Toto Addict

Three matches played out.

Their endings were hollow beyond belief.

Kwaaaak!

The builds diverged hard.

Against an opponent who had all-inned on speed zerglings—

Ten zerglings are running, and six more just started producing.

Oh Seung-hyun~ Oh Seung-hyun~ He's still pumping workers. He has no idea. There's no way he stops this.

Casually just making drones.

The game ended in a one-sided stomp.

"No, fuck, you saw it!"

"He clearly checked the creep and still…"

"How does a pro miss that?"

The reaction on site.

The flood of curses was only natural.

One tiny mistake had thrown the entire game.

Except it wasn't a mistake.

SpaceCraft was a game optimized for toto.

At least from the operators' point of view.

One-versus-one.

Frequent matches, short run times.

Far more bets flew around than in any other sport.

It was the cash cow of the betting boards.

And once the pot got that big, the illegal side of things always crawled out.

Match-fixing solicitations.

They dangled money in front of players barely out of their teens.

"N-no way!"

He hadn't factored that in.

Dalyul was shrieking, refusing reality.

She had analyzed the game. She had analyzed the psychology.

But she had committed the mistake of never looking at the bigger picture.

"You refusing the result?"

"This can't be happening. There's no way!"

"Then what? You lost."

"Ugh… uuu…"

Of course she couldn't accept it.

Who would ever stop and think the entire board itself was rigged?

Only investors ever bother with that.

Occupational disease.

No—honestly, he had already known.

That match-fixing happened in SpaceCraft 2 as well.

It had been inevitable, too.

Once LoL became the dominant game, SpaceCraft 2 had been left out in the cold.

Money problems always look the same.

The stock market had its own version of the same cycle.

Once every ten years, without fail, a major disaster hit.

Fed quantitative easing.

Then the rate hikes that followed.

And somewhere in the financial system, one or two pieces always broke.

"You're saying that player threw it on purpose?"

"Yeah."

"You can tell just from watching the match?"

"Once you set the premise, it's not even hard."

SpaceCraft 2 was in the same boat.

Sponsors dried up and the money pipeline choked off.

He didn't know which player it was.

He only knew something was rotten—the rest was just finding the proof.

"So then… Oppa won, right?"

"That's right."

"Then this arrogant little brat has to listen to us now, doesn't she?"

The reason he had chosen today to come to the arena.

Process be damned—he had really, truly won the bet.

Hye-ri beamed and locked eyes with Dalyul.

Apparently a fair amount of resentment had been stacking up.

Take that, you fucking bitch.

He felt the same way.

Maybe 160 cm on a good day.

Unkempt long hair and a stick-thin frame that screamed shut-in.

She had clearly lived completely submerged in gambling.

It was time someone taught a girl like Dalyul a little reality.

"W-what are you gonna do about it!"

"Still not coming to your senses?"

"Seriously."

"I already lost all my money… I'm completely broke, sob…"

She was trembling.

Her tiny frame made him feel like some nasty senior bullying a junior.

Kind of disappointing.

He had thought she had more spine.

If she was going to whine just from losing a bit of cash, he might need to re-evaluate her.

"My free lifestyle is completely ruined!"

"Just earn it back with a part-time job."

"I'd rather die than do that."

It was a seed-money problem.

No matter how talented an investor you were, you still needed principal.

I wasn't an exception either.

Starting capital: 500,000 won.

And even that he had only swung at pure garbage-stock day trades.

If he had slipped even once?

He might have ended up working part-time himself.

"Still…"

"Hm?"

"It was fun. Losing the money. Hi… hihi. Hihihi."

That sense of loss was exactly what grew an investor.

You only really learned after you got cleaned out.

It feels like installing a brake on yourself.

The reason investors lose money.

Nine times out of ten, they simply cannot control their greed.

Losing teaches you how.

The experience of watching your money vanish makes rational thought possible.

"She looks like she completely snapped."

"Pretty sure she did."

"Should we just take her straight to a psych ward?"

At the same time, it became a shackle.

When the moment came to get greedy, you hesitated on the bold call.

Because investing is never purely rational.

And yet if you never lost, you never grew.

Investors were trapped on that Möbius strip.

"It was fun?"

"Hi, hihi. Felt like I blew all my money on gacha."

"Yeah, that tracks."

If there was any way off the strip, there was only one.

You had to go completely insane.

You start treating money like game currency instead of money.

Just numbers.

That was the hardest part of investing.

The fact that it was real money warped every decision.

Cutting a loss hurt.

Taking profit made you settle for a tiny gain.

Because you understood the weight money carried.

Anyone who lost money eventually understood.

Watching someone who had just lost their entire fortune still find it fun was deeply satisfying.

"You've got nothing left now."

"I can't do toto anymore."

"Want to try something more fun than toto?"

"?"

Not being able to gamble.

And having to worry about making a living.

Those two things alone seemed to sting her.

While solving both of those…

There was a way to give her a vision of the future as well.

He had been about to offer some proper senior-to-junior guidance when—

"Oppa, though."

"Yeah?"

"If the game really was fixed, shouldn't we report it first?"

"…Yeah, we should."

It was about to get a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠lot bigger.

The spark came from an underworld community.

.

.

.

One user dropped a post.

Too loaded to dismiss as pure shitposting—the author was no ordinary name.

A named user.

Toto shared a bloodline with stocks in one key way.

High hit-rate people attracted disciples.

"Tosuni" was one of those users.

A complete new face who had only started toto a few months ago, and yet—

Hit rate said everything.

To the toto junkies, they had no choice but to take it seriously.

It meant you could print money by slamming the underdog.

Before long it spilled into the regular communities.

Threading the first needle was always the hardest part.

Sensitive topics were taboo just to bring up.

But once the spark of suspicion caught fire—

Collective intelligence finding the evidence was only a matter of time.

The communities lit the fuse.

Once public opinion swelled, the people in charge could no longer look away.

The investigation results.

The suspicions turned out to be fact, and SpaceCraft 2 fans exploded in rage.

It was a disaster big enough to shake the entire scene.

No—they had been holding the scene itself hostage.

For the fans, it was pure agony.

The tournament side came down hard; the people involved in the fixing received severe punishment.

Fortunately it had been snuffed out early, so the actual tournament operations barely took a hit.

And there was one user who had made that possible.

She became a hot topic across the SpaceCraft 2 community.

And among the toto junkies, even more so.

Match-fixing.

Even the toto junkies went feral over it.

In the end the ones who got hurt were always the regular bettors.

The big money was manipulating the market for unfair profit.

And she had thoroughly screwed them over.

She became a legend among the toto junkies.

And that same user was now offering a brand-new field of vision.

She opened her eyes to the world of stocks.