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CHAPTER ONE; kings bleed
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THE VILLAINOUS THIEF OF KETTERDAM, ACE
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WANTED DEAD or ALIVE by the order of the Merchant Council
100 000 kruge reward for capture
Ace scowled at the poster—she was worth a hell lot more than that. The reward for her capture was a pitiful sum, hardly worth the paper it was printed on.
A hundred thousand kruge could buy a lot in the Barrel—a place where survival was a constant battle. It could buy some flashy jewelry, or a fancy dress for those with more money than sense. It could even secure a one-person boat in the harbor, fit for someone who valued solitude. The possibilities were many, but not endless. A hundred thousand kruge, couldn't buy the finest jewels and dresses, it couldn't buy a house or even more than a week's worth of gambling in the clubs of the city.
A hundred thousand kruge was a lot of things to a lot of people. For Ace, it was borderline offensive. Especially considering the ugly painting she was rolling up at the moment was worth twenty thousand kruge more than her. It was a common misconception that stealing was an easy way to get rich, but Ace knew better. The road to riches was a treacherous one, and it required a certain level of finesse to navigate—years of practice; thankfully, Ace had been in the business of theft nearly since she was born.
The first poster demanding her capture had appeared on the streets of Ketterdam on her twelfth birthday—it was a rather memorable day.
She had been hitting small targets ever since she decided to stay in Ketterdam—or rather, ever since she knew in her mind the reasons to stay in Ketterdam heavily overweighed those to go back to her little inconspicuous village in the Southern Colonies. A week before her twelfth birthday, was the first time she made a dent in a merchant's wealth. She'd been nagging at them for a while, stealing watches and bejeweled pins. Breaking and entering their empty townhouses and stealing anything she seemed to have worth. And finally, she believed she'd made her presence known enough to finally present herself to the world as the upcoming outlaw in Ketterdam.
Ace had decided to go straight to the source and broke into one of the banks of Ketterdam. It wasn't the biggest one, but it was important enough some of the junior members of the Merchant Council had money being held there.
It took weeks of planning, but Ace was nothing if not meticulous. She had studied the blueprints of the sewers, trained to fit through a tiny vent—which was thankfully possible due to her young age—, and acquired a powder that could knock out the guards. And her escape had been simple; she'd attained a homeless girl's attire with a big tattered wool coat, where she had buried herself in, at the entrance of the bank, her loot, in paper money worth thousands, stashed inside a satchel hidden by the coat, until she was thrown out into the streets again in the morning, an inconvenience for the fine costumers of the bank—and they didn't know just how much.
