SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors-Chapter 46. The Road Tells You Everything Before You Arrive
The man got off the wagon, and the convoy behind him slowed down and stopped. People with hollow eyes and watchful faces looked out from the wagon flaps.
"The short version is... chaos," the merchant said.
He took off his hat and turned it over in his hands. "We left three days ago when the eastern approach was blocked."
"The city walls were still holding, but barely..."
"The defenders are spread thin across three sides and are losing men faster than they can replace them..." He stopped. "And there are thousands dead already..."
"If the numbers I heard before we left are even close to being right."
Marshal didn’t say anything, but Lucian could tell that her jaw and fists were set in a way he recognized.
"What are they fighting about, actually?" Lucian asked. "You said there were three ways, and what are they?"
"From the east, there were a lot of dragons and things that looked like dragons, but their movement looked somehow weird and exotic..."
"From the west, there are big things, like boulders that walk. And then..." The merchant’s voice changed.
He took a look at his hat. "Then there’s the worst one in the south..."
"What’s in the south?"
"I don’t know what it was." The man said, "I only saw it once, from a distance, and I’ve been telling myself since then that it’s better I didn’t see it clearly."
He looked up. "It killed a whooping fifty soldiers, and I watched them from the wall."
"They were running toward it, properly armored, with a full defensive line, and it just... worked through them without a sweat..." The man tried so hard not to tremble. "Fifty people, in maybe half a minute... gone... just like that..."
For a short time, the road was very quiet.
Glacielle had gone still, like she did when she was hiding her feelings. Octavia was no longer changing her relaxed posture, and Marshal’s face had hardened into the kind of professional focus that Lucian had learned meant she was figuring out how dangerous things were and how worried she was about them.
"Are you all brave enough to go toward it?" The merchant said, "To something that could potentially end this entire world?"
He sounded like he really meant it, and he wasn’t sure if being brave was the right thing to do. He went back to his wagon and came back with a bundle of supplies, including dried food and a few sealed flasks of clean water.
"With all my respect and honor..." He pressed them into Lucian’s arms. "Please take these..."
"They won’t do much, but at least you won’t be hungry while you’re on your way there."
"Thank you so much... we appreciate it," Lucian nodded. "And don’t worry... we’ll try our best to solve this."
"Yeah, we hope," the convoy started moving again, slowly and with a lot of noise, away from the capital and toward the safety of the countryside.
They watched as the convoy departed. Once it vanished from sight, a heavy silence enveloped the remaining group. Each member felt the oppressive weight of uncertainty pressing down on them, aware that the journey ahead would present challenges they could hardly fathom.
"That thing he talked about..." Lucian said. "It sounded serious if he just said ’it could potentially end the entire world.’ Now I’m honestly concerned about it."
"It’s probably something that is related to a mythic tier," Marshal said. "It has to be... Nothing else matches that description or those numbers."
"Corvus got his upgrade to work."
"Apparently." She was already walking again, not stopping. "That means we have a harder fight ahead than we thought."
"Change your expectations and keep going."
Lucian and the others kept on moving.
...
About an hour later, they picked up two more travelers: a five-person adventuring party with B-rank guild badges who were going to the capital from a different road that had merged with the main trade route.
Their leader was a young woman with a mage’s staff and the kind of wide-eyed recognition that people get when they meet someone who is much stronger than they thought.
She was staring at Marshal.
She said, "You’re Marshal Kyratiel Sunbreaker." It sounded like she was making a statement of fact that she couldn’t quite believe.
"The Marshal Sunbreaker herself...! The leader of the Sunforge Legion."
"Former commander," Marshal said, not slowing down.
"The stories about the Abyssal War campaigns are basically required reading for any serious adventurer, you know?! The three-day defense at the Solen Pass?! The cavalry charge at Dunmere?!" The mage was walking faster to keep up with them. "I’ve looked over your tactical reports."
"Then you know I don’t slow down for conversation during a march."
"I-I’m sorry...!" The mage looked like she was going to be punished for a moment, but then she got better right away.
Next, she saw Lucian. "Wait, you have three SSS-rank warriors?!"
"Are you one of those Gacha Masters...? Is this the party that beat the Searing Fang dungeon? We heard about that in Riverhold."
"Huh, so it is true..." Lucian said, "Word gets around quickly."
’Is there some kind of an announcement like in-game where someone just cleared the hardest dungeon, then notifies it to everyone?’
A tall man with broad shoulders and an air of easy confidence approached Lucian. His demeanor suggested he had never experienced a fight that altered his perspective. He was a B-rank party member.
"Hey, how does the gacha thing work? Is there a trick to getting SSS-rank? I’ve been trying to save up for a premium pull for months."
"This world... it seems like there are a lot of people who can also engage in Gacha, huh? The deeper I dive into it, the more I realize how lucky I am to have received the guaranteed bikini warrior, and it’s a guaranteed SSS rank as well."
Glacielle moved to the side, putting herself between the man and Lucian in a smooth, slow way, like a glacier moving into a gap. Her frost aura didn’t flare up very much.
She stood there with her pale blue eyes flat, and the temperature around the man dropped by about two degrees.
She said in a respectful way, "Master doesn’t share system information with strangers."
The man stepped back a little bit. "O-Okay...! That’s fair enough...!"
"Fufufu." Octavia hadn’t moved very quickly, but somehow she was now on the other side of Lucian. "She’s right about that~!"
"Our master is ours alone, right?"
"Please, can we just keep walking?" Lucian said, and then he looked at the man. "I’m just lucky with my pulls..."
"Maybe you need to trust your gut feeling more and try not to pray for better pulls because that kind of thing is busted anyway," Lucian sighed.
"T-thank you for the suggestion!" He bowed down.
They kept walking, and the B-rank party fell behind slowly as it became clear that keeping up with Lucian’s group was harder than it looked.
And then comes the third meeting, but it wasn’t a group of people traveling together. It was a family sitting on the side of the road in the thin shade of a tree that wasn’t quite enough for the job.
A woman holding two small children in her arms, a man lying flat on a makeshift stretcher with a bandage around his middle that had bled through, and the stillness of people who have been walking for too long and aren’t sure they can keep going.
Lucian stopped without even thinking about it.
"We should help them," he said.
He thought he might have to make a case, but Glacielle was already walking toward the family before he could finish his sentence. Marshal looked at the tree line once, made sure there was no immediate danger, and then went in the same direction.
Octavia followed, and when she crouched next to the hurt man, the casual "ara ara" energy she usually wore so easily faded away to show something much more useful underneath.
"Water healing doesn’t work on serious wounds," she said, looking at the bandage. "But I can slow the bleeding down and help with the infection."
"Can someone give me the clean flasks?"
Glacielle had already made a low ice shelf against the tree and tilted it so that the little bit of shade it provided covered the kids better. The kids looked at it with the wide eyes of people who have been uncomfortable for a long time, so even small things seem big to them.
Lucian sat beside the father, offering him food and water from his pack while Octavia focused on her task.
"What happened...?" he asked.
"Was there a monster attack?"
