Gacha Harem System

Chapter 224: Thirty Against Eight

Karrakas didn’t turn from the window. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

"There should have been a patrol by now," he said.

Lukas set down his rations. "How long has it been?"

"Long enough." Karrakas kept his eyes on the street. "Patrols in the Undercity run on a consistent cycle. They come out at regular intervals, and on predictable routes. That’s how the dungeon works."

"If you stay in one place too long without clearing the street, the patrols accumulate. You’d have more and more of them building up outside until you have no choice but to fight your way out." He finally turned from the window. "That’s why you can’t simply sleep in this dungeon without posting guards and managing the streets around you."

"Maybe the dungeon reset its timing when it rearranged itself," Akira said. "The layout shifted twice. Maybe the patrol cycles shifted with it."

Karrakas shook his head. "I’ve run through this dungeon twice. Yes, the layout changes, the streets change, and even the distances between things change. But the patrol cycle doesn’t."

He glanced at Akira. "Dungeons like the Undercity have internal rules they don’t break. The cycle is one of them. It’s been running since before the first Adept ever walked through that gate, and it will keep running the same way regardless of what we do inside it."

"So if the patrols have stopped," Melody said slowly, "something stopped them."

"That’s what concerns me." Karrakas moved away from the window. "I don’t know what it means yet, but I know it isn’t nothing."

He looked at Lukas. "Something is wrong in this dungeon. I don’t know what it is, but I’d rather we treat it as a serious problem and be wrong about that, than assume it’s nothing and find out otherwise."

He crouched and picked up his own rations.

"Prepare for the worst," he said. "All of you."

And so they continued eating, but Melody was still uneasy, kneeling at the window, periodically checking the streets outside.

Then she saw something that made her breath hitch.

"Guys..." she said quietly. "Come look at this."

There was something in her voice that brought everyone to their feet without question. They moved to the windows, crowding around it to look out at the street.

Both ends of it had company.

From the left, four Automatons were advancing, and from the right were four more. But these were nothing like the D-rank patrols they had been dealing with all day.

They were taller, standing a full head above the D-ranks, their bodies broader through the shoulder and chest. freёweɓnovel.com

The skin covering them was thin and pale, stretching tightly over the clockwork underneath so that the shape of the gears and mechanisms beneath was faintly visible with each movement.

They walked on two legs, but hunched, their spines curving forward and their long arms hanging low. At the end of those arms were hands with fingers that tapered into sharp, gleaming nails.

"C-rank Automatons," Karrakas said, almost to himself. He exhaled slowly. "So this is what it prepared."

Lukas looked at the thirty Automatons standing directly outside the building. He and Akira exchanged a glance. Then they pushed the command through [Resurrect] simultaneously.

The thirty Automatons immediately dashed out to attack, but the C-ranks didn’t even slow down.

What followed was not a fight in any meaningful sense. The D-rank Automatons knew where the heart was, and attacked the ribcages of the C-ranks with the same ferocity that had worked all day.

The pale skin parted easily enough, but beneath it, instead of the relatively simple clockwork of the D-ranks, the gears were tougher, repelling the attacks easily.

They were causing no lasting damage.

The C-ranks, on the other hand, moved through the D-ranks the way a sword moves through water.

Their long arms swung through the air, the gleaming nails tearing through D-rank bodies, scattering gears and metal across the street.

They didn’t appear to register the D-ranks as a genuine threat. They simply kept moving forward and the D-ranks kept falling.

"Thirty against eight," Akira said. Her voice was very flat. "And it isn’t even close."

"No," Karrakas agreed.

The last D-rank Automaton finally went down, with Lukas and Akira feeling the mana drain from their [Resurrect] skill tapering off to nothing. Scattered metal covered the street from one end to the other.

The eight C-ranks stopped, then turned towards the building.

Their glass eyes, larger than the D-ranks’ and slightly luminous, settled on the windows where Lukas and the others stood looking out.

They then began to wait.

Karrakas turned from the window. "I don’t think we can fight eight C-ranks without taking serious casualties." He looked at Lukas. "What do we do?"

"I have something," Lukas said.

He moved to the door before anyone could ask what he meant. He pulled it open and stopped at the threshold, taking care not to step outside.

He reached into his spatial ring and closed his hand around the [Monster Ball]. He held it out and activated it.

The ball released its contents in a streaming rush, the energy pouring out and expanding, until the Spiked Turtle materialized in the street

The C-rank Automatons dashed backwards in an instant to prevent being crushed under the weight as the Turtle filled the street completely.

It was so huge, its shell scraped against the buildings on both sides as it settled into place, the walls cracking and crumbling where the edges of the shell made contact.

The cracks from its battle in the desert were still visible across the surface of its shell, where the lines running through the shell hadn’t fully closed during its time in the ball. But it stood, radiating intense pressure.

Even among C-ranks, it was clear the Spiked Turtle was a cut above the rest.

"Attack," Lukas said.

At that moment, spikes erupted from the Turtle’s shell, launching forward.

Two C-rank Automatons took direct hits, the force of the spikes scattering their bodies across the street in a rain of broken gears and metal fragments.

[You have killed a C-rank Clockwork Automaton (x2)]

The remaining six broke formation instantly, throwing themselves in different directions, scrambling for cover.