Time slipped by like a fleeting shadow — in the blink of an eye, half a month had passed. During this short period, many significant events had occurred one after another.
First among them was the situation with the Assassin Brotherhood.
Under Sebas's careful orchestration, the entire branch of the Brotherhood within Mandrake City had been mobilized and sent to Heim City — only to deliver their own heads instead.
However, the number of assassins in Mandrake territory was never large. It was a small region, after all, and most of the Brotherhood's local members were merely intelligence agents, not professional killers.
Sebas didn't bother killing all of them. Instead, he implanted Soul-Eating Worms into their bodies to control them and then handed them over to Witt, tasking him with building a new intelligence organization.
As for the remaining assassins — those who were actual killers — all of them died and their corpses were delivered to Hel.
And, true to his principle that "even a mosquito's leg is still meat," Hel didn't waste them. He revived the corpses as skeletons and sent them to work in the Skeleton Factory as free labor.
Any useful attribute tags they carried were carefully extracted and stored by Hel.
However, since assassins were far rarer than thieves, Hel only managed to obtain a purple-quality tag:
[Assassin Expert]
It was a knowledge-type tag that enhanced assassination skills — allowing its user to leverage the environment and various tools to stage perfect accidental deaths.
Even against transcendents, a stealthy strike could achieve cross-tier kills.
And when combined with the earlier [Thief Expert] tag, both could produce an effect greater than the sum of their parts.
Fortunately, the one thousand trainees Hel had been cultivating were nearly ready.
From them, Witt selected six hundred, forming Heim's first intelligence and assassination force.
Hel, ever terrible at naming things, called them "Ember."
He chose the name because, after removing the base attribute tags, what remained were the "embers" — faint traces of what once burned brightly.
Hel hoped they would operate like those embers — leaving no trace behind.
Among them, one hundred were chosen as assassins, receiving the best talents and resources Hel could provide. Most of the attribute tags Hel had gathered during his hunts were invested into this group.
Each assassin was given at least one purple-quality talent tag, while the top ten received rare shadow-type talents — along with the majority of Hel's stockpile of shadow-element crystals.
In addition, Hel spent a significant amount of his energy points to upgrade both the [Thief Expert] and [Assassin Expert] tags to orange quality, distributing them among the eleven top agents, including Witt himself.
These were to become Hel's elite assassins — the best of the best.
That way, whenever something dirty or dangerous needed doing, Sebas and the others wouldn't have to risk exposure themselves.
Because if someone were to discover that Hel was hiring killers, he might still talk his way out of it.
But if it were revealed that he was working with undead, that would be a death sentence.
After all, undead creatures were the chosen of the Death Lord of the Supreme Church — sworn enemies of all humanity.
Anyone found collaborating with them would immediately become a public enemy of the continent, with bounties issued by every major faction.
But assassins were different.
The Assassin Brotherhood operated across the entire human world and continued to thrive. No ruler in their right mind would ever attempt to destroy them completely — because everyone eventually needed someone to handle dirty work.
Many powers had tried to train their own assassin groups, but none could match the Brotherhood's vast, multinational expertise.
Hel's ambition, however, was precisely that — to create a cross-border intelligence and assassination network of his own.
Thus, of the six hundred members, one hundred became assassins, while the remaining five hundred became intelligence operatives.
Two hundred of them formed the Heim Trade Association, operating openly to gather surface-level intelligence.
The other three hundred were dispersed across various organizations, infiltrating them from within.
Thanks to the blue-quality talent tags they were given and the limitless supply of soulless elemental crystals from Hel, it wouldn't take long before all of them reached third-tier strength.
And in any organization, a third-tier combatant was already considered a pillar-level member — making it easier for them to rise and gain access to sensitive information.
Of course, manpower alone wasn't enough for a proper intelligence network. They needed equipment too —
listening devices, image recorders, wireless transmitters, forged documents, and so on.
But on this magical continent, there was no such technology — only alchemy tools that served similar purposes.
And anything involving alchemy was expensive.
Moreover, Witt planned to take advantage of the lull before the Beastmen invasion to deploy his operatives across the land. That meant they needed these tools as soon as possible.
With no other choice, Hel temporarily set aside his ongoing work and returned personally to Heim to handle the problem.
"So this is what you call a listening device?"
Hel turned the small, palm-sized box that Witt handed him, examining it curiously.
"Yes, young master," Witt said. "This is the most common kind. It can block most spiritual probes and has a three-month active duration.
The only limitation is that someone must bring a receiver close enough to its signal range to collect the recordings."
He pointed to another small box on the table.
"That's the receiver. This design minimizes magical fluctuations during transmission, so others won't detect it.
The data transfer is fast — no more than ten seconds, usually — otherwise it would be a death trap for our agents."
Hel frowned, clearly unimpressed.
"Still seems inconvenient," he muttered, examining the bulky contraption. It wasn't only troublesome to use — it was also too big to hide easily.
Witt nodded.
"There are better alchemy tools out there, of course, but they're all banned items. Even on the black market, they're hard to find.
The ones I used before, during my time with Windwolf's Eye, were the size of a gold coin, and they could transmit signals through fine conductive threads, removing the risk of exposure."
Hel sighed.
"Fine."
He then pointed to another device standing half his height and asked,
"And what about that thing?"
Witt smiled.
"Ah, that's the tool for long-distance communication."