Extortion Is a Villain's Basic -1-
Marchina. She was the casino master of the Golden Continue’s Cheongang branch. She had one clear purpose: to live a long, long life on the money she earned through the casino. It sounded like a casual figure of speech, but she meant it literally. In this city, money could buy lifespan. That was why the power structure still held firm even though the average human life expectancy had plummeted. The poor died faster. The rich lived nearly forever. Some people called it a rotten world, but Marchina—who had been rotten from the start—saw it differently.
Her parents had died in poverty. They hadn’t simply passed away; they sold off their future lifespan to gamble, lost everything, and died as shriveled husks. Yet Marchina never blamed the gods. Even when she looked at their mummified corpses, drained of every last second of life, she never cursed the world. She was simply, endlessly terrified of dying like that. So she made a single vow: I will never die that way.
Marchina wiped a glass and scanned the casino floor. Lately the frequency of trash from the outskirts coming in to cause trouble had risen sharply. Filthy gangsters. She couldn’t possibly trust them with security. She needed a replacement. But handing the job to a megacorp like Cheongang felt just as bad—the bastards always acted like they were the ones in charge and it made her sick to watch them squeeze for more.
Why hadn’t the detective agency she hired answered yet? This was exactly why you shouldn’t believe news reports so easily.
“Haa…”
She breathed on the glass as if polishing it, using the motion to vent the stress lodged in her chest. Think about something else. Money, maybe. She studied the guests who had come to Golden Continue today. Among the seemingly respectable patrons stood several obvious thugs. The guards she had hired were openly ignoring them, and the uneasy customers were already starting to slip away.
Never mind. She couldn’t think of anything else. Marchina set the spotless glass on the shelf and left the counter. A cigarette might clear her head.
“Aack, damn it!! Why the hell isn’t this coming out?!”
Then an odd scene caught her eye. In the row of slot machines, a man was pouring an astronomical amount of credits into one while a woman beside him egged him on. One glance told her the machine had already swallowed credits worth seven hundred million. Yet its payout rate kept showing negative numbers as if it were broken. Even Marchina—who personally repaired the machines during breaks—found it bizarre.
That… really shouldn’t be possible.
Of course every casino set its slot machines to a negative return rate. Game masters weren’t philanthropists. But this was extreme. A stranger might even suspect the house had rigged it.
That wasn’t the only strange part. The woman urging the man to overspend was clearly a professional. She poked at his pride with surgical precision, as if she held a personal grudge, creating a situation where he literally could not stop. In the end, it took the man only five minutes to vomit up 1.1 billion credits. When he finally lost his temper and attacked the machine, the guards dragged him away.
“What the hell…?”
Marchina, who had just earned 1.1 billion in the blink of an eye, forgot why she had left the counter and simply stared, dazed.
A woman like that in the casino could make so much money that mere protection fees would look like pocket change.
Without hesitation, Marchina approached the woman and offered her business card.
The malice within you marvels at your audacity.
“Hmm, you want to hire me as manager of Golden Continue?”
“That’s correct, miss.”
The woman who had introduced herself as Marchina—the casino master of Golden Continue—had approached me and spoken.
“What exactly made you say that?”
“To be blunt, a moment ago I watched you… ‘devour a man’s soul,’ if you’ll forgive the dramatic phrasing.”
“Ooh, and?”
“Do you know how much that gentleman spent on the slot machine in only five minutes?”
“How much?”
“1.1 billion.”
I nearly dropped my poker face in genuine shock. Wait… had the guy been that stressed? I’d only teased him a little from the side and he’d burned 1.1 billion?
“I’m speaking from vision. If you work as a manager here at Golden Continue and occasionally lead customer solicitation like that, we’ll give you up to ten percent of the resulting sales.”
“Wow, ten percent?”
I pretended to be impressed, but it didn’t move me. I had no sense of what ten percent actually meant, and besides, I wasn’t the kind of person who could tie herself to one place anymore. When I got home I had a touch-starved scientist, a money-biting robot, a cooking shuttle, and a kind-hearted medic waiting for me.
“Thank you for the offer, but I’ll have to decline.”
The moment I refused, Marchina’s characteristically decadent eyes twisted fiercely. She grabbed my hand without permission.
“Why? These are unbelievably good conditions, aren’t they?”
“Why? I simply don’t feel like doing it.”
“What? In this city money is power, strength, life itself! You’re rejecting the offer for a reason like that?”
“Hmm…”
She wasn’t wrong. Still, clinging to someone who had already said no was annoying. I lightly swatted her hand away and smiled brightly.
“Then give me eighty percent.”
“Pardon?”
“If you give me eighty percent, I’ll consider it.”
“No… what are you—”
“Honestly, the sales generated by my solicitation would belong entirely to me, right? Yet you offer ten percent? Even if you gave me three hours a day, room and board included, I wouldn’t want it.”
“…”
Marchina couldn’t close her gaping mouth. She seemed to have been rendered speechless by my perfectly logical argument.
…No, honestly, was anything I said wrong? Now that I think about it, I’m getting angry. Trying to act generous while only offering ten percent of the sales.
“…This woman is completely insane.”
Marchina crumpled her face like she had stepped in dog shit and returned to work. I neither stopped her nor cursed at her. She was the casino master of Golden Continue; we would meet again soon enough. I simply filed the incident away in my mind.
Chae Yuha: Let’s get started.
Seolhwa: Okay!
Kim Seokho: Understood.
While I pondered exactly how much protection money we should extort—
Marchina, who had been expecting to earn some money for the first time in a while, returned to the counter nursing a headache instead. Only then did she remember she had stepped away to smoke. She had failed to enjoy her break and gained a headache for her trouble. Her already decadent eyes looked even more exhausted.
“…”
Thinking about it again, Marchina realized she had no real reason to curse the woman. Whatever her intentions, the woman had already brought her profit. She should have been grateful.
—‘Then give me eighty percent.’
Yet the memory of that bright, confident face demanding eighty percent made Marchina scowl again. She felt like she had been completely played. Had the man earlier felt the same way before he blew 1.1 billion?
“Oppa, are casinos always full of such scary-looking people?”
“No. This place is especially low-quality.”
At that moment a customer’s voice reached Marchina’s ears. A dog-faced girl with brown hair in a single braid was speaking. Beside her stood a thickly muscled man answering her. They appeared to be siblings.
“See the guards standing over there?” The man pointed at each person as he explained. “Even though armed guards are watching, those thugs are openly swaggering around and harming customers. What does that tell you?”
“Aha! So the guards and the thugs are working together!”
Aaah, damn it. Who the hell are you two?
To Marchina, their behavior looked like suicide. The trash from the outskirts already had violent tempers. There was no way they would stay quiet after hearing that.
“Aah?”
Sure enough, the largest thug in the group began dragging a bat across the floor toward them.
“Hey, sis. Bro. Was that comment meant for us?”
The giant thug threw an arm around the man’s shoulders. The dangerous atmosphere made the remaining customers start slipping away.
“Stop!”
Marchina, her head pounding, shouted at the thug.
“Hey, Goliath. This is really troublesome. How long has it been since you took so much money last time, and you’re already back?”
“Huh? What are you talking about all of a sudden?”
The giant thug, Goliath, played dumb.
“What exactly did we take from you?”
“Don’t play innocent. Keep acting like this and I might stop hiring you and go cling to the Cheongang Group instead.”
“Oh dear, how scary. Our little Marchina might actually do that.”
Thump, thump. Goliath patted the arm of the man he had in a headlock.
“If you could have done that, you would have done it already. Stop wasting time and hand over the money.”
“…How much?”
“Let’s see… this time we should take at least fifty percent, yeah?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Why is it ridiculous? You don’t pay taxes, right? Think of fifty percent as just paying the same taxes as any other citizen.”
“Wow, Miss Marchina. You pay fifty percent in taxes?”
At that moment someone stepped up to the counter. Every eye in the area snapped toward the newcomer. There stood a beautiful young woman with a radiant smile. The very same woman who had refused Marchina’s recruitment offer with absurd sophistry.
“Who’s this girl?” Goliath asked, glancing over.
The smiling woman swept her gaze across the counter to confirm no civilians remained, then said,
“Why ask a question like that? You’re all going to die here anyway.”
She snapped her fingers.
The man who had been waiting quietly for the signal—Kim Seokho—immediately seized the wrist draped over his shoulder.
“Huh?”
BANG!
Before Goliath could even register what was happening, he was slammed into the floor and lost consciousness.
“Boss!”
The thugs scrambled for their weapons. At the same moment, nano-machines resembling Nadja’s surged from the bodies of Seokho and Seolhwa, who had been disguised as customers. The machines formed simple suits that completely covered the siblings’ forms. The once-imposing thugs took one look at the clearly dangerous armor and began to retreat.
“They asked for fifty percent earlier, right?”
The smiling woman—Chae Yuha—stepped forward protectively in front of Marchina.
“We’ll only take forty percent. Half of the eighty percent I mentioned before. Wow, isn’t that a bargain?”
“…What?”
A giant question mark floated inside Marchina’s head.