Gacha Harem System-Chapter 32: Strong Boar

"Stay back," Lukas said.

Melody didn’t argue. She stepped to the side and held her position, sword ready but lowered. If anything went wrong, then she’d intervene.

Lukas faced the boar alone.

It was watching him with small, dark eyes set deep into a wide skull. Its breath came out in short, hard bursts, each one kicking up a small cloud of mist in the cool forest air.

The tusks caught the filtered light coming down through the canopy, their edges worn smooth from use rather than decoration.

It charged again.

Lukas moved laterally, letting the boar’s momentum carry it past him.

He slashed at the neck as it went by, but the blade skated off the hide without opening anything.

He reset his footing and looked at the mark his sword had left. Just barely a white line in the skin, not even deep enough to be called a graze.

The hide was the problem. It was very thick, the skin hardened to deflect attacks rather than absorb them, angled by the natural muscle beneath it so that attacks that weren’t perfectly placed simply slid away.

He needed a specific spot.

The boar turned and charged again, faster this time, learning his lateral movement.

He went the other way, wrong-footing it slightly, and this time when he slashed he changed the angle, driving the tip of the blade in at a steeper point rather than dragging the edge across.

The tip caught onto the hide.

A short cut opened on the left side of the boar’s neck, just below the jaw. The wound wasn’t deep, nor enough to do serious damage. But it was open, and blood welled up immediately.

He activated [Blood Armor] and felt the shell reinforce across his body.

The boar swung its head at him, one tusk catching him across the forearm.

The shell took the impact, cracking along the outside of his arm but holding. He was knocked sideways, boots dragging through the earth, and caught himself before he went down.

He charged back in before the boar could reset.

Every pass, he went back to the same spot. He hit the same cut on the left side of the neck, driving the tip in a little deeper each time, widening what was already open rather than starting fresh somewhere new.

The boar’s hide was strong enough to keep weathering every new attack. But it definitely couldn’t stop a blade going into a wound that was already there.

The boar caught him twice more. Once with its shoulder, which sent him skidding back three full steps, and once with a tusk that hooked the side of his cuirass and left a deep gouge in the metal.

The [Blood Armor] absorbed both, thinning each time but holding on.

The cut on the boar’s neck was deep now. He could see the muscle beneath the hide, dark red and glistening, and below that the pale outline of something more vital.

The boar lowered its head for another charge.

Lukas set his feet, raised his sword in both hands, and waited.

It came straight at him this time, fully committed with no deviation.

He sidestepped at the last possible moment and drove his sword into the open wound with everything he had left in his arms.

The blade went in deep.

The boar’s legs locked. It took two more stumbling steps forward on momentum alone, then stopped. Its head dropped slowly, the tusks dragging two shallow lines in the soil before it slumped to the ground, dead.

[You have killed a B-rank Strong Boar.]

Lukas stood over it, breathing hard, and wiped the blood from his sword on a nearby tree.

Melody walked over, her eyes moving from the boar’s corpse to Lukas.

"This might have been a mistake," she said.

He looked at her.

"The time it took you to kill that one boar? You could have cleared ten C-ranks in the Scorched Forest. Maybe twenty." She folded her arms. "At this rate, coming here actually slows you down. We either figure out how to fight faster, or we go back."

Lukas looked at the corpse for a moment. She wasn’t wrong. The boar had taken longer than he wanted to admit, and only one B-rank kill wasn’t going to move his experience bar by anything meaningful.

"You have a point," he said. "But give me a few more fights before we decide. I got through that one without knowing what I was dealing with. Now I do."

He looked at her. "I think I can move faster. I want to find out before we give up on this."

"And if you can’t?"

"Then we go back. I’m not going to waste time on pride." He picked up his sword. "But I’m not leaving without testing it first."

Melody studied him for a second. Then she nodded. "Fine. Show me if you can do it faster." 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

"Very well." He nodded. "Let’s go."

A notification appeared before he could take another step.

Ding!

[New Quest: Let’s Find Out, Shall We?]

[Objective: Kill ten B-rank beasts.]

[Reward: +200 Gacha Points]

[Penalty: -500 Strength]

He stared at it for a moment, then told Melody.

She nodded at the details from his description and was quiet for a second.

"Ten," she repeated. "Alright. Here’s what we do. After those ten kills, we check your experience and your pace. If the numbers make sense, we continue. If they don’t, we pull out and go back to the Scorched Forest."

"Agreed," Lukas said.

They moved along the boundary line, staying close to the edge where the Green Forest met the last of the burnt trees behind them.

The canopy thickened overhead as they walked, the light dropping further as the undergrowth grew denser between the trunks.

They didn’t have to look for long.

Something moved fast between the trees, faster than its size had any right to allow, and then a massive anaconda broke into the open, its body as thick as Lukas’ torso, scales catching the dim light as it coiled and reared.

It spat.

A thick stream of liquid arced through the air towards them.

They split in opposite directions, the venom splattering across the ground and the bark of a nearby tree, where it immediately began eating into the wood with a soft hiss.

Lukas put a trunk between himself and the snake and pressed his back against it.

This one he couldn’t just muscle through. He had to fight smart, not hard.