It took Dee days

The mess was also quite stunning afterwards as she flailed in desperation. It took Dee days to get all the blood out of her fur, despite the fact that one of the things the organization didn't skimp on was cleanliness. Cleanliness kept your body odor under control, and stopped the spread of diseases. The masters had no problem beating the kids to death but losing them to disease was a waste of resources and everyone's time. It might also have something to do with the fact that the masters had very sharp sense of smell, as that was important for an assassin.

The end results of the experiments on her fur were interesting though. The fur didn't turn rough or coarse; in fact it was almost the opposite. Her fur had never been as soft and silky smooth as this, which would make many noble demi-humans and werebeasts jealous. The experiments weren't for cosmetic effect though. The real effect came out as she infused her fur with her psionic power.

With the power consumption being a bit too much for her current level, it was more effective to only enhance the point of impact just before she got hit. That problem would lessen in the future because her powers would increase while the consumption would not. It wasn't exactly an equal to plate armor, but that too would improve with time. As with many of the changes, it was something with great potential but wouldn't do much if she didn't utilize it correctly. So it would be up to her how useful the end result would actually be, as the effects grew along with her own powers.

They also worked on her claws and teeth, although the assumption would be that she would use either a weapon or poison in the future. You should always be prepared to fight unarmed, even though an assassin who was unarmed was a failed assassin. You always had something in store and hidden for surprising situations, or you used items in the surroundings as a weapon. A good assassin would be able to turn everyday items into weapons. A really good assassin wouldn't need to. Dee's claws and teeth were a good enough so that she would never truly be unarmed.

The easiest part of the whole process were the drugs and chemicals. The researchers liked to feed several kinds of rather powerful drugs to the kids to speed up their development and increase their power. Many of these drugs were rather dangerous, but they were effective. These weren't the types of drugs that altered the users mind, but the type that increased growth and development or other such positive effects.

Of course they usually also had negative effects that damaged the user's body, but Dee's regenerative abilities countered those. As a result, the scientists could use even more dangerous pills and chemicals and those sometimes knocked her out for days, or left her foaming at the mouth. The good side was that she was left alone during those times. The downside was that most of the positive effects were countered as well because she couldn't stop her regeneration from erasing the effects.

As she pondered about the past, Dee suddenly realized that it was about time Malik had another mission for her. Even before the operations had been finished, Malik had been assigning her on missions whenever she wasn't too bloody and twitching in pain to move, or training with the various masters gathered here. For about the last six months, the operations had stopped and her training was winding down. At least the training given by other masters besides Malik. It was rather embarrassing for the masters to be trashed by a nine-year-old, and the masters besides Malik were getting trashed most of the time now.

Malik himself never fought Dee. Instead he brought her to the full members of Zabaniya, and had her fight them instead, offering advice and corrections from the side whenever she eventually got beaten to a pulp. The worst part was that it wasn't that she didn't have the skill. She was just too far behind physically when fighting against fully grown opponents that were stronger, faster and had more experience. The point though was to learn how to fight against opponents superior to herself. She was taught how to gain victory from the jaws of a hopeless situation, to use her head and to use clever strategy. Against more experienced foes however, that was easier said than done.

She spent much of her time on missions now, and the portion of the time spent on them was increasing. At first, this was another area where she had a lot to learn from Malik who worked as her handler, but here she proved the extent of her devious mind. Soon Malik only asked for reports and provided alternatives that Dee might not have considered. Naturally as the organization was focused on assassinations, that was also the main focus of her missions. There were some instances of information gathering for other active members, but most of the time when she was sent out, someone ended up dead.

During her time being held by the Zabaniya, she had taken the life of over hundred targets. She had lost the exact count a long time ago, so it might be a closer to two hundred by now. Most of them were cases of assassinating a single person, but sometimes the targets were given in groups. At first the tally included some guards and the occasional family member, but nowadays Dee prided herself in her ability to take out her targets and no one else.

Sometimes she felt that she had lost something important as she no longer felt sorrow while taking the life of another person, but at the same time she felt that there should be more to it. Some of it was because she could rationalize things to herself. Many of the targets, though not all, were not good people. Most of them deserved to die. You have to really earn the hatred of someone to force them to seek out the services of Zabaniya, which didn't come cheap. This usually meant that you were a very bad person, but sometimes it also meant that you were a person of principle that made a stand against the wrong people. Dee also rationalized that if it wasn't her, then it would simply mean that someone else would be sent, and that someone might not make it as painless and might target their family as well.

That was only a part of it though. Some of it must have been her nature as a demon. Despite years spent being raised by Selvaria, she was not at her very core a good person. Perhaps not an evil one, despite all that she had done in the order, but not a good one either. Demons weren't all bad, and many races of demons were as normal as any other humanoids, a mix of good and bad. However, the races making up Dee's heritage were not among those demons. Most members of the races that were used to create her had a penchant for violence and death. Not all of them of course, no race is entirely evil, but a majority of them.

There was also a certain numbing effect in seeing that much death and suffering. Not just those that she caused, but also the death and suffering of the other children in the order. The order also had their ways of encouraging this numbing. Only the strong ones would survive seeing their compatriots and friends die around them. They would pit the children against each other in a fight to the death. Usually the first time you killed someone was the hardest, but the order forced the issue when two kids entered the ring, and only one of them walked out, now having performed the first difficult kill. If the kids refused to do it, both of them were killed. As one could imagine, the order went through a lot of kids, but with a planet and a pair of cities this huge, there was no shortage of 'products'.

For Dee, this first kill had actually been one of the easiest. She suspected that it wasn't an accident that her opponent had been an Archon, a race of lesser wingless angels. Normally people would have trouble killing angels and their sub races, but for Dee it was all too easy. All she had to do was to remember the destroyed village where Selvaria had found her as a baby. The order usually also made sure that the first few mission targets were palatable. No innocents or children, just the scum of the Pantheon. Child assassins weren't very good at taking out high value targets anyway. That would come later if they survived long enough.

Although she didn't feel much when taking the life of another anymore, that didn't mean she was emotionless. One of the worst parts of being among the Zabaniya was the loneliness. There was no point in making friends with the children because they would very soon either die or betray you. The masters were also out of the questions as they would take that as a sign of weakness. Spending five years without meaningful friendly contact was excruciatingly painful for Dee. On the nights she wasn't either unconscious or in too much pain to think, she often silently cried herself to sleep while remembering the soft touch of Selvaria and the kind words of the pendant.

A telltale clack of shoes on the stone floor took Dee out of her thoughts again. It was easy to recognize the owner of these steps. The weight, pace and confident attitude matched Malik. No one else could be as carefree in this den of murderers, where even a child could take your life. The familiar form of the black dressed man appeared at the door. "Time to work Wraith. I think you'll like this one."

Oh right, the bastards had given her a new name. You left your old name and identity behind when coming to this place. You earned a new name with your actions. Wraith was the name given to her, due to her ability to slip into anywhere she chose, and only kill the designated target and no one else. An arbiter of death that no walls could stop.

They had tried Furball, but four dead trainers, two dead scientists and one dead full rank Zabaniya had convinced them to come up with something better. Malik had been rather amused when the enraged Dee had torn the Zabaniya to pieces with a surprise attack after their usual training session had ended and the man's guard was down. Apparently her handler seeing the whole thing didn't count as getting caught for the purposes of punishment.

The names were something that could not be revealed even under torture. As the enemies of Zabaniya would really like to get their hands on certain people to exact revenge, the order did something that Dee wasn't able to recognize when the names were officially given. It had to be a spell of some kind, but Dee couldn't tell any details. In any case, none of the members were able to reveal the person behind any of the names even if they wanted to. And they didn't want to because they knew the Zabaniya would hunt them down and kill them slowly if they did.

'Time to reap another life.' Dee thought glumly.