Editing Ezio Auditore da Firenze (section)

====Saving the Aragonese Assassins ====

The plight of his brethren in Spain distressed him, and, feeling that it was his obligation, Ezio Auditore announced to Antonio that he was postponing his search for the Apple and taking the initiative to rescue them.

Upon arriving in Barcelona, he was casually greeted by a French woman, who was actually in the midst of fleeing from the city guards. The woman swiped his sword from him as soon as she was spotted by the guards again and had to resume her escape, in the process sending Ezio after her as well. After a wild chase across Barcelona's rooftops, Ezio managed to drop down behind the woman and snatch back his sword while she was musing over having shook her pursuers. The French rogue had revealed that she knew of Ezio's identity as an Assassin but refused to share what she knew of his order before she left him.

With this misadventure over, the Assassin set about with his task at hand, meeting with Antonio's two contacts in the city who had information on the local Thieves' Guild which doubled as the headquarters of the Aragonese Assassins. The two directed him to the tallest tower in the center of the city, but when he arrived there, he found that he was too late; the building had already been emptied of Assassins by the Inquisition's soldiers. Ambushed, Ezio fled across the city until he was driven into the catacombs beneath the city, but he could find no respite as the vast underground chambers were also occupied with enemy soldiers. Only by relying on the highest degree of parkour training was Ezio finally able to escape the Inquisition in the sewers, but just as he did so, he ran into a man who introduced himself as the Assassin Raphael Sánchez.

Raphael had uncovered that Gaspar Martínez was the Inquisitor Prosecutor behind the purge, and not long after, Ezio tracked down and assassinated Martínez. The approach had been easy, as Martínez did not know that the Assassins still existed or that the Florentine who questioned him was one of them. Simultaneously, Ezio recognized that the purge had been "too systematic to [have been] a coincidence" and could not believe that Martínez's confusion was genuine. Before he killed him, the Inquisitor had gloated about the imminent execution of one of the men they had recently captured. Without a second to spare, Ezio rushed to the public square where the auto-da-fé was taking place and saved the young Spanish Assassin from a fiery demise.

On Martínez's corpse, Ezio had found a list of six names which Raphael recognized as Assassins of Zaragoza. The two journeyed to Zaragoza, where Raphael instructed Ezio to investigate their first lead, the ''calificador'' Pedro Llorente. At a building where the Llorente's tribunal normally assemble, Ezio located Llorente in the midst of torturing one of the Zaragozian Assassins. Spying through a window in the roof, he watched as Grand Inquisitor Torquemada arrived to check on the interrogation and then to execute the Assassin on the spot. Before leaving with Llorente, the Grand Inquisitor vocalized his gratitude towards Rodrigo Borgia for informing him of this group of atheists, thereby revealing to Ezio that the Inquisition had been tipped off to the Assassins by the Templars.

Ezio's failure to save the prisoner only made him more determined to rescue the lives of the other five. He descended beneath Zaragoza and liberated four of them in a single sweep of the labyrinthine catacombs. Though this raised the alarm for Llorente, his order to heighten security for the last prisoner was to little avail as Ezio slipped into the palace holding him just as Llorente was sealing the gate. Once the Florentine had freed the last captured Zaragozian Assassin and reported these developments to Raphael, he proceeded to the cathedral to assassinate Llorente, testing the Inquisitor's knowledge of the Templars beforehand. Just as Martínez had scoffed at the mention of Assassins, so had Llorente dismissed the Templars' continued existence as "fairy tales".