The Crack Museum, Part 2
“This is basically a total rip-off gacha game, you know?”
“Everyone in our guild keeps saying the exact same thing.”
“Who?”
“Park Deokgu.”
“……”
“……”
“Ah! Come to think of it, Kasugano Yuno of the Yozora Guild has also expressed a desire to join this expedition….”
“Nope.”
I could feel Lee Jihye looking at me as if she found my blunt response surprising.
Of course, if one of the continent’s most celebrated eight seats volunteered to join the expedition, the polite thing would be to applaud her for it. Unfortunately, that only applied if we were talking about an ordinary dungeon.
Zero luck stat.
If I thought about Kasugano Yuno’s luck stat, simply saying she wanted to help was already a nuisance.
Just the fact that she was taking an interest in us made me feel vaguely as though bad luck was gathering overhead.
Honestly, I wanted to tell Jihye not to worry about her at all, and that should have been enough.
“That’s unexpected. I thought you’d want to bring her along….”
“Her luck stat’s low.”
“Ah….”
“Terrifyingly low.”
“I knew you two were close, but close enough to share stats?”
“Not that closely, but….”
“Well, then. What a pain….”
She gave me an oddly sidelong look, but since she didn’t say anything else, I got the feeling it didn’t really matter to her either way.
From the start, she wasn’t the type to care all that much about who I met.
The only thing she ever cared about was whether the people I met were useful.
I had no idea why she thought I’d eventually end up back in her hands, but one thing I could admit was that, because she was here, this job had become much easier.
I should’ve brought her into Blue.
She was not only fitting in well at Black Swan, she was practically taking off. Seeing that, I almost felt relieved she’d stayed there instead, but there was still an undeniable sense of regret.
This is nice.
It was the kind of time that let me feel what it meant for two people to work together so well their hands and feet moved in perfect sync.
When I buried my face in the expedition profiles again, Jihye spoke.
“This is hard. Luck matters, but balancing everything else is difficult too. This is the first time I’ve poured this much effort into the formation itself. Sure, other expeditions have had their own tricky parts, but never to this extent.”
“……”
“And look at this… there really aren’t that many people with high luck stats. Even you’re only in the seventies… I thought you’d be higher than that.”
“What’s the average luck stat of the people currently trapped inside the museum?”
“Let’s see… around 30? Maybe give or take fifteen, depending on whether you count plus or minus.”
“No wonder it’s a mess.”
The single most important factor in conquering the Crack Museum was, naturally, making luck stats public.
There was no need for me to run around with my Mind's Eye, stealing glances at people and hunting down only the ones with high numbers.
Jihye had suggested partially revealing the luck stats to conquer this dungeon, and naturally, both Black Swan and Blue had agreed to the arrangement.
We’d thought the formation would be straightforward, but the brakes were slammed on because there were far fewer people with decent luck than expected.
The ideal setup would have been to form an expedition exclusively from people whose luck stat exceeded 80, but those with legendary-grade talent in luck were far harder to find than people gifted in ordinary stats.
I had no choice but to admit that this was the most veiled stat among all the stats players possessed.
Well, of course.
No one had yet figured out how to raise it, and no one even knew why luck existed in the first place.
There were people with high luck who dropped dead on the road, and there were people like Kasugano Yuno, whose luck was low yet who charged straight ahead on a golden path to success.
Raise strength, and you become stronger.
Raise agility, and you become faster.
The simple logic that worked for every other stat didn’t seem to apply to luck.
Of course, being lucky did…
…seem to matter a little for production types, at least.
In any case, for this expedition, we had no choice but to grab at whatever straw we could and include people with high luck stats.
Forming an expedition out of only those people, of course, would have been suicide.
Realistically, the target average had to be at least 60 luck.
With members of that level, we’d be able to put together a force capable of taking on at least a legendary-grade named monster.
That was the heart of the formation, and it was why Jihye was having such a hard time.
“What did Blue decide to do?”
“We’re still talking it over. For now, it’s set that Hyunsung, Ha-yan, Heeyoung, and I are going.”
“You’re not bringing Deokgu? Hasn’t he grown into a solid asset for Blue by now?”
“That’s exactly what I’m struggling with. He’s great in every other respect, but his luck stat is only forty now. Just bringing him in drops the average luck stat way too much.”
“Force him in. If things go wrong, he’s the one most likely to shield you, at least. The stats of you, Ha-yan, and Hyunsung are high enough that it shouldn’t matter much. The real problem is our Black Swan members.”
“What about Dialugia?”
“She’ll probably come… but since this is a dungeon, it’ll be hard for her to manifest properly. And she’s not exactly good with weapons, so I don’t particularly want her there. Of course, her raw stats are high enough that she’d still be useful, but….”
“What about your precious daughter?”
“If she comes with us, the Blue members left behind will take care of her with everything they’ve got. I’m worried about leaving our little dumpling alone, but… if she thinks she should go, what am I supposed to do? It’s dangerous, after all.”
“In human form, her luck stat was in the eighties, right?”
“Your guild master too….”
“Yes. In the eighties.”
“If that’s the case, then our frontline’s not bad. We should be able to respond flexibly no matter what named monster shows up… especially Deokgu….”
“He’ll definitely help. A pure tank with the specs to withstand attacks from a legendary-grade named monster is rare, after all.”
“The priest line is a little thin, but that can’t be helped. Which means the backline’s getting harder to set too. We don’t know whether we’ll be facing a named monster with high physical resistance or high magical resistance, so it’s hard to pour all our resources into one side….”
“We’ll need to keep talking about the formation. I’m sure the guild masters are discussing all sorts of things too. Hunting monsters is their specialty, and we’re only here to offer our opinions as the strategy team. All we have to do is submit the report, sort out the list, and send it up. When’s the next meeting?”
“Two hours from now.”
“Take a look at the supply team.”
“The formation? Our guild still has a bit left….”
“I’ll finish it.”
She gave me a doubtful look, as if asking whether I was really up to it, but then she nodded at once.
I could understand why she’d look at me that way.
She had no way of knowing how well I understood Black Swan.
I’d already been in and out of Black Swan enough times to use my Mind's Eye on their members and check their traits and general specs.
I’d memorized the higher-ranking executives, so doing it alone was actually more convenient.
There was no one else who could arrange a formation by considering not only traits, stats, and classes, but personality too.
Though if everyone’s status windows were public, the story would be different….
People had more secrets than you’d think.
Especially when it came to temperament and personal quirks.
It wasn’t common, but there were plenty who fed false information to others by exploiting the fact that status windows couldn’t be checked by anyone else. In that sense, I figured I might be the only person on the continent who could build an expedition like this.
This is statistics.
Formation was, in the end, statistics.
Using the expedition data Black Swan had accumulated over a long period of time, I could judge which combinations were efficient, which warrior and which mage complemented each other best.
That was formation.
If you compared dungeon conquest to a soccer match and thought of the expedition members as eleven players, the answer came quickly.
What was the win rate when two players were fielded together? What was the win rate of a certain player when playing at home versus away?
What percentage of wins did a certain player achieve when facing a rival?
A victory in the match was a successful expedition; a loss in the match was a failed expedition.
Of course, there were definitely things that couldn’t be explained by that kind of method alone.
At the end of the day, it’s just quantification.
There were always variables in the real world, and responding to those variables was entirely the expedition members’ responsibility.
Some people might sneer that what use was a formation if it was made by some desk jockey rolling a pen around….
But if players could handle every match by themselves, there would have been no need for managers or coaches in the first place.
Statistics don’t lie.
They’re far more persuasive than useless things like friendship, passion, grit, or spirit—things you can’t really explain.
The number of deaths and injuries in previous expeditions.
The success rate of expeditions that included a specific member.
For someone like me, even that kind of thing was possible.
What kind of people tend to fail in expeditions?
Of course, I wasn’t a god.
I knew perfectly well that judging a person solely by temperament or quirks was dangerous.
Still, if it meant raising our success rate even a little, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with quantifying even the tiniest details and grinding them together.
Because…
our regressor was a little uneasy.
Unlike Park Deokgu, who was optimistically thinking, As long as the pick goes well, we’re fine, Kim Hyunsung had been unable to hide his anxiety ever since the expedition was decided.
The answer to why our usually confident and lovable regressor was showing that kind of expression was obvious.
Had he experienced this before?
It was just a guess, but he had probably experienced the Crack Museum once already.
If not that, then at the very least he’d heard about it.
The story I could imagine was simple enough: a mythic-grade monster had suddenly burst out, and every ally had been wiped out.
He might even have been crushed one-sidedly by it.
His expression had grown a little stiff, and the danger he was sensing kept flashing through my field of view.
He spent longer than usual swinging his sword alone, and the more uneasy he became, the more fervently he threw himself into preparing for the conquest.
Whatever Kim Hyunsung was worried about, it was surely one of the sealed or contracted beings inside the Crack Museum.
There must be a monster he believed he could no longer control with his current power.
I’ll carry you, hyung.
I couldn’t do much, but at least in this respect, I could help.
It had been a long time since I’d focused this hard myself. No, it had truly been a long time since I’d been this busy, not since I’d handed most of my duties off to other people.
Apparently noticing how I’d started getting into the groove, Jihye had already left the office long ago.
I kept my attention on the expedition members for a long while.
The meeting began, and the report for the unit I had organized was safely delivered to Kim Hyunsung and Park Yeonju.
And then—
“Hyunsung, your vice-guild master… is truly capable. No, how… how is something like this even… possible?”
The expedition we had put together produced results in the trial run that even Black Swan’s guild master found astonishing.
Lucky break.
That was exactly what I thought.