Alice looked up in the direction of the origin of the curved bullet.
With her hands in her pockets, she walked out of the alley like a student wandering after school, her expression relaxed.
One kilometer away in a straight line, on the rooftop of a building.
Fox felt no frustration over the failed mission.
Her slender fingers danced over the rifle like a pianist, and in just three seconds, the custom large-caliber sniper rifle was disassembled into a pile of cold parts, sliding into a specialized shock-absorbing bag.
Click.
The bag snapped shut.
As a killer, Fox did not believe in luck.
She believed in the warp and weft of the Loom of Fate, as well as the geometric trajectory of bullets as they cut through the air.
But that shot just now was one of the very few misses in her career.
The girl hadn't just dodged the bullet.
In the split second before the trigger was pulled, in the microsecond the firing pin struck the primer, the girl seemed to have already read the landing point of death.
The composure she showed while dodging, the elegance as if she were dancing with the bullet, and the shuddering sensation brought about by that final point into the air, all pointed to one thing.
The target was not a lamb waiting to be slaughtered.
Fox grabbed the bag, kicked open the rusty, heavy iron door on the rooftop, and rushed down the stairs.
Adrenaline surged through her veins, pushing her sensory acuity to its peak.
If it were an ordinary failed assassination, she would choose to fire a follow-up shot or find a second sniping point.
But that gaze, spanning a thousand meters, told her: if she didn't leave now, the roles of hunter and prey would reverse in the next second.
Rushing out the back door, she found herself in a dark alley filled with the smell of rotting garbage.
A black modified Harley motorcycle was lurking quietly in the shadows.
Fox mounted the motorcycle and put on a full-face helmet with a tactical HUD display.
As the engine ignited, her black leather jacket tightened, outlining her cold, arrogant, and explosive silhouette.
"Boom—"
A low roar exploded in the alley, the front wheel of the motorcycle lifted slightly off the ground, and like an arrow leaving the bowstring, it instantly tore through the silence of the alley.
Like lightning.
However, after driving only one block, while passing a seemingly normal corner in the old city, Fox's pupils suddenly contracted.
An unprecedented sense of crisis stung the back of her neck like a needle point.
Without any hesitation, Fox slammed on the front brake.
The wide hot-melt tires rubbed violently against the rough concrete, leaving a five-meter-long scorch mark, and the stench of burning rubber immediately filled the air.
Under the massive inertia, the Harley motorcycle almost tipped onto its front wheel before barely coming to a stop.
Fox did not look back.
After realizing the target possessed unconventional abilities, she had been staring intensely at the rearview mirror.
But her method of observation was different from ordinary people; she wasn't looking for a specific face, but rather for a sense of incongruity in the scene.
In her perceptual radar, everything behind her was normal.
Too normal.
At five o'clock, a faded yellow taxi was honking wildly due to traffic, and the driver was sticking his head out to curse.
At three o'clock, a vendor pushing a hot dog cart was squeezing mustard onto sausages, steam rising.
At six o'clock, a few students with school bags were pushing and shoving each other.
This was a perfect, painting-like scene of city life.
Yet in this picture, it was as if a ghost had appeared, or rather, the World had developed a logical void in this corner.
Although her eyes saw everyone, her brain was desperately ignoring a specific existence.
That faint sense of oppression made her feel as if she were being choked by an invisible hand.
"Visual deception, or psychological suggestion?"
Fox snorted coldly, fished a small silver sphere from her tactical belt with her left hand, and without looking, threw it backward.
The sphere traced a parabola in the air, and the moment it hit the ground, it split open, emitting a slight mechanical unfolding sound.
It was a military-grade high-precision infrared perimeter sensor, capable of capturing micron-level dust disturbances in the air and 0.1-degree temperature changes.
At this moment, Fox dared not trust her own eyes, because eyes could deceive and the brain would fill in the gaps.
But she believed in the laws of physics and the laws of thermodynamics.
As long as it was a carbon-based life form, it was impossible to erase its body temperature, and impossible not to disturb the airflow when moving.
Just as the sensor hit the ground.
Alice, in her passerby mode, paused slightly.
The state of thin presence granted by the Kato Megumi character card was not invisibility, but rather making people around her subconsciously ignore her existence.
However, this conceptual ability showed a flaw when facing pure physical detection instruments.
"Beep—"
The sensor instantly erupted with a shrill alarm.
"Found you."
Fox sat on the motorcycle, and through the tactical goggles of her helmet, her gaze, cold and sharp as a knife, instantly swept toward that patch of shadow.
Her left hand lightning-fast drew the custom Beretta 92F from her thigh holster, her wrist gave an extremely strange flick, and she pulled the trigger at the empty air.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The three gunshots almost overlapped.
Three bullets traced three strange arcs in the air, like three poisonous snakes, blocking all possible paths from the left, right, and top at tricky angles.
There was no way to dodge.
Alice's pupils reflected these three counter-intuitive bullets, her body leaned backward with extreme suppleness, followed by a side flip that defied human mechanics.
"Whoosh— Whoosh— Whoosh—"
The three bullets grazed her hair, clothes, and heels, hitting the brick wall behind and spraying gravel and dust.
It was this split-second exposure and dodging action that completely shattered that layer of passerby-ness, allowing Fox to lock onto Alice's position with certainty.
"Monster."
Fox cursed inwardly, but did not linger in the fight.
If the opponent could dodge her curved shots within five meters, even if she were the strongest assassin in The Fraternity, getting into close quarters would mean certain death.
She slammed on the throttle, forcibly turned the handlebars, and crashed herself and the bike directly into the floor-to-ceiling glass window of a long-abandoned laundromat next door.
Crash—
The thick tempered glass shattered instantly under the impact of the Harley motorcycle.
Amidst the flying crystalline shards, the sunset light was refracted into bizarre patterns.
Fox's figure was divided into thousands of fragments within these countless reflective surfaces, blurring the line between reality and illusion, as if she had split into countless people in that instant.
Taking advantage of this momentary visual interference, Fox rushed into the dim interior.
"Trying to leave?"
A curve of excitement tugged at the corner of Alice's mouth.
The clash just a moment ago made the blood in her veins begin to boil.
With a tap of her toes, her figure light as a swallow, she chased into the laundromat without hesitation.
The interior of the abandoned laundromat was dim, with huge tumble dryers standing like rows of silent tombstones, and the air filled with the smell of old mold and pungent rust.
Alice's gaze swept over, but she did not see any sign of the motorcycle.
She quickly crossed the hall and pushed open the shaky back door.
Outside the back door was an even darker and more complex entrance area to the underground drainage channels, with crisscrossing waterways like a labyrinth.
Just as Alice was about to step forward, her sharp intuition suddenly made her scalp tingle.
"Something's wrong."
She stopped abruptly, her gaze falling on a pile of debris above the back door frame.
There, a black leather jacket was hanging.
That was the leather jacket Fox had been wearing.
Inside the jacket, three miniature tactical flashbangs were taped together, and a piece of transparent fishing line, so thin it was almost invisible, was connected to the door hinge of the back door.
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