Dungeon Raider System

After unceremoniously snatching the book from Miss Dragonfang's hands, Uriel proceeded to open it on the pages the red cloth tape marked. The pages were thin, frail and the book was weathered which explained why it ended up on Uriel's hands at a reasonable price, but the reason why it took him so long to read wasn't the state of the book but the size of the font.

Uriel silently read as he nodded a couple times, then he fell in his usual pensive state that briefly disconnected him with reality.

"Did you find something?" Miss Dragonfang asked, invading Uriel's personal space without him noticing until she was already sitting on his bed next to him.

"I can't make anything out of this." He replied with a shrug and then scolded her for being too close.

"Hey! I've been waiting for months to see what was behind this door, the least you can do is let me be comfy while we're here."

"So you really didn't enter my room... What about the others?"

"I just barged into Sam's since he's been such a jerk to me, but it was already empty."

Uriel ignored Miss Dragonfang's pouting and hurried over to Luna's room thinking he may have misunderstood her message and there was an actual red thread to follow inside her room. After all, if she really meant that specific book she would have placed the post it on the book itself.

Uriel attempted to open the door, but wasn't surprised when it turned out to be locked since Luna was wary of living in the same building as a man. He grabbed his Swiss army knife and proceeded to pick the lock, but when he attempted to push the door it wasn't giving in. Again, this didn't surprise him as much as it annoyed him.

"Dammit Luna! Why did you have to put so many locks on the door?" Uriel complained and attempted to bash at the door, only to bounce off like a rubber ball prompting Miss Dragonfang's laughter.

"Pfft, this is so good... Why don't you give it another try and show that alloy door who's boss." She laughed some more. Even for a heavenly rank hunter, breaking through an alloy door was too difficult which was one of the reasons why it was one of the most popular building materials for hunters.

Thankfully for Uriel, he wasn't just anyone and he left Miss Dragonfang completely dumbfounded after breaking the door on his second attempt.

A feat like that was only made possible by Miss Dragonfang's annoying remarks and laughter which caused him to want prove her wrong, though that was something Uriel wasn't willing to admit. Instead, he focused on finding the red thread Luna mentioned on the note.

The room was filled with crumpled papers and it was as messy as Uriel thought it would be, not that he ever entered her room since Luna never allowed him inside. He knew, from what Nika mentioned about Luna's room in passing, that Luna's extensive research was always taped to the walls, but it was nowhere to be seen and Uriel was forced to look through her stuff.

"If you're going to follow me around you might as well give me a hand." Uriel glared at Miss Dragonfang who had yet to recover from her amazement.

"How can I help you find whatever it is you're looking for if you don't tell me what it is?"

"It's a red thread," He replied and just then he noticed a small piece red cloth hanging out from a drawer. "A-ha!"

"I don't think you should open that drawer..." Miss Dragonfang warned, but Uriel didn't stop.

"The least you can do is stay out of my..." His sentence was cut short when after pulling the red cloth that stood out from the drawer, the drawer fully opened revealing Luna's underwear and leaving Uriel with a huge bra on his hands and a stupefied expression on his face.

"So that's why she always wears baggy clothes!" Miss Dragonfang laughed some more and then spoke hurriedly when she started doubting if Uriel was red because of embarrassment or anger. "I tried to warn you, the first drawer is usually for underwear."

"This is useless, why would Luna ask me to follow the read thread if there's no red thread!?"

"Maybe it's a coded message."

"That's not possible, she's not good with words and always means exactly what she says..."

"Then maybe the red thread is not in her room." Miss Dragonfang shrugged her shoulders without thinking much about it and since there was nothing else to go by, Uriel decided to head over to Medusa's room.

Her room was much easier to break into and contrary to Luna's, it was pristine. Medusa was always a very neat person, not because she enjoyed doing chores but the complete opposite. She would get take out to avoid washing the dishes, just as she would always hang out in the living room to avoid making a mess in her own room.

Uriel felt a lot more comfortable going through Medusa's stuff given that they already shared an apartment together, but he decided to stay as far away from the first drawer on her dresser just to avoid triggering miss Dragonfang's laughter who had been tailing him the whole time just to poke fun at him.

"Don't you have something better to do?"

"Nope." She replied with a bare face.

Going through a girl's stuff under the expecting gaze of a soldier was too much pressure for Uriel, even if the girl in question was hi ex girlfriend. However, it turned out to be the right call after he found what seemed to be the red thread he had been looking for.

"This must be it." Uriel said when he noticed there was an exposed red wire on the light bulb.

"You're seeing things, Medusa must have been lazy when she installed it and made a mistake."

"Again, that's not possible. Just as luna is incapable of leaving a coded message, it would be impossible for Medusa to live in a place with a faulty wire.

She's an engineer student, she even built a zeppelin with her own two hands and there's not a single exposed wire in the whole ship." Uriel said as he followed the red wire with his eyes until it disappeared beneath a plastic facade which Uriel promptly ripped apart exposing more of the red wire.

The wire followed the electricity mainframe like the wires next to it, but then went inside the wall which forced Uriel to spend over an hour following the red wire all over the building.

At first, Miss Dragonfang followed him making a snarky remark here and a playful joke there, but it soon got old and she didn't understand why would Uriel waste so much of his time following what on her eyes was nothing but a practical joke.

But Uriel knew his friends and he was certain they wouldn't make him jump through so many hoops if it wasn't absolutely necessary and after following the wire for so long he noticed it didn't serve any purpose other than leading him somewhere since it's placement was highly inefficient, something Medusa would only do on purpose.

Leaving a coded message only Uriel would have been able to understand was something none of them was able to do. Luna was privileged with an incredible intellect and so was Medusa, but the first couldn't leave a coded message if her life depended on it while the latter would most likely use numbers or mathematical formulas Uriel wasn't familiar with.

Then, the only thing they could count on to leave a secret message was the fact that he knew them better than anybody else. It was the only possible explanation and Uriel had faith he would be rewarded for the time he spent on his seemingly pointless chase of a wire.

He dutifully followed the wire, taking care not to mix the one he was following with others that were clearly placed as a decoy until the wire led him somewhere he didn't expect: Nika's room.

Uriel gulped down his saliva, unsure of hat he would find inside, and as soon as he opened the door he saw what seemed like a normal bedroom if not for a single detail that confirmed one of his biggest fears.

"No way! Someone must have broken in before to steal the boss' bed!"

"I'm afraid it's much worse than that... She didn't have one to begin with." Uriel replied after cringing for a few seconds.

"Oh! So she never spent the night here."

"That's not it, she slept with me every night." Uriel blurted out, realizing his mistake one second too late when Miss dragonfang burst into laughter.

"You really want me to believe that she slept with you!? That's a good one. The boss is not only out of your league, but it's also not a secret Medusa had a big crush and you and would have killed you if she knew you were doing the dirty with Miss Nika." Miss Dragonfang laughed so much her belly ached.

"It's not like that! It's her trait! She didn't need a bed because she always slept inside my shadow!" Uriel clarified.

"Even if that was possible, you do realize beds aren't just for sleeping, right? A healthy, beautiful and rich woman like her would certainly bring home some company from time to time."

"She never did."

"Not even once!?" Miss Dragonfang insisted, but Uriel refused to keep playing Miss Dragonfang's game and focused again on his search.

The wire went deep inside Nika's room, then directly into the one place he didn't want to look: the first drawer on Nika's dresser.