They thought it would be easy.
Night had swallowed the eastern compound. Lanterns guttered behind latticed windows; guards slept in shifts with the dull confidence of men who believed money and bribes would buy them safety. Outside the walls, the hired knives moved like rats—ten, twelve, twenty—silent as shadows, hired hands with blades and poisoned darts, voices hushed into bad jokes and brittle courage.
Alex walked among them, chest tight with fear disguised as bravado. "Tonight," he whispered, "we take the cat."
They crossed the yard on ropes and dirt, slipping through the compound the way thieves slip through a house. They knew the watch schedule, the guard rotations; they had paid for inside help. Everything was arranged: a fast strike, a single clean cut. Nobody expected the thing that waited in the dark.
Rahul did not sleep. He had not come here to be surprised. In the lab, he watched the night through feeds and sensor prints—heartbeat blips, thermal ghosts, the thin, foolish patterns of men who think they can hide. NW‑14 sat in shadow beside him, a perfect stillness: a predator that had learned to be godlike by design. The machine of muscle breathed slow, whole body coiled like a spring, talons folded against armored palms. It was not decoration. It was a calculation.
When the assassins slipped through the outer fence, NW‑14's pupils narrowed the way a blade does when it finds an edge. Rahul tapped once — not an order so much as an authorization — and NW‑14 moved.
It began with silence. A shadow detached from the deeper dark and slid over the first rooftop. No footsteps, no sound of leather, only the momentary dimming of a lantern and then the quiet thump of a body hitting earth. One by one the hired men disappeared from their patrol routes: a throat cut so clean the body fell like a struck puppet; a dart to the neck that folded a man into himself mid-step; a pair of hands crushed until bone replied with the small, final crack that stops breath.
The compound's alarms did not scream until the third body. By then panic had been sewn like a hidden seam. Dozens of men rushed to the courtyard with torches, blades raised. NW‑14 met them in perfect geometry: movement as silent as a single thought. It stepped through the lantern light and was a blur of talon and arc that left no clumsy stumble, no wasted energy. Where it struck, armor failed; where it moved, men did not see it coming until their own skeletons told them they had been cheated of motion.
It was not slaughter for pleasure. NW‑14's killing was surgical, economical—disable, neutralize, move. When a small band formed behind a collapsed gate and thought to pin it, NW‑14 leapt up and over, landing in their midst like a shadow given weight. A fight that should have lasted minutes ended in seconds. Twelve men who had planned to be heroes lay silent on stone.
Inside, Alex scrambled. He heard the screams, the shouts, and for the first time understood the fragility of the arrangement he had built. He stumbled into the courtyard, calling orders that were meaningless against the kind of precision he faced. A blade found his shoulder; he stumbled back, blood hot and shocking. He tried to run and a dark shape filled his vision—a face not quite human, eyes too still. NW‑14 did not gloat. It moved with the economy of a machine bred to waste no effort, and Alex's last breaths were swallowed in the hush after the strike.
They died surprised. They died without understanding. Even as their throats stopped and their eyes went slack, most had no clue who had taken them—some thought it was a ghost, some blamed rival gangs, some whispered of the Nightwatchers' vengeance. Only in the end, when the compound lay broken and silent and the lanterns guttered low, did the pattern become clear: not men, not soldiers, but something else had struck.
NW‑14 returned to the shadows without hurry. It carried no trophies; it left no signature—only the arrangement of bodies, the faint smear where a talon had found flesh, and the absence of struggle in the survivors' memories. Rahul watched the feeds as the last motion died. He felt no triumph; there was only data — timing, physiology, force vectors, stress responses. NW‑14 had performed exactly as designed.
At dawn, the compound smelled of wet stone and iron. The bodies were found in the morning count—two dozen, maybe more. Rumors flew, faster than the ravens, each wilder than the last. "The Nightwatchers," some said, and their words carried fear. "A demon," said others. Alex's men scattered like spilled oil; the merchants who'd done business with the eastern branch fled their ledgers and locks.
None of them knew the truth. Not until Rahul himself walked through the charred gate, not until NW‑14 stood in the dim corridor as if it had always been there, would the shape of the night reveal itself. Even then, there was no indictment, only an immutable fact: a thing had come and taken what belonged to him, and no one had the right to call it anything but his instrument.
Rahul paused before the corpses, eyes flat. He did not stoop to check for signs of life. He read the telemetry instead: entry vectors, kill sequences, energy expenditure, the one misstep where NW‑14 had almost overextended. He noted it in his mind, a correction to be cataloged. When he finally spoke, his voice was small and precise.
NW‑14 melted into the shadows. It was better to stay in the dark than to be seen in the light. Silent and unseen, it became one with the shadow, ready to act for Rahul.
At the same time, another Nightwatcher moved quietly, cleaning up the bodies and restoring the courtyard so that it looked untouched. Everything had to appear normal, as if nothing had happened.
NW‑14 waited in the darkness, a silent protector, ready to carry out Rahul's orders whenever needed.