Dungeon Exploiter

Gobi wanted chips, and chips turned out to be a problem.

Not the chips themselves — the problem is that you can’t just buy things anymore. The corner store where I grew up got rezoned into a Grade-B dungeon, which is the most honest thing the apocalypse ever did, and now everything you want comes out of a machine.

Every NexoDrive lobby has one: a gacha machine, taller than me, glowing, playing a little song that a team of psychologists built specifically to make your wallet feel heavy.

You feed it the currency you earn clearing dungeons, you pull, and it hands you something at random — gear, a potion, a snack, a cosmetic hat for a class you don’t play.

Mostly the hat.

Above it hung a banner that said FEATURED — LIMITED, with a cartoon woman in armor and roughly forty belts, a pull rate of 0.6%, and a countdown that never seemed to actually reach zero.

There was a guy at the machine when I walked up — corporate lanyard, nice shoes, eyes like two low-battery icons. He was pulling, and judging by the mountain of duplicate hats around his ankles, he had been pulling for a long time.

“C’mon,” he whispered to the glass. “C’mon. This one. This one’s her.”

His companion chirped in his ear, loud enough to leak out: “Exciting news, Derek! You’re only forty pulls from PITY! You’re basically due!”

You’re never due. That’s the entire business. But Derek nodded and fed the machine again.

“What’re you going for?” I asked.

“Seraphina.” He didn’t look away from the glass. “Limited banner. She’s a companion unit — you summon her and she fights next to you, and her crit aura stacks with the whole party. It’s a real meta, you wouldn’t — it’s a whole thing.” He rubbed his face.

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“I’m close. I’ve been close for eight months.”

“How much you spent?”

He told me.

It was a house. He had spent a house on a chance at a woman who steps out of a card and fights beside you.

I wasn’t there to lecture him. I was there because a goblin was sulking in my apartment about a bag of chips and I’d promised to fix it. I had exactly enough currency for one pull, left over from a Brood-Mother and a crowbar I never got back.

I wanted the chips. Failing chips, a water. I would honestly have taken a water.

I pulled once.

The machine stopped its song. Then it started a different one — a song Derek had plainly never heard, because he turned his head so fast something in his neck popped.

MYTHIC PULL

Pull rate: 0.001%

ACQUIRED: SERAPHINA — Companion Unit (Limited)

Pity progress: N/A — first pull

The lobby lights went gold, a little fanfare played, somewhere a leaderboard updated, and a cardboard standee of the forty-belt woman rose out of the top of the machine and struck a pose for me.

Derek made a sound I have only heard once since, from a dog at a vet.

I looked at the card in my hand: a drawing of a lady with a sword and too many buckles, worth more than Derek’s house.

“You can have her,” I told him. “I don’t play whoever this is.”

For a second, he let himself believe it.

A screen slid up between us.

ITEM IS ACCOUNT-BOUND. Trading is disabled to protect player investment.

Of course it was. You’re allowed to spend a house chasing her — you’re just not allowed to be handed her. That would defeat the purpose.

“That’s —” Derek started, and didn’t finish.

Liya was sitting on the mountain of hats, washing a paw.

“I wanted a water,” I said.

“I know.” She yawned. “That’s the funny part.”

Derek was on the floor now, in the hats. I felt bad. I always feel bad. It has never once helped.

I opened my profile to see if there was anything I could actually give him — currency, a spare hat, the ring Gobi gave me, anything.

I don’t look at my real profile much, the one only I can see.

There was a line at the very top that I’d never scrolled up far enough to read.

TITLE: Douchebag.

There was no rank attached to it and no sponsor. It was just the System’s private, honest opinion of me — and judging by how far up it sat, it had held that opinion for a while.

“Huh,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Liya. “It’s not wrong.”

On the way out I bought Derek a water from the vending machine. It was the one thing in the whole building I could actually give away.