Chương 134: Sewage Treatment

June walked along the dark maintenance corridor with a lantern affixed to his waist with sinew. He took care not to track sewage into his suit's orifices. The scent of waste was an assault on his superhuman nostrils.

'How unsurprising! The sewers reek of sewage! Yippee!' The receptionist was kind enough to provide June with a short handwritten note on his targets' defining traits, a copy of the contract he had picked up, and a temporary pass granting him access to the sewers. The scrawled copy of his chosen contract also contained a list of locations where suspected or confirmed Sumeye activity was noticed.

He lifted a gauntleted pair of fingers and wiggled them into the visor's slits, chipping them on the way in, and pulled out a pamphlet. June was no local to Lengue; fortunately, he brought the same pamphlet that he scanned into the simulation, though now crumpled and slightly torn. He managed to convey to the clerk with a few brisk words that he wanted the locations marked down on the pamphlet's shoddy map.

The sewers were a maze; every turn looked identical from the last; every location smelled the same, and even though Lengue's capital wasn't as expansive as the few cities he had visited in his lifetime, it was still large enough to get lost in. He understood that he was woefully unprepared to take on a quest like this; the recommended head count for this contract was ignored, and the tools that most professionals relied on weren't on June's toolbelt. Why?

Every second was ticking towards the next phase of the tournament. June paused in his tracks; he began to get cold feet.

'I probably should turn around… this is probably a massive oversight on my end.' He slipped the pamphlet back into his visor and froze…

'I should at least re-read Sumeye's traits again before deciding…' June poked his finger back into the visor without care for the straining sound of bone as he shoved his fingers in the narrow slits and fished out a somewhat damp handwritten note.

'Times like this, I'm glad I'm wearing gloves! It's like sticky uncooked meatball in there!' He fiddled with the small note; he had curled it into a roll before depositing it within his visor; unsurprisingly, leaving a curled-up roll near sticky flesh made the roll stubborn enough to not straighten out. A few moments passed until June got tired of fiddling with one hand and held the tiny note open with both of his massive arms.

His shell's fingers nearly covered the entire note, so he had to skirt the edges with a ginger grasp, and finally he began reading. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"Sumeye! Common local threat, comparable to a dog in size… typically has curled black fur… sum of eyes randomly dispersed over its body? Commonly hides in the dark, not common, but not rare to bump into one with sorcerous abilities….? The rest is common knowledge!?" He let out a cartoonish exhale with his entire shell and moved a hand to pinch a brow, accidentally breaking the bone that buffered between the visor slits.

"Okay, it's black, the size of a dog, has a sum of eyes? I get that the clerk was tired, but what the hell do they mean the rest is common knowledge? I don't know common knowledge!? I'm from a different world!" June tried to gingerly reach into the visor slits once more and knocked down another strand of buffering bone in an attempt to refish out the contract… again.

"Okay! Alright! Let's see…" He read through the contract, giving backchanneled agreements to himself to fill the empty void of rushing sewage and silence with his own voice.

"Found it! Sumeye spotted in sewers… past incidents? Missing pets, children, and even adults?"

'I really need to figure out a way to see better out of this damn shell! I just need to…' He looked around and sighed once more. He was lost.

June didn't know how long he had been underground for; all he knew was that from the few manhole covers that he passed, it was already daytime. He had entered the guild hall near midnight, and from the trickles of light that streamed through the manhole covers and sewage grates, he still couldn't tell the exact or even general time. All he saw was light; the sky had been fully obscured.

Even if he could see a semblance of sky, he didn't know what the daylight cycle of Lengue was like, considering that he had spent a simulated year in a digital reality and for the rest he had mostly been stuck indoors. The worst thing that was gnawing at him was that for the last indeterminate amount of time, June realized that he was being followed by two things.

The issue, though, was that the presences following him were nothing like the presences he was able to sense during his time in the simulation; the things watching him seemingly disappeared when he turned to look. A slow frustration built up within him; he wanted to act and hope for a positive outcome, since walking this long so far hasn't amounted to anything except picking up two secret admirers. But regardless of how much his frustrations built themselves up, he kept his head steady.

Regretfully, yet thankfully, the simulation was his only prolonged case of survival; he made plenty of decisions, both good and bad, but the boon and bane of such an experience being in a realm where a major mistake like death didn't matter was that he was able to experiment. But the truth of all was that, in the first real-life scenario, the entire year he spent in the simulation would instantly become annulled. Beasts in the real world were not two-dimensionally stupid.

Dreamers in reality wouldn't have their abilities restricted, or work under others who didn't mesh well. Half the reason Brighthaven even got as far as it did was due to the blatant mismanagement of human resources in the other factions; if the royal faction understood even a fraction of what their Dreamer forces were capable of, a small squadron of them would have been all that was needed to destroy Brighthaven.

In reality, that kind of mismanagement was rare; organizations in the real world were not ramshackle groups held together by straw. Even the Aspirant forces that he contended against were not utilized to their full potential. Within the simulation, every threat was a hammer, but in reality, a threat came in many amorphous forms. The simulation was a game… this was real life. Losing here didn't give you a participation reward. Losing here didn't give you valuable life experience.

Losing here didn't give you a boon of any sort. Losing here… in real life meant one thing, and one thing only. If you lost in the real world, that was it. Death was the ending…

'Then again, I have come back from death a few times!'