The cold moonlight shone down on the Royal City of Norman.
Occasional whimpers of wild dogs echoed from the depths of the alleys, while the distant taverns remained lively, with someone bawling out a vulgar tune at the top of their lungs.
Rosie was running.
The ground beneath her feet was bumpy and uneven, yet her steps were steady and swift.
Cold wind rushed down her collar, making her linen clothes rustle, but her entire body was as hot as if she had just stepped away from a furnace.
Her heart pounded heavily against her chest, the lingering adrenaline from the killings still coursing through her.
She didn't feel nauseous at all; in fact, she felt quite excited.
Suddenly, a warm current surged up from her lower abdomen.
It wasn't the urge to pee, but a very mysterious sensation.
It felt as if something had awakened inside her, spreading along her blood vessels to her limbs.
As the warm current washed through her muscles, her slightly sore legs suddenly felt much lighter.
Her stride frequency remained the same, but the distance of each step was noticeably larger, allowing her body to spring forward much more easily.
Just as she was wondering about it, a prompt box lit up before her eyes.
【Level 2 Swordsmanship: 100/100 → Level 2 Swordsmanship, Agility +1】
【Level 1 Heroic Strike: 8/200】
“Huh?”
She let out a cry of pleasant surprise.
She hadn't expected that killing two scumbags would actually level up her Swordsmanship, and even Heroic Strike had gone up by five points.
What surprised her even more was that leveling up Swordsmanship actually granted her a free point of Agility.
“Killing monsters to level up—makes perfect sense.”
She licked her lips and continued running forward.
Just as she rounded the corner of the alley, a second prompt box popped up.
【Completed Adventure Quest: I'm No Pushover!】
【Completion Rate: Those two won't be coming back. Ever.】
【Reward: Combat Skill - Charge】
【Charge: Consumes a moderate amount of stamina to charge toward a target within twenty-five meters. Speed is greatly increased, and low obstacles along the path can be vaulted over. The first attack during the charge receives a minor boost.】
“Huh? No level?”
The moment the prompt box disappeared, a wave of muscle memory flooded into her body.
In an instant, she knew how to lower her center of gravity, how to use the strength of her thighs to propel herself forward, and how to transfer all her kinetic energy into her weapon before colliding with the target.
It was as if she had practiced this movement hundreds, thousands of times.
Rosie used the moonlight to scan the path ahead.
A broken wooden cart abandoned by someone lay across the road, and further ahead was a flight of stone steps leading uphill.
She took a deep breath, and her soles felt as if a charge of gunpowder had exploded beneath them.
The surrounding scenery instantly stretched into blurry lines, the sound of the wind filled her ears, and the broken cart flashed past beneath her feet.
In less than a breath, she was already standing at the top of the stone steps.
“Holy crap.”
Rosie looked back at where she had just been standing.
By her estimate, she had run nearly twenty meters in less than a second.
The price was a dull ache in her calf muscles, and her breathing had quickened a bit.
She grinned, reaching up to wipe the sweat from her chin.
“Even Usain Bolt would have to call me boss...”
After running for a while longer, Rosie figured she was far enough from the crime scene before she slowed her pace.
The scent of blood had mostly dissipated, leaving only a faint metallic tang clinging to her clothes.
She leaned against a stone wall, took a couple of breaths, and began to calculate her current situation.
No matter how one looked at it, this was still the Royal City.
It wasn't unusual for a few people to die in the Royal City of Norman every day.
A corpse would be fished out of the outer city's sewers every few days; the city guards mostly turned a blind eye, filling out an accidental death report to call it a day.
But those were cases of backstabbing with no eyewitnesses.
To kill two people in broad daylight like she did, the nature of the crime was entirely different.
Before long, the city guards would arrive at the scene.
No matter how perfunctory they were, they would have to open a case for such a blatant homicide.
And that guy Hawk would surely get the news immediately.
When that time came, she would face both a warrant from the city guards and a private hunt by the "Jackals."
Official and underground, a double pursuit—double the fun.
An even bigger problem was the timing.
The Royal City of Norman closed its gates every night at nightfall; once the iron portcullis dropped, there would be guards patrolling the city walls.
But looking at it from another angle, this was another world.
There were no surveillance cameras, no ID cards, no fingerprint databases, and no big data tracking.
With over a hundred thousand people crammed into a single city, trying to find someone who actively wanted to hide was like looking for a needle in a haystack, unless they searched house-by-house across the entire city.
In her past life, Rosie had watched plenty of police procedural dramas.
Anti-tracking strategies quickly flashed through her mind, and she filtered through them one by one, comparing them to her current situation.
First, humans had scents.
The first thing she could think of was hounds.
The city guards of the Royal City of Norman did indeed keep hounds, which were said to be specially trained to track major criminals.
A dog's nose was far more reliable than any eyewitness.
If she wanted to throw off the dogs, she had to scramble her scent first.
She immediately changed direction and headed straight for the outer city square.
At this hour, the daytime vendors in the square had long dispersed, but there were still a few late-night food stalls packing up near the corner.
She found a barbecue stall that was closing up. The charcoal was still glowing red, grease dripped from the iron grill, and the air was thick with a strong, savory aroma of roasted meat.
Pretending to pass by, she intentionally slowed her pace and lingered near the stall for several laps.
The smell of grease smoke blended with burnt fat, soaking thoroughly into the fabric of her clothes.
After leaving the barbecue stall, she circled back to a corner where fish had been gutted during the day.
The gutters there were filled with fish scales and entrails discarded by fishmongers, emitting a rancid stench that made her head throb.
She stomped on the dirty water on the ground, her soles getting caked in mud mixed with fish scales.
Then she began to make a wide loop around the outer city.
She didn't just wander aimlessly; she specifically sought out places with strong odors.
Open-air warehouses for drying fish, dye workshops flowing with filthy water, the outskirts of the livestock market piled with cow and sheep manure...
Every place she passed added another layer of bizarre, compound smells to her clothes.
Eventually, she couldn't even tell what she smelled like anymore.
Finally, as she passed through a narrow alley with hanging laundry, she casually snatched a linen shirt that someone had forgotten to bring in for the night from a clothesline.
Slipping into a gap between two walls, she quickly stripped off her foul-smelling clothes and changed into the clean, coarse linen garments.
She balled up her old clothes and stuffed them deep into a neighbor's trash pile.
Only after doing all this did Rosie let out a long sigh of relief.
Hounds tracked based on a scent profile.
She had mixed at least five or six pungent smells on her body that would drive any dog's nose crazy, and since she had changed her clothes, her original scent trail was effectively shredded.
Unless the city guards kept magical scent-tracking devices instead of dogs, anyone trying to follow her would be completely baffled.
As for eyewitnesses, with the constant flow of people in the outer city square at night, who would remember a passerby who stood near a barbecue stall for a few extra seconds?
Rosie found an old three-story house with a loft. Some bricks protruded from the outer wall, and relying on her high attributes, she scrambled up using both hands and feet, slipping through a small window into the loft.
The window was unlatched, and the interior was piled with old furniture and hay, looking like an abandoned storage room.
She cleared out a nest in the hay, wrapped her clothes tightly around herself, and burrowed into the pile.
Before closing her eyes, she had one final thought:
How much did the city guards even get paid a month? Would they really work overtime for two street thugs?
The answer was probably no.
And with that, she fell asleep.
It was exactly as she had thought.
The city guards indeed did not find her.
In fact, they probably just made a couple of casual rounds and went back to call it a night.
After all, the deceased weren't exactly respectable citizens.
Two thugs who already had records with the city guards weren't worth making a fuss over.
The next morning, before the sky had fully brightened.
A thin layer of pale, grayish-blue colored the eastern horizon, and a chilly, gray-blue mist blanketed the streets.
Rosie crawled out of the hay pile in the loft and stretched her stiff neck.
After a night's sleep, her stamina was mostly restored, and her spirits were much higher.
Slipping down from the loft, she spent two silver coins to buy a cloth cowl from a vagrant, pulling the brim low to obscure most of her face.
The morning light was still weak, and there were few people on the street. Only an occasional vendor heading to the morning market pushed a wooden cart past, its wheels clattering dully against the stone road.
The outer city's trade district was just beginning to wake up at this hour.
A few early-arriving merchants were unloading goods, white smoke rose from the bakery's chimney, and an old man selling meat pies set up his stove by the roadside.
Rosie walked over and pulled out five copper coins.
“Give me a meat pie, fresh today.”
The old man swiftly wrapped one in a dried lotus leaf and handed it over.
She took it and ate as she walked. The crust was crispy, filled with minced meat and onions, and it was so hot she had to keep blowing on it.
Chewing on her pie, she stepped deeper into the market.
By the time Rosie emerged from the market again, she had transformed into a completely different person.
Her messy, signature black hair was gone, replaced by an unremarkable chestnut color with a slight reddish tint.
She had bought some henna powder from a dye shop, mixed it with water, and let it sit on her hair for half an hour to dye it.
Though the dye job was somewhat uneven, with a few strands at the tips still showing her original black, it was more than enough to fool most people.
Additionally, she now wore a simple leather helmet on her head. Some parts of the leather were frayed, clearly marking it as secondhand.
The linen shirt she had temporarily swiped was also gone, replaced by a set of padded linen gambeson.
In truth, it was just several layers of thick linen stitched together with leather padding at the joints. The defensive value was better than nothing, but its main advantage was how light and agile it felt.
Over that, she wore a poorly fitting old leather cuirass, which was mainly a bit tight around the chest.
Tucked into her waist was still that same short sword, and a round wooden shield hung slung across her chest—likely a secondhand piece stripped from some unlucky soul.
On her back was a bulging cloth pack stuffed with purchased travel supplies: dried meat, flint, a waterskin, a small roll of bandages, and a small pouch of coarse salt—all the essential survival gear for an adventurer in the wild.
Her original savings amounted to forty silver coins, and the two pouches she had looted from the bald guy and the skinny guy added another thirty-odd silver, bringing her total to over seventy silver coins.
Yet in this single morning, this small fortune quickly dwindled.
The new padded gambeson cost ten silver coins—since it was brand new, it was naturally a bit pricey.
The old wooden shield cost five silver coins; it had a few cracks along the edge, but they didn't affect its utility.
The old leather cuirass cost a whopping twenty-five silver. This was the most expensive piece among all her gear, but since it protected her vitals, she couldn't afford to skimp on it.
The old helmet cost eight silver coins; it had a few scratches on the leather, but at least it covered her head.
The remaining money went toward the henna powder and various travel supplies, costing her another dozen or so silver.
Now, she had only fourteen silver coins left in her pocket.
But Rosie didn't feel a single pang of regret about spending this money.
Because once she donned this gear, she was no longer the pitiful girl from the outer city slums dragged down by a gambling addict of a father.
She was a bona fide adventurer.
She actually looked far more normal than her peers, who were covered in scars, had fierce glints in their eyes, and carried strings of magical beast fangs at their waists.
Rosie strolled confidently across the square to the stage station near the city gates.
Every morning, several public carriages departed from here, catering specifically to travelers without their own mounts.
She found a carriage heading south to Mountain Wood Town and bought a ticket for two silver coins.
The carriage cabin was a square wooden box covered in tarpaulin on all four sides, lacking suspension springs underneath and fitted with old axles.
Besides her, several people were already seated inside. When they saw Rosie board, they merely raised their eyelids and didn't spare her much of a glance.
Rosie found a corner to sit in, leaning her backpack and round wooden shield against her leg.
After a while longer, the carriage was finally full.
The driver cracked his whip, and the draft horse let out a puff of white steam, beginning to trot forward.
As the wheels rolled over the stone pavement, the entire cabin gave a sudden lurch before settling into a rhythmic bounce.
They reached the city gates.
The carriage paused slightly.
The voices of guards conducting routine inspections drifted in from the front, followed by someone lifting the canvas curtain at the back of the carriage.
A shaft of morning light squeezed into the cabin, illuminating the sleepy weariness on everyone's faces.
A guard wearing a half-cuirass poked his head in, his gaze sweeping across the faces of the passengers.
When his eyes landed on Rosie, they paused briefly.
Rosie's expression remained completely unfazed.
The guard glanced at the short chestnut hair peeking out from under her helmet, then at the standard adventurer gear she wore.
He shifted his gaze to the passengers behind her, swept over them once, and pulled his head back out.
“No problems here, move along!”
The guard waved his hand.
The driver called out in response, the whip cracked, and the carriage set off once more.
The carriage rolled through the city gate archway, the stone overhead blocking the light for a brief moment before it brightened again.
The city gates receded further and further behind them, and the dusty gray walls of the Royal City of Norman were gradually obscured by the withered yellow bushes lining the road.
Rosie leaned against the swaying wall of the carriage, pulling her helmet down slightly to cover her eyes.
The few hours of sleep she had gotten in the loft's hay pile last night were ultimately not enough. Now, with the carriage swaying to and fro, weariness began to wash over her.
She yawned and closed her eyes to take a nap.
The cabin was quiet, filled only with the clatter of horse hooves and the creaking of wheels.
She had no idea how long they had been bouncing along like this.
Suddenly, the driver let out a panicked shout.
“Whoa—whoa!!”
The draft horse neighed as its reins were pulled tight, causing the entire carriage to decelerate abruptly. Rosie's body involuntarily lurched forward.
The cloth pack and shield near her legs almost went flying, but she grabbed them just in time.
“What's going on?”
“What happened?”
The carriage instantly fell into a commotion.
Rosie remained silent, but her ears perked up.
The driver's voice came from the front, loud enough that it seemed intentionally directed at the passengers inside.
“What do you think you're doing?”
A somewhat familiar, gruff voice replied.
“Nothing much, just checking if the person we're looking for is in there!”
Rosie's pupils contracted.
Hawk?
This guy actually predicted she would flee?
And he even figured she would head south instead of north, setting up a blockade ahead of time?
Was his class a Prophet or something?
【Sudden Adventure Quest: Why Are You Always Chasing Me?】
Rate on N.U.
