I Won't Dig My Own Grave
Honestly, I had never believed this special training was doomed to fail. If anything, I had the odds of success pegged even higher.
Why? Because when I totaled up the years I'd lived as an otaku gamer, the stretch I'd spent free-to-play was longer than the stretch I'd spent as a whale. Waaaaay longer.
If the viewers of my stream heard me say that—people with the image of Streamer Marchen, twelve million won a year in spending, wedged hard into some corner of their skulls—they'd flood the chat with pure disbelief. But it was obvious. Come at it with common sense, and it was perfectly easy to accept.
I was twenty-two. Count the year I'd already lived once, and my mental age was twenty-three. And what did that mean?
...Right. Shave off about three and a half years, and the whole rest of my otaku gamer life belonged to my years as a minor. Which is to say, a huge portion of that life had no choice but to pass under my parents' control and interference.
And my father could not comprehend spending money on a game you were perfectly able to play for free. For a man who already thought so little of games to think well of in-game purchases would have been nothing short of a miracle.
...I still remembered it with perfect clarity. The time I wanted a swimsuit skin so badly that I secretly spent my allowance, got caught by my dad, and the entire household flipped upside down. I wasn't joking back then. I genuinely thought I was about to be thrown out of the house.
That was one of the things that forced a free-to-play life on me, but a minor whose only income was an allowance had finances too thin to allow anything else. The value of ten thousand won now and the value of ten thousand won then were as far apart as heaven and earth. Seriously. Three thousand won to me now was a single pull. Three thousand won to me then? That was serious money, enough to buy cola popcorn, the bourgeois ultra-premium snack. And the value of cola popcorn to me then? Picture a chicken dish you'd only ever see at an ultra-ultra-high-end restaurant.
Anyway, for one reason and another, I had lived free-to-play for a very long time. So it had to still be in there: the free-to-play DNA inside me, persecuted and oppressed ever since I started spending for real. If I could only drag that DNA back out... this special training could succeed...!!! The odds were king-tier!!!
With that mindset, I began the special training.
And then.
"...To think a day would come when this looked so hateful."
Guaranteed Summon Package!
4th Anniversary Package!
Starter Package!
Summon Special-Offer Package!
My confidence withered on the spot. The moment that come-on-come-on, just-look-at-the-packages window—the game company's favorite tool for hauling in revenue, bulked up with everything it had—started poking, poke poke poke poke, at the spending instinct I'd worked so hard to build, dizziness washed over me. I wasn't joking. The second I looked at it, the vertigo went ping— and the world spun.
Too many package windows, was that why? As if. With my years in the trenches, how many of those did anyone think I'd seen? I was dizzy from crushing the spending instinct inside me for dear life.
Still not buying? Still not buying? How badly did I want to spend, that the moment the game actually began, one look at the package window welcoming me and I was hearing hallucinations like that?
Fortunately, it seemed it hadn't been a hallucination. ...Though I had to wonder if a hallucination wouldn't have been kinder.
Today, I meant it from the heart. I wanted to take my father's mindset—the man who could not understand spending money on a game—and equip it onto the free-to-play DNA inside me. I was truly desperate. This time... this time, I could not be the one digging my own grave...!!! This one really could not be self-immolation...!!!!!!
The questions newbies ask veterans when they first start a game are many and varied. And I would bet that ninety-nine out of a hundred newbies ask this one.
"Can you play this game without spending?"
And most veterans, hit with that question, will answer like so.
"Drop the greed for competitive content and free-to-play is stupidly doable!"
"Hey, you can clear every stage with the starter characters!"
"You can even hit pity once every few months on in-game currency alone, I'm telling you!"
Why did I know the lines so well? Because they were phrases I'd worn out shilling Knight Rise.... Of course, right after that, you casually tack on a footnote.
"But if you're even thinking of spending, a reroll account is honestly pretty great...."
"The monthly pass is just that efficient...."
"Even paying nothing but the server fee makes the game so comfortable...."
And why did I know those so well? Because, obviously...... You fatten the sunk cost a little at a time, and the moment the newbie doesn't look ready to quit, that's when you switch to openly coaxing them to spend.
"Wow.... You don't have this character? That's a human-rights violation. Don't tell me you... don't even have citizenship...?!"
"Who said you could launch illegally!!!"
"Yuria says she's cold because she doesn't have any clothes.... You're not planning to become the kind of trash who leaves Yuria shivering, are you?"
"Mind running that through a translator? I'm a human, so I don't understand beast-speak."
Something like that. ...Yeah. Those were lines I had actually used.
No conscience, you ask? But... shilling is basically an instinct carved into a gamer's genes. So, Your Honor, I am not guilty! Since when is it a crime for a carnivore to eat meat according to its instincts!!! And back then I was shouldering a mission. I had to change a future called Seobjong. I truly had no choice.
Then was I not going to shill in Raider?
...No. Shilling is an instinct engraved in gamer DNA, remember? And I had absolutely no intention of doing something as unheard-of as a tiger eating a salad. Right. That thing called shilling had felt wonderful when I was the one doing it.
Being on the receiving end, this was genuinely making my head spin.... Of all moments—while I was twisting myself into knots, somehow forcing my way through the stage to challenge the boss—getting shilled like that was going to drive me insane. How to put it? It felt like suffering through constipation in the bathroom while somebody beside me chanted, come on, come on, take this laxative once and a glorious movement is absolutely guaranteed!!!
The problem was that the laxative was disgustingly expensive, and an overdose would kill you. ...Socially. A moment of sweet relief, or my dignity.
"Yeah.... I'm satisfied with this too.... They're starter characters, so the cutscenes are plain.... The motions are boring.... Tank, damage, and heal all feel like they're missing a screw somewhere, but even so, I'm satisfieee—ghkk—eeeeek...."
No matter how I think about it, an hour of the Bunny Boing Remix really doesn't seem right....
And so I let the viewers' endless requests that I throw the game—no, their shilling—go in one ear and out the other. This was exactly when the free-to-play DNA inside me needed to clock in.... Maybe it had been persecuted so long it couldn't put up a fight. I should have been feeding it better.
"The good points. Let's try to find the good points. If a person wants to be satisfied, they really do have to look for the merits——"
"...Ha?"
This was it.
Unlike a moment before, Marchen could not control her face, and nearly every viewer who saw it became certain. That, right there, was Marchen's reverse scale—the pride she was crushing down, teetering on the razor's edge between spending and not spending. And so the viewers began to rake their claws across that pride like maniacs.
And then.
"Ha, haha, ahahahahah...."
Marchen began to laugh as if her mind had left her, hollow-eyed and gone.
"Proof. Proof, huh.... Yeah. I should. Proof."
The instant Marchen said it, the veterans who had watched her stream since the Knight Rise dark age understood. The light in Marchen's eyes had changed. Which was to say——
We're screwed......
—that they had awakened a shard of the Marchen from those days.