Dark Arrow Ch. 01-03

Hello everyone. This is my first submission, so I crave your indulgence. I do not like to write without trying to develop a convincing world and character for that. I hope I have done that here. Unfortunately due to that the page number of the submission has blossomed into much more than I initially intended.

I did not set out to write a quick stroke story, but I found that by the point I had the characters where I felt the sex was not being forced into the story it was longer than even I am accustomed to. Ideally this would be broken up into likely three separate submissions however since this is my first attempt here I did not want to have a first submission that did not include the sex. As a result I am posting this in its entirety as chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this story. If there is interest I will add more chapters.

For those of you looking just for the sex you will miss a great deal of the underlying tension that leads to the eventual sex and some of this scene may not make as much sense as I hope it does for those who read the entire submission however if you are interested strictly in the sex you can skip to page 7.

Thank you all for your time in reading this. Feedback is always welcome. I hope you enjoy your first trip to the world I attempted to craft. ~~ sincerely DarkTerra

*****

Erillia hugged the shadows as she stalked her prey. For days now she had haunted the shadows following and waiting for a clean shot. She scoffed a bit at life's twisted sense of humor. Had she not grown up on the outskirts she would have never learn the so called primitive skill of hunting. Had the outskirts not been so impoverished that they couldn't afford ammunition for their rifles she would never had discovered the art of making her own weapons. The skill to turn wood, string, and feathers into a deadly tool was fast dying out. If not for the very reason that those in the city proper looked down on the destitute members of the outskirts she would not be where she was. They had crafted the very nightmare they now lived in fear of.

She slunk into another dark corner, marveling at how easy this had become for her. It was more often than not harder to hunt for her food than it was to hunt her targets. The smooth rasp as she plucked an arrow from her back and skillfully nocked and drew it in one swift motion was a comfortingly failure noise.

Her target was Nathan Bicormish, steel works mogul. The irony of the situation was not lost on Erillia as she glanced at down her onyx black arrow at the leather bound grip, the only part of her bow other than the string which was not made of discarded steel, and smiled. Her target had enjoyed the soft life of the upper class city dwellers. His girth made tacking and targeting him much easier, and the force her custom bow imparted would be more than enough to insure lethal penetration. At this distance she estimated she would have approximately 5 seconds from the moment she released the arrow until she had to be gone from the street. She smirked, that was plenty of time for a hunter of her caliber.

"The reaper sends her regards." she murmured as her fingers began to relax on the string. She saw the movement from the corner of her eye as the string left her fingers. It happened so fast even her eyes had a hard time tracking it. A man, who appeared to be in his mid-twenties, burst from the shadows behind her target. He didn't try to shove Bicormish out of the way, or warn him of the danger. He simply grabbed the rotund oaf by the shoulders and slammed him over backwards to the ground.

Her arrow passed with in centimeters of its target, cleaving through his overcoat and embedding itself in the mortar of the restaurants brick façade. Cursing beneath her breath Erillia quickly secured her bow to her back reflexively and faded back from the street. She paused after a second however and froze in uncertainty.

Her entire reputation as an assassin was built on the fact that she took any job, and had never failed. She was subtle, but deadly. She wouldn't be able to compete with the roving gangs which sold a similar service, but whose methods were far more flashy. Her unfailing success had allowed her to demand a price far above what her competitors charged. Now thanks to one young hero her entire livelihood was about to go up in smoke.

"Cock sucking son of a whore!" She swore softly as she glanced back at her target. The sound of hover cars arriving startled her into action. She moved swiftly blending into the deeper shadows of the alley ways. Moving towards the center of town and more lit areas instead of back towards the outskirts she silently prayed these cops weren't more skilled than those usually dispatched to deal with her targets.

Bicormish was her most high profile target to date, though her work was becoming more and more well known. She needed this job. The exorbitant fee she had been able to negotiate would have allowed her to go dark for several moths maybe even a year if she was really frugal. Hopefully it would be enough time for her unique signature to fade into the backs of the investigators minds.

Unfortunately her near miss meant she now had two choices. Try and finish the job or give up her 100% success rate and with it her ability to demand the prices that she needed. She darted through a few more alleyways and finally ducked under a darkened doorway and sagged against the greasy bricks. hunching over holding her head in her hands she racked her brain for a solution to her situation. She'd begun taking this type of work simply to improve her lot. She'd had dreams of slowly earning her way into better parts of the city, but she knew now that was never more than a pipe dream.

Even if she were to earn enough money to afford to move into a better area she would never be accepted by the inner city dwellers. More over should she attempt to force her way into that social circle she would no longer be accepted by those who scratched out an existence in the outskirts. With this job though she had begun to have hope that things might be changing. She'd never be able to change her lot in life here, but if she could earn enough she just might be able to change it as part of one of the colonization missions off world.

"New world, New life."

The advertisements for those missions had seemed to haunt her dreams and whisper in her ear ever since she had taken this contract. She know she would have to lay low after this one, but even if she had to lay up and spend everything she earned from this job it would establish her as a top level assassin. Bicormish might be a big fish for her, but there were far bigger fish out there. If she could land even a few similar contracts after her vacation she could save up enough to get off this god forsaken rock.

Colony life was hard for many people because it required hard manual labor and the ability to survive, but for Erillia that was her daily existence. At least if she was on a colony her struggles might actually matter in the end. Now though she had to either risked everything and went back to finish the job on a target who was spooked and likely surrounded by guards and police, or she resigned herself to being a two bit thug and assassin for life. She wouldn't live long in that life on her own, so she would be forced to join one of the gangs that liked to think they ran various areas of the outskirts.

She ground her teeth and rested her head against the door frame cursing her luck. Taking a deep breath and blowing it out slowly, she did a quick inventory check. She didn't bring her lock picks and hacking tools this time because the woman who hired her had demanded that this be done in public. She had a few rope snares with her though, since she had planned to leave the city for a few days to do some hunting and let the hue and cry die down. They might double for a garret if she could get close enough. It would be a silent kill, and less messy and obvious then if she slid a knife between the fat bastards ribs, but it still left her with one problem.

The reason she had chosen to use her bow for this rather than employ explosives or poison was for the signature. No other assassin in terra used a bow and arrow. If she used her weapon of choice no one could dispute this was her job. She straightened up and narrowed her eyes. Bow and arrow it was, but if she was going to do this it would have to be now, before they took Bicormish in for questioning and assigned guards.

He wouldn't be allowed back into public until they determined who had hired the assassin and who the assassin was. She'd still get him, no matter the security she could eventually find her way through it, but by then it would be late. No it had to be now, and it had to be public. She glanced up at the skyline for a second considering a long range attack, but quickly shook that idea off. There were too many cameras, motion detectors, locked doors, and other complications trying to get to a roof or room that would have the vantage point she needed. That was why she'd decided to take her shot from street level in the first place.

The street wasn't really an option, at least not from this side of the street. She couldn't cross the street with her bow in plain sight either, and even if she did manage that there would be far too many people crowding the area for a clean shot. She groaned, and shook her head. Hand to hand it was, she tried to shake off her growing sense of impending doom as she slung her quiver and bow off her shoulder, but it just settled over her more firmly. Quickly pulling the pins and detaching the arms from the bow, she dropped the pieces into the quiver and wrapped them in her coat as she moved away from her resting place.

The alley rejoined the street a couple hundred yards from where a crowd now gathered around the police cruisers. Quietly she crossed the road, dropping to a knee in the shadows of the alley as she surveyed her approach. She carefully placed her quiver under some trash, positioning it so that it was well disguised, but easily retrievable, since she expected to be coming back for it in a hurry. Plucking an arrow, she concealed it in the sleeve of her ragged coat before sliding out of the shadows again and joining the throng of people jostling for a view.

Moving like smoke she squeezed between bodies, carefully moving through the press of the crowd until she could see her target. The police had only brought two cruisers she noted with relief. Had they followed the established protocol she would have had a much harder time getting to her target. They should have swept in with four cruisers and two transports. Eight officers to form a cordon around the zone and two transports to whisk the target and retrieval teams away so that it was unclear which transport held the target.

To calm her nerves as she moved forward she mentally rehearsed the police action plan for assassinations. They would split the transports in opposite directions, and sent them to different stations leaving the assassin to blindly guess from distance which transport to target. The upper level assassins in Terra had learned these practices by now. They were more likely to simply raise the alarm and destroy both transports, Provided their client paid enough of course.

Erillia however wouldn't be able to take out the transports. What few explosives she had access to might do the job if they were on the ground, but once they took off she wouldn't be able to touch them.

"I don't give a good god damn how many prisoners you have to transport today!" The tenor roar of the sergeant boomed out over crowd, startling many of the gawkers and scattering the closest bystanders like doves from a hawk.

"I've got an attempted assassination down here. We can't fight the rat bastard and the stupid SOB has no idea who would want him dead. I've never seen an assassin use a bow and arrow before, but if the Good Samaritan hadn't acted we'd be here for a homicide, not an assassination attempt." There was a pause as whoever the sergeant was speaking to responded. Erillia was close enough now to see his face flush in anger at what he was hearing.

"Listen you fucking asshole," He roared, his voice strident with his anger. "I don't know why his personal deflector didn't stop it. I do know that I'm standing here with an exposed target, I don't have the assassin in custody, I'm four officers short, and I'm holding the target's jacket . As a result I can clearly see the rip the arrow put in that jacket, and I can see the bloody arrow is over an inch deep in the mortar! I don't care who you have to pull. I don't care what kind of paper work you have to file later to explain it. You get me the god damn transports down here NOW!"

Erillia smiled She'd only been at ½ draw on the bow. If she drew to max that arrow would have gone nearly three inches in, but the stress on the shaft would have snapped it off. Not to mention that it wouldn't have penetrated Bicormish's personal shield.

The deflector shields had been a marvel of engineering six years ago. Not more than a trinket for the intellectuals and super rich to toy with for fun. With the prevalence of assassins here in Terra however, they had swiftly moved from a pinnacle of engineering to a basic necessity for the upper class. They were meant to stop any projectile, and the first prototypes were effective beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, a problem was quickly recognized.

People who needed the protection would be unable to eat, or shake hands, or shower even unless modifications were made. The compromise was to modify the ion projection field to respond to speed, which had seemed the perfect answer. It could be tuned now to allow the person to eat, drink, and fuck without ever taking the shield off. The risk for a stabbing was increased, but that required close contact. With the exception of fucking close personal contact was something that those who needed these shields seemed to naturally avoid.

In addition, most assassins capable of hunting the bigger fish weren't looking for a suicide attack. Getting up close and personal was effective, but it required skill to get that close to your target, and the challenge was that once you struck getting away was practically impossible. Her bow however sent an arrow to her target just slow enough speed to pass through the shield but gave her the added range and accuracy that a throwing knife simply couldn't match.

If she drew to max of course then the arrow would exceed the speed threshold and the deflectors would stop it. Though she was used to drawing at full for hunting she had also learned how to alter the draw while maintaining her accuracy and the majority of her range. What little range she did lose was negligible in the confines of the city anyway.

Erillia fingered the bulge in her left pocket as she thought about the reasons why the established assassins didn't attempt what she was about to do. She sighed softly and slid closer, popping between two burly men and finally gaining the front row of bystanders. One of the officers glanced at her as she squeezed into the front, but quickly looked away. She fought down her smirk at that, but really she couldn't blame him. The assassins of terra tended to be either flashy showboats, or hulking bruisers. The uniqueness of the signature no doubt had them expecting some gaudily dressed fop with a shiny golden or silver bow and a flowing cape, or some other such nonsense. She had to admit if she had been successful and built a career and name for herself there would undoubtedly have been copycats who would have dressed exactly like that.

Small wonder then that the police were ignoring one small, ragged looking, waif. Particularly since there had never been any female assassins of the caliber needed to fire that shot and evade detection. There had been a few women to wear the assassin mantle, but as far as history recorded they had sold their bodies and poisoned their targets during coitus or otherwise avoided direct combat. None had dared to take up a weapon to hunt down their targets, and for that Erillia thanked them. None of her targets nor the authorities expected a woman to be a fighter. No one thought that a person, let alone a woman, could pack the power and speed needed to be a lethal opponent into a frame as slight as hers.

Indeed at first glance one would not expect her to exceed 54 kgs, though, due to her intense exertions while hunting and her weight training after she started selling her skills, she tipped the scales closer to 70 kilos. Her frame was slight, but she was as hard as the steel and titanium bars that formed the skeletons of the star ships that she dreamed of riding away from this hell hole.

No it was small wonder that the officer had over look a ragged dirty woman. Her raven hair was tied back harshly and likely matted with sweat and dirt, adding to her appearance of being a street urchin or common whore. The only thing about her that might have drawn a second glance were her eyes. Ice blue, so light they almost appeared glacial white at times, or, in the right light, like the waters of the fiords she read about during her short time in the mandatory schooling. Schooling was hardly an adequate term for what was given to the children of the outskirts. The teachers were there to teach them just enough so that they could read the police announcements and warnings. It also drilled into the outskirt residents that they were inferior and unworthy of the teachers' time, though that wasn't one of the stated curriculums.

Just because she understood the reason for being overlooked as a threat didn't mean it did not irritate her. If not for the fact that their ignorance was giving her the opening she needed she would have been positively pissed at being overlooked. As it was she couldn't help by smile at the lesson she was about to teach this crowd of onlookers. The crowd on the far side of the circle from her position had begun to get agitated and the police had focused their attention in that direction. They had also ushered Bicormish away from that side, inadvertently shoving him towards her side.

Choosing her moment as a fresh outburst from the crowd caused the officers in front of her to glance over his shoulder; she shoved back hard into the men behind her, elbowing one in the gut as she did. The man she elbowed reacted predictably, grabbing her hair and shoving her away from him shouting curses and threats. She stumbled forward and allowed the forward momentum to carry her to the ground as if she had tripped, right in front of the officers.

"Stupid little cunt! Since you're so ready to go to your knees maybe I should show you what a girl like you is good for," He growled. He made the mistake of following her forward without stopping to look at where she had landed. As she had hoped the officers spun around on seeing her lurch forward, but his attention had not fully focused before the man she had targeted surged forward towards them. His hands dropped to his waist band as he advanced, and Erillia finally allowed the smirk she had been holding back to come out. The man was focused on her, and she had no doubt he had every intent of fulfilling his threat as he reached to remove his jeans.

The officer however had barely heard the altercation, and seeing a good sized man bulling his way forward and reaching for what he believed to be a weapon concealed in the man's pants he reacted on instinct. His weapon cleared its holster and a second later the crack and sizzle of a plasma bolt silenced the crowd. She glanced over her shoulder to see her would be rapist gaping stupidly at the officer, before slowly tipping forward and crashing to the street. His fall was like a trigger. Screams went up as the crowd rushed to get away from the body. Warning shots cracked out from several sides, and the officers began roaring instructions to the crowd.