Just as Lysander began to pull the door to his dormitory open, the lights snapped out.
Instinctively, he dropped to the floor and pulled out his pistol, aiming it down the hallway and tensing his body for an attack. However, the lights flickered back on within a few seconds. Lysander whipped his head around, searching the hallway, but there was nothing to be seen. He slipped into his room and took cover by the door. 
Almost out of the air, a female voice emanated through the room. 

"Do you feel safe within these walls, Lysander? Untouchable by anyone?" the voice asked. A chill ran down Lysander's back, and a candle in the hallway dropped to the ground and sputtered out. "I'm waiting." The shutters began to clatter.

Even before his exile from the Legion, Lysander had dealt with countless assassins; snipers, agile masters of stealth, gangs of murderous brutes, but this sensation was new to him. It was almost as if the assassin was [i]taunting[/i] him. He had heard tales of men and women that killed through fear, driving their targets mad or subduing them to a state of submission and finishing them off. He suspected as much for whoever was calling him now. And yet, it was almost inconceivably stupid to inform a target that you were attacking them; assassins tried to take their victims by surprise. He concluded that the assassin was not in the building.

But even then, how was the voice so close? The killer must have somehow been throwing their voice, or projecting it with some sort of ranged equipment. As the thought entered his mind, Lysander peered around the room in search of a speaker or bug of some sort, but his eye found nothing. It was certainly hidden, and he didn't have the time to go looking. 

The killer was most likely trying to draw him to a trap, Lysander thought. There wasn't much he could do, and leaving the building by conventional means was too dangerous. He peered down the hallway. At the end he had come from, a set of stairs twisted in both directions to the top and bottom floors. At the other end, a large window was open to the air, its curtains waving gently in the breeze. 

The window was too high up to be a convenient entrance for an assassin. Lysander scoped it out; it almost the size of a door. He racked his mind, trying to think about what he had seen of the dormitory building's surroundings before he had entered. 

Lysander took one more look around the hall and the room and, seeing nothing, tucked his weapons close to him and cursed under his breath. He sprung out from behind the door and sprinted down the hallway. As the window grew closer, he picked up speed, then jumped through the opening into the air.

He braced himself for the moment he was airborne, then hit down hard. He was on the roof of the Quartermaster Hall, adjacent to and slightly shorter than the dormitory building. He dropped to a roll to protect himself and his weapons clattered across the dully angled tin roof. Without slowing down, he snatched his katana and sati, which had come off his belt, and sprinted across the roof, jumping again and hitting the ground much harder than he had the Hall.

He gasped for air as he collected himself, pushing off the grass and looking around for the assassin. Hopefully, he thought, he had put some distance between them.