Karrakas held up a hand. "Of course not. But there are rules you follow out here if you want to stay alive."

He counted them off.

"First. Nobody hunts alone. Not on this floor, not at your current rank, and not until you know this desert well enough to navigate it blindly, which... is another thing entirely."

He looked at each of them in turn. "Second. The moment one of you takes a serious hit, you retreat. Immediately. Not after one more kill, and not after you’ve cleared the area."

"The moment it happens, you pull back." He held their gaze, making sure they knew how serious he was. "I don’t care how confident you feel. Confidence in a desert full of beasts with necrotic stingers is how people die slowly."

"And third?" Lukas asked.

"You go back to the city and you find a [Healer] or a [Medic]. Any class built around recovery will do. All you need to do is look out for a building with a red cross painted above its door."

"You pay them, they fix you, you go back out." He shrugged. "It’s not complicated. It just costs money and time."

Melody looked at him. "And if we don’t want to keep making that trip every time someone gets scratched?"

"Then you find a healing [Item] of your own." He said it without any particular emphasis. "Which, as I already explained, has about as close to zero chance as something can have without being impossible."

"You’d have a higher chance of finding an ultimate weapon than an healing [Item].

Nobody said anything to that.

They pulled their rations from their spatial rings and ate in silence, staring at the desert as the sun continued its slow work overhead.

Lukas chewed without tasting much of it, thinking about the problem.

The average Adept had no real path to a healing [Item]. Karrakas had made that clear.

They’d face auction houses with invitation-only access, prices that pushed into territory most people would never reach, and the slim chance of stumbling across one in the field.

But he wasn’t the average Adept.

He had the system.

He could pull a new wife. This means he’d get a new class, new skills, and depending on who came through, there was a real chance she’d arrive with something useful.

Maybe a healing class, a recovery skill, or an [Item] that could heal people. After all, his system gave him women with good classes.

But there was something he’d been sitting on since before they left Havenhart. Something he hadn’t touched yet because he’d been preoccupied by other things.

The mystery box.

He didn’t know what it gave. That was the point of it, and also the problem with it. Two thousand Gacha Points was not a small cost to spend on an unknown outcome.

But he needed to know whether the mystery box was worth spending points on or worth ignoring entirely.

There was only one way to find out, and that was to use it.

Absorbed in his thoughts, he didn’t notice as Melody shifted closer to him until she was practically pressed to his side, her voice low as she spoke.

"I’ve been watching you," she said. "You haven’t used anything except [Smite] the entire hunt. Not once." She looked at him carefully. "Is something wrong?"

Lukas smiled. "Quest."

Her expression shifted immediately, the concern replaced by understanding. She smiled back and said nothing more.

They finished their rations, packed away what remained, and got to their feet.

They quickly took down the shade they’d rigged, folding it before storing it in their spatial rings.

Karrakas looked at the sky, then at the group. "Do you guys want to continue with the hunt and stay out overnight, or hunt on the way back to the city and call it a day?"

"We want to head back," Lukas said.

Melody and Akira didn’t argue. They knew him well enough by now to know that he had a reason for saying that, even if he hadn’t given one.

Karrakas raised an eyebrow. "You’re sure?"

"Yes."

He thought about it. His current quest would end when the hunt ended, and the hunt ended when they returned to the city.

The sooner they walked back through that gate, the sooner two hundred Gacha Points were added to his total. There was no reason to stay out a second longer than necessary, and keep himself confined to one skill for that duration.

Karrakas checked the compass, adjusted their route, and they set off.

The return journey was quieter than the approach had been. The beasts they encountered came in smaller numbers and were spread further apart.

And as expected, none of them posed anything close to a serious problem. They killed what crossed their path, stored the corpses, and kept moving. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The sun was already dropping towards the horizon, painting the red sand a deeper shade, when the ringed city appeared ahead of them.

They walked through the outer gate as the last of the light faded from the sky.

The moment Lukas stepped inside the walls, a notification appeared.

Ding!

[Congratulations. You have cleared the quest.]

[Reward: +200 Gacha Points]

He let out a quiet breath and pulled up his system interface.

[Gacha Harem System]

[Gacha Points: 800]

[Banners:]

[Wife (4000 Gacha Points)]

[Skills (1000 Gacha Points)]

[Items (1000 Gacha Points)]

[Mystery Box (2000 Gacha Points)]

He smiled, seeing that he now had eight hundred points. He needed one thousand two hundred more before he could open a mystery box.

One thing he was sure of was that as long as he kept hunting or moving around the Second Floor, the quests would keep coming. So he knew that the two thousand points he needed were within reach.

He closed the interface.

Karrakas had stopped a few steps ahead, waiting for them to catch up.

"We have two options now," he said. "Either we go back to the inn and rest, or we find a selling pavilion and offload the corpses we have on our hand tonight."

He turned to look at them. "What do you want to do?"