The 6.2 Billion Won Option

I don't swear much.

It might sound obnoxious, but my family was comfortably well-off from the time I was little. My parents raised me with a constant emphasis on character, and they liked to say that people who give have room in their hearts—so even as a kid, I was handed a generous allowance. I was always popular among my friends. I never needed to drag myself down by cursing.

It was the same when my parents died. Maybe because I'd never picked up the habit of swearing when I was angry, I could simmer and swallow the rage ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠all I wanted, but the curses never came out. I really thought that would last me my whole life.

Until I joined the military.

"Fuck. This shit just will not drop."

Day five already. For five days straight I woke up, washed, turned the stream on, and did nothing but spin the gacha until late at night. The first day or two were bearable. I'd spun the class gacha about that much, and I had enough viewers that talking with them made the hours fly.

Day three was the wall.

"God. I'm bored."

I could have pulled while doing something else. There just wasn't anything else to do. I wanted to go hunting, but I didn't have a single proper weapon or skill to my name. I'd seen people say I could slap something together and head out anyway, but I had no intention of stamping the word half-assed onto my character.

"I'll go once I'm done pulling."

What I'd poured into the class gacha had already been left behind. I hadn't expected it to drop right away, but it was eating time, and little by little I was wearing thin.

"Ugh. Should I just use whatever?"

Every so often, the devil whispered.

Every time, the viewers brought the whip down. It was my character, but I was grateful for the ones who got so lost in it they coached me as strictly as if it were their own.

Even so, I couldn't help it. From day four on, I stopped bothering to hold the curses in.

"Piece-of-shit game. Make a hundred-pull button already."

I'd reached the point where quitting would only make the time I'd already sunk feel wasted. Nothing in my head. It'll drop eventually. In the end I left the stream running and killed time watching other streamers.

"Whoa. Mages are disgustingly broken."

Haven Online has every kind of class you can think of, but once you bundle them under Root Class, the branches are already decided. Naturally, balance was all anyone talked about.

The way I saw it, Haven Online was not a well-balanced game. Of course it wasn't. From Windy's side, this wasn't a game at all—she'd made another world. In reality, not everyone has to be equal. Someone has to be gifted. Someone has to succeed, so the people underneath get provoked and start thinking about climbing. And on top of that, it's a game built to make money. They sell every kind of feature, slap grades on them, and charge cash for a reset. How could the balance ever hold?

Haven Online is a game that settles its balance with money. Mage-line classes have a higher ceiling than the other lines, but they've built it so that seeing that ceiling requires a wallet with the same ceiling.

"Hope it drops today."

Plenty of people were mocking me, but more and more were cheering me on, too. Strange. The more money I spent, the more people pitied me.

Maybe what they wanted was simply to see it. An option pulled by burning this much cash. Not the sort of option anyone could actually picture—the fantasy of socketing in the kind of thing you'd only dare to dream about once, in pure imagination.

And the fantasy finally became real.

The curse tore out of me on its own. Not even when I'd pulled my five-star class. Not even when I'd landed my one-star and my two-star as SS had a cheer boiled up out of my chest like this. Five days had felt like being cast away alone on the open sea, so instinct didn't give me a choice.

The viewers roared with me. The problem was only a hunch of a hunch—that their cheering wasn't made of the same feeling as mine.

I didn't really know what any of that meant, but I at least figured I'd pulled something good.

"Chat. This is good, right?"

I hit them with one clean, ice-cold flex. Payback for five straight days of getting called a sucker and chewed out by my own viewers.

The reaction was delicious.

My stream averages about twenty thousand viewers. Considering I haven't even been streaming a full month, that's an absurd number. Set against everyone actually playing Haven Online, though, it isn't that many. Famous Haven rankers pull viewers from all over the world, and plenty of them average anywhere from five hundred thousand to over a million.

So a lot of people saw it. And then the livestream moved on—an option witnessed only by whoever happened to be watching.

The problem was what came after. Clips spread through the communities and out across the world, and the three-star SS special option I'd pulled became a sensation after the fact.

I still didn't have a single skill, so honestly I couldn't feel how good the option was. Truth be told, I'd been hoping for something I understood better than this—a mana-reduction option, a straight upgrade over the S-rank I'd pulled on day one. But watching everyone lose their minds, it had to be seriously good. Plenty of people kindly broke it down for newbies who, like me, couldn't follow.

They said the reason lay in the skill gacha working differently.

It doesn't take long, they said. It's just expensive.

I understood fast. I even had a decent idea of what I needed to do next.

"This is gonna be fun."

Someone had neatly totaled how much I'd spent on the three-star SS special option.

"I really did spin a lot."

Once every three seconds. Ten-odd hours a day, five days straight. No wonder. It had been a long fight, but the satisfaction of filling three of them rolled over me as a real sense of achievement. Everyone already looked like they were waiting to see what the fourth star would cost.

"Gotta try using it first, though."

Doing nothing but spinning options kills the fun. You take it in stages. If I wanted to feel the pleasure of actually growing, I had to use it a little as I went.

A little over a week since I'd started Haven Online. I declared my first hunt.