Chen Xu sat on the ground resting for a long time before getting up. The fight had yielded no loot, but much of the discomfort lodged in his chest had dissipated.
It was an emotion he could not quite describe. He refused to call it guilt; it felt more like anger at having some private possession damaged or encroached upon.
He had also tested his current combat strength along the way. He was barely a match for the Lv.9 Sethis.
His injuries and the gap in levels and attributes were part of it, but the main reasons were his inability to use Dark Energy and his lack of attack options.
Sethis's [Assassination] had given him quite a surprise. It could practically multiply his combat strength, and clearly did not drain the user's energy.
That was not even the main point. If he had not seen through the first sneak attack combining a real body with a false one beforehand, almost anyone else would have faced certain death.
There had been something wrong with those footprints. Sethis had an injured leg, so his footprints should have alternated between deep and shallow, yet that trail had been perfectly even.
The moment Chen Xu noticed the discrepancy, he pinched up some bloody mud from the ground and used [Tracking Technique].
Information from the air and ground twisted into a single strand, and a red light like a quest marker pointed toward the killing threat behind him.
It felt similar to having the entire map revealed. Its only drawback was that, like [Stealth Technique], it drained his physical energy.
His constitution had already reached 11 points. Activating it for just an instant had not cost much. But if he had kept it active any longer, he would have collapsed before Sethis even needed to act.
With his right arm broken beneath the Chort's hoof, Chen Xu had no choice but to trouble Tomira for the third time that night.
The spot where he had hidden using Stealth Technique was at the foot of the bridge. The corner could barely fit a curled-up person, and the Chort could only reach its front hoof inside.
The instant it stepped on him, he had almost thought he had been exposed.
To get accidentally injured even while hiding in a blind spot-it was hard not to suspect that having his luck stripped away was the cause.
"How did you... never mind, don't tell me." Tomira stopped herself. She thought he had gone off "playing the hero" again.
The injuries on this young compatriot of hers nearly rivaled those of the Temerian veterans she had once treated:
"We're only flesh and blood, Pro. Don't imitate those mutants. You'll die."
Chen Xu nodded with a bitter smile. Just taking off his leather armor hurt enough to make him bare his teeth.
His right arm was a bloody mess. The Chort weighed at least two to three tons, and the instant its hoof landed on his arm, Chen Xu had heard a crack.
Now, though, things looked somewhat better than he had imagined. There was no obvious displacement.
Tomira treated all his wounds, large and small, again, then nailed together a wooden brace for his broken arm and hung it from his neck.
Chen Xu thanked her and left. He found his frightened chestnut horse at the edge of the woods. Worried it would run off again, he sneaked up to it and suddenly vaulted onto its back.
Surprisingly, the horse only startled a little and barely struggled. He did not know whether that was thanks to [Riding] Lv.1.
"Good horse. From now on, your name is Lizi."
He rode back to the tavern, took a bottle of pepper vodka from the liquor shelf, and headed for Willis's smithy.
He fired up the furnace, melted down several sword blanks, and hammered out a crude iron shovel.
Hearing the dull clang of hammering, the villagers who had survived the disaster finally worked up the courage to venture onto the street and inspect the situation.
Some ran anxiously into the tavern, then wailed as they clutched their relatives' bodies.
At some point, the bodies of the Nilfgaardian soldiers on the ground had been stripped bare. It was most likely the work of a few Chosen.
Chen Xu dug a pit behind Willis's yard and buried the old dwarf in it.
He planted the shovel in front of the grave and used the corrosive ink from inside Willis's clothing to write his name on it:
The finest blacksmith in White Orchard-Willis.
As the sky grew pale, the Nilfgaardian troops coming to relieve the watch discovered bodies strewn across the ground and flew into a rage.
The garrison commander came in person. Even after hearing the villagers' accounts, he still could not believe that only two escaped prisoners had done this.
"Two people silently wiped out an entire elite squad of mine? Are you joking?"
Impotent fury rose on his weathered, war-ravaged face. "They definitely had help!"
He ordered everyone to gather in the street, then pointed at the soldiers' bodies, stripped of their armor, and raged:
"Who did this! How dare you do such a thing and insult the dignity of Nilfgaardian soldiers!"
Several Chosen lowered their heads and snickered in tacit understanding, only for the commander's next words to change their expressions drastically. "Search! Turn every inch of White Orchard upside down! Anyone who took something they shouldn't have is an accomplice!"
What infuriated the Chosen even more was that a villager actually stepped forward to inform on them:
"Sir, it was these people. I saw it with my own eyes."
There were other witnesses among the villagers. To keep the soldiers from ransacking their homes, they chimed in as well. "Yes, yes, yes! We saw it too!"
The crowd distanced themselves from Heipi and the others as though avoiding the plague:
"These people gather together every day, plotting who knows what."
"They must be spies!"
Among the Chosen, Chen Xu alone seemed to have integrated somewhat into village life, smithing for the Nilfgaardians and swapping boasts with customers at the tavern. As a result, he fell under no suspicion.
A large number of Nilfgaardian soldiers surrounded the group. Several soldiers went into their houses to search and, sure enough, found incomplete sets of armor.
The reason was that these fellows had fought over the armor while stripping it off, leaving the pieces scattered between them.
The Chosen tried to break out, but one was hacked to death on the spot.
Those who had saved up enough points to preserve their lives vanished into thin air, startling the Nilfgaardian soldiers into striking even more viciously.
Heipi and several others knelt trembling on the ground, not daring to resist at all. Endless torment and interrogation awaited them.
Seeing that he had achieved his aim of making an example of them, the garrison commander ordered the bodies piled together and burned on the spot. If Chen Xu had not buried Willis beforehand, perhaps not even a handful of ashes would have remained.
From then on, White Orchard's patrol force doubled, and the bounties on Sethis and Penny doubled as well, dead or alive.
Although Chen Xu had not lost his job, his injured arm also kept him from becoming the smithy's new master. He had long since prepared his excuse:
He had been injured by the two fugitives while protecting Master Willis.
That trace of grief and his moist eyes completely fooled the soldiers, who even took the initiative to comfort him and tell him not to be too sad.
[Deception] went up a level on the spot.
The Nilfgaardians planned to seize an experienced blacksmith from Cozylitz, half a day's journey away, and bring him back. Until then, Chen Xu only needed to maintain the tools and smelt iron ingots while awaiting the new blacksmith.
It amounted to a day off, but they did not know that Chen Xu was already planning to leave.
With Lizi, traveling long distances had become much safer.
After the soldiers left, he rode a circuit around all of White Orchard and found that almost every monster had been cleared out by the army and Geralt. He could not make another fortune with the paralysis potion.
However, he found all four remaining Places of Power in White Orchard, gaining four free skill points.
He spent two skill points to raise [Sneak Attack] to Lv.3 (max): critical hit chance for stealth and backstab attacks +75%, critical damage +30%.
Knowledge of vital points across different sexes, ages, and species, along with methods of concealing his own killing intent, flooded into his mind as countless pieces of information and rapidly imprinted themselves there. His mind began to feel sluggish.
For this one attack skill, he had to invest heavily.
When Chen Xu tried once more to improve it with skill points, a wrenching sense of dislocation, as though his mind were being torn apart, suddenly struck him along with pain!