Eren ignored the voice in his head, which he had subconsciously agreed to refer to as the system, and faced the newly arriving crowd who would be taking the trial mission with him.
With all he had heard from the system so far, these people should be taking their trial survival mission as well, and naturally, they should be as weak as him. He was also curious about how they would react to the bleeding moon.
But to his surprise, they seemed completely unfazed by the entire scenery.
There were five of them, and they all landed on their feet with steady balance. One of them, a middle-aged man with an eye patch covering his left eye and his left arm missing, even performed a stylish superhero landing as though he had done it many times before.
After landing, the five of them scanned their surroundings quietly. When their heads lifted toward the sky and the bleeding moon, none of them reacted the way he had expected.
They all seemed like they had been here before, which was deeply strange.
Also, the five of them didn't react to one another's presence. Instead, they appeared familiar with each other, as though they were already acquainted beforehand.
'They should be new to this like me, but they all seem very different,' Eren thought to himself while scanning the individuals one after another, carefully noting their appearances.
The crimson illumination from the bleeding moon was unusually bright, and as a result, seeing things clearly wasn't as difficult as it should have been at this hour of the night.
While the new arrivals were still observing their surroundings, one of them quickly noticed him.
The one who spotted him was a young lady in her mid-twenties, dressed in a tight-fitting off-shoulder crop top and a mini skirt that accentuated her curves. Her long black hair fell neatly over her shoulders, barely disturbed by the wind.
Yet despite her fashionable appearance, there was nothing careless about her stance. Her posture was firm and balanced. Her eyes were calm and observant, like the eyes of someone measuring him rather than merely looking at him.
She smoothly turned to the people around her and muttered something to them that Eren could not hear despite the short distance between them. Afterwards, all of them turned in his direction, observing him suspiciously, as though he were a predator in disguise.
Eren didn't appreciate so many eyes on him, especially judgmental ones, as they always triggered one of the traumas he had faced as a teenager in one of the foster homes he had been sent to.
For a brief second, the forest around him seemed to fade as he subconsciously relived the moment.
A dark room.
The low moans of older women.
The soft clicking sound of a camera.
His chest tightened instantly, and his fingers curled into his palms without him realizing it. The rustling of leaves around him blended disturbingly with the faint echo of that old clicking sound buried in his memory.
Eren clenched his fists harder and shook his head sharply, forcing the images away before they could sink any deeper. He steadied his breathing, though it still felt uneven, and forced himself to focus on the strangers standing before him.
Nonetheless, when he fully returned his attention, the charmingly dressed young lady was already standing right in front of him, and he could clearly smell her heavy perfume.
Eren could not tell whether he had relived the trauma in his head for longer than he realized or whether she was simply very fast and stealthy.
He hadn't even noticed when she had closed the distance between them.
"Hey, handsome. My name is Megan." She smiled cheekily and extended her hand for a handshake.
Eren stared at her strangely. Not only was she unbothered by their strange environment, but she was calm enough to smile and act friendly.
How does this fit the character of a newbie? he wondered.
He even began to consider that the system had sent NPCs instead of real humans. But nothing about her seemed artificial at all, and from what he had seen so far, the Bloodyscape wasn't a video game.
Megan's friendly expression slowly crumbled into confusion when she noticed how tense he was.
"Why are you acting so strangely? Is this your first time?" she asked.
Eren thought about her question for a few seconds before nodding in response.
"What!" Megan let out, her voice loud enough to alert her colleagues.
One of them, a middle-aged woman with a chubby build, instantly created a fireball and pointed it in Eren's direction, mistaking the raised tone of her colleague for a signal of danger. Her actions didn't seem random at all. Instead, they looked practiced and precise, like movements she had repeated many times before.
Eren froze at the appearance of the fireball. It was his first time witnessing magic in real life.
However, his reaction to the fireball made Megan believe his previous claim without hesitation.
"This is a gold-ranked survival mission. How can an unawakened survive here?" she mumbled to herself in confusion.
Her words were quiet, yet they were close enough for Eren to hear them clearly.
Nonetheless, they sounded like gibberish to him.
Gold-ranked. Unawakened. What do they even mean? he wondered.
Just as he was about to ask her,
The system's voice resurfaced in his head.
[Oh crap, how could I have made such a blatant mistake?]