Wandering around the streets of Vale without a care in the world, I was bound to encounter a mugging sooner or later. What I didn't expect was for the muggers to not target me and instead go for the people behind me. Because I didn't fear for my life with my current host of superhuman strength, speed and endurance, I had once again decided to cut through a part of the slums on a downtrodden area of Vale.
I only noticed after the shouting started since I wasn't particularly concerned with the Ki signatures of a bunch of civilian strangers. I could tell if someone had Aura, but since none of the people involved had any, I couldn't be bothered to keep track of everyone.
In any case, this would be a good opportunity to score a couple easy Gachas, so I decided to intervene. Walking into the back alley the victims had been dragged into, I realized they were a dog-eared Faunus man and what looked to be his tailed daughter.
Huh. I wasn't aware traits could be inherited in a mismatched way like that.
"Put your weapons down or I won't be nice," I gave the misguided, probably racist, youths mugging the Faunus pair a chance. They could either surrender with their consciousness intact or be sent away bloodied and unconscious.
"The fuck are you supposed to be? Some dog-fucker hero," the most aggressive of the muggers shouted as he pointed his pistol at me.
"Rude," I scoffed, entirely unfazed by the threat as I continued to approach.
"Stay the fuck back before I blow your goddamn head off! And give me all your fucking money while you're at it, retard!" He continued his tirade.
When he realized I had exactly zero fucks to give, he decided to shoot me.
I caught the bullet in my palm and brandished it for them to understand how utterly screwed they were. It wasn't even a challenge, since I'd been fast enough to catch and deflect low-caliber weapons since before I graduated from the Turtle School of Martial Arts. Sleeping under the same roof as Launch in her trigger-happy state did that to anyone who wanted to survive.
When shooting me didn't yield any results, the idiot tried to draw his gun on his original intended victims. I wasn't about to let him or any of his minions take any hostages against me, so I used the Afterimage technique and my physical speed to smack them all into unconsciousness. I tried to hold back, but since I hadn't ever used my enhanced strength on a regular person since getting it from the Turtle's Tutalege Scenario, more than a few bones were broken.
[Congratulations! For defeating six civilian thugs, you have earned twelve Uncommon Gacha Coins!]
Good thing I recently got Healing as my first magic spell. Now I wouldn't have to waste my Health Potions, risk some stupid excessive violence or whatever other charge if the police were so inclined to target me for any reason.
"Hey, before you guys go, were either of you injured? I can heal," I offered before moving on to do the bare minimum healing I thought the muggers needed to not bleed out before an ambulance showed up.
"Please heal my boyfriend, they slapped him before demanding us to hand over our wallets," the girl said.
"Boyfriend?" I raised my hand to the side of his swelling face to heal him while looking at him with mildly concealed distaste. This guy had so much hair and wrinkles on his face that he could pass for someone in their fifties. As for the girl, I wouldn't think twice if she put on a middle school uniform and stood in the middle of a group of children out on a field trip "He's not… You know—"
"We are both twenty!" The girl loudly defended both of them.
"My bad," I felt bad for committing that kind of faux pas. "Help cure my ignorance by letting me know if that's normal. I don't really know all that much about the difference between Humans and Faunus beyond the obvious," I said while gesturing at their animal traits.
"It's fine," the girl sighed. "Even other Faunus think we're in some sort of twisted relationship. We've been together since middle school, before our traits fully developed. It just ended up as bad luck for him to appear older than he is while I look a lot younger."
"I can see why you'd be annoyed by having people constantly judge you," I admitted. I turned to the guy, whose face finished healing and said, "Sorry."
"It's all good," he laughed good-naturedly and we went our separate ways.
[Congratulations! For healing seven mildly injured people, you have earned fourteen Uncommon Gacha Coins!]
This was good information to keep in mind for any future interactions I might have with Faunus people. Besides the superpowers and monsters, this world had potential for the god-awful trope of legal lolis and otherwise impossible-to-detect jailbait. The former group I feared I might disrespect unintentionally, while the latter might ruin my life if I'm not careful.
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Moving right along, I didn't come across any other interesting situations or confrontations with people I was familiar with. I ate dinner at a restaurant which was a slight disappointment compared to the crepes I had earlier in the day before returning to my apartment.
Aura was still a few hours away, so I turned my nose at the idea of accepting the Zombie Store Invasion Scenario. The Terrorist Takeover was the first Unique Grade Scenerio I'd ever earned, so even if it didn't sound like guaranteed death, I decided to set it aside as well in favor of the Gang Initiation Scenerio.
I hadn't had my fill of excitement quenched with just a bit of sightseeing around the city and a nonexistant fight against a bunch of helpless idiots. So, I took a deep breath and readied myself for a fight to the death before accepting the Scanerio.
Reality shifted and I was no longer in my apartment at night. I was now outside of some wild-west-esque town setting as the evening sun started setting into the horizon. Surrounding me were what had to be hundreds of heavily tattoo, thugged-out gangsters the likes of which would be caricatures if they weren't so very real and close to me.
"So the Gringo wants join us? If you did your research before coming here, you would know we don't take kindly to you fucking Americans," The leader of the gangsters said before addressing the others surrounding me, "What do you say about making an example of this idiot to stop others from trying the same shit with us in the future."
When people started pulling out shanks, bats, machetes, guns and even a chainsaw, I threw caution to the wind and let loose a Kiai. I wasn't strong enough yet to do much more than disorient normal people and cause them to lose their footing for more than a few moments, but that was enough to entirely massacre a section of gangsters with Ki Blasts.
"Your bitch of a mother, this son of bitch is fighting back! Shoot him!" Someone yelled out.
Unfortunately for them, no one had the speed to keep up with me. Even worse, their weapons were only as sophisticated as the ones from Earth. Only the guy with a chainsaw might have stood a chance at injuring me, but he didn't have the speed to avoid me punching his jaw off his head and probably dealing catastrophic brain damage in the process.
I picked up a machete and found that I preferred killing people by decapitation and fatal blade wounds over punching them and feeling the destruction I caused through my bare hands. That wasn't to say I was particularly happy with being put in a position where I had to kill all these people, but I could rationalize my actions on several fronts.
Everyone I killed here was probably a remorseless gangbanger that the world would be better without. This was a Scenario, which I couldn't even be sure was real or simulated. My life was being threatened first, so I was right to defend myself; fair or not that I was overtly strong enough to not kill them and still leave without a scratch didn't matter when I considered the opposite might be true had I taken the Scenario without getting as strong as I was now.
And, most importantly… Every kill gave me an Uncommon Gacha Coin. When I was done killing off the last guy, I also received a Rare Gacha Coin for resolving the Scenario and was returned to my room.
Was I a remorseless monster for being able to brush off having just killed off approximately 256 people? Maybe. Don't know, don't care. As long as I didn't consider them people with identities beyond existing for the purpose of fulfilling a role in the Scenario it'd probably be alright.
Right?
I proceeded to cash in all my Gachas for the day.
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 27 | Mandarin Chinese x3 (Skill)]
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 60 | Knife Throwing x5 (Skill)]
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 32 | Drumming x8 (Skill)]
[Results: Rarity — Rare 770 | Shadow Clone Technique (Skill)]
[Results: Rarity — Rare 313 | Tamriel: Healing x3 (Skill)]
[Results: Rarity — Rare 257 | Lucky (Perk)]
[Results: Rarity — Unique 5,000 | Skill Advancement: Advanced (Consumable)]
"Yoooo," Katayoki squealed in delight from the recesses of my mind. "Knife Throwing and Drumming? I guess that prayer thing worked out, am I right?"
"What? Who cares about that when compared to the Lucky Perk and Skill Advancement?" I was outraged, but that was more because I was dealing with him than for any other reason.
Drumming was cool to have especially for as high leveled as I got it. Knife Throwing would be immensely useful in my quest to master using the Zanpakuto Spirit as a weapon. But the real meat of the matter this time around was the Lucky Perk and Skill Advancement Consumable.
Lucky as a Perk retroactively changed the way Gacha worked to make the odds ever so slightly more favorable. It wasn't anything game breaking like fully eliminating negative pulls from the pool of rewards or making Gachas exclusive to their Rarity. But it did raise my chances of getting the highest rarity I could 10% more likely; relatively, not additively, unfortunately.
The way Gacha originally worked, if I used a Rare Coin there was a 33% chance I would get a Rare pull; 33% I'd get an Uncommon and a 33% that I'd get a Common. If I used a Unique that went down 25% each and so on the higher the rarity tiers went. Now, I would be getting a ~36.7% chance for a Rare pull, a 27.5% a Unique and so on.
That would be useful over the more Gachas I used over time. The Skill Advancement, though, was immediately more useful as it allowed me to bypass the Level 10 Skill Level Cap for any one Skill. That… I wasn't too sure what to use it on at the moment. In fact, I thought it prudent to keep it reserved for a more opportune time.
The way Skill Advancement worked, it would take any one of my Level 10 Skills and immediately raise it to Level 11 before allowing more of the same Skill to be reentered into their new Rarity pool when I went to roll more Gacha. That could be saved for a critical moment.
Like if I needed to get away from someone too strong I could use the Skill advancement on my Sprinting Skill. Or if I maxed out my Healing skill and was later greviously wounded, I could use it then to hopefully gain healing magic potent enough to keep me alive.
'No sense in using it now.' I thought to myself before getting ready for another night of heated knife-throwing combat.
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Katayoki said.
"What?" I groaned exasperatedly. Couldn't he wait just a few more minutes for me to come over to him of my own volition?
"You haven't used any of the Locked Gachas from the Gang Initiation Scenario. When you initiated the roll of all your current coins, only the unrestricted ones were used if you check the numbers."
That… Was true. I felt like an idiot for not noticing literally hundreds of missing rewards while scanning for any good pulls from this last bunch. In my defense, I'd never really waited to use a Locked Gacha Coin outside of a scenario or in conjunction with regular coins. It was hardly the most grievous mistake I could have made.
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 10 (Locked) | Drug Money: Lien x128 (Item)]
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 20 (Locked) | Drug Precursors and Chemicals x64 (Item)]
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 30 (Locked) | 1 Kg of Pure Columbian Cocaine x32 (Item)]
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 40 (Locked) | 1 Kg of Fentanyl x16 (Item)]
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 50 (Locked) | 1 Kg of Blue Meth x8 (Item)]
[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 60 (Locked) | Cartel Firearms x8 (Item)]
[Results: Rarity — Rare 100 (Locked) | Optical Scale (Perk)]
You know, besides the firearms and already prepared drugs, everything else was deceptively useful. I mean, the Drug Money came out to the equivalent of ten times my whole family's inheritance and the Drug Precursors and Chemicals could be put to use with the Alchemy Kit I'd gotten some time ago now that my Alchemy Skill was at Level 10. I wouldn't be cranking out any restorative potions without some unearthly materials, but explosives and poisons were well within my capabilities.
Even the Optical Scale perk would be helpful whenever I got around to doing some Alchemy. With just a glance I could tell how much material I was working with down to a hundredth of a milligram. It didn't work on anything heavier than a ton, but asking for more was unreasonable of a Rare Perk.
Happy with the haul, I went to bed and woke up in my Inner World for my scheduled nightly torture session. Katayoki was lucky I was physically resting while my soul was at war. I wouldn't be putting up with him and his demands if it cost me my sanity.