Gacha Kingdom Building

I didn't manage to obtain the rights to determine the spawn rates of monsters in the second area, but we might've managed to clear the first area of monsters completely.

If I were to do away with the forest now, It would probably work as a straight-up extension to the kingdom area as I doubt the rabbits would come out from the forest to the open area.

While expanding the kingdom territory is not a priority right now, it's good to know that I can make an area safe for expansion using this method.

As for the summons, I decided to claim the 28 tickets and spent 8 on Bea's spellbooks, this way, my debt to her was more than settled and she even got a surplus from it.

Not to mention... it seems like she got a pretty rare one recently. She has acquired a skill for [Spatial Magic] from studying it.

Now while that does sound grandiose, thanks to its low level it's still not as overpowered as one might think, but given her Gift and her ability to quickly earn levels for her magic, it's worth keeping an eye out for it.

If this skill starts rapidly gaining levels... I'll snatch it for myself.

Still, she seems happy with it, and she also started getting levels on [Ice Magic], so everything's going well on that front.

As for her other magic skills, she has reached level 10 with every basic element aside from fire which she's not focusing too much on.

So I grabbed myself her Water, Wind, and Earth magic skills and in exchange upgraded her [Fire Magic] to level 10, this way, she stayed completely balanced.

As for the remaining 20 tickets I still had, I wasn't going to make the same mistake as summoning more spirits since at least for now it's not really worth it.

I got a few levels in newly acquired skills thanks to these tickets:

[Spiritual Communication x3

Allows the user a better understanding of spirits, even without the use of words. This is a passive skill that cannot be turned off. This skill may also work as an active skill. When it is directed towards a contracted spirit, this allows said spirit to better understand complex orders and intentions coming from its contractor. The more complicated the order is, the more mana it will consume.]

[Pursuit Of Knowledge x2

Adds points to the user's intelligence. Also helps focus on certain activities and increases one's memories.]

As for the skills I already had, they received the following levels:

[Greater Might] x3, [Fire Sword Arts] x3, [Eagle Eye] x2, [Focused Strike] x2, [Heat resistance] x2, [Ice Veil] x1, [Wind Magic] x1 and [Water Magic] x1.

Receiving levels into magic is pretty useless thanks to Beatrice and Claire but at the very least these came after I had obtained Bea's, so in this stance, it ended up being fine.

Now... [Pursuit Of Knowledge] goes so well with Bea's Gift and hobby that it's almost a cheat, so I didn't waste time and shared it with her.

Since Licia seems to value [Ice Veil] a lot as a skill, I ended up sharing it with her too since I had obtained a few levels in it these past few days, since she also uses magic quite a bit I included [Pursuit Of Knowledge] as part of the package.

Claire also wanted it, even though she definitely didn't need it, but it was hard to resist her pleading face.

The last one to receive something was Mia. It was definitely not as good as everyone else's but to be fair, I just wanted to see her being thankful and shy.

I still had 25 tickets stored but... I decided to leave these like this for a while, just in case the next event also rewards me by multiplying my current amount.

I could always use them when the need arrives anyway, so it didn't feel too much like a waste.

Well, the monsters on the current floor do use fire magic quite a lot, and since she proved to be somewhat weak to it, I gave her the increased levels in [Heat Resistance].

Having completed our preparations, we went ahead for another dive in the dungeon.

On our way, I could see a few different races walking around on the streets. Even though it caught our attention due to the novelty, their reaction to everything around them made me very nostalgic about how the girls were when they first arrived.

Talking about that with Licia and Claire only led them to become incredibly embarrassed though.

Thankfully no major incidents happened on our way today, and we entered the dungeon to hunt more monsters.

The encounters were all as nasty as before, and after going a bit deeper than before, we ended up facing a group of [Hair Ball].

This thing used its hair strands to whip me from a bunch of different directions.

These strands however are incredibly durable and strong, and they managed to cut deeply both the ground and the walls.

A single hit from one of these could probably take off an arm or a leg, and since each of these balls could use a bunch of tentacle-like members, dodging the array of whips was extremely difficult even for Mia and me who are the fastest among the group.

At least everyone could somewhat deal with his using their swords skills, but I gotta say that I was very envious of Anna who didn't even try dodging and just grabbed one of the whips after it hit her.

She then pulled the monster toward her and cut it in half with her greatsword.

It was by far the least impressive fight as there wasn't much in the way of skill being used there, but it was a spectacle nonetheless.

As for me, I couldn't really deal with them the way the girls could, especially Anna's, so I went with a magic approach.

Firstly I used [Mana Shield] to tank some hits as I charged forward, for each tentacle that came my way, I cut them using wind blades, and once I got close enough to it, I didn't give it a chance to survive a hit, using [Fire Magic] to strengthen my blades, I also activated [Physical Prowess] and [Focused Strike] to make sure this thing was gone.

This must be by far the most troublesome floor yet, the variety of enemies means we have to adapt our way of fighting every time to match them, and their unnatural behavior makes it too difficult to predict their actions.

At least they don't show too much in the way of strategy, and stick to their... thing...

Due to our help from the backline, whenever we struggle, the opponent doesn't get a chance to deal a significant blow.

Still, is important to do our best so that we don't overwhelm Ellie and Beatrice.

In the end, this expedition earned us two level-ups, and $1127. This result was mostly thanks to us being able to go deeper into the floor and also being able to last longer thanks to an increase in our mana pools.

I needed to make sure to get something to take away these things from my mind though, and the best healing for a hellish vision was a sight from heaven, so I passed on a cake store before heading home.

As planned, this ended up doing wonders to clear my mind and helped me forget the abominations from today.

Once inside the kingdom, I wanted to keep trying to clear the second area with Mia, but we saw an interesting quest pop up in the [Quest Center].

The quest specified that we had to capture a golden-horned rabbit, and upon doing so, we would be rewarded with one extra point in our speed status.

While a single point wouldn't make too much of a difference, this was a big deal.

The quest allowed the registration of a party of up to four people, so I decided to take Ellie since she's pretty good at hunting in the forest and also Licia since she has a good set of skills for most situations.

Claire did try her best to make me bring her too but... I know better than to let this girl participate in a mission inside the woods.

Thanks to Ellie and Mia, it didn't take us long to find the monster, with its golden glow working against it.

However, for some reason, we couldn't catch it no matter how much we gave chase or tried to surround it.

We were just one step behind every time.

This should've been impossible though... Mia has like twenty times its level, and her build focuses a lot on speed so there was definitely something going on here.

Not to mention, even Ellie's arrows were constantly missing him. What's worse, since we were in a forest, she couldn't do her arrow storm thanks to the trees providing a natural barrier, still, I thought I could use her to test a theory.

Miwen: "Ellie... can you chase it?"

It was the same for everyone, the monster was always just a little bit faster, just enough that we couldn't catch it.

But seeing Ellie give it chase right after Mia made things clearer.

It's not that the golden rabbit was faster than us, it's just that its speed was fixed to be greater than anything chasing after it.

Once we've noticed that, we created an ice corridor, and forced the monster into it. We then closed it from behind, effectively trapping the rabbit.

There wasn't too much space in there and the walls were exceedingly high, to the point they were taller than the trees around us.

Using our ice magic we started to freeze the rabbit in place, while Ellie shot two arrows at it, perforating both of its ears.

She chose to debuff the monster with increased tiredness and paralysis.

Frankly, this much was overkill, but this little shit gave us a lot of trouble and made Mia pretty pissed off, so to be honest, he ended up being lucky.

Once we were back inside the [Quest Center] there was a big box on the side of the counter, and upon putting the rabbit there, the quest was cleared and it really ended up boosting our speed.

There's a bunch of Gifts that improve one's status, but it was the first time Gacha Kingdom Building had done that for me aside from when I acquired skills, not to mention, that it also increased the status of other [Citizens].

We completed all other quests available, but another quest that offered status points as a reward didn't show up and with Licia, Ellie, and I here, we had to hurry and make dinner or else the others might've stuffed themselves with cake.

We also ended up getting teased by Claire of all people thanks to the small change in scenery we made using [Ice Magic], but since it was going to melt without us maintaining it, no permanent damage was made to the forest, unlike someone's fire magic might've done.