Chak-chak-chak-chak-chak-chak.

Without a sound, twenty-odd bodyguards raced through the vineyard.

They ran in single file, like a scene from a movie.

About three hundred meters to go.

Most of them were ex–French Foreign Legion; they could sprint a distance like that flat out in no time.

"Hoo-huk, hoo-huk."

Ragged breathing came from all around, in a steady rhythm.

Their suits were soon drenched in sweat.

They were custom-made, woven from bulletproof fiber.

They could stop most knives and bullets.

A perk the House provided for its knights.

The Assassins' fog!

At the head of the group, Édouard's nerves were strung tight.

Gray fog, packed into one spot and nowhere else.

He knew it from past battles with the Assassins: a fog zone.

Raised by the Assassins' sorcery, a zone like that was deadly.

The naked eye couldn't track the bastards inside it.

The knights who'd joined recently didn't know how terrifying this fog was.

Not many of the knights had ever fought the Assassins for real.

They'd been drilled in the techniques over and over, but drills and the real thing were as far apart as heaven and earth.

"Thermals on!"

Édouard gave the order on the run.

Chak-chak.

Like special forces operators, the bodyguards deftly pulled on the infrared detectors hanging around their necks.

They'd drilled it countless times, ready for the Assassins to strike without warning.

In their hands were automatic rifles, specially modified to hold extra rounds.

Infrared sights swept the way ahead, pinpoints of red.

The silver rounds have to work!

In all their past battles with the Assassins, they had always used silver.

Before there were guns, they'd used silver-plated spears and swords.

Since guns came along, every magazine had been loaded with silver bullets.

The Assassins were called demon servants for a reason.

Ordinary steel or bullets left only shallow wounds on an Assassin's body.

They couldn't be killed that way.

Only silver could wound them badly.

But as the years went by, they'd grown more and more resistant to silver rounds.

Bastards that once died from a single shot now had to take…