LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 5
<5 - Secret Assassin Instructor>
One day, just like any other, I was absorbed in training.
However, something special began today.
“I am the maid dispatched to take care of the young lady.”
“Ooh.”
Clap clap clap.
A maid in a stunning outfit appeared, deserving of applause.
With short green hair and sharp eyes, the cute maid graciously lifted the hem of her long skirt with both hands to greet me.
“From today, I’ll be attending to Miss Oknodie. My name is Reap Life.”
All was well.
Which made it even more suspicious.
“Miss, is there something wrong with the maid?”
“Your name. What is your full name?”
“My apologies. Let me introduce myself again. I am Reap Life.”
Reap Life.
The life of a leaf.
What a pretty name for a maid.
And that made me even more envious.
Some had silly names like Jonnas Wahyhiemhai, but why did the maid get a perfectly normal name?
I was both jealous and angry.
“Miss?”
“It’s nothing.”
To be jealous of a maid because of a name.
That’s something I couldn’t share with anyone.
*
Reap Life felt intrigued.
A harvested life.
Once, thanks to the Boss, a girl who had barely survived vowed to sacrifice her life to the Boss.
Having discarded her old name, she gained a new one.
Reap Life.
It was a name imbued with the pride of an assassin.
She was reaped by the Boss.
And she would reap the Boss’s enemies with her own hands.
That name held a double meaning.
“Did you reveal your identity?”
“Not at all. I intend to also serve as a secret guardian. I have no intention of revealing your identity to the young lady.”
“Then it’s purely based on instinct.”
Reap felt intrigued.
“The verification request from the supervisor is about the skills of an assassin. It won’t end with just a single test.”
“I know. I’ll leave the evaluation up to you.”
“Quite confident, aren’t we?”
“You’ll see.”
Reap watched every move of the young lady closely.
And she was convinced.
‘She was born to be an assassin!’
The young lady had the instinct to hide, trying to escape from the butler and herself at every opportunity.
She also had the instinct to scout, gauging whether she could slip through the window at night, sensing her surroundings.
With immense weapons hidden away, she acted as if nothing was amiss, continuing to eat meals without skipping a beat, even while training with heavy weights.
“I will report to the supervisor.”
“When do you plan to start training?”
“Right from today.”
“Ensure it doesn’t interfere with the current training.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll minimize the drug and poison resistance training and postpone the stealth skills for later. For now, I’ll focus intensively on hiding and scouting training.”
“Not bad.”
“But I wonder why someone of your caliber is still doing this. I hear there’s been trouble with that last ‘young lady’ incident…”
“That’s enough.”
Reap shut her mouth at the butler’s swift hand motion.
“Know your place. The one you need to watch is not me but the young lady.”
“…My apologies.”
Jonna, the reaper, left to prepare for tomorrow’s training for the young lady.
Reap smiled coldly.
‘No matter how talented the young lady is, if she gets too greedy, it could be trouble. The organization isn’t lenient enough to tolerate repeated mistakes.’
*
The new maid, Reap.
She was annoyingly helpful.
“What are you doing in the laundry basket?”
“…It looked like a good place to hide for a moment.”
[Hiding failed.]
Sometimes she was a hindrance to training.
“Miss? Wait… Was it just the shadow of the garden tree behind the curtains?”
[Hiding experience +1]
[Someone saw you, but didn’t notice.]
[Hiding experience +3]
[Stealth experience +1]
At times, she helped instead.
Unlike the butler Jonna, where hiding was a matter of chance, the maid had many chores such as laundry and cleaning.
If I didn’t predict the movements through observing the daily schedule or conversations during meal times, I’d get found out quickly.
Yet if I prepared well and outsmarted the maid, my hiding experience skyrocketed.
Thanks to that, even my stealth skills improved naturally, turning bad luck into fortune.
“Ugh. This dish tastes weird.”
“My apologies, Miss. I will be more careful next time.”
However, lately, the butler had been a troublemaker.
Until now, he had always cooked well, but now he kept failing in seasoning, serving dishes with odd tastes.
“Miss?”
“Don’t take it away. I worked hard on it!”
[Identified spoiled food.]
[Poison resistance experience +1]
[Ate spoiled food.]
[Poison resistance experience +1]
Was there a risk of food poisoning involved?
But if I can show that I finished this, she might cook more carefully next time.
After breakfast, I felt grateful towards the butler, but both the butler and the maid stared at me oddly.
Hehe. Did I move them?
From afar, the butler and maid whispered and from the next day, the maid acted strangely kind to me.
“Would you like a strawberry-flavored lollipop?”
“Sure!”
“This is grape-flavored.”
“Yes, please!”
“Today, I specially baked cookies.”
“That sounds great!”
Her giving me treats delighted her, and she kept bringing me snacks whenever she could.
Hehe. Thanks to my genuine reactions, I feel rewarded for all the treats.
Sometimes, she brought snacks that tasted weird, but because I ate them without a problem, she brought everything from slice cakes to alphabet chocolates.
Silly maid.
She doesn’t even realize that her salary is being used as a sacrifice to increase the collection rate of the Cooking Handbook!
*
Late at night.
In the user room of the Secret Training Ground, the butler and maid transformed back into officers of the Organization and assassins.
“How’s the poison adaptation training going?”
“It’s progressing faster than expected. I inadvertently made quite a bit of progress.”
“Is it similar to that at meal times?”
“The detection rate is about 30%, which is pretty high.”
“Is that normal?”
“Of course, it’s abnormal.”
Reap asserted.
“Normally, a common person would feel a mild discomfort after eating poisoned food, but the way Miss Oknodie expresses her strong suspicion or certainty is unusual. If she realized it, she wouldn’t even eat it.”
“And yet she ate everything.”
“Two scenarios are conceivable. She’s been on the brink of death several times after eating poison-laced food on the streets, or she had to eat contaminated food to survive.”
The assassin’s assertion.
Jonna thought he knew enough about the garbage of the streets but realized his thoughts had been naive.
“This city has a lot of toxic trash.”
“Are you planning on cleaning it up?”
“They were touching the organization’s young lady. We can’t let them live.”
Malice intensified in Jonna’s eyes.
“Wait… could the street magician’s trickery and the food laced with poison for the humans of the street indicate that another organization might have infiltrated this city?”
“You intend to take action?”
“It’s worth investigating. Reap. Change tonight’s observation mission regarding the young lady. Confirm if there’s unidentified hostile activity of an organization.”
“If you discover them, then what?”
No need to say.
“Murder them all.”
At Jonna’s orders, Reap bore a chilling smile.
*
Today, I was lucky enough to have no observation duty.
Once the maid came, the butler Jonna’s surveillance decreased, and I naively thought the maid would peacefully sleep at night since I had given her snacks, dropping my guard.
Hehe. Is it troublesome?
If you lower your guard around a veteran player like me…
I might sneak out at midnight and invoke an event like ambushing the criminal organization in the streets.
After all, those who challenge the test with money extorted from commoners are likely better off being taken down by a righteous player to bolster their funds.
Thus, I quietly left the mansion.
While looking for signs of organizations I remember, I headed to an abandoned warehouse near the sewer, and ta-da, a hideout with dozens of corpses appeared.
“…?”
Is it an organizational feud?
Why are they all dead?
Looking at the vault, there wasn’t a trace of a turn.
It wasn’t a murder for money.
Feeling uneasy, I raided the criminal organization’s office in the slums where another group could be.
“…??”
Again, many bodies were stacked.
The hideout of a corrupt merchant that tries to capture players as slaves with a 20% chance.
The tent of a circus group that eats human flesh.
Every crime organization I came upon was littered with corpses.
What the heck is this?
This is kind of scary.
Feeling creeped out, I returned to the mansion and shut the window, and lights suddenly clicked on.
“EEEKK!!”
“Where have you been at this late hour, Miss?”
“S-some light evening stroll.”
“I smell blood.”
“N-no! I didn’t kill anyone. Every place I went, they were all dead!”
Reap, who looked slightly surprised, smiled at me.
As she gazed at me with a charming smile, ripe like a fruit, she undressed my outdoor clothes and laid me down on the bed.
As I blinked in bewilderment, Reap covered me with a blanket up to my neck and then placed her hand over my eyes.
“You had a bad dream.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t worry. Tonight, I will keep watch. You won’t have nightmares, so sleep well this night.”
With a soft voice, drowsiness came creeping in.
Through the gentle hand covering my eyes, I heard the flickering flame of a candle, and I started feeling as if I had inhaled some sort of hypnotic gas, gradually becoming drowsy.
Was it… a nightmare?
Feeling a sense of relief from her cool touch over my eyes, I drifted into sleep.
“I allowed you to… follow me… for specialized training….”
I thought I heard Reap say something in my dream, but it must be my imagination.