If You Pull Now, It'll Drop
"Commander...!"
"But as unfortunate as this is to say... honestly, with less than a million points, I don't think we stand a chance."
"What?"
Had my words really hit her that hard? For a moment, shock, dread, and sheer bewilderment flickered across Jessica's eyes — but only for a moment. She soon recovered enough to ask, in a tone that strongly suggested she hoped I was joking, whether I could possibly be serious. Her entire demeanor radiated distrust.
So I turned the gallery post I'd been reading toward her as proof.
"Here. Exhibit A."
"Ah — yes, sir."
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Quick disclaimer before we start:
This is pieced together from stuff I overheard in the gallery, plus tips and verifications sent in by chat and email — so it might not match reality perfectly.
Anyway, enough rambling. From everything I've dug up so far:
The absolute top tier — as in, the top 1,000 — have racked up at least 1.5 million points, minimum.
And that 1.5 million is the floor.
One guy who emailed me with verification, someone I estimate is a top-100 ranker, currently has around 3.1 million points.
Even he said he's definitely not #1 — apparently there's someone out there who's already stacked up 5 million.
So yeah. Better safe than sorry. lol
"Ta-da."
The moment I showed her that deranged post, Jessica's eyes started trembling even harder than before.
"I'm sorry, but... does that even make sense? Three million, five million points — no matter how you look at it..."
"Tell me about it."
Honestly, I found the numbers pretty suspicious myself. Barely a month and a week ago, even the highest-earning players were averaging maybe a hundred thousand points a day on a generous estimate. And now, a month and a half into the event, someone had five million?
As the comments under that post had put it — unless they'd completely boycotted the shop, those numbers were bordering on physically impossible.
But trying to outright deny them ran into a different problem: we had no solid evidence to the contrary. So I set my hands on Jessica's dejected shoulders and spoke again, my voice resigned.
"At this point, with us still sitting under a million, fretting about the rankings is basically meaningless."
"...I suppose so, Commander."
Jessica seemed to agree that chasing the leaderboard under these conditions was a stretch no matter how you spun it. She gave a small nod of acceptance. That said, she immediately raised a new concern.
"But Commander — what about the gallery admin rights, then?"
The look in her eyes said she genuinely wanted to know how I planned to handle that. I shrugged and gave her a simple, unbothered answer.
"Gallery admin rights? Power-tripping as a mod?"
"Yes."
"Do I look like someone who cares about running the gallery and throwing my weight around as a moderator?"
"..."
Jessica's expression went flat. She shook her head firmly.
"No. In my assessment, you do not."
"Nailed it. Exactly. Why would I give a damn about the gallery?"
"...Ah."
"In the most literal sense — not my problem."
Other people were having full-blown meltdowns over gallery admin privileges — the so-called armband of power. Me? I'd never had any real interest in that side of things to begin with. And now that the gap had been exposed as not just wide but absurdly, comically wide, throwing a tantrum to claw our way onto the rankings made even less sense. Better to just casually pick up quests and raid the shop instead.
With that settled, I hit the completion button on a quest another pirate captain had just delivered, then floated the proposal to Jessica: ditch the rankings and loot the shop instead.
She heaved a long, heavy sigh — but still fell in line.
"I'll follow your lead, Commander. Frankly, I don't see any other viable option."
"Good. Very good."
Satisfied with that display of loyalty, I moved straight into the next phase of the plan. And that plan was...
Random Causality Lock Ticket (Superhuman Exclusive) ×1
45,000 pts
"Alright then — time to dump it all into the gacha."
It was a bold declaration of intent: pour every remaining point into expanding my superhuman forces. That resolve lasted exactly five minutes.
Just as Jessica had warned me in advance — even though this was a superhuman-exclusive gacha, there wasn't so much as a single letter of "superhuman" anywhere in the results. Just an avalanche of resource crates, plus a handful of Event Point Crates that felt like the system was telling me to take my consolation prize and get lost.
A surge of irritation rose in my chest and spilled out as a hollow laugh.
The event was still ongoing. (2)
"What... the hell...?"
"Oof."
Watching a precious 450,000 points plummet in value to roughly 10,500 points' worth of junk nearly sent me into a violent episode. But then —
The moment I cracked open those three gleaming Event Point Crates...
> Event Point Crate ×3 — OPENED!
> Total of 250,000 points acquired!
Maybe the universe really doesn't let people die after all. With a massive pile of points flooding back in — recovering roughly half of what I'd lost — the unstoppable rage and grief that had seized my mental state evaporated on the spot, and cold rationality returned.
Or rather... not so much cold rationality as...
"Jessica. Isn't this a textbook case of Pull-Now-Win-Now?"
"...Excuse me?"
"You know. 'If you pull now, it'll drop.'"