The Class Pull Doomsday
A hundred thousand won a pull.
The price was so absurd a hollow laugh slipped out of him—but then he glanced at his balance, and he went ahead and did it anyway. A hundred thousand won at a time, and the number still refused to shrink.
"……Why are the odds this terrible?"
"One-star, 82 percent. Two-star, 12 percent. Three-star, 5.9 percent. Four-star, 0.09 percent. Five-star, 0.0000001 percent."
"……"
Cheaper than a dinner date?
The thought came and went, and right behind it came another. He wanted to pull a five-star. Just once.
The reason was simple. Every video he had watched before logging into Haven Online had been dazzling—gorgeous, no matter the class. Warrior, mage, tank. Stack the level high enough, stack the class grade high enough, and the effects turned spectacular. That was the rule. One player winning a fight at dozens to one. One player hunting a boss alone. A world that ran on nothing but the survival of the strongest.
That was the world he wanted. He hadn't wanted it for very long. He wanted it anyway.
So he pulled. Hard.
He got bored halfway through every card, and he filled the boredom by asking the woman in front of him whatever came to mind.
"Has anyone actually pulled a five-star?"
"At present, the publicly known five-star users in Haven Online number four in total."
"Whoa. That's insane."
So even odds that ridiculous still coughed someone up, simply because enough people were pulling.
"Five-star. I'm going five-star no matter what."
He was still tearing through cards when the woman spoke up.
"Would you like to turn on your stream?"
"Huh? Me?"
"Yes. Many users share their play through streaming, and some even earn revenue that way. Judging by your play style, I believe you would communicate quite well with a large audience."
"……What are you. Are you Windy?"
"I am one of Windy's sub-selves."
"……"
So she is Windy. Or she isn't.
An NPC lecturing a user on what to do was ridiculous. It was also, annoyingly, fascinating. A play style like this made for good broadcasting, did it? Fair enough. He was pretty sure he'd heard that money-spending streams pulled huge audiences, people chasing the vicarious thrill of watching someone else burn cash.
"Hm. Should I turn it on?"
He couldn't think of a real reason not to. He wasn't afraid of his face getting out, and besides, it was a game. The character had imported his real-world customization, sure, but this was also a game where you could buy a serious amount of plastic surgery. Not many people would look at the face on a stream and decide it was really his. And if they did, so what. He barely left the house anyway.
"How do I turn it on?"
A five-star was going to take forever regardless. How long, he had no idea. Pull one card, get bored, read what class it was, skip it—that alone ate a minute at minimum.
"Would you like to use the command, Streaming On?"
"Streaming on."
Would you like to start the broadcast?
The message came with a setup window blooming open in front of his eyes.
"Oh."
Title. Category. The rest of it. Nearly everything was already filled in. All he had to do was name the thing.
"A title, huh."
What was he supposed to call it? He didn't actually want to bait a crowd. Just a few people who could share even a sliver of this boring misery. That would be enough. So he kept it plain.
Satisfying.
The moment the broadcast began, a transparent camera appeared in the sky on a diagonal above him. He didn't reach for it. He simply decided it should move, turned his intent this way and that, and the camera turned with him. So he could set the angle himself. Neat.
Viewers: zero. As expected. He didn't care. If he kept going, someone would show up.
A hologram beside the camera showed the outgoing feed, and a chat window hung next to that. He dismissed both. Right now he wanted to focus on nothing but the cards.
The card grind started again.
A post went up on the Haven Online community.
Haven Online was an enormous game. Players all over the world logged in, and the consensus was that the gameplay itself was perfect—which meant the money it printed was obscene. People said the entire games market had swollen hundreds of times over in the wake of Haven Online. The rumors went further than making a living. They said the ones who had licked the honey out of that blue ocean had put up buildings and then settled in to enjoy a second life in virtual reality.
Naturally, plenty of people showed up for the express purpose of spending money. And the first thing those people did was show off that money in the very first pay-to-win system the game put in front of them.
A hundred thousand won on the first pull. In a sense the class card was a virtual-reality ID, the cost of being born into a new life, and a hundred thousand won might not sound expensive for that. But a class whose three-star rate sat at only six percent carried an expected cost of at least a million and a half won. Unless your luck was filthy, it wasn't a gamble you took lightly. Most people started at one-star or two-star, saved up, and climbed the grades through reincarnation. You had to raise the character from nothing all over again, of course. The gap between grades was simply that wide, so you did it anyway.
When Haven Online first opened, somebody had said it out loud.
Everyone had agreed. Everyone had cursed Haven Online for having the nerve to run a business that brazen. Three years later, plenty of people were still cursing it. Haven Online had also become a game that almost no one on Earth could claim they'd never heard of, and a great many of them were playing it.
The reason was simple. You didn't need a high class just to live. The worldbuilding was perfect. It was another world entirely, and in a new world you didn't have to be strong to enjoy the game.
Haven World. The players' fate was to defend a planet built at a one-to-one scale with Earth, but other users were already thrashing themselves bloody trying to do exactly that. Ordinary users were free to enjoy Haven World exactly as it was. Even one-stars and two-stars were strong, for that matter. Billions of NPCs filled the world, AI-made people standing in for ordinary lives, and if you put in the work you could earn money. Earning a lot of money meant raising your class—that part was still true. Even so, the people without money grumbled and played Haven Online at whatever level they could reach.
And of course the vicarious-pleasure streams were popular here too. Plenty of viewers prowled the streaming lists for no reason except to watch the channels where someone was spending. So it wasn't strange at all for a brand-new streamer, a channel still sitting at zero viewers, to end up posted on the community. Plenty of people spent big, sure. A game was still a game.
A strange broadcast, showing up after so long. People took an interest. For the ones who lived on the community all day, hunting anything worth a click, prey like this was a rare delicacy.
There hadn't even been ten viewers. Riding the community's sudden attention, the count climbed into the hundreds. Chat scrolled. People demanded a reaction. The streamer gave them nothing.
So the viewers talked among themselves about when this endless gacha was ever going to end. The card pulling, of course, did not stop.
Three more hours passed. The viewer count had climbed from the hundreds into the thousands.
"Haaahm."
"Is there no auto-pull? This is a pain."
"Ah. It's time for Yeonju noona's stream."
Kim Siwoo had been muttering to himself the whole broadcast. Mid-mutter, he finally opened the chat window.
"Huh. What. Three thousand? Why are there so many?"
"Hey, everyone."
The chat shot upward at Kim Siwoo's greeting. A few of them had a question.
"Ah. Yeah. I'm that Kim Siwoo."
"Yeah, well. Her stream's about to start, so I'll pull a little longer and then shut this off. It's boring—I can't do this all day. I'll rest and come back tomorrow."
Whether he noticed the viewers catching fire or not—
Kim Siwoo's stream was over.
The community stayed hot for a long while after.