Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

The hovercraft continued to shake whenever it passed over even the slightest unevenness of the terrain below.

It had no problem gliding through the air like some sort of levitating ski-man riding down the mountain but in reverse. Yet, even a few meters deep chasm, as long as it was wider or longer than three, or four meters, would cause the ship to rapidly plummet for a moment, sending my guts to hell and back.

Still, in the climb mode, there was little to no fear of actually crashing down, for even if we plummeted low enough for it to be an issue, the moment we neared any point of the ground that we could crash again, the hypermagnets of the vehicle would pick up the slack and kill our undesired dive.

This knowledge didn't make it from my conscious part to inform the specific department of my instincts, making my entire body tense up and feel as if I was dropping to my death with every, even slightest turbulence.

And most of all, it surely didn't make for an easy, comfortable ride like the one we experienced in the maglev thus far.

"Is it really necessary to go that slow?" Fay inquired while giving me a side-eye. The worry in her eyes was real… but about just as real as the small smirk hiding in the corner of her mouth.

At first, my initial response was to just reply to her in kind and limit my comment to just a side glance… And that's exactly what I've ended up doing, only to cut the expression short when my sense of responsibility forced me to bring my eyes back to the path below.

"Too slow?" On the other side of the ship, sitting in the other passenger's seat, Claudy whined. "I would say we are going too fast already!"

Out of the three of us, Claudy was the one who was faring through this trip the worst of us. Despite great agility he could represent as a supreme, and one focused on swordsmanship to boot, the constant falls and raises of the maglev clearly didn't sit well with him…

Or his sense of vertigo.

"If we go any slower, we risk getting stuck in a chasm," I replied while pointing out the problem that I never knew I would encounter.

During the climb, our speed fell to roughly a tenth of what it was when we were crossing the starlight plain. And while it would pose no problem for me to reduce our current speed even further… But it would come at the cost of driving the momentum of our vehicle to a near-complete stop.

Sure, we would still move forward a bit, but if we ever found ourselves above a mountain's rift wide enough to fit the entirety of the maglev, then there would be nothing we could do.

Right now, we could cross chasms several times wider than the length of our vehicle, all thanks to the minimal momentum I was trying my damnest to maintain without affecting the ride's experience by too much.

It was simple vector math, where the plummeting of our ship caused by the sudden increase of the distance between the hypermagnets and the ground or raw stone below would create an angled path, as opposed to a direct fall.

In this way, even if the angle of our descent would be too light for us to cross the entirety of a bigger chasm, we would approach the other end of it at, well, an angle, allowing the maglev's drive to carry us back up without much trouble.

On the other hand, if we were to fall straight down, then we would find ourselves at the bottom of the chasm where the hypermagnets would gain traction once again… And we would be forced to face one of the many, near perfectly vertical walls of stone.

'I wonder what would happen if we found ourselves near a…'

As if the world was listening in to my thoughts to actively throw problems my way, when we climbed up above one of the many side-peaks on our way to the top of the mountain, I was suddenly forced to pull on the control stick with all my might.

With the hypermagnets turning to reverse, the hovercraft came to a quick stop before jerking backward.

"Woah…" I uttered a small cry while trying to calm my rapidly beating heart.

As if listening to my thoughts, what appeared like a perfectly normal chain of mountains…

Actually had one hell of a massive circle cut directly out of it.

A perfectly round area created by some mighty force extracting a massive cylinder of stone directly out of the mountain's core, with the dug-out reaching far below the level of the plain and reaching deep into the earth's guts.

"What the hell…"

"What the hell is this…"

As if to showcase the insanity of the sight below and just slightly ahead, both Fay's and Claudy's reactions were pretty much the same.

And if not for my struggle to keep calm given how we nearly fell into this devilish trap, my reaction would be pretty much the same.

"This certainly doesn't look like something that could occur naturally," I muttered after taking a moment to ensure the maglev did what it was named after and simply hovered in space, with enough of a safe margin of space not to risk falling down into this unnatural hole.

The question, though, was simple - who could be responsible for digging out a nigh-perfect circle of solid stone as wide as two or three football stadiums stacked one after the other.

And if that wasn't enough proof there was some kind of conscious power at play here, just the sight of the perfectly fine-cut walls left behind after some entity extracted a cylinder of stone right off the mountain's core…

"How it happened isn't the main issue, Pete," Fay suddenly announced in a strangely grim voice.

Turning my head over, I then followed along her extended arm to look at where she was pointing.

It was a beam of light only slightly brighter than the usual, silvery hue of the direct starlight.

But it was a beam of light that rose up from the very bottom of this circular void, climbed up the perfectly vertical wall, and then diffused…

Diffused into the very barrier that we were so desperate to avoid.

"Well, shit," I muttered upon realizing the meaning of this sight.

Since the barrier reached as far as the edge of this massive hole, if we wanted to cross it, we would have no other choice but to do so around the outer perimeter of the hole, as opposed to skirting along its side near us.

And that, along with the pull of the barrier that disallowed us from gaining any distance from its edge, effectively blocked our path.

'Wait,' I suddenly reflected, when I realized another meaning of Fay's warning, that eluded me before.

"How are you able to see it?"

Up until now, I was the only one who could perceive starlight. For whatever reason, both Fay and Claudy, both born in this world, couldn't really do so no matter how hard they strained their eyes or how near to one of the zones of direct starlight I brought them.

'So, what changed now to make her able to see it?' I asked myself, only to momentarily recall the very first quest given to me by the system.

[Main mission: Starlight plain

- Easy route - Escape the Starlight plains

- Advanced route - Survive on the Starlight plains

- Master route - Uncover the secret behind the Starlight plains

//Completing any route doesn't lock the ability to complete the others!//

//Rewards increase with the difficulty of the route//]n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Pressed by the strange feeling, I summoned the system and glanced through the quest options.

Up until now, as rare as my quests were, they were always along the most obvious path for me to take. And if I were to follow both this arbitrary ruling and my own guts, this massive, anatural hole… was just the obvious path for me to take, it had to be somewhat related to this damned quest!

'The question is,' I thought, gulping down my saliva, my thoughts already moving on from what I just asked about to a question that reached far deeper into the very reason why I was even allowed into this world to begin with.

'Is this hole the easy route of escaping the plain, or the master route of uncovering its secrets?'