Chapter 52: FastTrack II

Other adventurers were complaining...

A lot.

Keane had started taking too many of the better contracts, and while he didn’t really care, the complaints themselves weren’t exactly difficult to understand.

Whenever a difficult gate appeared with a good reward, Keane would usually take it. Whenever there was some dangerous monster extermination contract that paid well, there was also a good chance Daniel would place it in front of him.

There were only so many profitable contracts appearing around Valewind at once, so having one Gold-ranked adventurer constantly taking and completing them alone was obviously going to attract attention.

"He takes everything."

"How are we supposed to make money if he keeps grabbing all the good contracts?"

"He doesn’t even have a proper party."

"Does the Guild really allow this?"

The answer to that last question was yes.

The Guild didn’t have much reason to stop him.

Keane wasn’t taking contracts only to abandon them later, neither was he constantly failing or endangering people because he went after things above his ability. He took the contracts and completed them, and from the Guild’s perspective, that was what mattered.

Most of the work Keane took was also dangerous enough that ordinary teams weren’t exactly rushing to accept them in the first place. Complaining after someone else cleared the gate was easy, but entering before knowing whether everyone in the party would come back out was another matter entirely.

The Guild was more than happy to have someone reliable enough to take those jobs.

As for Keane, the arguments didn’t really concern him. As long as Daniel continued finding good work, Keane would keep doing it. That was the entire point of their arrangement.

Some time later, after returning from another gate, Keane was already thinking about where he would go next.

The gate he had just cleared had been disappointing, with the strongest monster inside barely being worth mentioning. Some how, all the gates around Valewind never went past a certain level, almost as though they were being controled. Being a programmer himself—or at least he was, it resembled too clear a structure.

Anyway, he finished the entire thing quickly, collected whatever useful materials he could find and left without much trouble, not returning with the team that focused on collecting profitable monster parts.

He was actually thinking that he needed to find something stronger soon when something in the distance caught his attention.

To his surprise, it was a gate.

Keane stopped walking and looked in its direction.

It was several hundred metres away from the main road, which wasn’t strange on its own, but there was no Guild marker around it, no guards, no warning signs and not a single adventurer nearby.

That was strange, and certainly interesting.

Even more, Keane had seen more than enough gates by now to have an idea of what they normally looked like. Their environments could be different and so could their colours or whatever strange effect surrounded them, but there was normally something about them that still felt familiar...

—This one didn’t

The entrance looked dark, though black wasn’t exactly the right way to describe it, it looked stale. It was more like the light around it became weaker the closer it got to the gate, while a faint red-purple colour moved underneath the surface as though something behind it was slowly breathing. It reminded him of the alien movies he watched back on earth, where there would be cocoons.

Even the air around the place felt weird.

Keane looked around once more, but there was still nobody nearby.

’The Guild hasn’t found this.’ He thought to himself.

That was the most obvious explanation.

Normally, the reasonable thing to do would be to report it, and Keane knew that much. The problem was that he also knew exactly what would happen afterwards.

The Guild would send people to inspect the gate, then classify it, restrict access around the area and probably spend the next few days deciding who should enter and whether it was safe to begin with.

Keane looked at the gate again.

’Or I could take a look... I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt, just a quick peak.’

He was already a Gold-rank adventurer, and with every stat sitting at 199, nothing inside the gates he had been entering recently had even come close to seriously hurting him.

Of course, Keane didn’t think that meant he was invincible, that would be stupid, but he also wasn’t planning to run inside blindly and ignore anything dangerous he found.

After thinking about it for a few seconds, Keane started walking toward the gate.

The dark surface rippled when he reached it, and after a final moment of hesitation, he stepped through.

.

.

.

Appearing on the other side, inside the gate, everything looked normal at first, but after looking around properly, Keane quickly realised that something about the environment was strange, it was just a bit difficult to explain exactly what.

The ground looked like stone, but some parts of it were strangely soft when stepped on—but not muddy, while the walls looked organic in certain places and more like some kind of mineral in others. There were also strange formations growing from the ceiling, some of them resembling roots while others looked disturbingly similar to bones.

Keane continued wandering about the place, until something stepped out, a monster.

He immediately turned in that direction, and not long after, a creature slowly came out from behind one of the rocks.

Keane stared at it for a moment, unable to really classify what he was looking at.

The thing had four legs, or at least, Keane assumed they were all supposed to be legs—and in the oddest way, they really looked like legs, like the arms had been replaced by hind legs. Two of them looked like they belonged to some large wolf, while the other two were almost human in appearance it was disturbing.

Its body wasn’t any better either.

Patches of fur and scales overlapped each other across its body, and while one side of its head had only a single eye, the other had three. Even its mouth opened sideways instead of normally.

’What the hell is that?’ Keane thought to himself while looking at the creature, and strangely enough, the creature also seemed to be looking back at him as though fully conscious.

It didn’t last long though.

The creature suddenly attacked, rushing toward Keane with an irritating screech.

Keane simply stepped aside, allowing it to pass before turning and throwing a punch into its body.

The monster was sent flying across the chamber before crashing heavily into the wall, and after that, it didn’t move again. He made sure to control the force of the punch, the last thing he wanted was the blood and innards of an unknown monster all over him.

Keane walked over to the body and looked down at it.

Strength wise, it wasn’t anything particularly impressive, perhaps early Mortal... Intermediate perhaps.

That however wasn’t the strange part.

The strange part was its body.

Keane crouched beside it and looked over the different parts properly, but even then, he still couldn’t tell what the creature was originally supposed to be.

’Just what is this mess? Chimera?’ He thought to himself.