The Harvester

Chapter 35: An Offer

Chapter 35: An Offer

? ? ?

?

Tutorial Mission Completed

?

Assessment: You have completed the side objective, Overtaking, with a 48% contribution. You have killed the clone of Aquila with a 78% contribution. You have collected 62 Souls and defeated a total of 235 foes, both indirectly and directly.

Mission Time: 8:35:55.

Rewards: 2240 Talys, Access to the First Plateau.

—

You are now going to be transported to the First Plateau. Brace yourself.

?

? ? ?

?

“Brace myself?” Rakna muttered to himself as he stood in a place plunged in darkness. There was nothing in sight except the System window.

And soon enough, the warning explained itself as he felt something a lot similar to what he went through when the System first took him away from Earth. A splitting headache attacked him and in the blink of an eye, quite literally, his surroundings changed to something completely different.

At first, his blurry vision made it impossible to make out anything but it faded away in under ten seconds and what was presented to him then was pretty shocking, even for him.

First of all, he seemed to be standing in the middle of a very wide and futuristic-looking circular platform with blue neon lines across its surface. He then looked around and almost dropped his jaw at the sight of a city with a dark blue color-scheme extending as far as the eye could see.

Each building was worthy of being called lighthouses with the countless electronics they sported such as holographic billboards and neon letters. There were a few skyscrapers that reached nearly unimaginable heights and as crazy as it sounded, there even seemed to be one building that had a direct connection to outer space.

Other than that, Rakna couldn’t ignore the many flying vehicles as well as the thousands of people he could see flying around with jetpacks or with what seemed to be magic for the most part.

In this landscape, the only places he could see a bit of verdure was on top of certain towers that seemed to have greenhouses on their roof. He could also see smoke on the horizon, or maybe was it mist?

But, what surprised Rakna the most was that it was the same story for every cardinal direction. Everywhere he looked, the city stretched beyond what he could see and, unconsciously, he almost felt lost and a bit intimidated.

Pronos seemed to share his sentiments as he looked around with a silly expression.

“Ah, I see you finally arrived,” piercing through the noise of the city composed of sounds of both machinery and airborne vehicles, one voice spoke to Rakna from behind.

His eyes widened a bit and he managed to kill his surprise in an instant before turning around. As one might have been able to predict with a bit of thinking, it was Gray who stood there twirling his cane with a grin flashing on his face.

“You…” Rakna scowled.

“Yes, me,” Gray quipped. “Missed me?”

“I don’t think I would miss someone whose only interaction with me was a joke about me hiding in fear from a bunch of dogs walking on two legs.”

“Uh,” Gray blinked in a daze. “That was a good come back, wolf boy.”

“I aim to please,” Rakna uttered with a dry tone and the clown cackled darkly.

“You’re terribly emotionless for a kid,” he said and tilted his head. “Well, I guess I should not be surprised to see a bit of uniqueness in an S+ candidate,” he commented offhandedly and smirked when he saw the young werewolf’s scowl.

“And yes, I know about your potential value. It’s a very rare rating by the way; be proud. Also, do not worry, batch overseers like me have rules to follow and we are not allowed to use an analysis skill on newcomers. I only know about your basic information such as your name and potential. I can’t even check your race in fact,” he said with a shrug.

“I see…” Rakna muttered and Gray rubbed his chin.

“On a side note, I can see that you’re using an illusion to hide your appearance. You’re not really the first one to do so but, friendly advice, none of the stronger Hosts will fall for such a low-level trick. You can hide from the weak guys but do not expect the higher-ups to not notice it.”

“You’re awfully chatty for someone who borderline insulted me when he first saw me. Why are you even telling me all of this?” Rakna spoke with an accusatory voice and Gray laughed.

“In my defense, kiddo, you made me, and the whole batch as well, wait for half a day before we could start the tutorial. Well, we got the report from your shopkeeper telling us that you had been gravely injured and needed rest but still,” he sighed and looked at Rakna in the eyes.

“As for your little question, let’s say that… you’re bound to attract a lot of attention if you’re not careful,” he said with a serious tone. He pointed at Rakna’s back with his cane. “Not only do you have S+ potential, but those tails… you have two of them now.”

Rakna frowned. “And?”

Gray snickered and put his cane back on the ground. “And you’re a werewolf. A werewolf capable of growing more than one tail is a first in the history of the System. If I were you, I’d do my best to not carelessly transform in front of others and maybe you’ll be able to pass as a beast-man with noble blood. Many Hosts would be more than happy to dissect you, experiment you, torture you, and even enslave you if they found out about your abnormality.”

Rakna’s expression twitched as he took in those words. Alexa had already made him very aware of the individuality of his situation, add to that his recent acquisition of a Royal Luquila’s genome, a creature of legend, and he basically had a massive target on his back.

However, he didn’t know that it would be so bad that Hosts would try to either subjugate him or turn him into their lab rats. Pronos looked at him in worry and Rakna silently patted the little snake before opening his mouth.

“You’ve dodged my question,” he said and Gray exclaimed in curiosity.

“Oh?”

“All in all, the only thing you told me until now is that you possess information with the potential of ruining my life in this shitty ‘System Society’ of yours. You haven’t answered why you’re telling it to me though. Is it just to taunt me?”

Gray’s eyes narrowed slightly and the screen he had for mouth switched to a more good-natured smile. “Worry not. I’m not about to threaten you for fun. In fact, you could say that I’m willing to give you an offer.”

“An offer?”

“Yes, indeed,” Gray nodded and turned around with his red tailcoat flailing behind him. He started walking to what seemed to be a staircase to one side of the platform they were on. He waved his hand at Rakna without looking. “Follow me.”

Rakna raised an eyebrow and he shared a look with Pronos before he ultimately decided to follow the clown. As they were walking down the stairs that were built above the buildings, he passively began to observe the city in a bit more detail.

“Like the view?” Gray asked.

Rakna just hummed and replied with a question, “Where are you bringing me to?”

The robot clown chuckled and pointed at something in the distance with his cane. “Do you see that over there?”

Rakna followed the line defined by the cane and spotted a structure not far. It was the exact same design as the platform they had just left.

“There are as many platforms like these as there are groups from your batch. I don’t know if any of your friends told you already, but on a yearly basis, a batch is summoned from a random planet and separated into several groups. Your school was Group C, by the way. To give you an example, Group A is from the country you call ‘Korea’.”

“I see. What’s the connection between that and my question though?”

“Well, each group has a caretaker like me. And we’re currently in the process of assembling the ones who passed the tutorial. So, I’m just bringing you to where the others are right now. Your friends with whom you fought Aquila included.”

“Why do I feel like there’s more than just ‘assembling’ people to this?” Rakna said with a voice oozing with sarcasm.

Gray chuckled. “You’ll see soon enough.”

A few minutes later, they had reached the end of the staircase that was right next to a large road where there were actual land vehicles instead of flying ones. Rakna spared a few seconds to look at the city from up-close before continuing to follow Gray who was heading to a nearby building.

He walked to the entrance and the automatic doors slid open as he got close. Rakna tagged along and after barely taking a step inside the building, something came out of nowhere and blocked his path.

He jumped back in reflex and stared wide-eyed at the metallic arm cutting his path. He traced it back to its source and saw a large robot that was as tall as his werewolf form, standing there.

|| ID. || It spoke with a mechanical voice and Rakna turned to Gray for an explanation.

“Just ask your AI for your ID. Every Host has one and it’s used to make records of their movements in the System, their purchases, and especially to access places with, let’s say, stricter security such as this place. It is quite literally an ID; an identification document. Some places even need you to be over a certain age to visit. Later on, you’ll have to get yourself a physical one.”

[S1985266348P,] Alexa spoke without waiting for her Host and Rakna carefully repeated the sequence to the robot which instantly looked through the database and found the recently created entry.

|| ID Verified. Welcome, Rakna Xiorra. || It then backed away and removed its arm before returning to a slightly concealed corner of the entrance hall. That explained why Rakna hadn’t seen it coming at all before it was confronted with it. That thing somehow wasn’t making any noise while walking and trying to sense something that isn’t alive was quite hard.

“Come on, I don’t have all day,” Gray said and pushed open the doors that were the closest to the entrance. When Rakna saw what was behind them, his mind shut down for a second.

It wasn’t because he couldn’t process what he saw or anything, rather, it had gone way beyond his expectations. The best he could do to describe what laid in front of him was a party. This building was a large party hall and currently, hundreds of young-looking people were chatting and serving themselves on the absolutely massive buffet available.

“What? You didn’t expect this?” Gray said with a grin. “It’s always like this after a tutorial. We gather the batch and throw a small welcome party. Especially, since most of you haven’t eaten much for at least a good half day. So; the buffet.”

Rakna threw an inquisitive look at the clown as they walked in. “I feel like there’s more to this.”

“Obviously,” Gray didn’t even try to hide. “It’s related to the offer I mentioned. But you’ll have to wait for everyone to be gathered. In other words, you’ll have to wait for the tutorial mission to hit its time limit. Which is about… three hours and a half from now,” he said and pointed at a certain corner of the hall.

“There. Your group’s there,” he said and Rakna looked at where the clown was pointing and managed to spot a few familiar faces amidst the crowd. “On this note, I have to go and wait for the other Hosts at the platform. Thanks to you, there’s probably going to be a lot more of them surviving,” Gray said in a fake annoyed tone and turned around. “Have fun,” he added as he exited the building again.

Rakna watched him go with a scowl and made his way through the crowd to rejoin with his group.