Sneak attacks are wrong

"What the hell? When did this happen?" Lorne stared in alarm at the threads wound around his ankle.

His opponent was stronger than he had imagined!

Sequence 7? No, higher than that!

"Shit!" He reached back for the holster beneath his arm. His index finger had barely hooked the hammer when the woman before him suddenly vanished.

He had only drawn the barrel halfway out when a cloying fragrance rushed into his face. The woman was already right in front of him. He could even see the bloody foam at the corner of her mouth.

"A rookie."

Sharon felt a flash of delight at Lorne's reaction. His clumsy movements were nothing like those of someone who had undergone extensive training.

Her threads were merely a diversion, meant to distract him long enough for her to seize the opening, rush forward, and kill him with a single strike.

A black flame formed in her hand. She had little spirituality left, and this was the last flame she could summon. That was why she had closed the distance-to make sure this one attack hit.

Unless something unexpected happened, the man before her would be burned to charcoal in an instant.

"What?"

Perhaps it was her injuries, or perhaps the ground was too wet. Just as Sharon reached Lorne, her legs inexplicably buckled, and her foot slipped...

For an instant, she felt dazed. In all her years as an Assassin, she had never made such an elementary mistake.

The black flame that should have struck him instead swept past Lorne as she stumbled, merely setting his coat alight.

Lorne used the momentum of leaning backward to slip free, flinging away his burning coat.

"Damn it!"

Unwilling to waste this opportunity, Sharon pressed forward, thrusting her hand at Lorne like a blade.

This was an Assassin's unique ability to unleash an explosive burst of strength in a single strike.

Looking at her face, hideously contorted with murderous intent, Lorne felt a moment of disbelief. He had never expected his journey in another world to end so soon.

Bang!

Blood suddenly burst from Sharon's left breast, spraying Lorne's face with blood and fragments of bone. Her bladed hand stopped barely half a centimeter from his Adam's apple.

"Cough... Who..." Sharon looked down at the bowl-sized hole in her chest. The blood seeping out had completely soaked her lace nightdress red.

She staggered, trying to continue her attack, only to slip on her own dripping blood. Her face slammed straight into the cold ground.

"What just happened?" Lorne, whose life had practically begun flashing before his eyes, stood bewildered. It took him a full second to recover.

He wiped away the pulpy mixture of flesh and blood obscuring his vision, then looked down at the empty space beneath his arm. A suspicion occurred to him.

"No way..." He lifted his left foot and took several steps back, then surveyed his surroundings out of the corner of his eye.

His revolver lay a short distance away, a thin wisp of smoke still rising from its barrel.

After a brief moment of astonishment, Lorne more or less understood what had happened.

When the woman's strange black flame struck his coat and he flung it away, the Gun Holster beneath his arm had gone with it, taking the revolver along.

The moment the gun fell, its hammer happened to strike the ground, causing it to discharge.

And the bullet had happened to hit her in the chest!

If she hadn't suddenly tried to ambush me, the bullet shouldn't have hit her at all... Lorne worked out the angle and arrived at that conclusion.

So she died because she tried to launch a sneak attack... Lorne muttered inwardly as he looked at the woman before him.

"Even though I survived, this really is..."

"It's just... just absurd!" Lorne touched his wildly pounding chest and couldn't help exclaiming.

He picked up the fallen revolver and swung out the cylinder. Sure enough, one round was missing.

He had barely practiced shooting. Even with the boost from his Robot abilities, he might not have hit her if he had actually fired himself, let alone struck her squarely in the chest.

Beneath the crimson moonlight, the scene before him felt both absurd and sacred.

But before Lorne could feel relieved, the supposedly dead body suddenly sprang up.

"What!"

In an instant, her sharp nails were only centimeters from his throat-the woman still wasn't dead.

Just as her fingertips were about to brush his Adam's apple, a dark shape swooped down from the eaves, moving so fast it left a blur.

Lucky's claws sliced precisely across her throat. Using the momentum, the Orange Cat swung her tail and twisted around as though on a swing, planting her hind paws directly against the woman's temple.

Lucky had been lying in ambush nearby all along. Her years as a stray had given her far more experience with situations like this than anyone might imagine.

"Mrow!" Only when Lucky landed did the bloody line across Sharon's throat slowly open. Arterial blood sprayed onto the surrounding walls.

With a final, unwilling howl, she crashed heavily to the ground.

This time, she was dead for good.

"Meow."

"Meooow!"

Looking at the scene before her, Lucky suddenly began to yowl.

The sheer excitement in that cry could have frightened a stray dog to death.

Lorne sensed that Lucky seemed to have entered a state of both extreme excitement and extreme pleasure.

"Could it be..." Seeing Lucky like this reminded Lorne of the bliss that had welled up from the depths of his soul when he had gained complete control over his Potion.

"Lucky drank the Assassin Potion. Could she have just..."

The scene before him was so shocking that Lorne failed to react for a moment.

Lucky padded over and rubbed against his calf, her paws leaving plum-blossom prints in the pool of blood.

Apparently having learned his lesson, Lorne regained his senses and questioned whether the corpse still had any life left in it.

After considering it briefly, he raised his revolver and fired five shots at the body on the ground, giving it a little pulse check.

Bang, bang... bang... bang!

Looking at her head, now completely shattered by the bullets, Lorne confirmed that she no longer had a pulse.

"All I did was go for a stroll, and this happened. First a den of horrors, and then... I... really have rotten luck!" Breathing hard, Lorne recalled everything that had happened that night.

Running into something like this makes me unlucky, but what does coming out of it completely unharmed make me...? As his taut nerves suddenly relaxed, the question surfaced in Lorne's mind.

"No one's going to come, right?" Lorne scanned his surroundings. He was waiting for the moment when the Beyonder power within her body emerged.

If my guess is right, she should produce that transparent substance too, just like the corpse I found before... As Lorne studied the mangled corpse before him, his eyes filled with

anticipation. At the same time, another question arose in his mind.

If she was like that Silver-Haired Woman in Backlund, she should belong to the same Pathway.

Then why is everyone I encounter a woman?

And they're all quite good-looking, with considerable allure... Lorne glanced at the voluptuous corpse and speculated.

Could this Pathway improve people's looks? If women become beauties, would men become handsome too?