Chapter 653 Reaching an Agreement
After ending the call, Moon spotted a familiar pastry shop down the road.
It was the same one he, Selene, and Yara used to visit. The shop had reasonable prices, a warm interior, and pastries that were worth the trip. Moon had been craving something sweet since the long hunt.
He walked inside.
The smell of fresh baking hit him the moment he entered.
The shop was mostly empty at this hour, and the young woman behind the counter recognized him immediately. Her eyes widened and her mouth parted slightly but she managed to compose herself into professional mode before he reached the counter.
"Sir, welcome. What can I get for you?"
Moon smiled easily.
"Hello, can I get Red velvet. Yellow pineapple. Vanilla Chocolate. Two of each. And whatever the specialty of the day is."
She nodded quickly and began boxing his order. The pastries were neatly packaged into a wide flat box with the shop's logo printed across the top.
He paid, gave her a tip and left with the box tucked under his arm.
"Thank you, sir!" The worker said with a massive smile on her face.
Moon walked to the nearest training center.
I should use my time well while waiting for Tom.
He still hadn't cracked the assimilation technique Sierra had taught him at her estate. The skill was too important to leave incomplete.
He paid the entry fee for one of the luxurious Second Order rooms.
The chamber inside was well-equipped. Reinforced walls rated for Second Order attacks and a range of powerful training puppets designed to withstand Four-Star Evolver attack.
Moon set the pastry box down on a small side table before taking out his bow.
His fire gathered around the arrow he nocked, trying to sink the element into the arrow's molecular structure rather than coating the shaft's exterior.
Unfortunately, just like other times, the fire resisted.
He released the arrow but the fire slid off during flight, missing the target by a small margin.
Moon did not give up, and tried again.
The fire sank slightly deeper this time. A few of the flame particles began to interact with the arrow rather than sliding off.
He tried again. And again. And again.
An hour passed by in a blur.
Moon released the arrow before shaking his head and sighing.
"Still have a long way to go...."
He had made barely any progress. His arrows now integrated maybe ten percent of the element particles into the arrow, up from the near-zero baseline he had produced at Sierra's range.
The improvement was real but it was still very marginal. At this rate, reaching true assimilation would take weeks of practice.
The skill was too difficult.
Sierra had been right about the class-level knowledge requirement. Without direct access to the specific understanding that an archer-class awakener possessed, Moon was fighting the fundamentals with every attempt.
I need to copy an elemental archer next time I find one.
The thought reinforced his earlier plan. If he could get his hands on a proper elemental archer's class for a twenty-four hour window, the assimilation principles would come to him through the class transfer rather than through his own labored experimentation. He could learn the fundamentals during that window and then continue refining them after the class expired.
He lowered his bow before reaching for a pastry from the box on the side table.
The phone chimed with an incoming call.
Ring-ring.
Moon set the pastry down on the training room's side table and answered.
Tom's voice came through, "The Association agreed to your demands. They have a sword ready in their vault for you, and the assassin armor too."
"Perfect."
"But they have two conditions. Firstly, they want full transparency on everything that happens inside the gate. Every encounter, discovery, material recovered from any beast or environmental source. The Association wants complete visibility on the gate's interior because it killed their previous team, and they need every data point they can extract to understand what they're dealing with for future incidents."
"That's fair."
"Second. First priority on any items recovered from inside. If you find something valuable, the Association gets first right of purchase before any private market. They'll offer competitive pricing, but that means you can't take a rare item and shop it to a higher bidder. If they want it, they get it at fair market rate."
Moon considered both terms briefly.
The Association had clearly learned from their previous mistake.
The last gate he had entered, the S-Rank that had almost killed him, had contained a Supreme Rank Three-Tailed Fox. He had never disclosed the encounter to the Association for obvious reasons.
The loot he had walked out with had been substantially more valuable than anything his official reports had mentioned, and the Association had certainly figured out that he had held back information after the fact.
This time, they were structuring the contract to prevent the same pattern.
Moon didn't mind the terms.
A B-Rank gate wouldn't contain a Supreme Rank creature. The tier gap was too extreme.
Supreme Rank beasts likely required S-Rank or higher environments to spawn naturally. The odds of encountering anything close to that tier inside a B-Rank interior were effectively zero.
The transparency clause would cost him nothing meaningful. The first-purchase clause would only affect items he might otherwise have preferred to keep private, and even then, the Association's pricing was competitive enough that selling to them wouldn't represent a significant loss compared to alternative markets.
He smiled slightly.
"Sure, I have no problem with the terms."
"Excellent, the city is about seven hours away by orbital. The Association wants you on-site as soon as possible. They've sent me an orbital pass that you can use to board the nearest departure point without any of the usual booking delays. Just walk into any orbital station, present the pass at the gate, and they'll route you directly to a priority shuttle."
"Copy that."
"The pass is being forwarded to your phone right now."
Moon's phone buzzed with a confirmation message a second later.
"Anything else I should know?"
"They'll brief you fully once you arrive. But one thing to keep in mind. The team roster is being assembled from across the kingdom. You'll be meeting people you've never worked with before, some of them with reputations of their own. Be careful about the dynamics, not everyone will be friendly to the young prodigy walking to steal their spotlight."
"I'll manage."
"I know you will."
The call ended.
Moon pocketed the phone. He picked up the pastry box from the side table, took one last bite of the red velvet slice he had started, and packed the rest away carefully.
He walked out of the training room, heading towards the oribtal.