Assassin

Serpent-bodied Enchantress · Seductress and Devourer in Greek Mythology

A monster of Greek myth, the upper body a beautiful woman and the lower body that of a great serpent. Once the beautiful queen of Libya and a lover of Zeus, she was driven by Hera's jealousy to the loss of all her children, and from her grief and rage was changed into a creature that, by night, steals and devours the children of other mothers (Diodorus Siculus, Library 20.41, 1st c. BCE). Hera further denied her sleep by cursing one of her eyes to remain forever open, and she carries her eyes out in a bowl when she leaves home (Plutarch, On Curiosity 2). Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.25 (3rd c. CE) tells how a Lamia seduced the young Menippus, and was unmasked at the wedding feast by the philosopher Apollonius — the source which John Keats reworked in his poem Lamia (Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, Taylor & Hessey, 1820), turning her into a tragic figure of love and revealed truth.

暗殺者 · Assassin — A death specialist who finishes it all with a single strike

The assassin specializes in eliminating targets with a single decisive strike, a stealth combat class. Wielding shadow movement, poison, hidden weapons, and surprise attacks, assassins target enemy weaknesses through reconnaissance and infiltration rather than open combat. Historically the most famous group is the 11th-13th century Hashishin sect of Syria — origin of the English word 'assassin' — alongside Japanese ninja, Indian Thuggee cult, and Byzantine imperial spies. In fantasy, the most common depiction is a black-hooded masked dagger-wielder, a staple class in Assassin's Creed, D&D's Assassin class, and similar games.

忍者 · Ninja — A Japanese espionage warrior who fights through darkness and deception

The ninja (忍者) was a specialized warrior group of espionage, assassination, and reconnaissance active during 14-17th century Japan's Sengoku (Warring States) and early Edo period. While samurai were a profession of honor and direct combat, ninja were the opposite — using all unconventional means: disguise, infiltration, poison, traps, gunpowder weapons, and information manipulation. The most famous ninja clans were the two villages of Iga and Kōga, communities isolated in mountains transmitting ninja techniques (ninjutsu) hereditarily. Hattori Hanzō, who helped Tokugawa Ieyasu escape during the Honnō-ji Incident (1582), is the most renowned ninja. During the Tokugawa shogunate they were officially employed as the shogun's intelligence organization 'oniwaban.' Disappearing as a profession with the Meiji Restoration, they have become Japan's most powerful global cultural icon today.

The Italian thrusting-only dagger

The stiletto is a thrust-only dagger developed in 15th-century Italy, with a thin, rigid blade of triangular or square (sometimes round) cross-section: it has no cutting edge at all and attacks only with its needle point. Some 15–30 cm long, the slender, stiff, awl-like blade was specialized to drive precisely into the gaps of plate armor — the armpit, the joints, the eye-slit of a helm — or between the rings of mail. Small and hard, easy to hide under clothing, it served both as a battlefield armor-piercing dagger and as a weapon of self-defense and assassination. A narrow, deep stab wound looks small but is deadly, which fixed its image as 'the stealthy assassin's blade' and later influenced military fighting-knife designs in many countries.

The ninja's concealed throwing weapon

The shuriken is a small Japanese throwing weapon, and as its name, meaning a blade hidden in the hand, suggests, it was an auxiliary weapon carried in secret and thrown. It falls into two broad families: the bo-shuriken, a thin spike or needle form about 15 to 25 cm long thrown point-first, and the shaken, the flat, multi-pointed star form widely known as the ninja's throwing star, about 10 to 15 cm across. Although popular culture portrays it as the ninja's main weapon, it was in fact not a main arm but an auxiliary tool of distraction and deterrence that scattered the enemy's attention. Several were carried hidden in the clothing or the sash, and they were made of iron or steel.

A silent tube weapon firing poison darts

The blowgun (or blowpipe) is a projectile weapon: a long, narrow tube, roughly 100–300 cm, through which a dart is launched by the breath. With no powder or bowstring, it sends only a light dart by lung power, so the weapon itself does little harm — the plant poison smeared on the dart tip is the real killing agent. Its great strength is silence: the shot makes almost no sound and has no recoil, letting a hunter hit the mark before the quarry takes alarm. Its effective range is short, about 10–30 m, but its accuracy is high. The hunting peoples of the tropics — the Amazon, the Dayak of Borneo, the practitioners of the Japanese fukiya — each developed it independently as the archetypal silent, poison-tipped hunting tool.