Starbeck saw the panicked Rorl and High Demon confronting another Server. He automatically wanted to retreat back into the house.
There weren't a lot of battles between players in the big city, but not entirely none either.
Without an effective sanction system, plus the alluring reward of killing others, a lot of players were willing to take the risk.
Therefore, the impromptu battles that happened across the city were quite frequent, to the point that some players who purposely avoided conflict would stumble upon one once in a while.
Starbeck, however, already set up a series of countermeasures, and no doubt the situation before his eyes required him to activate one of them.
Everyone knew the room of a player was the safest place in the entire city, but at the next moment, Starbeck's face changed because the owner of the house who he just bought a bunch of spices from rejected his request to re-enter the house.