Suspiciously Good Luck
My luck was suspiciously good.
Bababababa-bam!!!
A massive burst of music shook the entire slot machine zone, and in an instant, every gaze in the vicinity converged on a single spot.
"Whoa, no way."
"Holy crap, that actually hit."
"Isn't that someone famous?"
"Looks like Lily?"
"Who's that?"
"Oh, you know, that famous streamer..."
People started stealing glances our way, openly gawking. Half of them seemed to recognize me, and the other half clearly had no idea who I was.
To enter Kiki Island's resort area, you had to take the Kiki ferry—no exceptions. And that ferry only ran on a fixed schedule. In other words, even if people knew I was here, they couldn't get onto the island right away.
That's partly why I turned the stream on.
If this had been a place people could enter on a whim, I never would have broadcast from here at all. My vacation would have been thoroughly ruined by everyone who came to gawk at me.
"Hmm."
Still, the guests currently at this resort were largely unconnected to me. Quite a few of them, in fact, didn't much care for games or streaming at all—they'd simply come to enjoy their holiday.
"No way, is this real?! I spun thirty times and never got that once!"
"And she got it."
777.
The so-called jackpot—the rarest, highest multiplier a slot machine could offer.
I'd put in 30,000, so...
Djiing.
"Oh."
The card, black with a golden band around it, had turned red in one section.
"H-how much is it?"
White Autumn asked, trembling all over. Following the instructions I'd gotten from the guide earlier, I flipped the card over and checked its back.
"Well..."
"Two hundred thousand? Whoa, betting 30,000 for a six-times return—"
"It's two million."
2,120,000 KP, to be exact. Since 20,000 was my leftover balance, that made the jackpot a seventy-times multiplier.
"...What?"
"Yep."
"...What?"
"Yep."
"........"
"Want me to share a little?"
"I love you."
I handed White Autumn 100,000 KP and walked back to the service desk. The guide received the card as if she'd been waiting for exactly this, took some action on it, and returned it to me.
"Confirmed. You now have access to a wider range of facilities."
"Thank you."
When I bowed my head, White Autumn beside me gave a matching, dutiful bow.
With her 150,000 KP, she apparently hadn't met the threshold yet—her card hadn't changed.
"Shall we go find Jjoa? She's already up to 300,000 and upgraded her tier."
"Sure. This time you have to win it yourself, you know?"
"Ha! Just watch me. The slot machine was just bad luck on my part. Get a little actual skill involved and..."
"The winner is Lily Elbrit."
"?"
"No way, again..."
"Twenty-one."
I'd won again.
Kiki.
♥1 ♧1 ♧2 ♧2
Blackjack—a game where you draw cards from the dealer and combine their values to hit 21. The rules themselves weren't particularly hard, so I picked them up quickly after a round or two...
"This is unbelievable..."
"You're amazing, sis."
By this point I'd met up with Jjoa, and the three of us sat at the same table to play. There were other players at our table too, and before anyone knew what was happening, I kept landing 21 after 21, swept the entire table clean, and slipped away gracefully.
My luck really was suspiciously good.
"You're not secretly using some kind of technique, are you?"
"As if. Everything's locked down."
Because this dungeon was under the control of a 'System,' every skill, technique, or item that could conceivably enable cheating was unusable. Of course, I could have forced my way through those restrictions if I really pushed, but I saw no reason to. I'd come here to have fun—clenching my teeth through it would rather defeat the purpose.
"For someone doing that, you're winning an awful lot, though."
"A win's a win."
Even if I was here to enjoy myself, I couldn't very well throw away money I'd won fairly, could I? If it's mine to take, I take it.
Jjoa stared at my card with a curious look.
"So how much do you have now?"
"Right now..."
Current KP: 8,670,000
"8.6 million? I can't even imagine how much that is."
"Whoa. How many times mine is that?"
"At this rate she's going to hit ten million."
Jjoa and White Autumn were currently neck and neck—each had the money I'd given them plus what they'd won on their own. Naturally, I sat far, far above both of them.
It looked like an enormous sum, but even I wasn't at the very top yet. Especially considering that my card hadn't been fully dyed red quite yet...
"Shall we go after something bigger this time?"
"Bigger?"
"Yep."
A space further 'back,' different from the area up front. Ordinarily my tier wouldn't have permitted entry, but now it did. And a companion could come along, so long as they'd reached the required tier themselves.
"Ooh! Yes please!"
"Let's sweep the whole casino today!"
Kiki.
A space tinged with a chill, precise air. The dealer with seven strawberries pinned to her uniform quietly moved her hands, and I, seated at the center of it all, spoke.
"Red, 16."
"Gasp."
"My gut says black, 24..."
"She hasn't lost once since she sat down, I swear."
"Nobody can beat Lily-nim?"
Behind me, the crowd of onlookers had swelled without my noticing, and the roulette wheel began to spin, their chatter washing over me.
Drrrrring~♪
Gulp.
The result, naturally enough...
"Red, 16."
"WHOOOOAAA!!"
"This has to be a bug, right?! How does she win every single time—"
"There are no errors on Kiki Island."
The dealer shook her head firmly, accepted my card, and paid out the KP.
Current KP: 28,900,200
The card was now dyed completely red. From the golden band wrapped around it, a strange energy was seeping out.
By this point, it was more than fair to start suspecting something.
My luck is seriously, disturbingly good.
Celestials receive transcendent enhancements across the board—physical ability, senses, mana, everything. Luck was the sole exception. Neither celestials nor demons were specially attuned to fortune. There had been the occasional being blessed with luck through an authority, but I wasn't one of them.
If anything, I'd always considered myself unlucky.
Far too much happened to me for 'luck' to be the explanation.
If I'd truly been lucky, I never would have lived through any of it in the first place. So this absurd fortune of mine had to be coming from somewhere else entirely.
For starters, it wasn't my own ability. I wasn't using divinity or any other magic or technique to the limit, nor was I doing anything that violated the System.
And yet this kept happening—which meant it was the System's intent.
Then I suddenly recalled the message I'd seen when I first arrived.
[Tip.] Kiki Island is a tourist destination built by renovating a deserted isle that harbors a special secret. By day it offers gentle warmth and refreshing scenery; by night, a cool breeze and a canopy of beautiful stars. Beware! Kiki Island holds many secrets—but there is no need to go digging for them.]
[Kiki Island's secrets are being kept. At certain intervals, stats will rise randomly by a small amount.]
Kiki Island held many secrets, and the better those secrets were kept, the higher my stats climbed.
Agility has increased by 0.3.
Even now, my stats were climbing at a steep rate. Put all of this together, and there was only one conclusion...
...My luck is tied to Kiki Island's secret.
One of the island's secrets had reached into my fortune, and since that secret was not an 'error' but a perfectly natural phenomenon of Kiki Island, the dealer reacted to nothing.
"...So why would they give out something like this?"
"Huh?"
"What do you mean?"
"Never mind."
Whatever the case, I was heading toward the lobby desk with Jjoa and White Autumn. We technically should have visited the desk after every change, but I'd won so much that we decided to make one trip for all of it.
"Hmm?"
"Who's that?"
When we arrived at the lobby desk, one more figure was standing there besides the regular guide. A guide a full head taller than the petite one—but even so, still on the short side, roughly Jjoa's height. Yet something about them radiated a distinctly different presence.
Chalang.
Above all, the badge pinned to their chest was unlike anything I'd seen on the island so far.
A single large strawberry.
A kind I had never once laid eyes on in all my time here.
"Lily Elbrit?"
"Yes."
"Your card, please."
I handed it over without a shred of suspicion. The new guide pressed their palm to it once, gave a small nod as if confirming something, and then—
Tak.
The card landed on the desk.
"Follow me. Her Majesty the Queen summons you."
"...I'm sorry?"
"Her Majesty wants us too?"
Before we could ask a single question, the man vanished into the darkness. We stood there blankly for a moment, until the original guide nodded along.
"Yes. All three of you, please follow."
Kiki.
◆1 ♧2
We walked on through deep darkness. It was a pitch-black passage that no shaft of light could reach, but that didn't concern me in the slightest.
"Sis, your eyes are glowing."
I could see everything perfectly anyway, and Jjoa and White Autumn were following directly behind me, so there was no problem at all.
"...But why did he tell us to follow him and then just take off ahead of us?"
"Maybe he's mad at how much you won? Right? I bet the staff are ticked off that the Boss cleaned them out."
"No way. A resort like this must rake in plenty."
I doubted the amount I'd won was anything significant to them. Besides, if Apple Flavor's hunch was right—if that badge, and my bizarre luck, were bound up with Kiki Island's secret...
"Urgh!"
Jjoa let out a small yelp.
The space around us brightened all at once. We had entered somewhere utterly unlike the casino interior, and before us stretched the inside of a luxurious, luminous mansion. The man, who had arrived first, blocked our path before an ornate set of double doors.
"You two will wait here, please."
"Huh? But we were supposed to come along—"
"Off you go, sis."
"I'll be right back."
"Hngg."
Leaving behind the pouting Jjoa and the disappointed White Autumn, I stepped inside.
Beneath a glittering chandelier, a woman sat enthroned upon a chair forged of gold. Whether out of sheer audacity or a genuine belief that this was proper attire, her outfit was so daring that any ordinary man would have found nowhere decent to rest his eyes.
"......"
I simply stared at her.
Above all, the strawberry badge pinned to the woman's chest was more special than anything else in the room.
"Welcome, Darling."
The Blessed One.