The Silver Bootleg Button
I happen to be a consumer who knows how to spend wisely!
Today was Tuesday. Ordinary people can muddle through a Tuesday and still have to cross that whole mountain range of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday before the weekend shows its face, so they must be suffocating. I was a little different from ordinary people. If anything, I was desperate for the weekend to hurry up and end, and for Tuesday to get here already.
Why? Because Tuesday meant a Raider update! Gacha! Brand-new content! And gacha!!! So as Raider's world champion, and as a gamer, getting my hopes up for this update was the most natural thing in the world.
As if to prove those hopes, I started the stream much earlier than usual today. Forty minutes before maintenance ended, to be exact. For the record, maintenance was scheduled to end at 4:00 p.m., which meant I had gone live at 3:20. And what did that mean?
It meant I had gone live during the hours when office workers were hard at work earning a living. Office-worker viewers... I'm sorry...! But you can't skip the rush when maintenance opens, can you? So please, just make do with the edited NewTube video!
I was inwardly offering that one-sided apology to some unspecified mass of office-worker viewers when a donation came in.
"A full breakthrough, huh.... Who knows? I'm thinking I'll pull the character and the weapon at base first, try them out, and then decide about breakthroughs. Still, the new character's a greatsword user, so I suspect I'll break them through in the end.... Two breakthroughs are basically halfway locked in, and you can assume there's no chance I run it all the way to a full breakthrough."
...Right. I'd known a reaction like this was coming. Which was exactly why I could answer the moment the full-breakthrough consensus started climbing the chat.
"Everyone? I've seen the numbers too, you know. A base copy and a full breakthrough are a pretty big stat gap, but two breakthroughs and a full breakthrough aren't that far apart."
So the ceiling for efficient spending was two character breakthroughs plus a base weapon! Anything past that was genuine whale-tier insanity, just setting money on fire! And the innocent, pure, wide-eyed pretty girl Marchen of the past hadn't known that. In the fight against Techsecular she had only ever felt the stat gap between a base copy and a full breakthrough, and she'd been delighted that a full breakthrough was, indeed, a full breakthrough. If Master Wonhyo — the monk who once drank from a human skull — had seen me back then, wouldn't even he have conceded the match? Skull water is free. A full breakthrough costs a fortune.
"My brain had short-circuited back then. ...I never even planned to take Tequiel all the way to a full breakthrough!"
My resolve was firm. Unless a character truly had my heart, I was never taking them to a full breakthrough. Even stopping at two character breakthroughs and a base weapon was hardly easy to begin with. What if the featured character or weapon didn't appear a single time, and I was stuck exchanging for them at pity? That was 600 pulls. And 600 pulls was 1.4 million won.
...1.4 million won. What, is that somebody's dog's name?
Surely a featured unit couldn't fail to show across 600 pulls? On Raider's launch day I had pulled 310 times, and the featured unit never appeared once. Pull off that glorious feat one more time? Oh my. Six hundred and twenty pulls, and still not a single featured drop?
And there was one more thing I had to get straight. I had already spent three million won on Raider. Not even a month had passed, and I had caught up to a quarter of everything I'd spent on Knight Rise across an entire year. This was not a joke. I was blowing more money on a game than I ever had in my life. If I didn't hit the brakes here and instead maxed every featured unit the second they dropped, the way the viewers kept saying, then someday my Raider spending could sail past ten million won and into the hundred millions.
...No matter how much I loved Raider, spending in the hundred millions wasn't a little much. It was a lot.
I said it like that, and to make it plain I'd entered full stubborn mode, I folded my arms and scowled. But full stubborn mode didn't last very long.
Because I had just heard a shocking piece of news.
"...Huh? Hold on. No, for real? W-w-w-wait, wait a second. It's not, right? This is bait?"
I said that and rushed straight into the update notice. And then I saw it. The maintenance end time had been changed from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00. ...It really was extended maintenance? They hadn't run a single emergency maintenance since launch, so I had trusted them.... I had trusted them...!
"Wow.... Of all things, it's a one-hour extension, so it's awkward to shut the stream off and turn it back on later."
I let out a heavy sigh as I said it. I didn't even have any content prepared. Kill time with Just Chatting? Or watch some anime? No, first....
"I don't know if it's because all the wind just went out of me, or because the reality of extended maintenance is stressing me out, but I am suddenly dying for something sweet. Before dinner, I'll order one little snack."
I said that and picked up my phone to open a delivery app. ...How long had I even been live, and there was already a message in that short a time. Huh? A package had arrived? I hadn't ordered a package....
"...Ah!!!"
I let out that one-note yell, then scrambled out of the streaming booth. I grabbed the package sitting beside the front door and carried it straight back into the booth. I set it on the floor, then called out at full volume.
"All right! What do you suppose this is?"
I glanced over their guesses and smiled. A figure — a pretty convincing guess, but sadly wrong.
"One second? Mind if I change the stream title?"
The answer was—
"All right! First, shall we take out whatever's inside the shipping box?"
I sliced the tape sealing the box clean off with a box cutter. Then I threw the flaps wide open, and drew out today's star, asleep inside. A black box — the kind anyone who had ever watched a silver button unboxing would recognize — revealed itself. Five of them.
This time, some fairly fresh deductions popped out. But once again, I didn't see a single viewer who had the right answer.
"Turns out you can buy extra silver buttons. So I bought one to store, one to display, and one to use for content. The other two I bought as commemorative gifts for Medongbu's editor number one and editor number two."
I said that, and this time I carefully opened the black box. I took the paper out first, then peeled away the plastic wrapping the silver metal plate — it had the feel of a moderately thin, oversized book. Then I picked up the silver metal plate. The Silver Button. I slowly read the words written on it out loud.
Presented to
Marchen
For passing 100,000 subscribers
NewTube
It wasn't that I'd gotten a defective one. It was a perfectly good product. Then why — why was national-treasure-class pretty girl Marchen, who really ought to be smiling, scowling at all?!
"But no matter how I look at this, it doesn't look like a button at all, does it?"
It was because the Silver Button didn't look like a button. If the NewTube icon at the very top had been done in raised relief, it might at least have felt a little like a button.... Sadly, the NewTube icon was an engraving, sunk into the metal.
"So from now on, shouldn't we stop calling this a Silver Button and start calling it a Silver Bootleg Button?"
I said that and gave the silver bootleg button a couple of raps with my fist.
Anyway, that was the end of the unboxing. And since I had a display copy and a storage copy set aside, it was perfectly fine to put this silver bootleg button through as much abuse as I wanted.
...How was I supposed to abuse it if I wanted word to get around that I'd abused it properly?
I thought about it for a moment, and then, out of nowhere, an idea surfaced. A truly out-of-nowhere idea.
"But—"