[Moon Princess]: Oh, well timed — look, the tasks are already here~
[Moon Princess]: Let me see the difficulty levels... my, they're all C rank. Not particularly demanding. I suppose even without Lady Marika, we should be able to handle these smoothly~
[Moon Princess]: Our little group has really come up in the world. I still remember back when the Level 0 to Level 1 task was a D-rank basic and even that nearly stumped me and the admin — we almost didn't make it~
[Aspiring to Be the Perfect Human]: Your Highness, could I be so bold as to ask roughly what each task difficulty level corresponds to?
Having quickly scanned through everything stored in his memory, Shin had already pieced together several likely candidates for all three tasks — even from the sparse descriptions. But he wanted to hear Kaguya's take before drawing any firm conclusions.
[Moon Princess]: Good question. I suppose I can explain it for our newcomer~
[Moon Princess]: Based on what I've seen over time — D-rank tasks fall within the range of what an ordinary human could accomplish. Higher than that, you start getting into the supernatural.
[Moon Princess]: C-rank enemies are roughly in the monster/yokai tier. B-rank tasks may involve confronting actual divine beings.
[Moon Princess]: As for A-rank — I honestly have no idea, since we've never triggered one. The only B-rank special task we've seen was the one Lady Marika handled herself, hammer in hand~
[Moon Princess]: It's a shame there isn't a "stay-at-home" task this time around. The last time a crafting-type task appeared it was snatched up by the Great Witch. I'm stuck here either way, so I'd love something to do~
Kaguya held court in the chat with the easy confidence of an old hand.
Fair enough — she genuinely was one. Setting aside the fact that she was likely the second person to ever join this group, her age among this crowd was in a class all its own.
Respect for the senior veteran.jpg
But while reading the newly posted basic tasks, Shin had already started forming his own thoughts.
Between a Pillar Man's raw intelligence and a Level 1 Spirit Bastion's enhanced cognition, he had cross-referenced his memory against the task descriptions and made a fairly confident assessment of which world each one likely pointed to.
[Aspiring to Be the Perfect Human]: Your Highness — can each task only be taken by one person at a time?
[Moon Princess]: Yes — back when we had that D-rank task, the admin handled it solo, and I was beside myself with worry the whole time~
[Moon Princess]: Though the "one person" restriction applies only to group members. You're perfectly free to bring along someone you trust, but it costs an extra [Boundary Breaking Talisman].
[Moon Princess]: Tasks are the main way to earn points, after all — you've seen how glacial the check-in gains are. A hundred days just to afford one talisman. Absolutely criminal~
[Aspiring to Be the Perfect Human]: Understood. No further questions.
His gaze fixed on the task panel, Shin instinctively moved to accept Task 2 — then paused mid-motion, thinking it through once more.
If his reading was correct — Rome, subterranean, multiple human non-humanization traits — there was a very strong chance that Basic Task 2 was pointing directly at the world of JoJo he had come from in his previous life.
In the events of JoJo Part 2: Battle Tendency, the three Pillar Men — including Kars — had been excavated from beneath the Roman earth in Italy.
He had lived peacefully on Witch Island for sixteen years. Those first months, barely even half a year of memory, were distant things now. But that didn't mean he'd forgotten.
He didn't carry hatred. He carried a debt.
Shin had never been ashamed to call himself someone who wanted to be a good person — just as he'd never regretted, in his very first life, steering a car into the path of a runaway bus careening toward a river, trying to stop it.
This life was no different. The Great Witch had shaped his values from childhood with the same guiding hand.
No greed. No malice. No theft.
Even Meruru — who on the surface might seem like the most detached sort of creature — had absorbed these principles deeply.
Setting aside her occasional unsettling indifference toward life — was she kind, or wasn't she?
And besides, the Pillar Men as a people were fundamentally not unlike the Witch clan — both were inherently gentle, peace-loving races by nature. If Kars hadn't been the catastrophic exception that he was, things might never have come to this.
The debt of a clan's destruction — Shin had no intention of letting it go unpaid.
'If I accept this task and leave, I'll disappear from the island for a stretch of time. How do I explain that to mother?'
'Say I have business outside for a while — but would that be too obvious?'
Shin had spotted the problem. Once he accepted the task through his chat account, he'd be vanishing from right under the Great Witch's nose for some indeterminate period.
If he finished it within a single day — there and back — it might be fine. He'd never once broken curfew as a kid.
But if it dragged on past a day, Shin held no illusions about the Great Witch's intelligence. The risk of his cover being blown would be very real indeed.
'But I can't afford not to take this task. The debt I owe to this body's former parents has to be settled.'
'If there's really no clean way around it... I'll just come clean to mother.'
After an internal debate, Shin decided to go straight to the Great Witch and face it head-on. Compared to something as non-negotiable as vengeance, having his alias exposed and enduring a barrage of marriage-pushing was, relatively speaking, a very small price to pay.
Shin knew how to read a situation.
[System Notice: [Basic Task 2] has been accepted by [Spreading Witch Factor].]
[System Notice: [Basic Task 1] and [Basic Task 3] have been temporarily frozen. Best of luck to the group member — may the mission go smoothly and fortune favor the bold!]
Shin: ?
...Pardon?
To be continued…