Gacha Harem System

A/N: My apologies for the lack of updates. The month of July wasn’t what I expected it to be. Instead of enjoying my birthday month, I spent it in and out of the hospital. By the time I was completely healthy, the month was coming to an end. So I decided to wait for the new month to return. Apologies and happy new month.

And for those curious, I have no intentions to drop this book. Not now, and not in a few months.

See you on the other side.

***

Karrakas looked at the cart, then at Melody, and laughed.

"That? No. Of course not." He nudged the cart’s sunken wheel with his boot. "This thing’s been sitting here longer than I’ve been coming to these caves. It’s basically a landmark at this point."

"Then how do we get there?" Melody asked.

"We’ll walk, obviously." Karrakas spread his hands. "Around here, walking is the best mode of transportation there is."

"Some of these tunnels are wide enough to drive a car through, and others narrow down until you’re turning sideways to squeeze past. A vehicle takes you exactly as far as the widest passage allows, and then it becomes a very expensive thing you abandon or store away." He tipped his head towards the cart. "Like that."

"So someone drove in and learned the hard way," Akira said.

"Someone always does."

Karrakas turned towards the tunnel mouth, peering into the dark beyond the reach of the courtyard’s light.

"Speaking of which. You have your illumination on hand?"

Lukas, Akira, and Melody reached into their spatial rings almost in unison.

Three sun balls emerged.

They’d each bonded theirs the night before, a drop of blood apiece, feeling the connection immediately like a faint new sense at the edge of awareness.

Now the milky white spheres lit up the moment they touched open air, glowing to life without a word or gesture.

All three rose smoothly from their owners’ palms and drifted into position, hovering above and slightly behind each of them, high enough to cast light forward without glaring into anyone’s eyes.

The tunnel mouth ahead brightened, the first few meters of crystal wall emerging from the black.

Karrakas watched the display and smiled.

"Good. That’s money well spent." He rolled his shoulders. "Then we should continue."

Lukas frowned.

"Wait. Where’s yours?"

"My what?"

"Your light source." Lukas gestured at the three glowing spheres. "You’re walking into the same darkness as we are."

"Ah." Karrakas shook his head. "I don’t need one."

"How does that work?"

"My class covers it. [Nomad]." He tapped his temple. "Comes with a skill that lets me see in darkness. Complete darkness included. To me, that tunnel just looks like an overcast day."

There was a pause.

"That’s the first time you’ve ever told us your class," Melody said slowly.

Karrakas blinked, then chuckled.

"Huh. I suppose it is." He shrugged, entirely unbothered. "There’s no point hiding it anymore. At this stage, I trust the three of you."

He looked at them each in turn, his grin returning. "You’re weird, yes. Deeply weird, in ways I’ve stopped trying to understand, but not evil. That’s more than I can say for most contractors I’ve guided."

"That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to us," Melody said.

"Don’t get used to it."

With that, he turned and led them into the darkness.

They continued through the tunnel, the sun balls casting its light across the walls, with their footsteps being the only sound beyond the occasional drip of water somewhere in the dark.

Karrakas talked as they walked, slipping into the usual tone he used whenever he was teaching.

"Now, about the maps. The one you bought is a route map, which is the most common type, but you’ll run into others."

He held up fingers as he counted.

"Depth maps, which chart vertical layers. Essential anywhere with stacked galleries, and useless in flat networks. There are also survey maps, which are more accurate but older, because surveys take years. And Climber sketches, which are cheap, fresh, and wrong about a third of the time."

"A third," Melody repeated.

"A generous third. Someone maps a passage while running from something, you get what you’d expect."

He gestured ahead as the tunnel curved.

"The trick is layering them. Route map for the paths, depth map for the levels, and you treat sketches as rumors with drawings. If two sources agree, trust it. If one source says something the others don’t, verify before you commit your life to it."

"What about marking as we go?" Lukas asked.

"That’s a good habit. If you want to, you can use chalk or scratch marks, whatever suits you. But keep your system private. Marks anyone can read are marks anyone can move." He glanced back. "It’s rare, but it happens. Almost everyone has heard stories of a party that gets led into a dead end by tampered marks and picked clean."

Melody grimaced. "People do that?"

"People do everything, given enough time and greed."

Through all of it, Akira said nothing.

She walked slightly apart from them, her flail loose in her grip, the chain gathered in her off hand.

Her eyes never stopped moving, going from the walls to the ceiling, and back to the floor ahead of them, where the light faded, before her gaze went back along the way they’d come.

Her sun ball drifted a little wider than the others, pushed out by small nudges of her will to stretch the reach of its light without making it too bright.

Karrakas noticed.

"You can relax, Akira," he chuckled. "We’re still close to Fort One. Beasts don’t come this near the town. If anything was in this stretch, we’d have run into other Climbers dealing with it already. Or their very loud complaints."

"Unless we’re the other Climbers," Akira said.

Karrakas opened his mouth, before closing it a second later.

"Someone has to be the first party that meets the beast," Akira continued, her eyes still on the walls. "Someone runs into it before the reports exist."

"That’s... true," Karrakas admitted.

"I’m not saying anything is here." She stepped over a seam in the crystal floor without looking down at it. "I’m saying it doesn’t matter whether anything is here. We should be vigilant even when there’s no apparent danger. Especially here."

"These are the Crystal Caves." She finally glanced at the others. "The beasts are made of the same material as everything around us."

"Every surface in this place could be a surface, or it could be something waiting. Nobody knows where they’d attack from. So we treat every direction as a possibility, always. We have to be twice as alert here as anywhere else."

Everyone digested her words, knowing how right she was.

Melody’s hand drifted to her mace, while Lukas went on high alert.

Karrakas nodded slowly, conceding the point entirely.

"Twice as alert," he agreed. "Consider me corrected."

Then the sound of scratching drifted to them from up ahead.

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