Gacha Harem System

Lukas blinked, caught off guard by the question.

Karrakas laughed at his face. "What? It’s a fair question. I’ve been working with you for weeks now."

"And in front of me, we have a necromancer who likes fighting melee, a hexblade who loves cars way too much, and you." He gestured vaguely at Lukas. "Whatever exactly you are. You’re all so... unique. Individually and together. I’ve been wondering how three people like you found each other in the first place."

There was a moment of quiet, then Melody laughed.

"Ironically," she said, "Lukas found us. Both of us."

Karrakas frowned. "What do you mean, found you?"

"He sought us out." Melody rested her chin on her hand, a small smile on her face. "Though I suppose in my case it was a mix of coincidence and effort."

"I’d just come out of a dungeon run, back when I was still an Awakener. It had gone badly. I was injured, alone, and not in a good position." She tilted her head towards Lukas. "And he saved me. That’s how it started."

"She was in bad shape," Lukas said simply.

"I was in terrible shape," Melody agreed, entirely cheerful about it. "And then suddenly there was this man holding me up. And after that, well." She shrugged. "I stayed."

Karrakas turned to Akira. "And you?"

Akira chuckled, arms crossed.

"By the time I came along, the two of them were already a set," she said. "I’d just left my previous organization. I walked away from the whole thing, with no destination in mind. And I ran into them in a forest outside Havenhart."

She paused, remembering. "It wasn’t a friendly meeting at first, exactly. But it wasn’t unfriendly either. And then one thing led to another." She shrugged. "And here we all are."

"One thing led to another," Karrakas repeated.

"That’s the summary," Akira said. "The details are long."

"The details sound like they’d be worth hearing someday."

"Maybe someday," Melody said sweetly, in the tone of someone who had no intention of elaborating.

Karrakas looked between the three of them, then shook his head slowly, smiling to himself.

"I see," he said. "Coincidence and effort. That explains more than you’d think."

Before anyone could ask what he meant by that, the door opened and the attendant stepped back in, a fresh packet in his hands.

The attendant set the packet on the table.

"Section A1729," he said. "Everything current as of the last cycle. If you need anything else, I’ll be in the hall."

He withdrew, closing the door behind him.

Lukas broke the seal and spread the contents across the table. The others leaned in.

The updated map came first, noticeably more detailed than the general one from the information packet.

The routes were marked by condition, divided as maintained, partially maintained, and unmapped.

Water sources were flagged, and a handful of small caverns suitable for camps had been circled and labeled.

Then came the beast activity reports.

Lukas ran his finger down the summary page. "E-rank Crystal Wolves, confirmed packs. E-rank Crystal Bats near the upper galleries. Shard Crawlers along the lower passages, also E-rank."

He turned the page. "And a few D-rank sightings. A Crystal Boar spotted twice near the western branch, and something unconfirmed in one of the deeper galleries. No follow-up on it."

"Two D-rank sightings in a section this size is nothing," Karrakas said, reading over his shoulder. "That’s as quiet as these caves get. Anything actually dangerous draws clusters of reports, not single sightings."

"So nothing out of the ordinary," Akira said.

"Nothing out of the ordinary," Karrakas confirmed. "Which is exactly what you want for learning new terrain."

They went through the rest of it methodically, checking the route conditions, the notes on unstable passages, and the water access points, committing the important pieces to memory.

When they’d covered everything, Lukas gathered the pages back into the packet and stored it in his spatial ring.

They stood and headed out, back through the quiet contractor hall and into the noise of the main pavilion floor.

Halfway to the entrance, Karrakas slowed.

"Wait. Did we pay for that?"

Lukas chuckled. "I already paid before we entered the private room."

They pushed through the pavilion doors and out into the street. The town moved around them, with Climbers passing in both directions, the day’s noise well underway.

Lukas turned to Karrakas. "Do you have everything you need on you? Or do we need to stop anywhere else?"

Karrakas patted his spatial ring. "Everything’s here. Equipment, supplies, the works. I made sure I had everything on me before we left the inn."

"Then there’s nothing keeping us." Lukas glanced at Melody and Akira, got a nod from each, and looked back at Karrakas. "Can we head to A1729 directly?"

"We can," Karrakas said. "It’s a few hours out from the town gate, all walkable routes." He rolled his shoulders and grinned. "Ready to see what those new weapons of yours can actually do?"

"Ready," Melody said, her hand already resting on the mace at her hip.

"Then let’s head out."

They made their way back through the streets to the town gate, weaving through the morning traffic of Climbers and merchants.

At the gate itself, the guards barely glanced at them. They simply walked through the open passage in the palisade wall and out the other side.

"No gate fee," Melody noted.

"Fort towns don’t bother," Karrakas said. "Azure Town charges because tourists will pay for it. Here, everyone coming and going is working. Charging Climbers to leave and re-enter every day would just push them to camp outside the walls, and then the town loses their spending money entirely."

They stepped out into the courtyard.

It was as loud as it had been the day before, with the constant churn of parties heading out and coming back, sledges being loaded and unloaded, and prices shouted over prices.

Karrakas surveyed it all for a moment, then grinned and tipped his head.

"Follow me."

He cut into the crowd, and they fell in behind him, moving in a loose line through the press of bodies.

"Pay attention to the layout here," he said over his shoulder as they walked. "This courtyard is a hub. There are a lot of tunnels feeding into it. The big one behind us, the one we came in through yesterday, that’s the main route. It connects back to Azure Town, and if you follow the other branch, on to Fort Two."

He gestured ahead, towards the far side of the courtyard where the crystal wall of the cavern rose up, pocked with dark openings at ground level.

"Every other tunnel leads out into the network. They lead to different sections, different depths, and different dangers. And they don’t come labeled."

He glanced back at them. "So here’s your first practical lesson. I’m going to show you the tunnel that leads to A1729. Once you know that one, it becomes your landmark."

"When you’re reading a map or looking for a different tunnel later, you don’t search blindly. You count. Three tunnels left of the A1729 entrance. Two tunnels right. Everything positions off the one you know."

"So we’re memorizing one door," Akira said, "and navigating by it."

"Exactly. Every experienced Climber in this courtyard has their own anchor tunnel. Watch them sometime. Nobody stands around squinting at maps. They orient themselves based on what they know and go."

The crowd thinned as they moved away from the market stalls and the counters, the noise dropping behind them by degrees.

The cavern wall moved closer, and the tunnel mouths resolved out of the shadows one by one, each a dark opening in the crystal, most with worn paths leading in.

Karrakas moved to one of them and finally came to a stop before it.

"Here we are. This is the way to A1729."

The tunnel entrance was dark, with the light from the courtyard dying within the first few meters.

The path leading in was packed down by years of boots, and just to the side of the entrance, listing slightly on the uneven ground, sat an abandoned cart.

It was empty, with one wheel sunk into a shallow depression in the crystal, looking like it had been there long enough for people to stop noticing it.

Melody frowned at it.

"Are we taking that?"

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