Chapter 36: Toast to Survival

“Rak! You’re here,” Allan raised his voice the second he saw Rakna approaching and caught the attention of everyone. “We all got the notification you killed Aquila soon after coming out. What were you doing until now?”

“Stuff,” Rakna shrugged and he arrived at the big table they were standing around. He looked at the food displayed and Pronos practically rocketed out from under Sonata before landing on the table with sparkly eyes. “What about you know who? I don’t see him here,” he said while reaching for a plate.

“Over there,” Flavia pointed with her chin as she was eating dumplings with Nyx. Rakna followed her line of sight and spotted Herts’ little band huddled to the side of the room with the man in question sporting a dark expression.

Leia snorted as she swallowed a piece of bread. “He must be pissed off about losing half of the guys he had with him. They never appeared on the platform. I guess that bird was saying the truth.”

“Indeed,” Leis nodded.

Rakna hummed as he placed a full chicken on his plate. Then, much to everyone’s shock, he cut it into five pieces, which were still way too big for anyone with common sense, and proceeded to swallow each one of them, bones and everything, after chewing a few times. What they didn’t see though was how his fangs had grown temporarily when did it.

When he finished the whole chicken in just a few seconds, Rakna returned their incredulous stares with a lifted eyebrow. “What?”

“No, it’s just… did you always eat like that?” Allan uttered. “I don’t remember you doing that, ever.”

“Werewolf and all that… forgot already?” Rakna replied unperturbed. “I’m not really hungry right now but my ability to eat has probably skyrocketed. I have a hunch that if I was in my other form, I could probably finish another one of these in just one bite.”

“That’s kinda scary, bro,” Allan deadpanned. “If you ever feel the urge to eat one of us, please tell us in advance. Who knows if one day you’ll start craving for humans?”

“Well, hearts do taste good,” Rakna commented indifferently.

“Wait, what?” Allan froze. “What did you just say? Rak? Rak?!”

Rakna ignored his friend’s shouts and turned to look at the other people in the party hall. His eyes, which had sneakily turned golden, swiftly swept over each person. He even got a close look at the appearance of the Host on the opposite side of the hall.

‘Their characteristics vary a lot; Asian, South and North American, African, European… Truly we were picked out from across the Earth’s surface,’ he thought and blinked as his irises returned to their purple color. Then, from the corner of his eyes, he saw a tall man wearing a black trench coat enter the hall while leading a new group of people inside. ‘Probably another overseer.’

“What are you thinking?” Leis came up to his left and asked.

“Nothing much. I’m still assessing the situation.”

“I see…” Leis whispered. “There’s something I can’t help but notice personally. How many people do you think there are in this hall right now?”

Rakna glanced at him for a second before answering, “I’d say between two to three hundred.”

“And how many do you think there are left to arrive like them?” Leis continued while pointing at the small group of four people who had just entered the hall.

“Honestly, if we take how our side of things was, I don’t think there will be a lot more. Maybe a hundred and a half or so, at best. Truthfully, there are a few things that we had over the other groups in the first place. First; me.”

Leis let out a chuckle at that. “Can’t deny it.”

“Thanks to my Nirvana Skill, as well as Nyx’s help, we managed to defeat Aquila without too much trouble or losses but I doubt it was the same for the other groups. Then, there’s the fact that your gang, Nyx, Flavia, Allan, and I formed a pretty powerful force from the get-go. It was easy for us to collect and monopolize souls. Incidentally, because of our superiority, we haven’t had to face a certain situation.”

“Stealing,” Dan joined the conversation from the side. The others also seemed to be listening ever since Rakna started talking. “No one tried to steal souls from us.”

“Yes,” Rakna nodded. “However, there’s no doubt that anyone who isn’t trained like us will easily fall into despair at the situation. Humans are cowards, especially when it comes to the unknown. For them, it’s less scary to kill fellow humans than otherworldly monsters.”

Allan laughed wryly. “The fact that you’re actually not human anymore makes it so ironic. Because I know you would say that even if you weren’t a werewolf.”

Dan snickered. “True. And I can guess what you’re going to say after this, Xiorra,” he declared and everyone looked at him. “In this kind of situation, it’s very easy for the mundane folks to develop a psychopathic behavior. In conclusion…” He trailed and shot a sharp glare at the crowd. “You can fully expect this place to be roaming with freshly born serial killers.”

Everyone fell silent at his words and the many voices in the party hall drowned their area. Only Pronos wasn’t paying attention to anything as he stuffed himself with fish and meat.

Nyx sighed in the silence. “It’s such a sad thing to know that you’re completely right. Humans are just pathetic like that,” she remarked while staring at the ripples of the wine in her cup. “They do have a lot of potential as a species. The potential to be anything; from the worst trash imaginable to the most respectable of heroes.”

“Ah, right,” Dan exclaimed. “It almost slipped my mind that you too are not human. Your status says that you’re an Ascended Human… the heck is that?”

Nyx shrugged off the stares of everyone. “Personal.”

“Now that I think about it, how much information does your Scan give you?” Rakna asked and Dan mused for a bit.

“Well, depends but generally, it’s limited to the name, age, etcetera, and the attributes. I can’t see the skills at all and sometimes, even the attributes show as interrogation marks even when I use it on a target of the same level as me. What about you? You were able to see the entire status of Aquila. How did you do that?”

“Appraisal, that’s the name of the skill I use. The System tells me that it’s a better version of Scan. That’s all I know.”

“Anyhow,” Allan raised his voice a bit. “Let’s stop talking about this shitty game for a bit. I want to enjoy my food without being depressed, please.”

“I got to agree with that one,” Gantt quipped. “It spoils the taste.”

“All right,” Leis grabbed a cup of alcohol and lifted it a bit. Everyone understood the action and grabbed their own drinks. Rakna quietly poured himself a cup of water much to the amusement of his close friends. They knew that he hated basically every drink other than water.

Pronos looked at everyone in confusion and Flavia smiled before handing him a cup of water too which he grabbed with his tail while tilting his head.

“To our survival,” Leis said and raised his cup.

“”To our survival,”” all of them said except Nyx, Rakna, and obviously Pronos, before they downed their respective drinks.

At the same time, the other people in the hall apparently happened to see it and, like a chain reaction, they all made a toast with the same words, though in different languages.

* * *

As the new Hosts were enjoying their time, a few hours passed, and a few minutes before the end of the tutorial, a group of cloaked people appeared in the forest surrounding Rakna’s school but there was something odd about it. It wasn’t the area where the Tutorial had proceeded. In fact, it seemed to be one of the separate dimensions meant for the initiations.

“Do you feel anything?” One of the cloaked beings asked as the night masked their shape.

“Give me a moment,” a second voice responded. “Hm, I smell something in that direction,” it said and the group of unknown people instantly moved at a speed that would be mind-gobbling for anyone new to the System.

They traveled a few hundreds of meters in a few seconds and they all stopped somewhere with several trees carbonated or half deracinated. The cloaked people then collectively surrounded a certain shape lying on the ground.

“Fuck,” one of them said and crouched next to the corpse of the nine-tailed wolf. “It’s dead. Stabbed in the head. Its heart seems to have been… gouged out? Though it appears to be post-mortem…”

One of the others clicked his tongue audibly. “How the heck did this happen? We went through all that shit to kidnap it from those damn wolves, and now it’s dead? I thought hiding it in an initiation dimension would be safe. There’s no way a newbie Host could have killed a nine-tailed wolf, right? Even if it was a cub.”

“I’m lost as well. It can’t be someone from the seven branches since they have absolutely no reason to kill this cub. Heck, even we only wanted to use it as a hostage.”

“What about the Host that took their Initiation here? Maybe we can learn something if we interrogate them.”

“Unfeasible. There’s no way to pinpoint who it was. And for all we know, they might have died during the Tutorial anyway.”

One of them sighed. “No choice; burn the corpse. We can only fool the wolves into thinking that we still have the cub in our possession.”

“Understood,” the crouched figure nodded and placed his hand on the wolf’s body. In the blink of an eye, a white flame appeared and engulfed it before turning it into ashes.

“Let’s leave before the System kicks us out to the First Plateau. I heard Gray Whisles is one of the overseers this year. If he finds us, we’re dead,” he uttered and they disappeared from the forest as fast as they came.