The Assassin’s Guild Contract on Raine and Leese is the escalation from scattered bounty hunters to an organized interworld operation against Raine Talis and Leese Talis. The sisters’ unusual bodies, names, knowledge, and connection to Cato make them conspicuous targets, while their lack of stealth Skills leaves them especially vulnerable to hunters who can move rapidly between worlds. The contract therefore becomes more than an assassination attempt: it exposes how information, Guild organization, and Cato’s expanding network transform a local threat into a coordinated campaign.

Origins and Targets

Raine Talis and Leese Talis had become difficult targets to classify. After taking Urivan forms, they styled themselves Raine Uriv and Leese Uriv, adopting a lineage-based surname while retaining their given names. The System drew names from what its subjects genuinely believed about themselves, so a simple wish could not create a convincing cover identity. Their transformation also gave them full electromagnetic communications within their biology and made continuous orbital tracking possible, while allowing them to be backed up without relying on the earlier pseudo-bioweapon arrangement.

Their abilities and origin made them conspicuous on Uriva. Initik monitored his world’s promising Golds and Platinums through divine users, advanced buildings, and the various Halls, even though he could not personally watch the entire planet and considered his role guidance rather than total surveillance. Reports of two Urivans who had appeared from nowhere with an almost impossible breadth of knowledge naturally aroused suspicion. Their willingness to tutor younger and lower-ranked people could be read as kindness, but Initik also recognized it as a plausible means of ingratiating themselves with the population. When he learned their names, he identified them as the same names associated with Cato’s agents, despite their apparently native Urivan forms and movements.

The sisters’ association with Cato was not merely reputational. Cato treated them as agents and allies, supplied them with equipment, and watched their movements closely. He warned them away from Urivan towns until his surveillance could detect Muar, adding Yaniss to the same surveillance matrix after recognizing the danger posed by that Bismuth. When Dyen appeared near a portal and offered a warning whose motives remained uncertain, Cato told the sisters that if Dyen wanted payment, Cato would pay it himself rather than leave them responsible. That exchange established the contract’s central practical imbalance: the sisters could not offer Dyen much, but Cato could make a favor worth accepting.

Escalation Through the Guild

Dyen’s pursuit of the sisters initially seemed like an opportunity to travel and earn money. Following them across different worlds exposed him to native races, unfamiliar landscapes, and skies he had never expected to see, but the lucrative element was the number of people he could kill. Tornok Clan members appeared more frequently near the sprawl beyond the Core Worlds, while many of his actual targets were other assassins. Even as a member of the Assassin’s Guild, Dyen could not determine exactly how the hunters located Raine and Leese. Their status as nearly the only Sydeans remaining made them easy to identify, and he suspected that information about them was being bought and sold, perhaps even by Guild members unwilling to confront the sisters directly.

The repeated failures changed the contract. Someone noticed how many assassins had already failed to complete it, increased the reward, and anonymously assembled a group to deal with the sisters. Dyen had not previously known that the Guild could form such a group, or that its rules permitted one. He paid the nominal essence cost for a copy of the announcement in the Guild Hall on Vereem and immediately recognized the danger. Eight Platinums represented a threat far beyond the isolated assassins or pairs the sisters had already defeated, especially because Raine and Leese had not yet reached Platinum themselves.

Dyen considered joining the group only briefly. His Sydean identity would make the other assassins suspicious, and he understood that a coordinated party would be far harder to defeat than overconfident singletons or pairs relying on stealth, Skills, and equipment. He therefore remained outside the official group while continuing to follow the sisters. His own route through the contract also remained constrained by his ambitions: reaching Platinum depended on a particular kind of assassination contract that was not yet available to him, while Cato’s gifts offered a way to compensate for the centuries of equipment and Skill advantages possessed by older high-rank enemies.

The Interworld Hunt

The threat became immediate because the hunters could exploit the System’s portals. Raine and Leese had no room in their builds for stealth Skills, and they were almost the only Sydeans left, so their movements were unusually easy to identify. The Platinums could travel offworld with few obstacles and had enough essence to pay for rapid-fire teleportation, allowing them to search several worlds in quick succession. Cato’s warning network was therefore not excessive caution but a response to the hunters’ ability to converge before the sisters could establish a safe position.

The sisters moved through four worlds before the attackers struck. In the area before the next portal, Raine and Leese detected the ambush first and used movement Skills to skate away just before a cloud of dark blades erupted from the walls. Dyen glimpsed a Platinum assassin only briefly before the attacker returned to stealth: the figure was a grayscale, furred frog-like species unfamiliar to him. The opening attack was powerful enough to shred the Nexus walls, despite those walls being made of Platinum-rank stone. The damaged Nexus demonstrated that the attackers were not merely testing the sisters or attempting a symbolic warning; they possessed the force to destroy the infrastructure around their targets.

The attack also clarified why the contract had become a collective operation. Raine and Leese were difficult to surprise through ordinary movement, but their conspicuous biology and absence of stealth made prolonged evasion impossible once the Guild could distribute their location. Dyen’s ability to trail them invisibly gave him a different perspective on the pursuit: he could observe the hunters’ methods without exposing himself, while the sisters had to keep moving, seek high places, and test the equipment Cato supplied to them. Their travel through more than a dozen worlds over two months turned the contract into a repeating pattern of flight, surveillance, and sudden violence rather than a single confrontation.

Cato’s Support and Dyen’s Position

The contract drew the sisters more tightly into Cato’s operational network. During the pursuit, Raine contacted Cato to ask which nearby world could provide support, then told him that an entire group was after them. She and Leese used portals to continue moving while Cato’s communications infrastructure guided their decisions. Dyen, watching from stealth, understood that he would eventually need one of Cato’s communication lizards himself. The pursuit thus revealed a practical form of patronage: Cato’s value lay not only in overwhelming force but also in warning systems, rapid communication, equipment, and access to worlds where the sisters could evade the System’s enemies.

The sisters’ new bodies were part of the same defensive strategy. Their Sydean frames were adapted to a different sensorium, with altered scent processing, visual perception suited to the binary sun, and biological communications capabilities. They were not simply disguises; they were postbiological identities designed to operate within the System while remaining connected to their broader selves. Their lineage-based surname attempted to make their new status legible to the System, even though the unchanged given names preserved the clue that Initik and others could recognize.

Dyen’s involvement remained morally and strategically unstable. He did not owe the sisters unquestioning loyalty, and he was tempted by the Guild’s money, but he also had a personal reason to survive: he intended to punish the people who had taken his wife from him. Death would prevent that revenge. Cato’s power, added to the System’s own resources, gave Dyen a genuine chance against enemies who would ordinarily be absurdly difficult to challenge, even at Bismuth or Azoth. Following Raine and Leese therefore served several purposes at once: it paid him, allowed him to travel, gave him access to Cato’s orbit, and preserved a path toward his revenge.

Consequences and Significance

The contract’s immediate consequence was to make the sisters’ anonymity untenable. They could not simply hide in ordinary settlements because the System’s information economy, Guild contacts, and portal network enabled hunters to track them across worlds. Their decision to remain near dungeons and wilderness areas until Cato’s surveillance was operational reflected the limits of their disguise: Urivan bodies could pass as native, but their names, knowledge, and unusual capabilities continued to produce suspicion.

The pursuit also exposed the relationship between independent assassins and the Assassin’s Guild. The Guild was not merely a collection of isolated killers; it could raise the reward, circulate an announcement, and assemble a large Platinum team when repeated failures suggested that ordinary contractors were inadequate. At the same time, the anonymous organization of the group preserved uncertainty about who was directing the escalation and why. Dyen suspected a wider information market, but he could not identify the seller or the precise chain of responsibility.

For the sisters, the contract confirmed that Cato’s enemies were beginning to treat their connection as a strategic vulnerability. For Dyen, it provided both income and a moving vantage point from which to study Cato’s technology and the sisters’ unusual existence. For the wider conflict, it showed how Cato’s intervention generated secondary pressure: agents connected to him were not only protected by his resources but also exposed to increasingly expensive and coordinated retaliation. The contract therefore marks a shift from pursuit as personal danger to pursuit as an interworld political consequence of Cato’s war against the System.