“You got a name?” The woman asked gruffly, almost like an afterthought while she led me out of the security office.

"Tera," I answered back after a split second of hesitation.

She half turned her head to look at me with an eye, "I heard you're supposed to have lost your memories or something?"

"I did. But my name seemed to be one of the things I remembered. Maybe it might not even be my name, I dunno."

She made no comment and continued walking.

At this point, we walked out into the streets of the station and I took the time to look around, something that I did not get the chance to do when I was practically being manhandled into the station by the security officers.

Honestly, if you were expecting flying cars, tall, shining neon buildings or even sleek and clean architecture, you'd be disappointed.

The place reminded me of those suburban streets filled with rundown shop houses lit up by fluorescent light bulbs.

There were even steam pipes connecting in between the buildings and trash littering the alleyways in between those shop houses.

The only thing that really showed that it was not my original World was how the people around were dressed.

That's where the oversized jackets, the spiky neon hairstyles and the cybernetic implants could be seen.

In short… This was really cool.

“I’d recommend not to make that kind of face around here,” She cautioned.

I raised an eyebrow at her.

She pursed her lips, “I haven’t introduced myself have I? You can call me Amber. And before you ask, yes, I was named that because of my eyes.”

I wasn’t thinking about that but thanks for the information I guess?

“Nice to meet you Amber, so why did you say I shouldn’t make that face? Though I don’t really know what my face looked like just now…”

“That ‘in awe’ face you were showing just now. I thought they were joking about the memory loss thing but no one normal will be as impressed as you are about this dump of a place. One look and everyone here will think you’re a rich tourist.”

I grimaced, “And I’m guessing that knowing I’m a rich tourist would mark me as an easy target to get robbed or something?”

She smirked, “At least you’re smart enough to know that. Come on, Guild’s this way.”

I followed the blonde woman from behind and I took that chance to get a good look at her.

Aside from that long, flowing hair of hers that attracted attention, she also had the curves that turned a lot of heads as she walked by. It did not help that she was wearing a skin tight, black leather corset that did nothing to hide her curves.

At least she had a small leather jacket thrown over her shoulders though that only reached her midriff.

She was also wearing a pair of leather hot pants that really showed off her behind and I’m sure there’s a bunch of people who would be drooling over that absolute territory between said pants and her thigh high boots that were covered by her black pantyhose.

If I wasn’t clear enough, she was smoking hot.

Judging by how she was walking, she was either used to the attention she was getting or she did not care.

We continued down the street until we came to a small building that reminded me of those old alley bars.

The metallic door slid open with a soft hiss when she stepped up to it, revealing an interior with a design straight out of those noir detective movies. The only difference was the metallic material used for the furniture and the lights blinking around from the machines.

A middle aged man with a receding hairline was seated behind the single office desk with what I assume to be a computer terminal built into the desk itself.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He looked up with his sharp eyes when we entered, giving us a nod of acknowledgement.

“Amber,” He greeted before shifting his gaze to me. “So you’re the woman those officers told me about?”

“She’s the one, get her set up will you?” Amber yawned, laying herself down on a nearby couch with both feet raised to lay on the backrest.

She then took out a small tablet and started fiddling around with it.

The man barely acknowledged how she was acting and gestured to the area in front of him, “Name’s Ges. Step over here and I’ll get you sorted out.”

I did as he instructed and he started tapping on the screen in front of him.

Not a second later, a holographic screen popped out in front of me that looked something like a status screen though most of the information was left empty.

“Just fill in what you know I guess,” Ges instructed, waving his hand with a bored air like he had done this procedure thousands of times.

I tried to tap my finger on the blank sections of the screen and a holographic keyboard appeared in front of me.

At least this was something I can use without much problems.

I tapped away on the keyboard, filling in my name in the blank. There was a section that asked if I owned a combat ship, a transport ship or both so I selected the ‘both’ option.

Under combat experience, I also checked ‘yes’ before submitting it, leaving my history, physical sizes and all those other stuff blank.

Overall, it was quite bare bones.

“Is this really enough to sign me up as a Merc?” I asked.

He scrolled through the screen with his finger when my data was sent to him, “Hmph, as long as you’re not a pirate, you can become a Merc, we’re not picky. When there’s barely anybody paying attention to the fringe sectors of the USC, the people can only rely on Mercs like us to deal with problems that no one else is willing to deal with.”

Ges then paused when he saw the part that asked about my ship, his eyebrow rising a centimetre.

“I know you only have one ship… So is your ship both combat capable while also having a sizable cargo hold for transport requests?”

I hesitated, “Umm… How much cargo space does a transport request usually need?”

“I would say at least a Standard Galactic Delivery Unit on average. I'm, of course, not considering the requests that involve delivering sensitive cargo.”

I blinked at him, “What’s a Standard Galactic Delivery Unit?”

He groaned before looking around the room for a moment. He then reached up his hand and pointed behind me, “That, see that box over there?”

I turned and found a crate about the size of a single bed in the corner of the room.

Ges continued, “That’s the standard size of delivery packages. One box is a Standard Galactic Delivery Unit.”

I nodded, “Then that shouldn’t be a problem since my ship has a cargo hold that can fit at least five such boxes with space to spare.”

“Huh… Now I’m wondering what you did before you lost your memories. A ship like that would cost quite a fortune that no beginner Merc can afford.”

I shrugged and offered no explanation.

He didn’t seem too bothered by it and continued to scroll through the page before nodding, “Right. This looks fine to me. I’ll just need you to step to the back and take a simulator test.”

I frowned, “Is that necessary?”

Amber spoke up from the coach without putting down her tablet, “Unless you want to just start at the lowest rank and get the shittiest and lowest paying jobs before moving up the ranks, you might want to take the test to get a jump in your rank. That is, assuming you are skilled enough of course.”

Ges shrugged, “What she said.”

“There’s rankings here?” I asked.

“Of course there is. Despite how it looks, the guild still has standards and higher ranked Mercs get certain privileges the higher up they are. I doubt you want to hear the list of privileges you get for each rank now, do you?”

I shrugged to show that I didn’t care either way..

He flicked his hand at the console and a picture of a two dimensional pyramid diagram popped up in front of me.

“In ascending order, you have Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Emerald, Ruby and finally Prisma. Each rank has five levels that you need to advance through from rank one to five before you can rank up to the next rank,” He explained.

So there’s eight ranks in total with five levels in each rank, making it a total of forty levels.

He gestured to Amber who was still laying on the couch, “For the record, Amber over there is a Level three Gold rank.”

She waved without taking her eyes off the screen of her tablet.

“So, you want to skip the simulator test or take it? It’s up to you,” He asked.

“What do I need to do in the test?”

“Nothing fancy. There’s the ship combat simulator and the close combat simulator. Depending on how you do in the tests, you can even skip all the way to Silver rank from the start.”

Well.. Isn’t that just basically the same as playing VR games?

I nodded at him, “I’ll take the test.”

He stretched his arms before standing up and gesturing to the back, “This way then.”

Alright, as long as the simulator isn’t too crazy, it shouldn’t be anything I can’t handle.