There were fifteen of them, and surprisingly all of them were high-grade.
"You think you can just beat my buddy up and-"
Time slowed down as Rui activated his Martial Heart for just a millisecond. He activated a breathing technique while carrying the girl, ensuring she wouldn't get hurt. It would have been impossible to fight in such circumstances, but that was only when he was fighting an equal.
POW POW POW POW...!
Martial Squires were so weak that even such a handicap was not much of a handicap at all. He swiftly knocked all of them out within a millisecond, before leaping away to a distant isolated part of the bazaar.
The girl fiddled with her bracelet in shock. "Y-You're so strong...!"
Rui narrowed his eyes as he stared into her eyes with a piercing stare.
Three words escaped his mouth.
"Drop the act."
"E-Eh?" She tilted her head in confusion. "W-What do you mean sir?"
The air chilled by a few degrees.
"Did you think I wouldn't notice?" Rui asked her with a calm, yet steely voice. "I only began being targeted by Martial Artists after you began leading me around. No matter how cleanly I knocked them out, making sure to do so at a moment when no one was watching us, they always found me and always knew what had happened despite the fact that I ensured that there were no eyewitnesses."
He paused for a moment, considering her. "It couldn't have been esoteric surveillance measures, because not only was I specifically wary of exactly that, but the entirety of the Derimont Bazaar is an anti-sensory zone. It couldn't have been a Martial Artist tracking me for the same reasons. And yet they found me despite no surveillance, no tracking, and no eyewitnesses.
He paused for a moment. "...No eye-witnesses except you."
He had initially thought that she was the one being targeted by various Martial Artists. But if that were the case, they would have told him to leave her while he had the chance. There was no point in acting like he bumped into them and picking a fight with him instead.
He glanced at her bracelet, channeling Riemannian Echo deep into it. The technique's greatest strength was its range and its ability to bypass anti-sensory means, however, its shortcoming was detail and depth. It required active mental exertion for Rui to sense deep detail, Rui needed to want to, otherwise, he couldn't sense it, and he also couldn't do it while focusing on the range like he had been this entire time.
"You have an interesting bracelet there," Rui murmured.
"It's the last thing my mother left me before dying." She replied.
Yet she did not stutter despite the pressure Rui exerted on her.
"Yes, I'm sure that story is true." Rui snorted. "Is that why there is a micro-transmitting device at the center of the beads hidden under a layer of anti-sensory esoteric substances?"
She didn't respond.
There was silence for several seconds.
"In all the time that I survived the bazaar, I haven't noticed a single guide. I haven't seen a single hawker offering guides. Guiding is not a thing that people do here." Rui continued. "I highly doubt that it is something you do either. It was an excuse to approach me. You specifically wanted to approach me particularly."
His eyes narrowed. "You were targeting me. Yet you weren't out to rob me in collaboration with these Martial Artists. I gave you a handful of the few gold coins freely in the first place, so it would be redundant and ineffective. Furthermore, approaching me one after the other is also inefficient."
Several more seconds passed.
"I was being tested," Rui remarked. "Each hurdle was marginally stronger than the previous one. Step by step. That is quite unnatural."
She didn't respond to that either.
Several seconds passed.
"Who are you? What do you want? Why did you do all of this?" Rui asked.
Several seconds passed before she finally moved.
A smile bloomed on her face. "Impressive, Senior John. You are the first seeker to have seen through me this cleanly. Your deductive ability has far exceeded our expectations."
Rui narrowed his eyes at the girl.
He had never told her his alias, yet she addressed him by that name. The last time he had used that alias was many days ago when he resided in an inn where he registered under that name.
An inn that was many thousands of kilometers away from the Saiful Region.
"We apologize for these transgressions," She bowed her head slightly. "We did not expect you to learn of them in the first place. We did not mean to harm you. We merely wished to test you. Your Martial prowess and your character."
"...'We'...?" Rui asked.
"Surely you have figured out the answer to that question." She smiled mischievously.
Rui's eyes narrowed. He did, indeed. There were too many clues in her words.
"The Beggar's Sect?" Rui whispered.
She smiled, getting up. "We are interested in why you seek us. I had been instructed that I may grant you an audience if there was merit in your solicitations."
"So this...All of this...was just to test me? To learn more about me?"
"We are not in the habit of indulging in transactions where we do not have the upper hand in information." She remarked. "Follow me."
He simply stared at her figure from behind, before sighing and following her. He had expected to be the one to approach the Beggar's Sect. He had never expected that the Beggar's Sect would take the initiative to do so.
She led him through a series of hidden tunnels, returning back to the bazaar atop, which earned an expression of surprise from him. He had already scoured the entire bazaar atop and had especially paid attention to the centermost part of the bazaar where he had expected them to be hiding.
Yet he was only further surprised when she headed for the outskirts of the bazaar, where the empty book market was. They entered an abandoned building that was densely packed with books that nobody wanted to pack.
A large array of people writing in books were seated across a wide array of tables
"We have arrived." She remarked. "Be careful about what you say out loud. We can't have you spilling secrets due to lack of caution."
"This place is the...?" Rui murmured with surprise.
"Yes," She remarked. "A trivial market at the forefront of everything. The first thing that anybody sees when they reach the Derimont Bazaar. We are out in the open for the entire world to see, which is why nobody sees us."
Rui's eyes widened as he realized the ingenuity of this arrangement. An open base of operations that was entirely out in the open under the simplest of disguises. Everybody who came to the Derimont Bazaar looking for the Beggar's Sect assumed that the clandestine and furtive intelligence agency was located deep within the bazaar, perhaps even in the underground bazaars hidden deeply from the light.
It was precisely because of that every single person dismissed the outermost, forefront, and most exposed market and section of the Derimont Bazaar that was entirely out in the open. Not a single person even remotely considered that such a horrible hiding place could possibly be the base of operations of the secretive Beggar's Sect.
