This Life, I Will Be the Protagonist

As soon as the group was about to split up, Rita swiftly approached the two men she had marked. Without hesitation, she pulled out a **Fine Pistol** and fired a shot directly into one man's temple.

Before coming here, she had accumulated six regular attacks in her safe house. This was her seventh shot, and with her **Master Archer** talent, the seventh strike was guaranteed to be a critical hit.

Her high stats only added to the damage—one shot was all it took to blow the man's head clean off. Immediately, she fired multiple shots at the second man, aiming for his head and heart. Simultaneously, she tossed two grenades toward the larger crowd of players, without even glancing in their direction.

As the crowd scattered, taking cover from what they assumed were active grenades, Rita crouched and quickly searched the first corpse. Players' backpacks were only so discreet—after years of experience, she knew the typical designs and hiding spots. Within seconds, she found the hidden backpack inside the man's jacket, snatched it, and stuffed it into her own crossbody bag.

Meanwhile, the second man was bleeding out fast.

The grenades hadn't exploded yet, causing confusion among the players. As they realized they'd been tricked, they scrambled to attack. Swearing erupted across the parking lot.

Ignoring the chaos, Rita calmly started looting the second corpse. This time, she didn't use grenades. Instead, she grabbed handfuls of silver coins and tossed them into the air. Left hand looting, right hand scattering coins—she repeated this three times before finally finding the second game bag.

The players were still not fully loyal to the Lopez family, and silver coins were hard to come by—just a handful of coins was worth a full dungeon run, and the Lopez family always took the lion's share. A third of the players immediately crouched to collect the coins, while another third hesitated for just a moment.

That brief hesitation gave Rita two more seconds. She stashed the second game bag in her pack, stood up, and bolted.

With her **52 Agility**, the enemy's skills couldn't even touch her. Only one wide-range sonic attack grazed her, breaking her **Phantom Cloak**, but it only cost her about twenty health points.

Mateo stood there, watching helplessly as the situation unfolded. This elderly woman had appeared out of nowhere, killed two of his men, and sprinted off, all while the crowd was scrambling for silver coins. He'd only seen her from the back—an old woman, with spry steps and graying hair. The obvious **Disguise** felt like a slap in the face. And his men—his elite crew—had failed to stop her!

Mateo clenched his fists, his chest heaving with rage. He wanted to scream at his incompetent subordinates, but the world had changed. They were all players now, and without the overwhelming power to crush them, he couldn't treat them like dogs.

The two bodies were quickly retrieved, and Mateo's eyes burned as he glared at them. He didn't need to check—they were his trusted aides. This meant that their game bags were loaded with gold.

But now was not the time to mourn. Whoever had attacked might come back. Gritting his teeth, he stifled the urge to scream and ordered, "Move out!"

Mateo and his entourage sped back to the Lopez family estate, where they quickly stashed all the gold in the family's treasure vault. The vault was now their safest place, even if the efforts to secure it had slowed their overall progress.

The vault was equipped with scouting, alert, marking, and tracking tools. The floor was lined with electric grids, and only a select few family members had access. It wasn't just a treasure room anymore—it was the family's safe house.

...

After escaping from the Lopez family restaurant, Rita drank an invisibility potion and sprinted to a crowded area. She **Phantom Shifted** to the ocean.

Her **Disguise** skill was on cooldown, otherwise, she would've shifted to **Lania Kaia**. But even in **Undercity**, there were occasional NPCs, and she couldn't risk exposing the fact that humans could operate on **Lania Kaia**.

Once in the ocean, she took a quick bath, then moved to the shore to change her clothes. She cleaned herself with **Freshen Up**, then **Phantom Shifted** back to the city center, transforming into a calico cat and slipping into a busy crowd.

While **Insight**ing Mateo's crew earlier, Rita had noticed several tracking-type **Divine Gifts**—one could track blood, and another could track scent. To be safe, she needed to rid herself of any lingering traces.

For the next six hours, she wandered around the city. She even made a stop near the government's library stronghold, just to throw off anyone potentially tracking her. At one point, she squatted in a corner watching two cats fight for five minutes. She wasn't bored—it just so happened that the cats were fighting over her.

She glanced down at her own calico fur. "Am I really that irresistible?"

Not bad. She found it oddly satisfying.

As soon as her **Disguise** cooldown ended, Rita transformed back into a goblin and shifted to **Lania Kaia**, heading straight for **Undercity's** sewers. Only there did she finally take out the two game bags.

The bags weren't large—one had six slots, the other four.

She carefully inspected the metallic boxes inside. Each box was equipped with modern technology—probably tracking devices or cameras, but on **Lania Kaia**, those would be useless. No network, no tracking. Still, she leaned in and sniffed—there was definitely tracking potion on them.

Using her dagger, she pried open the locks, and a flash of gold nearly blinded her.

Touching the gold bricks, she sighed. Even these were laced with tracking potion.

Clever. Very clever.

She carefully removed each gold brick, confirming that every one had been tainted with tracking potion. There were ten boxes in total, each containing 1,000 pounds of gold.

In total, she now had 12,000 pounds of gold.

"Thank you, Lopez family, for your generous donation."

Rita burst into laughter. She might not be short on cash, but she was certainly short on morals. Just thinking about Mateo's shocked and furious expression made her chuckle even harder.

The best part was that the pain wasn't over yet. Gold's value was tied to its ability to be exchanged for coins through goblins. In the previous timeline, goblins had exchanged gold for coins on **Earth**, but now? She had already drained the goblins of their coins. It wasn't even certain they'd return to **Earth** anytime soon.

All that gold might not even be worth what the Lopez family's old assets were.

This was why she had been so eager to encourage the Lopez family to exchange their assets for gold in the first place. She didn't mind taking a slight loss on the belts and potions—getting them to switch to gold had been the ultimate win.

Rita didn't have the right potion to neutralize the tracking solution yet, but she knew the recipe. It was part of intermediate alchemy. She packed the gold bricks back into the stolen game bags, slung them over her shoulders, and headed to the alchemy shop.

There, she bribed **Apache** with half a pack of cigarettes, borrowed her cauldron, and brewed several dozen bottles of the antidote. Afterward, she bought a pot from the tavern, returned to the sewers, and carefully scrubbed each gold brick clean.

Storage boxes were something she had plenty of. Once the gold was neatly packed into her own boxes, she carried the metal containers out into the wilderness, set them on fire with a few **Explosive Arrows**, and obliterated them. She collected the fragments, tossed them into a barrel filled with fresh meat and blood, and dumped the mixture into a spider den as an offering.

Afterward, she slathered herself in pungent-smelling potions to erase any lingering scents before finally heading back to her safe house.