The official manages to stop herself from asking whether Bella has held a sword since before the last three days.  Instead she holds up the mostly-blank sheet of paper.  "Explain this?"

"I've never had it turn up a less confusing result than that. Probably a 『Rare Skill』but I don't know what it's called because it declines to print itself out."

The official almost calls bullshit on this, but she can't actually think of any more reasonable explanation.  Concealment Skills are designed to give reasonable non-question-begging results, not send up giant flare signals of exploding absurdity.

...The official is just going to go along with what the Vice-Guildmaster said about that interesting young lady who defeated a couple of bandits and brought in five other bandits dead, alongside the bodies of two dead C-ranks.  Namely:  She's hiding something, she's probably not evil, and be a little nice to her if possible.

On reflection, it's probably that sword.  The sword, scabbard, and belt together look much more expensive than anything else Bella is carrying.

Working admin in the Adventurer's Guild teaches you two things:  One, the world is fundamentally not a normal place, and two, most of the anomalies are none of your business.  If a young lady gets her hands on some kind of crazy enchanted sword and suddenly wants to visit the first floor of a dungeon, you would need to know a whole lot more about what was really going on, before you could interfere in a way that was actually helpful and didn't get your own hands burned.

"I suppose if you can move around a blade that quickly, you can handle yourself on the first floor, no deeper," says the official.  "Would you like to buy a beginner's book of 『Sword』 forms for ten copper?  A day or two of practice and you should be able to get 『Sword』 Lv. 1."

"That sounds great once I am less cash-constrained."

After Bella and Haroun leave, before they've even picked up their horses, the official is already reporting to the Vice Guildmaster, just in case all these anomalies correspond to Trouble above her own pay level in some way that only the Vice Guildmaster can infer.

The Vice Guildmaster hears this report, shrugs, writes her own summary of the affair, and immediately faxes it via magical communications artifact to the Adventurer's Guild regional headquarters.  Just in case all these anomalies correspond to Trouble above her pay level.

A minor but highly cleared official at the regional Guild headquarters will read this report immediately, shrug, and forward it at once to the global headquarters.

A senior official at the global headquarters will read it immediately, and shrug one final time.  They will then toss their copy of the report to a junior runner, to be dated and filed in the usual filing cabinet for Anomalous New Adventurer Reports; marked with the purple tag of something that isn't obviously Trouble right now, but remains unexplained and might turn out to be part of some other Trouble later.

Centuries of experience have shown that this procedure minimizes the amount of Trouble that is allowed to pointlessly and preventably explode, though of course there is still plenty of Trouble left over.

The entire process is very predictable, if you are someone interested in predicting it.

Bella and Haroun are riding horses through Relis, heading for the town gate.

Bella has been given the better-trained and more docile horse, but this will still take a lot of attention from her.  At least until riding the horse suddenly becomes easier around halfway to the gate.

After that, if Bella cares to cast her gaze around town, she's liable to notice some more things, now that it's brighter outside and there are more people around.  In particular, Bella is liable to notice some people with fur, tails, and pointed ears; and some empty-eyed people wearing heavy collars of unrusting red metal.  The overlap between these two population groups is substantially greater than statistical happenstance would predict.

"What are the - fuzzy people called," she murmurs. "- also I think I just leveled in horseback riding and that was weird."

Haroun looks around and spots the wolfkin in question, a perfectly ordinary-looking furry woman buying goat giblets from a butcher.  "Beastfolk.  You don't have them in your world?"

"Humans are it for species that can hold a conversation. - is 'beastfolk' a polite word?"

"As polite as 'human' is.  There's some people who consider it a curse word, but that's on them, not the speaker."

"You could say that about any curse word were you so inclined. Why do they consider it a curse word?"

"Same reason that 'Relican' is a curse word in some other kingdoms?  A tribe of wolfkin somewhere killed your grandfather's grandfather's grandfather and your own father is still blaming all wolfkin everywhere for that, even though your grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's brother probably killed the killer's mother."

"Wolfkin being the specific kind? Are there many kinds?"

"More than I could easily remember to recite.  Wolfkin are some of the most common, though.  Uh, tigerkin and Cait Sith also come to mind as some folks you're likely to see more of around these parts."

"Quick rundown on their deal as compared to humans?"

"...more fur?  Less likely to lean vegetarian if their crossed species is a predator, more likely to lean vegetarian if their crossed species was herbivorous?  Some have more sensitive noses, and you're less likely to find those in towns kept less clean than this town?  Lots of them correspond to particular tribes or subcultures on a regional basis but not in any globally identifiable way?  Wolfkin are maybe unusually loyal to each other on average but a lot of people would dispute that?  They're basically just people."

"...when you say crossed species is that literal somehow?"

"I mean what a wolf is to a wolfkin or a tiger to a tigerkin.  I'm not sure what you mean by 'literal' there."  (The Lictic word for 'literal' in the sense of 'string literal' or 'quoted term' is identical to the Lictic word for 'literal' in the sense of 'actually the thing'.)

"I don't actually need to know probably." Can she level faster by paying lots of attention to her horse skill and applying it and trying to extrapolate from it.

Bella doesn't level up again by the time their horses reach the edge of town.  They exit the town after showing their temporary dungeon-entry permits to the guards, getting the stamp that will allow easy town re-entry later.  The local minor dungeon is about 1.6 hours away.  Would Bella like to continue trying to become Better At Horse?

As long as she's riding a horse anyway and until she thinks of another question, which probably won't take long, why not.

How long will it take Bella to think up another question?  Horse-Riding still hasn't obviously gone up to Lv. 2 after five minutes of riding a dirt trail across relatively boring hills of mixed green and yellowing grass.

After five minutes she figures it's worth asking if there are best practices for getting skill-ups besides just practicing the thing and doing dungeons. She asks. "And is there synergy if you do those at the same time so combat skills level up faster?"

Bella asks the most interesting questions.  Not so much because the answers are unknown, this time, but because the questions imply such interesting other possibilities you could imagine, if you didn't already know how things worked.  "There's all sorts of skill books reputed to contain particular exercises that will get you faster to the next level of some particular Skill.  I'm not sure I could say there was a general principle besides that?  I mean, going on some of the things you've said before, if a Video Game tells you exactly how close you are to getting the next Skill level, and you can use that to determine exactly how many points you gain from doing a particular exercise, we don't have anything like that.  People try to figure out on a case-by-case basis what's most effective, and of course people argue about that."

Bella's final question is less ambiguous in Lictic than it would have sounded in English; in Lictic it clearly means 'Is there synergy if you do ((the exercises) and (doing dungeons)) at the same time so (that is why) combat skills level up faster?'  Haroun's reply is that dungeons beyond minor dungeons have opportunities to use all sorts of Skills, from Alchemy to Diplomacy to Weaving.  His basic impression is that you need to be using the Skills to do something dungeon-related, and you need to be helping to ultimately kill monsters nearby you in a relatively straightforward way; but it counts if you ride a horse to where you will kill monsters, or if you use an alchemy station to brew an explosive that somebody else throws at a monster.  Haroun isn't speaking for a known theory built by Earth-style-science, though; he's trying to interpolate an answer to Bella's question based on how he's heard dungeon-related things are usually done.

"- it's important that the monsters be near you but supplying potions to adventurers still works?"