Gacha Harem System-Chapter 50: Six Runs

There was a muffled flash of white light and Lukas appeared outside.

He blinked rapidly, his eyes quickly adjusting to the increased sunlight. And with his high Constitution, he adjusted almost instantly.

The same spatial gate he’d been walking through swirled in front of him.

He’d been through it six different times, and now, he stood in the small courtyard with his hair going in approximately seven different directions and a wide grin on his face.

He ran a hand through his hair, accomplishing nothing meaningful with the attempt, and looked down at himself.

His clothes were singed in a few places from the boss scorpion’s fire, and there was a faint smell of smoke clinging to him that six runs had done nothing to reduce.

He looked, by any reasonable measure, slightly unhinged.

And all he could say was that he felt excellent.

The runs had been genuinely enjoyable. Much more than he’d expected when he walked in that morning with the purely practical goal of replenishing their funds.

By the third run, he had stopped thinking about the money entirely and started thinking about completing the different goals he’d cooked up for himself.

By the fifth run, he’d started experimenting with how many scorpions he could group together before engaging, trying to maximize the [Blood Armor] charge from a single encounter.

The sixth run had been purely for the fun of it.

He grinned as he checked his haul.

He’d gotten forty eight thousand gold coins from all six runs, now sitting in his money pouch.

The other rewards were sitting in his spatial ring, waiting for him to sell them off. Which meant his next destination was, of course, the pavilions.

Speaking of pavilions, he’d tried, after defeating the boss on his second run, to hack the armored plates off several scorpion corpses and carry them out.

The idea had dissolved the moment he’d been teleported out and found his hands empty.

Dungeon beasts stayed in dungeons unless the system designated something as a reward. He had understood the principle well enough after that.

And after several seconds of thinking about it, he realized he wouldn’t have been able to sell them anyway.

Dungeon rewards arrived already processed, with some treated or stabilized, ready for immediate use or sale.

Stripping material from a beast yourself produced raw, untreated hide or plate that required additional work before it had any market value.

Pavilions were much more focused on the sheer volume Awakeners brought daily, and their profit margins.

They had no interest in taking on the processing step themselves unless the material was rare enough to justify the effort.

Something like Nemean Lion hide cleared that bar easily. Scorpion plate from a C-rank dungeon did not.

However, he didn’t let himself feel down about it. Because his most important reward from the day was currently wrapped around his left forearm.

The [Deathstalker Gauntlet] had come out of his first run, dropped by the boss as a dungeon reward, and he had stared at it for a full minute before putting it on.

The metal was the same deep red as the boss scorpion’s exoskeleton. The surface was dull and the metal dense, radiating faint warmth even without activation.

His grin grew as he stared at it. Then the information appeared before him.

[Deathstalker Gauntlet]

[Rank: Awakener]

[Holding the essence of a Deathstalker Scorpion, this gauntlet allows the wearer to fire a beam of flames and incinerate their enemies.]

He had tested it on the second run, pointing his forearm at an incoming scorpion and firing. The beam had come out hot and straight and had done exactly what it promised.

He had laughed out loud in the middle of the dungeon, alone, which had attracted three more scorpions from a nearby passage.

Worth it.

After the first run, no further [Items] had appeared regardless of how he approached the dungeon.

When he’d received no [Items] on his second run, he’d replicated his first run on his third run, and had received nothing.

Thinking maybe he had to vary his approach, he tried another speedrun, trying to beat his previous record, and still didn’t receive an [Item].

And by the sixth run, he’d accepted that him getting the gauntlet had been by luck, and good luck at that, and stopped chasing it.

He pulled up his status.

[Lukas]

[Race: Human]

[Rank: C-rank Awakener]

[Class: Thief, Hexblade]

[Exp: 3.89%]

[Stats:]

[Strength: 1766(+200)]

[Agility: 1307]

[Constitution: 1996]

[Mana: 2164]

[Skills: Pickpocket, Lockpick, Cursed Blade, Hex Shield, Blood Armor]

He frowned at his Agility. It had fallen behind everything else, sitting noticeably lower than the surrounding stats.

This was a bit worrying as he knew Agility and Strength worked together to produce his speed, and the gap between them was wide enough now that it was pulling his movement below what it could be if they were more equal.

He would have to find ways to raise that. Maybe clearing dungeons that rewarded speed, or summoning a wife with a high agility.

He closed the screen, nodded to the guards on his way out of the enclosure, and turned towards the pavilions.

When he arrived, the clerk processed his haul without much fanfare, running through the materials from his spatial ring and calculating the total.

When the final number was reached, it came to thirty thousand gold coins.

Lukas transferred them into his money pouch and headed home.

Melody was in the living room when he walked through the door.

She crossed the space in a few steps, wrapping her arms around him before he had fully closed the door behind him, then pulled back enough to give him a proper kiss.

"How’d it go?" she asked.

"Well." He held up his money pouch. "Very well."

She grinned, then her expression shifted into something more composed. "The realtor came by while you were out."

Lukas raised an eyebrow. "Already?"

"He wants us at his office tomorrow morning to finalize everything." She paused, building suspense for what she was about to say. "The buyer agreed to a hundred thousand."

Lukas was quiet for a second, then a slow smile spread across his face. "Full price?"

"Full price," Melody confirmed, looking extremely pleased with herself, as she had every right to be.

He pulled her back into a hug. "I married well."

She laughed against his shoulder. "You really did."