Chapter 3: Screw Murphy

[Congratulations! For cooking a restaurant-quality dish, you have earned two Rare Gacha Coins!]

[Congratulations! For cooking a restaurant quality dish…]

[Congratulations! For cooking…]

[Congratulations…]

It was very rewarding working my first shift as a cook. It was also very stressful, especially during the height of dinner time. From 12:00 - 6:00 PM it wasn't too bad, but afterwards up to around 9:00 PM it had been a nightmare of servers piling on hundreds of tickets an hour.

As a line cook I not only had to prepare food, but also restock ingredients and supplies whenever I or someone else noticed we were getting low as well as constantly communicate with everyone else in the kitchen. It would have been hard enough with the chefs breathing down my neck every time I was due to call out that something had finished cooking, but even in between those times I was constantly asked how long it would take for several different things I was working on at once.

God forbid you mess anything up. Damn near everyone would know about it; probably even the customers out in the dining area.

"What hell is this, Stevens?! This is a very nice char on the flan, but I doubt anyone with working tastebuds would appreciate it!"

In retrospect, it hadn't really been that bad for poor Stevens. My fellow line cook had only been angrily talked to for all of ten seconds and to be honest, it wasn't even much more aggressive than the head chef had been since the dinner time rush started. I just know it in my heart that when it happened, the tense atmosphere and urgency of everyone in the kitchen made it seem like the man had been cursed out to hell.

By the time my shift ended at 10:00 PM, I definitely felt like I worked for all the Gacha Coins I earned. In those eight hours I was working, I had made a total of 128 Rare, 288 Uncommon and 24 Common Gacha Coins. It was not a shock considering most of my time was spent preparing dishes instead of completely cooking everything from scratch. The Common Gacha Coins though felt like insults, when they were handed out for things like "successfully socializing" or "chatting up an attractive girl."

Whatever.

When I finally got back to my apartment, I took another shower before taking a seat on my bed and using up all my coins. The results were… Acceptable.

Cooking leveled up seven times to reach a max level of 10. Running leveled up seven times as well to reach Level 8. I got a few new Skills and Abilities, which also leveled up, a couple of interesting potions as well as a "Scenario" with a Positive Rarity. Everything else was situationally useful at best and actively harmful trash at worst.

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 50 | Inventory Slot x2 (Ability)]

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 99 | Invulnerability Frame x3 (Ability)]

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 81 | Sprinting x3 (Skill)]

[Results: Rarity — Uncommon 65 | Alchemy x2 (Skill)]

[Results: Rarity — Rare 112 | Lesser Red (Health) Potion x3 (Item)]

[Results: Rarity — Rare 111 | Lesser Green (Stamina) Potion x9 (Item)]

[Results: Rarity — Rare 825 | Turtle's Tutelage (Scenario)]

Now, at a first glance, I had been most excited about the prospect of having Alchemy as one of my Skills. Anyone who'd read lore on the insane feats alchemists of fiction were capable of would know the value of the profession. Unfortunately, just because I now had two levels in Alchemy didn't mean jack when I lived in a world devoid of any catalysts I could make use of.

Getting ingredients via Gacha would be the only way to make any progress for now. With Level 2 Alchemy, I knew enough about the theory to understand that Dust — magic elemental coal native to Remnant, basically — would probably make for a good catalyst, I just didn't know enough figure out how to do that at this very moment.

Alchemy was cool, good even, but it wasn't where the real value was in today's haul. Turtle's Tutalege had been the highest rarity reward I had pulled, but I had no idea what it might entail. The potions on the other hand? God damn broken is what they were! Health Potions worked like in a video game, restoring 10% to the standard of my peak physical health regardless of my condition. Stamina Potions did the same for stamina.

Sprinting was my first active Skill and it had pretty good potential, adding 10% more speed to my movement whenever it was active per level. At Level 3 it almost made me a third faster for just a slight additional drain to my stamina. This would scale ridiculously once I got the Aura to move faster than a normal person.

As for the Inventory Slots and Invulnerability Frame Abilities, they were arguably the best things I'd gotten. I'd gotten two Inventory Slots which allowed me to store a stack of 99 identical nonliving items in a personal pocket dimension.

The three Invulnerability Frames would give me a window of three microseconds after I initiated a dodge where I became effectively invincible and intangible, and nothing could affect me. Kind of worthless right now, when my reaction time couldn't hope to make use of it, but that was subject to change as I got more Invulnerability Frames and increased my reaction speed.

I set aside all my thoughts to consider whether or not I should make use of Turtle's Tutalege now or some other time. I had no idea what the nature of a Scenario would be. It might rip me out of Remnant and place me in another world or it might warp reality such that the scenario takes place on Remnant instead. Either way, it might be more than a simple event where I just watched what happened and would be expected to do something, like say… To defend a store from a zombie invasion or something.

"Ah what the hell. This is a positive Rare reward. What's the worst that could… No, that's too dangerous," I muttered to myself before accepting the scenario.

Faster than I could blink, the setting flickered and I was no longer sitting on my bed. Instead, I was standing next to two kids who couldn't have been older than twelve and the three of us were facing a short old man with a purple turtle shell affixed to his back.

"We'll begin early morning training by completing this simple route while delivering milk," the old man said.

Simple? I looked at the map he was displaying and balked at the stats displayed on the lower right of the holographic chart. 35.4 Miles in length with an aggregate elevation of 21,581 feet, this was not the kind of route any sane person would consider completing in a single day.

Then the old man passed out trays of milk for me and the boys to carry and— Holy shit! This was at least 30 lbs!

I tried to complain, but my voice was gone. Even worse was the fact that I was compelled to go through with this torturous "training" as the thought of not doing so caused existential dread to form a pit in my stomach.

[Congratulations! For participating in Master Roshi's Training, you have earned a Locked Rare Gacha Coin!]

Jesus. H. Christ!

We had only made it to the first house, three miles into the route when I got a Rare Gacha Coin, and honestly I wasn't even sure how I had managed to make it this far. My legs were doing fine thanks to the Running Skill negating 80% of my stamina consumed, but my arms were crying out in pain from carrying the milk the entire way.

I used the Rare Gacha Coin immediately.

[Results: Rarity — Rare 100 (Locked) | Endurance Enhancement (Consumable)]

After using the Enhancement, the pain in my arms receded to the point of being tolerable again. It was just enough to be noticeable, but not enough for me to not feel like I was dying after another five miles. Fortunately, just as I was about to drop by tray while on a path up tens of thousands of steps up a mountain, I got another coin which yielded a Strength Enhancement.

This trend repeated in a never-ending cycle of pain and misery, where I would only get the slightest reprieve right before my body gave out as we completed our "early morning training." When we were done with that, our insane "Master" had us till an agricultural field with our bare hands. All that did was shift the pain from my arms to my hands and back.

Somehow, the kids that were undergoing the training with me, were able to keep up and outpace me despite the fact that my body was much more physically developed — into adulthood, anyway — as well as the fact that I using Running as a cheat. The little gremlins definitely had me beat in terms of raw strength as I couldn't manage to cover a tenth of what they managed when we stopped to rely on our hands and fingers instead of our legs.

After thoroughly wearing out my hands and probably expediting the process to acquire carpal tunnel syndrome, we stopped killing our bodies to eat lunch and then study. When the time came for me to participate in the studying, I could finally speak, but only if it pertained to the ridiculous physics and calculus questions the old man forced me to work on.

On a side note, wherever the hell I was, it definitely wasn't Earth or Remnant as scientific advancements had reached a level that was practically magic. At the same time, there were dinosaurs around and I had actually a piece of meat from one for my lunch break!

Back to the training we went after our midday break. First to work on a construction site without power tools; because, of course we would. Then, it was off to swim ten laps inside a shark-infested lake followed by a trip to the nearest beehive to get tied to a tree and try in vain to dodge a swarm of agitated bees.

It was a perfectly sane routine. One that I was expected to follow for the next eight months… With a fifty-pound turtle shell strapped to my fucking back…

And I did…