"Anything yet?"

"We're working on it!"

"Damn it!"

Édouard, the head of security and a former French Foreign Legionnaire, scowled.

They'd combed Paris, but they hadn't found the bird that had flown the castle.

They'd gone over the Louvre's CCTV all night.

The suspicious cars alone ran to hundreds.

If we lose the young lady, our honor is... finished!

Hundreds of their members had died in the war with them.

The war with the Assassins always wore them down to the bone.

This incident was bound to send out huge shock waves.

The young lady was the Grand Master's youngest daughter, whom he loved dearly.

After losing his wife, the Grand Master had raised her with love, somewhere out of sight.

Cut off from the world.

If a young lady like that were ever harmed by the Assassins...

A wind of blood would blow through the Middle East.

The Assassins wanted that storm.

When the wind of blood blew, more warriors would throw themselves into the holy war.

The organization was on edge as it was.

After Hussein was removed, the Sunni militant groups in Iraq had steadily widened their activity.

Refugees had begun crossing into Europe.

Terrorists had slipped in, too—more than the organization could watch or stop.

Their abilities couldn't be dismissed, either.

Important information had leaked a few times.

There was definitely a spy inside the Knights.

And on top of that, their powers have evolved!

The Assassins had always had strange powers, and those powers had grown even more bizarre.

They'd take a bullet and keep attacking without dying.

When they chanted strange incantations, uncanny things happened.

Members of the Knights would suddenly have their minds taken over and stop obeying orders.

There'd also been attacks by weapons no one could identify.

The rumor even went around among the members that they'd moved past psychic powers and were using magic.

In fact, security chief Édouard had experienced that very thing firsthand.

A monstrous Assassin killer who'd taken some twenty bullets and still clung on, tearing at a member's throat with his teeth.

Even now, remembering it…