Finish Permanent Retirement "peacefully"

A method to finish the buggy Dark Brotherhood quest without dealing with bounty and the guards.

Quest and Bug Explanation

Permanent Retirement is one quest from the Dark Brotherhood faction, which is seemingly buggy. It’s the one where you’re tasked to kill Adamus Phillida, a Guard Captain in Leyawiin. Even if you can kill Phillida undetected, there’s a chance you will get a bounty of 40 gold. His bodyguard will immediately attack you if he sees you, and other guards will help him.

Luckily, there’s a way to bypass this bug without having to pay fines to the guards and go to jail. When I did this quest, I already finished all Thieves Guild quests, which makes this method easy.

What You Need

• Join the Dark Brotherhood and progress until this quest (obviously).
  
• Join the Thieves Guild and progress until you have at least 1 Doyen (Armand Christophe in Imperial City Waterfront or S’krivva in Bravil).
  
• A pretty high Sneak skill, so wear the Shrouded Armor (given for free when you enter the DB base for the first time) or use Invisibility Potions.

Step 1

Wait until 3:00 PM at Leyawiin. At this time Phillida will go swimming in a pond near the Castle. He will take off his armor, so hide behind a rock and prepare your special arrow, Rose of Sithis which can kill him in one hit if he is unarmored. MAKE A SAVE HERE. Be prepared to reload if things go wrong.
Fire your arrow at him. He will die instantly. Sometimes his bodyguard may come over, so reload if that happens. Sneak to his corpse, and loot his keys and finger. If you do it right and/or lucky, the bodyguard won’t come over or be hostile. Stay away from him, if he sees you he’ll attack. If you check your stats, you will have a 40 gold bounty.

Step 2

Fast travel to one of the Doyens. I used S’krivva because she is closer to the fast travel mark. If you see guards along the way, don’t worry, but DO NOT TALK TO THE GUARDS. For some reason they will arrest you, even if they’re in different cities. Talk to your Doyen, who will remove your bounty by paying half (20 gold), setting it back to 0. Feel free to talk to the guards now.

Step 3

Finish your quest or do the optional objective for extra gold. I recommend doing it, since by looting Phillida’s body you’ll get a key that will open the door to this room. Careful, there are still some guards inside and you need to sneak. Then return to Ocheeva and finish this quest. The desk where you need to put the finger is this desk.

Alternative Method

You can just open your console by pressing the tilde (~) button, click on Phillida and type "kill". He will instantly die, the quest will progress, and you get no bounty. However, you still need to walk silently to loot his body if you want to do the optional objective.

[Honestly, Literally]

Dude if you are having difficulties just get a 100% chameleon armor set or like this guy below me says drink an invis potion mid arrow

[boa'uls]

If you drink a potion of invisibility while the arrow is mid air you won't even be charged for assault.

[Button Eyes]

I don't really know, sorry. I rarely mod my games. But if it's a bug patch it should've fixed this.

[Venial]

Does the unofficial bug patch for oblivion fix this?
I played through this quest with the mod installed and never had a problem.

[Not olive]

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