Ruzena hears something

Your mind is blank. In between the arrival of the bear and now, you've forgotten the lines you rehearsed in your head. You mumble to buy time. "Well, you see, the thing is..." Suddenly, you see Ruzena's head perk up. She holds like that for a second, looking beyond you. "Get down!" she yells suddenly before she tackles you. She may be small, but her body is hard and strong, and she is able to knock you down in your unready state. As you hit the ground, you see an arrow whiz through the spot where you were just standing. An assassin! Ruzena gets up in a kneeling pose and fires a quick shot from her hunting bow. You hear a pained grunt come from the brush behind you, followed by the sound of someone limping through the foliage. Ruzena holds out her hand and you take it, allowing her to pull you back to your feet. "Come on, he's getting away!" she yells before running off. You sprint after her.

Ruzena is much faster than you and knows this forest much better, so you soon lose track of her. "Ruzena!" you call out a few times, trying to find her. Eventually you hear her calling back. You follow the noise and find the huntress standing over a corpse clad in forest-green clothes. "You did this?" you ask. She gives a light nod. "Yeah, basically. Seems like I hit the artery in his leg. Bastard was doomed from the start, and all that running didn't help him live any longer." You notice the large pool of blood soaking into the earth by his leg now, which has the fatal arrow still lodged in it. It seems that he broke it in half, probably so it wouldn't impede him as much, not that it did any good. "Friend of yours?" Ruzena asks coolly.

"I'm glad you I was with you. This guy looks professional, how did you notice him?" you ask, thoroughly impressed. Ruzena holds a hand to her chin for a moment before answering. "Instinct I guess. It's just...as a hunter, I could just kinda sense there was another hunter nearby. Like, it was too quiet. The sort of quiet I feel right before I shoot something I've been tracking for a while. I guess that sounds silly huh?" "Silly?!" you exclaim, "You saved my life! If that's silly, I'm in need of some silly right now." She smiles slightly. "We should probably check him, see if we can figure anything out about him."

You both begin searching him, and soon Ruzena finds something. "Aha!" she exclaims, holding out a slip of crumpled paper. Paper? The people who hired this man must have been wealthy if they were willing to use such luxuries. "Um, I can't, I mean, I don't know what language this is. Can you read it?" She says. She seems so uncomfortable all of a sudden. No matter, you have to focus. Your life is at stake. You take the slip and examine it. It doesn't look like any script you've seen before. "I don't think this is a language," you say, brows furrowed as you stare intensely at the scrap, "I think this is in code." She exhales audibly. "Oh yeah, that explains it" she says, forcing a laugh. You turn your attention back to Ruzena. "Back at my castle I might have something that will help me crack this. Want to come?" She looks at you like you've just met. "Well, aren't you the brainy one. Alright bookworm, I think we make a good team. Plus, I want to get to the bottom of this almost as much as you do."