The Insider System

Chapter 73: Death March

As Lake was walking he couldn't help but hope that he didn't need to use Jon to complete his mission because the Assassins guild already knew he was dead. The Alchemist guild literally had to pay for him after Lake had killed him. Lake looked at how the mission was worded and thought it seemed like as long as he did it it didn't matter what identity he used.

Lake wondered what guild he should sneak into. The obvious choices were either Thieves guild and Assassins guild but they were more high risk. Lake was actually leaning towards one of the normal guilds like the Adventurers guild, because they had open doors and once he had an identity he would be able to walk in like nothing was going on.

Lake was pretty sure he would have to go through some stringent test or something if he tried to enter the Assassins guild. Now the only problem was finding someone to kill, Lake didn't really care who it was, but he needed it to be somewhere where he could hide or destroy the body without anyone seeing him do it.

It didn't take too long for Lake to make a plan, he could just follow some adventures out of town and ambush them during a fight to make it seem like they had been killed by monsters. To make this plan work, Lake needed to follow really weak adventures, because they were the type that got killed like that.

Then he needed to make it seem like one of them got away, but in reality he was just going to hide one of the bodies and become them. Then head to the guild and report what happened to the others. Lake hoped that was all he needed to do to complete the mission, because he planned to leave before they found any of the bodies.

They would probably find the other body he had hidden as well even if he destroyed it so he planned to make it less suspicious by making it look like he was so worried about his friends that he returned to look for them after he reported it to the guild and ended up dying because he had already been injured or something.

Since it was impossible for people to track Lake using magic it should also be impossible to find any evidence that anything other than monsters had been there when they died, so they would only have what they could see to go off of. This made it so as long as Lake did a good job falsifying the scene around the bodies he would get away with it.

Lake was once again planning to do more than necessary just to see what was going to happen. Lake was interested in the investigation that might happen, because he wanted to know if there were any jobs that would make it possible to track him down after he killed someone.

Lake knew there had to be skills from some job that were going to give him trouble in the future, he just wanted to know what to expect. The fact that people still did crimes in this world made Lake wonder if he was overthinking it. It was possible that if there was even a job like he expected, maybe it was really rare so they would be too busy to look into some adventures going missing.

Lake finally saw someone wearing armor and stopped them. "Where's the Adventures guild?" They pointed to a tower Lake had thought would belong to a temple or something, and said. "That's the guild district over there." After they answered Lake, Lake eyed them to see if he could save himself the trip, and just get the core he needed now, but after thinking this Lake decided to stick with the plan.

It would be ridiculous to waste all that thinking to save himself a few minutes of walking. Plus the person he had asked seemed a little strong to die fighting the weak monsters around the capital. There were hardly any strong monsters inside the capital wall and they got weaker the further in you went.

That meant Lake needed to find the worst adventures in the city to follow, not someone who might have a few stats that were higher than his. Lake could feel the Insider stir a little after he thought this. It seemed it was excited that he was trying to complete the mission, and it seemed that it liked the way he was doing it as well.

...

Lake had arrived at the guild district but didn't go into any of the buildings. He was just waiting around for someone to move towards the city's exit which was actually visible from where he was, it seemed the main street was where all the guilds were. Once he saw some losers go out of the city Lake would know they were off to hunt and Lake would follow them.

It didn't take long, Lake guessed with all the refugees that had come in last night, lots of people were looking for work in the city, and since there weren't really any monsters here it wasn't hard for them to go out to pick some herbs or something. They were wrong though, the city was full of monsters actually, and them making themselves easy targets was exactly what people like Lake were waiting for.

On the way out Lake saw plenty of others like him trailing behind all the weak adventurers that had probably only joined the guild this morning. This gave him an idea, he could mug all the people he was looking at right now. If they were the type that were looking to kill people and rob them they should know how muggings worked.

Hopefully they would just hand over their stuff, but if they didn't he could kill them and say they had been the ones trying to rob him. Some of them were probably also members of the adventures guild or fighters guild, and Lake would be able to use their cores to complete his mission.

Lake looked at the group of peasants he had been following and marked them. He could always come back later if he didn't find any suitable cores to use. Lake had wanted a small group to target, but it seemed all these new adventurers thought they had a better chance in a group, so Lake was better off going with the single targets that were following them instead.

He would just test the investigative abilities of this world some other time. Lake planned on doing some robberies, and maybe he would receive a lighter sentence if he got caught taking something other than someone's life.

This made Lake wonder if prisons were even a thing here, it was possible no jail was strong enough to hold the superhuman criminals that specialized in breaking in and out of things, so instead of locking them up, they just executed people for their crimes. If Lake was in charge that is what he would do.

...

They had finally gotten far enough from the capital that there were actually trees growing. It had taken a few hours at the pace they were going, and if it wasn't for the fact Lake needed to do this far from town he would have killed everyone he could see for being so slow.

Like him, Lake guessed all these people hadn't known how far they would be going to reach the forest their mission told them to go to. Looking up at the sky, Lake knew there was no way these people would be back to town before the sun went down.

This meant that this forest was about to become a bloodbath, and it didn't matter what Lake did because unless he killed every murderer that had followed these people out here, most of them would be dying tonight. On the way here Lake had seen plenty of shady people that had been eyeing the stream of people moving towards the forest like hawks.

Lake had marked every one he had seen as potential threats and the number had passed 100. The amount actually made Lake think there was some conspiracy to kill all these people for whatever reason, and all these thugs had been hired by somebody, but Lake didn't think he was right, because all these people had just arrived, and all this had happened too quickly for it to be planned out.

Unless they had done this before whenever a massive amount of people came to the city, but if that was true Lake was sure he would have seen some form of law enforcement that had come to stop the massacre.

Lake realized he was thinking too much, and that he needed to actually just start mugging people. The best time to find out what was about to happen was usually once it was over unless you didn't want it to happen, so there was no reason he needed to know because he had no interest in stopping it. Lake pulled out his knife and jumped to where his first victim was.