A Pixie Spirit

After he finished with his preparations, he left the workshop. This time, however, he decided to take a different, more direct, route to the Hare manor in order to get there as quickly as possible. There was also the fact that he'd caused a commotion earlier because of his immature pranks, and he didn't want to face it.

Jack creeped through the shadows like the expert assassin he was, relishing in the feeling of it. A few times he walked past a few guards performing their nightly patrols and a few people heading back home after a night of drinking at the Wishful Hare. None of them even noticed him.

He was crossing over the rooftop of a simple wooden house and preparing to jump to the next house when his spiritual sense detected something out of the ordinary which caused him to stop in his tracks.

Down in the small house's courtyard, at the foot of a small birch tree, was a young girl kneeling and holding her hands in prayer. She wore ragged clothes that barely shielded her from the cold and she didn't wear any shoes. Even from the distance, Jack could see that the soles of her feet were very heavily calloused. The lateness of the hour only added to the peculiar oddness of it all.

Jack stopped for a moment to observe, torn on whether he should reveal himself or not, when the slight whisper of poorly hidden sobbing reached his ears. Not only was the girl praying, she was crying. Jack had no choice but to find out why. Even during his past life on Earth, Jack had possessed a weakness for crying children. He'd never been able to ignore their plights and had often helped them even if it was to his own detriment; one of the reasons why he never used to carry out any assignments on children, no matter how much money he was offered, was precisely because of this.

Using his skilled stealth movements, Jack dropped down from the roof into the small courtyard. Just as he landed, he pounced forward at full speed and rolled over, neglecting the force of his fall with nary a sound. The girl never even heard him.

Without stopping, Jack crossed the courtyard with the grace of a wind sprite and the stealth of a shadow and jumped onto the birch tree's thickest branch which was just over the kneeling girl.

From this new vantage point, Jack could discern the details of the girl's appearance. She looked to be around seven years old and she was skinny and showed signs of malnutrition; new and old bruises adorned the area around her collarbone. Her black hair was unkempt and dirty and her clothes were even more ragged when looked at from up closely. Overall, she was the visual definition of a street urchin.

"Please, oh please." She pleaded, doing her best to keep the noise of her weeping to the bare minimum. "Please save me! Oh, gracious Divines, save me from this horrible life!"

"Oh child, what is it that you desire?" Asked Jack, changing his voice into a baritone using a special disguising exercise. "Why do you seek audience with the divines?"

"Divine lord Darius!" Exclaimed the girl in surprise. After many weeks of tirelessly praying she had all but lost hope of ever getting a response from the Divines. She could scarcely believe that it had finally happened. "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you." She said as she prostrated herself completely and kowtowed in front of the birch tree.

"I am not Darius, nor am I one belonging to the pantheon of divines." Responded Jack.

"Oh!" The girl lifted her head and looked up onto the tree, only to see Jack crouching there with his face hidden in the shadows of the tree's canopy. "You're a pixie spirit! You're real! Just like in mama's stories!"

A pixie spirit? What the Hell? Oh, well, I guess that will help me keep my identity a secret whilst helping this poor soul out. Thought Jack to himself, half depressed that he'd been confused with such a playful creature.

"Aye, lass." He said while smirking. "I sleep in this tree, and your tears and crying have woken me up. I swear, lass, that if you don't stop, I'll never be able to go back to sleep!"

"I'm not a lass!" Complained the girl. "My name is Hannah, and I need your help, pixie…"

Amidst sobs, the little girl named Hannah told Jack of her tragic tale. It seemed her mother had recently passed away due to an incurable disease, leaving the girl in the care of her drunkard of a father. Her father not only was an alcoholic that enjoyed beating his daughter when he had one too many ales, he was also a gambler that wasted all of his coin on card games.

Due to his reckless gambling, he'd become heavily indebted to a shady group of loan sharks that were demanding payment. In order to keep them happy, he'd agreed on selling the girl to them to be sold off as a slave. Her destiny if she landed in those loan shark's hands was a bleak one, to say the least.

Jack's blood was left boiling from hearing her tale.

"Worry not, lass, this is all a dream." He said gently. "When you wake up tomorrow morning, everything will be back to normal."

"What do you me…" Before Hannah could finish with her question, Jack struck out with a finger on the taiyang acupoint on the side of her head and let a small stream of gentle qi enter her. She fell unconscious without even noticing it.

"Right, then," Said Jack as he grabbed some soil and tree bark and rubbed it on his face to conceal his features. "let's get to work."

--

Hannah's father was sitting with his head propped up with his left hand and he held an empty bottle of ale in his right. He wasn't conscious and he was mumbling to himself incoherently in the tell-tale sign of drunken stupor. The man was relatively large, six feet tall overall. He had a three-day old beard and he smelled as if he hadn't washed himself for a week.

Everything about him made Jack feel repulsed.

Even though he'd been incredibly careful of not making any sound when entering the wooden house, Jack soon realised that the man was too drunk to notice if he came barging through the front door.

This complicated matters slightly.

Only slightly.

Jack approached Hannah's father from behind and struck at his jianting and yintang acupoints simultaneously whilst releasing a heavy stream of qi into the man's body. The man jolted as the foreign stream of qi violently forced the alcohol out of his body, instantly waking him up and clearing his mind whilst also causing him a wave of nauseating pain.

"Who…?" Hannah's father tried to ask but was interrupted when Jack pulled him facedown onto the floor and held his arm behind his back in a painful lock that Jack held in place by placing his knee on it and his hand in a claw shape on the nape of the man's neck.

"Who I am doesn't matter."

"What do you want from me?" Pitifully asked the drunkard. "I don't have any money, but I'll give you anything! Were you sent by the Retrona family? You can have the girl, just take her!"

The man's words infuriated Jack, who tugged the arm he held in a lock in a direction that it wasn't meant to bend in. A loud, sickling, crunch sounded out and Hannah's father's shoulder snapped.

He tried to scream in agony, but Jack was ready for it, and, before any sound could come out of his mouth, Jack struck with his fist against the jiache acupoint on the man's mandible with such force that it dislocated and his vocal chords were paralysed.

The man realised he was completely powerless and couldn't even scream out in pain and he very nearly fainted from the terror he felt. However, Jack's qi wouldn't let him drift into unconsciousness and a warm stream of urine went down his leg.

Jack felt utterly disgusted and rose to his feet. He then kicked the man with his full strength against his side, braking a few ribs in just the right places for them to not puncture his lungs and turning him to face upwards.

"I need you to listen very carefully to me." Said Jack as he let a little bit of his bloodlust out. Not much, just enough to completely terrify Hannah's father into submission. However, it wasn't necessary as he was already frightened beyond anything he'd ever felt before. The bloodlust only made him look even more diabolical. "There is only one thing I need from you. Are you listening?"

With great difficulty, the man nodded.

"Good." Jack flashed an evil smile. "You will stop drinking and will halt with your gambling. Henceforth, you will save up every penny and give your daughter the life she deserves. Do you understand?"

Again, the man nodded, all the blood from his face having long gone.

"Good." Said Jack once more as the smile on his face disappeared. "Because I will come back. One day. And when I do, I expect to find a healthy, happy, girl, singing and dancing with other children. If and when I come back that's not what I see, I will rain death and destruction upon you. I will rip your body into shreds whilst you still breathe and force you to eat your own skin. I will tear your tendons, break your bones, rip out your eyes, cut off your tongue, mangle your manhood, and break your nose. Then I will leave you out in the street, with your ears intact, so that you can hear the cries of horror of the women who lay their eyes upon you; so that you can hear the songs the children will sing about the crippled monster that you will become and the mocking chants of men as they look at the disfigured creature you will become."

Jack leaned over Hannah's father and got close enough that their eyes were only separated by a few inches. Although it seemed impossible, the man had gone even paler and the only thing stopping him from vomiting all the contents of his stomach was the fact that he dared not anger Jack even more.

"Believe me. I don't make threats, only promises."

With those last few words, Jack placed the man's jaw back into place with a single slap, took back the qi he'd sent into the man's body, and left the wooden cabin as swiftly and quietly as he had come.

The moment he left, Hector, for that was the name of Hannah's father, looked around in a daze. In fact, he'd have thought it all a terrible nightmare if not for the very real pain still coursing around his body and his broken shoulder. For a moment, he thought back on the horrifying threat made to him by that mysterious figure and everything he'd said.

What was worse was the calmness of it all and the fact that he never once raised his voice than was strictly necessary.

That icy calmness just made it all the more terrifying.

"A devil of blue eyes…" Were the only four words he managed to eke out before completely passing out.