Chapter 37: Oreo Cookie Ice Cream
Brrrrrr...
The sound echoed through the quiet penthouse.
Damien froze a second later.
Brrrrrr...
He slowly lowered his gaze towards his stomach.
"..." His eyes widened. "...Ice cream!"
It hit him like a hammer. He hadn’t eaten once during the entire tutorial, hadn’t needed the toilet, hadn’t even felt thirsty after drinking water.
The system had paused his body’s whole metabolism the moment the tutorials started. Now that he was back, everything had switched on again at once, all at the same time, and his stomach clearly had opinions about it.
"...Right. I almost forgot why I was roaming around that night."
He hurried back to the television. Food delivery pulled up thousands of restaurants at once, every single one of them owned and run by players. Each listing carried the owner’s class next to their name: master chef, royal baker, spirit brewer, alchemy cook.
"...Classes affect cooking too?" He said it, half-mocking, half genuinely surprised. Apparently, combat wasn’t the only thing the system had built a career out of.
He scrolled for a few minutes before his eyes caught on something familiar.
Oreo Cookie Ice Cream.
He pressed it without hesitating.
Price: 3 Silver Coins.
"...Expensive." Then again, he had no frame of reference for what anything cost anymore.
He confirmed the order, and a notification blinked into view.
➤[Payment Successful.]
➤[Estimated Delivery Time: 15 Minutes]
He nodded and leaned back into the sofa. "...Now. Let’s see what comes next." Food could wait. Information couldn’t.
He opened another menu, and this one held his attention.
Gate Recruitment Board.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of listings loaded at once, new ones replacing old ones every few seconds.
Need Tank!
Looking for a mage Lv. 28+
Experienced Healer Wanted
Five-Man Party Seeking Archer
Need Porter for Dungeon Expedition
The whole world had apparently reorganized itself around these things.
He filtered the search down to Level: 10, and most of the high-level requests vanished, leaving a long list of beginner parties in their place. He scrolled through the basics of one listing after another until a golden badge stopped him mid-scroll.
Sponsored by the Government of Viremont
"...Government-sponsored?" He opened it.
➤[Gate Recruitment.]
➤[Leader: Doctor Smoke.]
➤[Required Role: Scout.]
➤[Current Members: 4 / 5.]
➤[REWARD IS NOT DISCLOSED]
Below it, a second panel unfolded.
➤[Gate Information:]
➤[Name: The Rusted Blade.]
➤[Difficulty: Rare.]
➤[Required Level: Min-Lv. 10, Max-Lv. 20.]
➤[Required Players: 05.]
➤[Attempts: 339.]
➤[Recorded Deaths: 718.]
➤[Current Status: Aggressive.]
Two buttons sat underneath.
[JOIN] [IGNORE]
"...339 attempts?" His eyes dropped to the line beneath it. Seven hundred and eighteen deaths, inside one gate. He swallowed before he realized he was doing it. "Gates really aren’t jokes."
He tapped the information icon, and an explanation unfolded.
➤[Gate Status]
➤[Dormant: The gate remains stable. The immediate gate-break probability is extremely low. Routine clearing recommended.]
➤[Aggressive: The gate has entered an unstable state. Collapse may occur without warning. If a Gate Break occurs, contained monsters shall invade the surrounding area. Failure to suppress the outbreak will result in civilian casualties.]
"So that’s the difference." A dormant gate could wait. An aggressive one couldn’t, not for long, not without the monsters inside eventually deciding to let themselves out.
His eyes went back to the numbers. He rubbed his chin. "The reward must be enormous. So is the risk."
His finger hovered over the Join button and stopped there.
He’d woken up two days ago, give or take. He barely understood how currency worked in this city, let alone what an aggressive gate actually did to the five people standing inside it when it decided to collapse.
"...Think first, Damien." He kept his eyes on the screen, on the number 718 sitting there, refusing to shrink no matter how long he looked at it.
Ding Dong.
The doorbell cut through the apartment.
Damien jumped off the sofa. "...Ice cream." He’d forgotten completely. He hurried to the door.
A delivery robot floated outside, shaped roughly like a small suitcase with a pair of blinking mechanical eyes. "Delivery for Resident Damien."
Its container popped open on its own, and inside sat a neatly packaged cup, cold mist curling off the lid the moment he lifted it out. "Thank you."
The robot dipped in something like a bow. "Have a pleasant day." Then it drifted off down the hall without another sound.
He carried the cup back to the sofa and peeled the lid off. The smell alone made his mouth water before the spoon even touched it.
He closed his eyes and took the first bite.
Silence. Chocolate, cream, cookie, and underneath it all, the plain fact that it wasn’t goblin blood.
His eyes opened slowly. "...Holy. This is fricking incredible." The texture melted before he’d even finished the bite, rich and cold and perfectly balanced, and he genuinely couldn’t tell if that was the chef class talking or just how good anything tasted after however long he’d gone without real food.
Half the cup disappeared within a minute.
"...Worth every silver coin." He smiled around the spoon.
His eyes drifted back to the television, where the recruitment window still sat open, waiting.
"...A scout." Unlike tanks or damage dealers, scouts worked reconnaissance, trap detection, pathfinding, watching enemies, gathering information before anyone else moved. It was, more or less, everything he’d already been doing without a title for it through both tutorials.
He looked at the Join button again.
"...No. I didn’t survive everything just to hide inside this apartment."
Spoon still in one hand, he pressed [JOIN] with the other.
A new window opened.
➤[Applicant Identity Required]
➤[Would you like to register under your true identity?]
[YES] [NO]
He frowned. "...Absolutely not."
John was a household name now, and his own disappearance had apparently become one along with it. His real name walking into a gate application was a fast way to get noticed by people he wasn’t ready to be noticed by yet. He selected No.
➤[Please, Create an Alias]
He sat with the blinking cursor for a moment, then typed a single word without much deliberation, the same word that had been sitting on the ceiling above his bed an hour earlier.
➤[Alias Confirmed]
➤[Player Name Registered: Sleepless]
➤[Identity Protection Enabled.]
➤[Other players will recognise you only by your alias unless permission is granted.]
Damien read it back once. "Sleepless." A small, faint smile. "...Fitting."
Another notification followed almost immediately.
➤[Application Submitted]
➤[Gate: The Rusted Blade]
➤[Leader: Doctor Smoke]
➤[Current Status: Pending Review]
He slid another spoonful into his mouth and settled back against the cushions. Through the window, the whole city spread out beneath him, lit up edge to edge, a view he still hadn’t gotten used to having.
Just as he scraped the last bit of ice cream from the bottom of the cup, a notification chimed.
➤[Doctor Smoke is calling you.]
[ATTEND] [DECLINE]