Gacha Harem System-Chapter 37: [Exp: 99.99%]

Night had long since arrived at the Green Forest, and a crescent moon hung in the sky above the canopy, throwing just enough light through the gaps in the leaves to make shadows out of everything.

Lukas walked through it and tried not to think about how much everything hurt.

Melody had her arm around his waist, supporting more of his weight than either of them was acknowledging out loud.

She was also battered, with her clothes torn in several places, and dried blood on her forearms. Not to mention the bruise along her jaw that had darkened over the last few hours.

But all through that, she was upright and moving cleanly. He was neither of those things.

He was covered in blood. His own, mostly, though the blood of a dozen B-rank beasts had mixed into it over the course of the night until the distinction had stopped mattering.

His shirt was held together in places by a few strings of fabric that looked like they were a single breeze from breaking apart.

Breeze blew through the trees, moving freely through the tears and holes where claws and tusks and scales had done their work.

His cuirass was gone, abandoned hours ago when it had stopped being armor and started being dead weight, the metal so warped and split from accumulated damage that it had been restricting his movement more than protecting it.

His other injuries and his broken shoulder blade were like red hot points of pain in his consciousness but he filed them in a corner of his mind to be felt later.

He coughed. The sound came out wet, and pain lit up across his ribs in response.

He checked his experience bar.

[Exp: 99.99%]

He was so close. Just one kill away. One single kill between where he was and C-rank, between failing the quest and completing it.

Then his eyes moved to the timer at the corner of his vision, and his stomach dropped.

Two minutes. That was all the time he had left.

But the worst part was that they’d been walking for over ten minutes without seeing a single beast.

The forest around them was quiet, and the beasts nearby had been killed by them, while those stronger than A-rank were deeper down in the forest.

And after their experience with the Nemean Lion, going deeper into the forest was the last thing on their minds. It would be the same as walking to their deaths.

He took a step forward, and his leg suddenly buckled.

He went down on one knee before he could catch himself, his sword hand hitting the ground to stop the rest of him from following.

"Lukas." Melody’s voice was tense and filled with concern. "Talk to me."

"I’m fine," he said. He wasn’t fine. "I can keep going."

He checked the timer again. One minute, thirty seconds.

He tried to stand. His leg took his weight for half a second, then his vision swam, with darkness bleeding in from the edges, the treeline tilting, and he sat back against the nearest tree before he went down entirely.

"Time’s running out." His voice came out lower than he intended. "Less than two minutes."

Melody looked at him for one second, her eyes moving across his injuries with the rapid assessment of someone making a decision.

Then she set him down properly, her broken sword still in his hand.

"Stay here," she said. "I’ll find something and bring it to you. Then you finish it."

"Melody—"

But she was already gone, disappearing into the dark between the trees without another word.

Lukas sat against the tree and watched the timer.

Sixty seconds left.

The anger came up before he could stop it. A rage directed at the specific unfairness of getting to ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent and running out of strength just a single meter from the finish line.

After the Nemean Lion. After the wolves and the anacondas and the boars and the hours of continuous fighting with a broken shoulder and open wounds and no armor. After all of it.

He tried to stand again. His vision darkened immediately and he sat back down.

Forty-five seconds left.

Something rustled to his left. His head snapped towards it.

But it was just the breeze moving through the undergrowth. In other words, nothing that he could kill.

He let his head fall back against the bark, staring up through the canopy at the crescent moon.

His hand was tight around the hilt of his sword. He focused on that, filling his mind with the texture of the grip and the weight of the sword resting against the ground.

Thirty seconds.

He watched the numbers flicker downwards.

Twenty.

Fifteen.

Then the sound of movement reached his ears through the trees. He sat up, immediately alert.

Thirteen seconds.

Melody burst from the tree line with a yell, her broken sword in her hand, and behind her...

Ten seconds.

An anaconda burst into view. It was B-rank, its body following her out of the dark in a fast, fluid surge, head already rising.

Nine seconds.

Lukas’s grip tightened on his sword.

"Finally," he said through his teeth.

Eight seconds.

He put his hands on the ground and tried to get his legs under him, but they wouldn’t cooperate.

Melody came to a stop beside him, spinning to face the snake, and the anaconda slowed, its head swinging between the two of them.

Seven seconds.

It paused. Its eyes found Lukas sitting against the tree, bleeding and propped up by bark, and something that passed for calculation ran deep in its brain.

Five seconds.

The timer was flashing red now, the numbers bright at the edge of his vision.

Four seconds.

The anaconda’s head turned towards him fully. A long moment where the primal part of its brain debated if this was a trap or an easy kill, before it settled on easy kill.

Three seconds.

It lunged.

Lukas threw himself to the side along the ground, the movement costing him everything his body had left, and swung his sword blindly, running entirely on the instinct built from almost two days of continuous fighting.

He felt the blade meet resistance for half a second, then the sword swung free.

One second.

He sat up.

The anaconda’s body was on the ground in front of him, writhing, and his heart dropped.

The timer hit zero.

Ding!

[You have killed a B-rank Acidic Anaconda.]

He stared at the blue screen with wide eyes, then back at the snake. He’d thought...

Then his eyes landed on the snake’s head laying two feet away, separated cleanly at the neck, the eyes already going flat.

The writhing body was simply the beast’s nerves still firing with no brain left to receive the signals.

Then the next notification appeared.

[Congratulations! You have advanced to C-Rank!]

[Thief: +20 Agility, +20 Constitution]

[Hexblade: +50 Mana, +50 Strength, +50 Constitution]

And then the one he had spent twenty-four hours bleeding for.

[Congratulations! You have cleared the quest.]

[Reward: +1,000 Gacha Points.]

Lukas read it once. Then twice.

The relief that moved through him was so sudden that for a moment he couldn’t feel the pain.

All he could feel was the tension that he’d been carrying since the notification appeared in his bedroom the night before draining away from his body.

He exhaled.

Then he pitched forward and hit the ground face-first, and the darkness that had been waiting at the edges of his vision for the last hour finally came all the way in.