Gacha Harem System-Chapter 47: What If...

The choice of dungeon had been easy.

Lukas stood in front of the entrance and looked at the sign above the gate with confidence.

He’d spent a considerable amount of time learning exactly how these opponents moved, attacked, and died.

Deathstalker Scorpions were not strangers to him.

He knew their tells, their range, the way they telegraphed the fire beam, and of course, the blind spots their pincers created when they overextended.

Fighting familiar enemies in an unfamiliar space was still an advantage over the alternative.

He paid the entrance fee and walked through the opening in the tall walls.

The space inside was small. All he could see was a bare courtyard with a stone cube at the center, the same design as every other dungeon entrance he had seen, which was exactly one more.

A blue spatial gate swirled slowly on the cube’s surface, the light from it dispersing around them.

He reached back and unsheathed his sword without breaking stride, then stepped through.

The light took him.

When it released him, he was standing inside a hallway, though hallway was the wrong word for it.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of wood. Living wood, or what had once been living wood, the grain still visible in long sweeping lines across every surface.

The space was the hollowed interior of a branch from a tree so enormous that the ceiling alone stood seven feet tall.

And the corridor was wide enough for two fully grown Deathstalker Scorpions to move through side by side with minimal clearance.

Small holes in the ceiling let columns of sunlight fall through at intervals, landing in bright patches on the floor. The light was the only illumination, and it was enough to see with.

Scattered across the wooden floor were bright red leaves, dried and curled at the edges, their color vivid against the pale wood beneath them.

There were no windows, and no exits were visible. All he could see was the hollowed branch extending in one direction, then bending out of sight.

Lukas stood there for a moment and tried to imagine the scale of the tree that had produced this.

The branch he was standing inside of was larger than most hallways he’d been in. Whatever the original tree had been, it existed at a scale that had no reasonable comparison.

He picked a direction and started walking.

He had heard enough about this dungeon to know that navigation was largely irrelevant.

The layout shifted and the branches forked constantly to the extent that there was no use trying to map the space out.

But while the paths looped and doubled back, every route eventually arrived at the same destination. The boss room was at the center, and the center found you as much as you found it.

He reached his first fork, standing at the place where two paths branched away from each other at a shallow angle.

Before he could make a choice, the sound of movement came from the left branch. A rhythmic, multi-legged scuttling, growing louder. A scorpion.

He stood and watched the left path for a moment.

Then a thought crossed his mind.

Could he reach the boss room without fighting a single scorpion?

He had no particular reason to try. He was here to clear the dungeon, collect the rewards, and replenish what they had spent that morning.

Fighting through the scorpions was the expected approach and there was nothing wrong with it.

But the idea had appeared, and now he was curious. He’d have to test the theory.

He took the right branch.

The air along this path was cooler, a faint breeze moving through from somewhere ahead. He walked at a steady pace, listening. Behind him, the scuttling from the left path faded.

Further along, he arrived at another fork. He stopped at the junction and waited, counting the seconds to pass the time.

He heard it after about a minute. The dry click of chitin and the soft percussion of eight legs on wood, coming from the right branch. He took the left. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

The path curved, then straightened. There were no scorpions on this path. He kept moving.

A third fork opened up ahead, and this time he stopped and waited again. His goal was to avoid the scorpions, so he was waiting for them to appear.

The sounds of the dungeon moved around him, and he could hear the distant scuttling, and the occasional low click of pincers somewhere in the branching network of passages.

He listened to all of it, building a rough picture of where things were without being able to see them.

Movement came from the left branch. He took the right.

He had been walking for less than a minute when he realized the sound hadn’t faded.

He slowed.

The scuttling was still there, behind him, and it was keeping pace.

He looked over his shoulder. There was nothing visible yet, but the sound was consistent.

The scorpion had turned into his branch at the fork rather than continuing its original path.

He kept walking, faster now, and the sound kept coming.

Then the path ahead of him filled with movement as a Deathstalker Scorpion rounded the curve in front of him and stopped, its pincers opening and closing in what looked like surprise.

Lukas’ eyes narrowed. He was trapped. There was one scorpion in front of him, and one behind.

He stood for a moment and thought about it.

He had told himself that everything was on the table as long as he didn’t attack or kill anything. Dodging and evading were not attacking. That meant in his book, slipping past without engaging was not a fight.

The scorpion in front of him made the decision easier by charging its tail.

The glow built at the stinger’s tip, the deep red light intensifying quickly, the heat of it already warm on his face from several meters away.

The path was narrow, and that meant there was nowhere to dodge. He had no room to go sideways, and no gap in the walls to hide in.

So he simply ran straight at it.

The scorpion released the beam.

Lukas dropped into a slide at the last possible moment, the beam passing directly over him, close enough that he felt it as a wave of searing heat across his back.

He came up out of the slide already moving, shoulder dropping as he twisted past the scorpion’s left flank, threading through the gap between its body and the wall with inches to spare.

Behind him, the beam continued its path down the passage and found the scorpion that had been following him.

The beam slammed into the beast, which released a brief screech of pain, then fell silent.

Lukas turned with a grin to observe the scene.

The scorpion that had been tailing him was now a blackened, motionless shape on the wooden floor. It has been killed in just one hit from its comrade.

The one that had fired was already turning to face him, its tail retracting and charging another beam.

He looked at the scorpion. Then at the crisp remains of its companion.

"Impressive," he said.

The scorpion fired its beam.