Scorpan grunted as he clambered to the top of the steep hill, the only one around as far as the eye could see, and the only vantage point that he would have of the lonely shack in the middle of the vacant valley.
"Why does she live so far out in the middle of nowhere?" one of his followers asked, stopping to kneel down and pet the hounds that accompanied him.
"Because she makes enemies, and she doesn't want them to find her. Unfortunately, she made enemies of the wrong group, this time." Scorpan looked through his binoculars. He gritted his teeth as he found the house's curtains drawn, but there was a flickering light inside that revealed a silhouette, seemingly sitting down and staring intently at something below. "She's already working on her novel! We must act swiftly. Send in the hounds, and then burn the cabin to the ground."
"You want to sacrifice my pups?!" The man stood, his dogs growling through their muzzles to either side of him. "Send your own damn pet in there!" Scorpan raised his gun to the man's face, and he hesitated. "K-Kill me, and they'll be out of your control."
"Those dogs have been bred to kill by any means, even giving their own lives. They're nothing more than sacrificial pawns. You knew that from the moment you started breeding them."
A woman yawned as she took up her position near the edge of the hill and aimed through the scope of her sniper rifle. "Why go through all that bother when I can just kill her now?"
"You don't have a clear shot. There's no guarantee that she'll die, and Lord Tirek wants to be sure of her death. No mistakes, or else every last one of us will pay the price." He turned back to the hounds' keeper. "Release them, Cybil."
The man, Cybil, looked down to his dogs for a few more seconds, before resigning and leaning down to release their muzzles. "They won't fail to kill her."
"She's fought off lions, tigers, and even bears before."
"Oh my," the female sniper replied. "But that's just in her books, right?"
"Her books are not works of fiction. At the very least, Lord Tirek seems to take them seriously. We'll use the hounds to cut off her escape, and burn her to ashes. Unless one of you would like to volunteer to attack her?" A silence passed between the seven people gathered at the top of the hill. "No? Then we will proceed as I have instructed."
Cybil took in a deep breath, and then nodded. He ordered his hounds towards the shack, and then watched as they raced along the valley.
Daring Do tapped her quill to the paper as she read over what she had written. Her latest adventure had ultimately ended in failure, but the journey itself had given her all that she needed to form a great novel. Still, something seemed to be missing. It lacked the same punch that her previous adventures had, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it.
"Was it because Caballeron gave up so soon? I should be happy for that, but for him to give up on a treasure like that… Something else is going on. Something big. I just wish I could see it…"
She heard the howls and gasped. No wolves lived in this part of the country. Quickly, she rose from her desk and grabbed the pistol to her side.
Her door flew off of its hinges and two great beasts charged in, growling at the author as they crouch down, ready to attack. She fired at one of them, crippling it with an accurate shot to the shoulder, but the other lunged before she could shift her sights.
Swiftly, she dodged to the side and rolled over her bed, reaching for the shotgun that lay beneath. As she re-emerged, the hound was already on her, and she had to use her shotgun as a makeshift muzzle to keep its gnashing jaw from reaching her face.
"Take a nap!" she shouted, releasing one hand to punch the dog in the stomach. It whimpered from the blow, and backed off just long enough for Daring Do to release her shotgun and aim it at the creature's face. She never had the chance to fire, though, before several arrows came crashing through her window, their heads ablaze in alcohol-soaked rags.
The fire spread rapidly, startling the wounded hounds and consuming them in mere moments. Daring Do cried out as she backed herself against a wall, watching as her home and her work were all consumed at once in a sea of flames.
"Damnit! Who are these guys?!" Something fell from a nearby shelf, and as she crouched to avoid the smoke filling the room, she picked up the item. It was a phone. An old one that was horribly outdated, but one that she could not afford to throw away, because it held the numbers of many important people that she dared not store on her actual cell phone.
She put the device in one of her pockets, and then turned to the wall behind her. There was a loose stone that stood out, and upon pushing it, a small section of the wall was pushed back. The smell of sewage filled the room, but it was a welcome scent compared to the burning wood and the smoke all around her.
"Good job I put this here," she said, grinning as she slipped through the hole, where a rusted old ladder waited for her. "Guess I should've invested more in the upkeep, though." Without delay, she descended down into the sewers below, panting heavily now that she was free from the smoke-filled house.
The last sound she heard before she sprinted through the long, cool tunnels was that of her house collapsing above her. Daring Do never looked back. She just ran, occasionally touching her hand to her pocket to ensure that the old phone was still there.
"No body has been found," Cybil reported with a glare. "No human bodies, that is."
"She could not have escaped," Scorpan reasoned. "We had eyes on the entire shack and there is nowhere around here to hide." Looking around, Scorpan noted the state that the charred bed was in, with the covers thrown to one side, and approached. He examined the mattress. There was a palm print in it, along with several small holes. "She vaulted over the bed. The wolves chased her over it. She never jumped back over."
"Hm?" The female sniper approached the wall beside the bed and kicked away the loose bricks. "Well well…"
Scorpan looked up and clenched his hand into a fist. "A tunnel? I ordered a full sweep of this land! Why did this never come up in the report?!"
"Hey, it was a rush job!" one man shouted, running over to Scorpan with a laptop tucked in his left arm. "Besides, I never saw anything about any underground tunnels. Either it was created off-the-record, or she paid good hush money to keep it secret."
"Or perhaps you're just not as good as you claim," the sniper chided.
"Watch it! You're only safe from a distance, you coward!"
The sniper pulled out a knife and regarded the man threateningly. "Wanna see about that?"
"Enough!" Scorpan shouted. "Find out where this tunnel leads! The longer we wait, the farther away she gets, and Lord Tirek expects results soon!"
"Not our problem," the sniper said.
"Isn't it?" Scorpan asked. "Sarah, you believe that I am the only one who will suffer Tirek's wrath if we fail, don't you? Then you are a fool!"
The man with the laptop adjusted his glasses. "D-Do you really think that Tirek will kill all of us for your failure?"
"We are all in this together. If we fail this task, then it means that either we were incompetent, or he was wrong to assign us. And Lord Tirek is never wrong."
A tinge a fear crossed Sarah's face, and her face hardened. "… What do we do, then?"
"Find out where the tunnel leads," Scorpan repeated. "We'll cut her off and kill her before she can reach the authorities."
Sarah peered down the hole and held her nose. "Smells like a sewer down there."
"A sewer? Impossible!" the man with the laptop said. "The nearest sewer systems don't stretch anywhere near this plot of land. Even Daring Do couldn't get away with building her own private sewer beneath her house."
"What about a mineshaft?" Cybil asked. "Were there any mineshafts around here at any point, Dexter?"
Dexter held his chin as he thought. "Yeah, but that was well over a couple centuries ago. They all closed after a massive earthquake collapsed the majority of them and caused many gas explosions. The people of an oppressed town thought that it was the wrath of God signalling a rebellion, and soon civil unrest spread over the whole region.
"By the time it had calmed down, the mines were all but forgotten." Dexter sat down and opened his laptop, punching some keys to bring up some diagrams on his screen. "Well what d'ya know? Turns out there was a mineshaft that ran under here, but it was among the few that sat outside of the affected areas of the earthquake. In other words, it was left intact, but because the only resources down there were things that the government had started to buy cheaply overseas, they closed it down a little over fifty years ago… Around the time that this plot of land was bought by Daring Do's grandfather."
"That man had connections in the government," Cybil said, crossing his arms. "He may have been able to buy the rights to the mine, and the join it up with the sewers of the nearby city, to hide its true purpose as an escape tunnel."
Dexter nodded his head, and grinned. "Well then, I guess this is where I hack into the security feeds of the sewer systems and find out where she got out…"
"When we find her," Sarah started, pulling out her rifle and adjusting the attached scope, "I'll put her down with one bullet."
"Don't destroy the brain," Cybil said. "The pups I'm raising love them. It's their favourite organ."
"Got it!" Dexter shouted triumphantly. "Oh… Oh no… Of all the places, she…"
"She climbed out of a manhole on one of the airport's runways," Scorpan confirmed, watching said manhole through his binoculars, before sweeping across the airfield, his hands shaking. "Then she boarded a plane, but which one?"
"There are only two planes that left in the time between when she emerged and we got here," Dexter announced. "One headed for England, one for Germany."
"She's on neither one," Scorpan assured him. He recalled the footage that Dexter had shown him, of how Daring Do waited in the sewer for a long time, occasionally peeking up through the manhole. "She waited for a specific plane to arrive. Whichever one landed just before she emerged is the one."
"Couldn't she have been waiting for security to lighten up?" Sarah asked, peering through her scope at one of the runways. Her sights followed a women in a suit, wondering whether it could have been Daring Do in disguise. She wanted to shoot her regardless.
"She could not tell that from the glances that she took. I'm certain that she was waiting for a specific plane to come down."
"Well, the only one it could be would be the one to America that has yet to leave."
Scorpan gasped. "America…" He found the plane and examined its wheels. There, he saw some crates positioned in ways that would allow somebody to easily climb into the plane, and an open toolbox on the ground. To top it off, there were muddy footprints around that area.
"Give me the phone," Scorpan said, reaching his hand back to Dexter. He felt the phone in his hand and he dialled a number. "Let me do all the talking."
He waited, and waited, and then, somebody answered. "This is Dark Rainbows, hottest nightclub in town! Would you like to book a reservation?"
"No. I would like to speak to your boss. I'm a VIP customer. Name's Steve Timms."
"Ah, Mr. Timms! One moment please!" A moment of silence followed, and then a new voice greeted Scorpan.
"Mr. Timms, it is nice to speak to you again. I trust business is going well."
Scorpan swallowed hard. "Actually, T, that 'errand' I had to run has taken a bit of a detour." He waited, and received no reply. "Y'see, turns out the girl got her schedule mixed up and boarded a plane to America. She left me the key to her house so I managed to retrieve the manuscript."
"She trusts you to the key to her house? Didn't realise you were that close to her."
Scorpan laughed. "Well she's a busy girl so I help her out sometimes. I paid her back today by cleaning the whole house."
"… That's good. And you say she's now in America?"
Scorpan hesitated. "Yes. I wanted to talk to her about her script, y'know, make some changes. But I don't think we have to worry."
"Oh?"
"Seems she went to attend an interview of some kind. You know writers. She wouldn't reveal anything in the script until the finished product is on the shelf."
"Ah, right you are. Oh, I have a client coming in soon. Tell me, what did you want to discuss?"
"I was hoping to fly over and surprise her, but getting tickets on such short notice is hard. Think you could use some of that influence of yours?"
"… Very well, but just this once."
Scorpan breathed a sigh of relief, and his followers all grinned. They were safe. For now, at least. He looked up and gasped. Daring Do's plane was leaving.
"So? What flight were you after?"
"Ah, one moment…" Scorpan turned to Dexter, who pointed on his laptop to the flight that had just left. "Uhhh, the next available flight to Maine. Preferably to the airport in 'Canterlot'."
"Very well then. I'll have my associate meet you there and offer you the full VIP treatment."
Scorpan tensed up, and his fear disheartened his team. "T-Thank you, sir. I appreciate it, really."
"Oh, and do say hello to your little pup for me, okay?"
With that, the call ended. Scorpan gripped the phone in his shaking hand and gritted his teeth together. "… We've got the go-ahead to America, but this time, he'll have one of his men watching us, to make sure we don't fail."
"I just got the tickets," Dexter said, amazed at the fast work. He frowned as he checked them over, and turned to Scorpan. "Um, he was only able to send five."
Scorpan raised his head and narrowed his eyes. He looked over his crew one-by-one.
Sarah, a sniper. Cybil, useless without his pet wolves, but still valued by Tirek because of his ability to tame wild animals. Dexter, a professional with all things ICT. And then, he also had one more sniper, this one mute and new to the game, brought along simply to observe. Nobody knew his name, and simply called him Mute.
The other two were simply hired goons who were brought along mostly to accompany them to the house and provide more eyes to watch over the shack. They served little use from this point on.
Scorpan knew that Tirek wanted the extra baggage gone. He cursed himself, for they probably would have survived if he had been successful the first time.
"What's wrong?" Dexter asked, and then gasped as Scorpan pulled out his gun, fitted with a silencer, and shot the two extras before they could even react. "Ah…"
"Now we only have five people," Scorpan said. "Cybil, call in your people to collect the bodies. Your pups will get an appetiser before dinner."
Cybil hesitated for just a moment, before a glare from Scorpan made him flinch into action. He put out his phone and stepped to the side. Sarah simply whistled her admiration. "I suppose you're Tirek's number one for a reason."
Scorpan closed his eyes and sat. "… How long until we leave?"
"Plane leaves in three hours," Dexter answered. "Weather looks favourable so there should be no delays."
"When Cybil's people arrive, we hand over everything. Weapons, laptop, phones-"
"You want me to walk around unarmed?!" Sarah shouted.
"You want me to leave my laptop to those barbarians?!" Dexter added.
"You want Tirek to find out you were carrying sensitive goods around airport security? Or worse yet, do you want to be caught by airport security?" Scorpan turned to Sarah. "Weapons will be given to us when we arrive. We're going to America, the land of guns, after all."
Sarah's face brightened a little at that, but she still seemed displeased.
Scorpan simply continued waiting, his hands shaking the entire time. No matter where he was, waiting was always the most painful thing. "We wait here. We ditch everything. We follow Daring Do and kill her. And then we return, and we live.
"We live to see Tirek's new world come to life."