Amanda’s room in the guildhall was the polar opposite of Torglin’s shack: an austere stone box, cold as a crypt. Yet inside her skull, a far brighter inferno raged.
She sat on the bare floor, legs tucked beneath her, back pressed to the wall. Her eyes were closed, but behind the lids blazed visions: not re thoughts, but luminous, perfect holograms.
Three suits of armor.
Not rely legendary.
World-rewriting.
One caught and shattered sunlight into a thousand lethal sunbeams, a crystalline carapace of living prisms.
The second was blacker than a starless sky, chainmail that devoured sound and light alike.
The third was lighter than cobweb, yet whispered with the rustle of dragon scales.
One of them would be hers. That was the entire point. She would not rely wear it; she would beco it.
Her current role—“spoiled advisor,” “scher in skirts”—suddenly felt like child’s play in a sandbox. Why bother manipulating a dozen brokers and sellswords for scraps of influence when she could beco a living nightmare for entire armies?
The vision hit her with painful, cinematic clarity.
Scene: a blood-soaked mountain pass.
The enemy line: a forest of spears and hateful eyes.
And there, alone in the center, a slight, red-haired girl in armor that did not belong to this world.
She smiles. A wide, lunatic smile visible half a league away.
She snaps her fingers.
Their warlord—a giant in gilded plate—suddenly chokes, claws at his throat as a crimson fountain erupts. He topples like a felled oak. No arrow. No flash of magic. Nothing.
She glances at a watchtower.
The sentry slides quietly down the railing, leaving a long wet streak on the wood. His scream dies in a slit throat.
She points one lazy finger.
The enemy banner—its pole thick as a man’s arm—silently tilts and crashes, as though kicked by an invisible titan.
To every onlooker it will not look like the work of a team.
It will look like her personal, incomprehensible power. A power that raises gooseflesh even among allies. As if she tugs invisible strings tied directly to Death itself.
They will whisper in terror.
“The Red Witch… she kills with a glance.”
“Her ghosts cut throats on the whisper of the wind.”
The corner of her mouth twitched upward—no warmth in the expression at all.
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A cunning politician?
No.
She would beco a phenonon. A walking cataclysm people believed in because the corpses were undeniably real.
It was not tactics.
It was art.
The illusion of absolute power, more terrifying than any real spell. Who would dare touch the woman whose re whim ended the finest warriors without them ever seeing their killer?
PROBLEM
The idyll shattered against one crude, ugly chunk of reality.
“Damn it…” The curse slipped out quietly, but with such concentrated venom the air itself seed to crackle. “And where exactly am I supposed to find two idiots willing to wear the remaining invisible suits and murder whoever I point at?”
She dropped her forehead to her knees. Nas flashed through her mind and were discarded just as fast.
rcenaries? They’d sell the armor for a copper the first chance they got.
Guild mbers? They’d betray her the mont they figured out what they were wearing.
Slaves? Too broken; they’d crumble at the first order.
Then it struck her.
A thought so simple, so cynically perfect it felt obscene.
They didn’t need to be strong.
They didn’t need to be clever.
They didn’t need to be experienced.
They only needed to be nobody.
Ghosts before they were even dead.
Refugees whose villages had been burned to ash.
Orphans who watched their families raped and butchered.
Ragged things with dead eyes where only one ember still glowed: cold, reckless thirst for revenge against anyone.
But there was one crucial detail.
Amanda’s hand clenched into a fist of its own accord.
Everyone must see only .
Their fear, their hatred, their confusion; everything had to point to her alone.
Her “shadows” had to be perfect voids. No one must even suspect human killers existed. They had to believe it was her unknowable, horrifying power.
The plan crystallized—diamond-hard, ice-cold, brilliant.
SOLUTION
Amanda rose to her feet in a single fluid, feline motion, brimming with new purpose. The stone beneath her bare soles no longer felt cold; it was rely sothing to push against.
Step one: wait for the dwarf to finish the armor.
Step two: descend into the slums along the Black River. Not to search, but to *choose*. Two. Young. Starving. With eyes in which the light had already died. She would offer them neither food nor shelter. She would offer them aning. Vengeance wrapped in silk and legend.
Step three: sculpt them with her own hands.
Not rely train them. Take those lumps of despair and mold them into perfect, silent instrunts. Breathe her will into them. Surround them with rumors so chilling the blood would freeze.
They would not be re assassins.
They would beco part of her myth.
The whisper in the dark that *she herself* would plant:
“Did you see the garrison commander drop? They say she only sighed in his direction…”
“Her shadows aren’t human. They’re the restless souls of dead soldiers she bound to her service…”
She walked to the narrow window. Below, the city crawled through its maze of filthy alleys. Sowhere down there, in that filth and despair, her future ghosts were already waiting.
Her living, breathing weapons.
Her perfect camouflage.
That reckless, icy smile blood across her lips once more, promising storms.
“Perfect,” she whispered into the gathering dusk. “If they insist on seeing a monster in …”
She let the sentence hang in the air, finishing it only in the silence of her mind with absolute, bottomless certainty:
…then I will beco the most terrifying monster from their nightmares.
And my invisible claws will tear their worlds apart while they stare, spellbound, into my smiling eyes.
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