The first few floors of the underground complex were just the usual black market. No assassins for hire anywhere. Drugs, weapons, and suspicious artifacts for sale. Sofia silently floated through the corridors, nobody strong enough to see through her title’s invisibility.

But if she wanted to go to the deeper levels, it was going to be a bit harder. Her mana senses couldn’t reach beyond the third underground level. There was a single set of stairs leading to it, guarded by two men with mana hearts.

They’re not playing around.

The graveyard nymphs couldn’t get her inside either, the entire lower levels were protected from spirit plane intrusions by a layer of black primus resin.

Teleporting would be complex, too. With this level of security…

The good news is that they’re basically in a small prison of their own making.

Basically the best option is to force my way through.

I should be able to survive even against a level 399. Surely this stupid black market wouldn’t be protected by a level 400… I don’t want to waste too much time on this…

Sofia floated until she was right in front of the door in between the two guards. Finally from so close up, one of them noticed something wrong. Sofia disabled her invisibility, appearing as a hulking form in an intimidating skull-covered bone armor. She locked all of the two guards’ bones in place, preventing them from even opening their mouths. They reflexively sent spells her way, but they all dispersed into a thin mana mist before they could even properly form. Dispelling these measly attacks with [Heat Death] was not even enough to make Sofia’s mana count move, the cost was lower than her regeneration.

She did not even spare them a glance, “Don’t make a scene and quietly open the door if you want to live.”

She released her control over their bones. The two guards did not hesitate to launch a coordinated attack.

Their weapons and spells never reached her. Their bones all turned to dust, and they fell to the floor like two disgusting bags of flesh. This wasn’t enough to kill them outright, but a dagger left through the cracks of Sofia’s bone armor, flying down with deadly speed, cutting the guards open.

Without a word, Sofia bent down, and plucked out two fresh ‘jewels’ for the Abereth, which had conveniently just appeared behind her, as if waiting for its new toys.

‘You have murdered [Jer Blackhand - Lightning mage Lv. 288]’

‘You have murdered [Velek - Mercenary Lv. 264]’

Lightning mage? So that’s what he was so desperately trying to cast.

With a snort, Sofia placed the two still bloody mana hearts into the Abereth’s slots. She did not even bother checking the trash they were equipped with. Controlling her dagger through the bone sprite catalyst, she made it carve out the entire triple-layered mithril and orichaclum door like it was paper, and simply pushed it open with a light kick.

A flurry of spells and arrows flew her way before the door even hit the ground.

“I guess I blew my chances at negotiations, huh,” Sofia said, negating every single damaging spell, all the debuffs being eaten by the philosopher’s stone, and the magicless physical attacks failing to pierce through her armor.

She counted at least twelve people above level 250, all relentlessly attacking her.

She stood in the doorway silently, waiting for it to stop. Her health had not moved once.

Ten seconds into it, the attackers were not backing down, in fact they seemed to think the reason Sofia did not move was because she couldn’t for some reason. Maybe they thought it took her too much focus to dispel everything. Nevertheless, they were careful, not a single one of them getting into close range.

Sofia hadn’t planned to kill everyone. After all, unless they were killing kids, she couldn’t care less about a random group of assassins in another country. But she also had very little patience for this kind of person.

Extremely little.

She teleported forward, putting all the attackers into her close aura range. They became boneless sacks of flesh. She did not even feel the itch to feed Bookie this garbage.

While Bookie himself had stayed in Ser’Extra, his book form was still latched at Sofia’s waist. She plucked a page and summoned Crowie.

“Collect the mana hearts and anything these guys have that looks valuable.”

Some of the flesh blobs tried to oppose resistance, one even used some healing skill that started to quickly regrow his bones. Sofia took control of the half-regrown bones and turned him into a fleshy bleeding porcupine.

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The flesh piles’ garbled screams of terror died down one by one as Crowie pecked out their mana hearts. There were actually a few people under level 250 in the mix, but they had all died from the deboning.

Meanwhile, now that she was inside, Sofia scanned through the entire lower part of the black market with her mana senses.

Her scan complete, Sofia started walking deeper into the black market, she shot a glance back at Crowie, still heartily doing his job. “You can pile everything up by the door,” she started. After some thought, she tore a second page from Bookie, summoning the fortune dwarf. He used to cost her entire mana pool but now five million was almost nothing.

“Don’t let anyone get in or out, I’ll be back in a bit.”

There were much fewer ‘merchants’ on the lower levels of the black market, most of them on high alert, hiding however they could. Except for the ones on the current level, who had witnessed how Sofia had dealt with the guards. Those ones had either fainted, or were already groveling on the ground, begging for their life.

These were all information sellers, it seemed. Sofia ignored them, and walked down to the fifth underground level.

This floor was large and noisy, with multiple rows of cages stacked and neatly lined up. The only reason Sofia wasn’t already killing everyone in this underground black market was because of these cages contents. Only monsters, no kids, no people. For the most part they were pretty common monsters like slimes and wolves, but there was clearly an emphasis on venomous ones. There was even a water basin full of spaced-out goblins, likely drugged to the gills.

A few of the monsters in orichalcum cages looked strong enough that they might actually be over level 250 with physikstones, which was certainly not something Sofia had imagined she would find under a human city. But she cared very little. No one stopped her as she walked toward the next flight of stairs, in fact no one even dared to move from their hiding spot or make the smallest noise.

Sofia only senses four people on the sixth and last floor, one guard who she guessed was about on her level, and three ‘regular’ people, all under level 200 from her estimate.

She expected the guard to attack as soon as she stepped into view, but to her surprise, the tall, burly man covered in scars, with two sabers at his sides, did not. He even bowed to Sofia as she made her way down to the sixth floor, which was a single room with three ‘shops’ one on each wall except the stairs. They were humbly labelled ‘Loans’, ‘Relics’ and ‘Cleaning’

“What are you doing! Kill him! We’ll double your pay for this month!” a trembling dried-up old man with a mouth full of golden teeth cried out from the ‘loans’ shopfront when he saw the guard greet the intruder.

The guard glared back at the old man, “Shut it, old Jang. I lose this.”

“What!” the old man spat back, “He’s forty levels weaker than you! Do you take me for a fool?! Kill him th–”

Sofia fused the old man’s lower jaw together with his skull, and turned to the guard, “You’re smarter than the guys upstairs. Refreshing.”

“Are you still going to fight me?” he asked in return, hands hovering over his weapons.

“Do you really think you can survive if I say yes?”

The man's face was sour but he did not look scared, “I don’t fancy my chances, but I won’t let myself get slaughtered.”

“Huh. I respect that. I’m not here to kill everyone, though,” Sofia said. Everyone else in the room visibly relaxed, slightly, though ‘old Jang’ was still visibly freaking out, clawing at his inexplicably locked jaw. “For now,” Sofia added, turning toward the ‘cleaning’ shop.

The veiled woman behind that shopfront started shaking visibly.

“Not very brave for a ‘cleaner’,” Sofia commented, “It’s different when you’re on the receiving end, huh?”

She summoned the assassin’s skeleton again. The three shopkeepers seemed more scared, while the guard’s face grew somber.

“Now, I’ve come all this way, can you confirm this is your ‘employer’?” Sofia asked the skeleton, pointing at the veiled woman.

“I knew it, necromancer… Fuck… This never ends well…” the ‘relics’ shop owner mumbled under his breath, probably thinking Sofia couldn’t hear him.

The skeleton nodded without hesitation.

“I’ve got the right place, then,” Sofia said, nodding to herself.

“D- Do you want information on one of my clients?” the veiled lady asked, barely managing to string the words together. “I will give them to you!”

“Hmm? No, I don’t care about that, actually. Now, for the true questions, does this place take contracts to kill children?”

The veiled lady seemed to desperately want to answer that herself to try to save her skin, but she couldn’t get a read on the necromancer under the armor, so she had no clue what to say.

The skeleton shook his head.

“Oh, so you still have at least a shred of integrity. It’s your lucky day,” Sofia said, walking up to the veiled lady’s shopfront. She tried to back off from the counter, but couldn't, her entire body mysteriously locked in place.

The guard seemed to consider putting his life on the line for his job, his hand twitching over his sabers, but Sofia looked his way, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. And I’m not going to kill her, so relax. She IS the boss of the ‘cleaning crew’, right?”

The skeleton and the guard both nodded.

Sofia leaned against the ‘cleaning’ counter and explained the situation.

“You see, as you can guess, this guy behind me is one of your ‘cleaners’. He went ahead and killed someone in MY city,” she said, leaning closer to the veiled lady who couldn’t even open her mouth to defend herself. “The first ever murder in my city! Because of you. We can’t have that; do you understand? Security is very important. We don’t do murder in Ser’Extra. Do you get it?”

There was a short silence.

“Ah, right, you can’t answer.” Sofia pulled the lady’s veil to the side, she looked like any regular 40 year old auntie, just with a lot of overdone black makeup. She frantically nodded with her eyes. “Hmmm. It’s good that you get it.”

Sofia grabbed the lady’s right arm, fused all of its bones, and twisted it into one long corkscrew. Everyone else could only watch in horror as blood and flesh spurted to make space for the new bone configuration.

“The next time an assassin from the human continent steps foot into my city, I’m turning this country into an open air cemetery, starting with you. I hope you got the message.”

Nobody in the room dared to say a word as Sofia unhurriedly climbed the stairs out.