drifted into the cold air as Zubaidah raised the warm cup of tea to her tentative lips. She was sitting on a balcony high above the rest of the market square, observing the scene that was occurring in the streets below her. As the busy work of merchants and of grocers selling their wares continued throughout the late evening, she inhaled the strong floral scent of camomile of her tea.

    She had been approached by a upper class woman after the incident at the Black Asp who had asked her to stalk their husband, due to certain suspicions of an adulterous nature. And now she was watching that very same husband walking through the markets’ colourful stalls, his eyes darting this way and that as he made his way to a side street. Even though he seemed to be going further in the opposite to Zubaidah’s position, she made no move to stop him in any form. For she need do nothing, all the groundwork had already been laid beforehand, and so she only needed to appear to him at a later time. She smiled softly into the pale liquid within her porcelain cup as she thought of her success in this endeavour, waiting for her tea to cool slightly before she attempted to drink any more of the boiling liquid.

228/1000

As she put down the empty teacup onto the detailed saucer, a cheerful voice spoke out from behind her, ‘I’ve got that man’s final location completely pinned down, don’t’cha worry, Zuzu!’ The source of this jollity was a young woman whose red hair was kept in a rough ponytail, which was bobbing up and down as she continued hopping up and down on the spot like she was on a sugar high. ‘Thank you, Koko, for the information. And if what you’ve said is the case,’ ‘And course it is, Zuzu,’ the redhead butted in, ‘Fine, then, as this is the case, we must move immediately.’

    As Zubaidah was helped to her feet by Koko, the assistance not necessarily needed by her but welcome either way, they spied out their target in a side alley not far from their current location. In a hurry to finish off their long-winded job, the two made their way along the winding backstreets of the market district and quietly hid themselves in the thick shrubberies outside of the villa that the targeted man had entered. However, before they could attempt to slip in after him, three guards marched into position in front of the doorway. Already aware that this would be the case, Zubaidah signalled for Koko to continue with the plan, gesturing towards the guards as if she was stabbing an imaginary something in the air. Recognising the signal, Koko flicked her wrist and gathered three knives into her hand before throwing them into the right ankle of each soldier, knocking them onto the floor from the speed and force of the blades projectile.

499/1000

Taking advantage of the opening that this gave her, Zubaidah slammed the butt end of her spear into the first guard’s stomach before finally knocking him out with a quick blow to his unguarded head. Aware that the other two guards were shaking off the initial daze the pain had given them, Zubaidah leapt towards the second guard, slashing at his arm as they attempted to make a clumsy attack with their sword, disabling their primary arm and disarming them of their sword. However, her finishing blow to the second guard was stopped by the last of the three whose greying hair suggested experience in this line of work. True to her deductions, instead of sidestepping her lunge and walking into her trap, the third guard seemed to recognise the manoeuvre that Zubaidah was enacting upon, and so he parried her attack and dealt a great hit with the blunt side of his sword to her primary arm. Dropping her spear to the floor from the searing pain, Zubaidah ran through the options she had and decided upon a bold course of action. She stayed in her current crouch and waited for the third guard to approach. Once he got within an arm’s width of her, she lashed out with her left leg sweeping his feet from underneath him, which caused him to collapse backwards. However, she left no room for error and wrested the sword from his weakening grip as he lay there in stunned panic, before standing up with a great difficulty. ‘I’m glad that you gave me such an intense and interesting battle but, unfortunately, I need to get this all over with quickly.’ With a simple swipe of the flat side, she knocked the second guard out cold before swiping at the third guard’s head, making his eyes roll upwards and fall unconscious.

    Finally rid of the nuisances in the form of those three guards, Koko ran out of the bushes, picking up Zubaidah’s spear as she went, and handed it to its proper owner, who used it as a prop to keep herself standing. With Koko supporting Zubaidah, the two entered into the now unguarded villa and quietly made their way to the upper floor where they heard a man speaking to a voice that was so slightly distorted that the gender and age was impossible to make out.
‘I promise that the payment will be paid by tomorrow,’ the man’s voice wavered, ‘Do not worry. And if it pleases you, I could have that price paid in double!’ The other voice, now sounding more feminine, replied, ‘I don’t care at all about what amount of money those bastards in the east up top get. I ain’t getting anything more than what I'm promised, and that’s only given to me if you pay up. If I had to say, I’m more like a knuckle on the finger, this here mercenary only gets paid for their threats, but is needed to connect the finger to the palm.’ Here, there was a sound akin to steel sliding on steel. ‘Just know that I’ll happily introduce you to my knife if you cause me to not get my pay.’

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With the mysterious voice having gone silent, and hearing a huge sigh of relief from their target, Zubaidah and Koko retreated to outside the property. As they digested the information, the two discussed the meanings of what that mercenary was talking to the man about. Most certainly, their target had been dabbling in a darker side of the city which Zubaidah had only touched upon, but Koko had apparently witnessed much more. Yet even she could not puzzle this riddle. Even when they put down all the cards into play, from the murders surrounding clients of the El Ragu beverage, to the sign of the bloody hand made by the assassin, from the assailant who had attempted to block them from accessing legal documents around sales of illicit substances, to the current situation which indicated some sort of mercenary force that was enforcing trade for an underground organisation. They reported to their client that her suspicions were proved false, choosing to skip the information about her husband's relations to a shady group, and received their due reward. But even after that, they felt unfulfilled, as if they were missing some important piece of information that linked all previous cases.

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