C168: Miss maid, why are we fighting?
Roson frowned. Davis still lay on the ground, clutching his chest, unmoving, while the bloody dagger remained beside him.
'Not him, then?'
Before Roson could piece together the implication, something metallic struck her hard on the head, and her vision abruptly turned to darkness!
"!"
Roson reacted on instinct, raising her daggers before her face!
Instantly, two metallic clashes rang out through the cold night air. She deflected two daggers that had been hurled directly at her skull, the force of the impact sending sparks showering into the dark.
Before anything could attack her again, her form exploded outward, transforming into a frantic cloud of bats and scattering upward into the sky.
At a considerable distance, the bats regrouped in the sky, and her slender form materialized against the backdrop of the moon, watching the scene below from the safety of high ground.
Unlike Florence, Roson had never cultivated the habit of launching assaults while in her bat form.
At first glance, such a tactic might appear advantageous against weak prey. However, exposing oneself in bat form also revealed numerous fatal weaknesses that only experienced ones understood.
"So this is your plan."
It was not Davis whom she needed to worry about, but the lad's reinforcements.
Her eyes flashed brilliant violet, and in the dark below, she watched as two additional men stepped out from the shadows of the trees. One was broad and muscular, while the other was thin, with perpetually narrowed eyes.
And a silver bucket clattered to the earth with a loud thud.
"..."
"..."
'Did they just...' Roson stared at the fallen bucket, at a loss for words.
Swallowing her disbelief, Roson descended slowly toward the ground with graceful, measured movements, her dark coat billowing around her like the wings of a great bird of prey.
"No matter how numerous your reinforcements, weaker prey cannot hope to—"
Even as she spoke, her ears detected a faint, rushing sound arcing toward her from the darkness!
Roson raised her dagger, deflecting another silver blade that had been hurled at her face.
"Not a man of many words. I find that quite to my liking."
She licked her lips, her fangs gleaming briefly in the moonlight, as her eyes flashed violet.
Simultaneously, all three men raised their weapons in a unified response.
Arnold threw two silver daggers that seemed to appear from nowhere in the dark. Roson batted them aside with flicks of her wrist, then pivoted to intercept Jack's sweeping cane strike before it could connect with her skull.
She kicked the thin man aside, sending him stumbling backward through the underbrush. Then she swung her dagger downward in a vicious arc, halting Rudolph in his tracks as he lunged forward, before launching herself directly at Arnold!
A single glance had been enough. She had identified the spearhead of this group!
"!"
Arnold moved quickly to block Roson's incoming strikes. Sharp metallic clashes of dagger against dagger rang out through the forest clearing, the sounds overlapping in rapid, staccato bursts!
The lad stumbled backward several strides under the relentless pressure, while Roson pushed onward, each of her twin daggers meeting his defenses in a barrage that allowed no respite.
Arnold's body accumulated wound upon wound, his coat and shirt slashed open in a dozen places to reveal the flesh beneath. He was being overwhelmed by the second, and even Izzy's concentration began to fry under the strain of maintaining his defense.
Roson's eyes flashed violet, and she drove her dagger in a powerful thrust toward Arnold's exposed chest!
In the same breath, from somewhere behind Arnold, a dark mass of viscous liquid lunged outward, aiming directly for the back of his skull!
"..."
Arnold stepped smoothly aside, allowing the blob of blood to pass harmlessly through the space where his head had been.
With Field Vision active, evading such an ambush was trivial. The real challenge remained keeping track of Roson herself, and in the fraction of a second his attention had shifted, her dagger grazed his chest, slicing through the fabric of his shirt and opening a shallow wound from which fresh blood seeped.
Despite being thoroughly injured, Arnold displayed no significant reaction to the pain.
Instead, he bent down low, drawing a deliberate gesture in the air with two outstretched fingers.
In the same instant that Arnold lowered his form, two glinting streaks of silver light shot out from the darkness directly behind him, converging upon Roson from her blind spot!
"!"
Roson, who had been pressing her advantage with confidence, suddenly halted mid-motion. Her pupils dilated in shock!
'What in the devilish—!'
Roson's body exploded into a cloud of bats, successfully avoiding the ambush attack by the narrowest of margins!
Her form materialized once more, hovering high in the night sky above the scattered treeline.
Roson's brows knitted together in confusion.
Hovering in the night sky, she had only just now noticed it: behind her previous position, the muscular man sat calmly upon the overturned bucket, entirely unmoving.
"You—"
They had trapped her blood-blob inside that silver bucket!
Roson's anger flared. Her lips curled into a smile, yet her eyes filled with a web of red, bloodshot threads. She gripped her daggers tighter. Her heart hammered faster in her chest, and swollen veins protruded obscenely from her face, running all the way down her neck to her arms.
"Really, you small fries... How annoying."
Roson reached into her coat pocket and withdrew a small bottle of crimson liquid.
She raised the bottle toward her lips, rotating the bottle—
"!"
Yet before she could swallow a single drop, a small object, glinting with reflected moonlight, shot upward from the ground below and shattered the bottle in her grasp!
"...?"
Roson stared down at the broken glass fragments and the dissipating crimson mist, her eyes wide with disbelief.
'How did they accomplish that?'
Instead of anger, she could only feel a profound sense of shock and amazement.
Because the object that had destroyed the bottle, if she was not mistaken, was a shilling!
How had they done it? She had been surveying the entire battlefield with constant vigilance. There had been no one present besides those three men, and not a single one of them had moved to throw or fire anything in her direction.
Yet the coin had appeared from nowhere, launching itself from the ground and striking precisely toward her Violence Yan essence bottle.
"What in the—"
*Rustle.*
Her ear twitched. A strange, rustling noise of disturbed branches reached her from somewhere behind, and Roson's intuition lit up like a warning flare!
Without even a moment to question or argue, Roson spun abruptly in midair, raising her dagger in defense!
A sharp metallic clash reverberated through the night! Roson's eyes flashed violet as she focused upon the figure now directly before her.
Another wave of surprise crossed her face.
"Florence...? Miss Night? Why...?"
The figure was a black-haired lady dressed in a maid's uniform. A bandage was wrapped around her head like the lad, but her eyes remained as cold and detached as they had ever been in all their previous encounters.
"Nothing personal, miss."
Having failed in her ambush, the lady in the maid dress, Florence, stated flatly, before allowing herself to drop back toward the ground below.
Roson remained hovering in the night air, gazing down at Florence in contemplative silence. Various thoughts flashed through her mind in chaotic succession.
"I understand now. It was you who constructed this entire ambush. It was also you who detected my presence from the very beginning."
Understanding finally dawned on her. The lad alone could not possibly have orchestrated all of this by himself. There had been a far larger, more elaborate conspiracy at work from the very beginning.
"Miss Florence, why are you doing this? We have never once crossed paths or interfered with one another. Each of us pursues our own objectives. Did Victor change his mind and decide to break the balance?"
Was this what the Trader's ominous warning had foretold?
Reflecting upon it, the conclusion made sense. Besides Madam Amanda, there existed only one force in this village that could genuinely threaten the Golden Land's Trader, and that was the Blood Sweet Order.
They were among the most extremely unstable and unpredictable of all the recognized Orders, erratic in their behavior, impossible to anticipate, and prone to sudden outbursts. However, because they produced many rare and valuable ingredients under extreme conditions that could not be replicated elsewhere, the Golden Land had long tolerated their presence and maintained a cooperative arrangement.
Florence gazed upward in silence, the two women locking eyes with one another for a long, suspended moment beneath the moonlight.
'A Spy, a Dhampir, and two random men. What a peculiar encounter.'
'It will be quite amusing if a Foreteller appears.' An entire Moon Faction meeting under a different viewpoint, facing each other on a deadly battlefield. A random thought flashed across Roson's mind, but she quickly shook her head.
Roson, of course, knew about Florence. The maid was a Dhampir, which meant most of Roson’s abilities had been compromised, even the weaknesses of a Dhampir.
'I should retreat. The Customer must be informed of this development immediately.'
Thinking rationally, Roson swept her gaze across the entire battlefield one final time and committed each of her enemy's faces to her memory, preparing herself to withdraw—
Her eyes unconsciously swept over the narrow-eyed man standing among the group.
The man calmly uncorked an orange-capped bottle and poured its glowing liquid onto the silver head of his cane.
The man calmly opened an orange-capped bottle and poured some of its liquid onto his cane.
A small turmoil rose within Roson’s chest.
Wouldn’t retreating at this moment... mean that she had accepted defeat?
'Absolutely not!'
Anger exploded within Roson's chest. She had been humiliated in this manner, degraded before her enemies. Why should she be the one to flee?!
'This humiliation can only be paid back in blood!'
At the very minimum, she needed to kill someone! She needed to take their blood as compensation for this unforgivable indignity!