Rita had only dared to sell Scratch Cards to the other students because she was certain they wouldn’t be able to pull anything valuable.
But when Mistblade had muttered earlier, "Is the drop rate really that low? Didn’t we all get sothing on our first card?" Rita froze. A sudden, unsettling thought flashed through her head.
Did these Scratch Cards... actually have a hidden pity system? Did they run on drop rates like gacha machines?
Lightchaser and GodDraw77 together had scratched over ten thousand cards. Out of all that, there had only been twelve Ancient-tier weapons, fifty-two Epic-tier weapons, and a little over a hundred Legendary-tier.
That sort of distribution couldn’t just be random. There was definitely so kind of underlying pattern at play.
Not just her—even Lightchaser and GodDraw77 themselves had sotis thrown a coin in, looked down at the glowing parchnt, and muttered under their breath, "Yeah, this one’s definitely a dud."
Rita imdiately activated [Waste Guide]. Ti froze around her, and she sank into her ti-stop world. She needed to test this hypothesis properly.
There was a problem, though. Scratch Cards couldn’t be mass-produced while ti was frozen. Cooldowns didn’t tick forward inside this still world. Even her [Murder Ti]—the skill that gave a 30% chance to reduce all cooldowns by 1% whenever she landed a critical hit—was useless here. Even if she crit forever, it would never reduce a cooldown all the way to zero.
So instead, she pulled out every last piece of parchnt from her bag. These were all the cards that Lightchaser and GodDraw77 had gone through the night before. The winning ones were all still mixed in, and right on the top sat the Scratch Card that had pulled that War-tier dagger.
The order of the pile was ssy. Those two had been tossing their scratched cards around without much thought. But it wasn’t hopeless. The general sequence of draws hadn’t been lost. That was enough for what Rita needed.
And in fact, this randomness was exactly what she wanted. If her theory was right, then the type of person scratching wasn’t what mattered. It was the type of weapon being designated.
She began sorting carefully, combing through the cards one by one. She had been there the entire night, after all, watching like a hawk as Lightchaser and GodDraw77 had burned through thousands of cards. Even when she’d flopped onto the desk pretending to nap, she had still peeked at every single weapon that appeared. She might not have gotten a good look at the attributes of that one War-tier dagger, but she rembered all the rest.
Patiently, Rita spread out more than eleven thousand parchnts along the length of the beach until they carpeted the entire shoreline. At last she found it: the first winning card Lightchaser had scratched.
It had manifested into a lightning-shaped Legendary dagger. Rita slid that parchnt aside.
The second jackpot—another Legendary.
The third... fourth... By the eleventh jackpot, it was finally an Epic.
That was just before GodDraw77 had joined the session.
Rita continued to pull out every winning card, carefully noting the number of blanks between them.
Seventeen to one hundred ninety-two.
Most of the ti, the gaps were sowhere between seventy and one sixty. But she didn’t care about the averages.
She cared about the extres.
The longest cold streak had been one hundred ninety-two misses in a row. Maybe her sorting had thrown that number off a little, but that wasn’t the important part.
The minimum was.
Seventeen.
In all of those thousands of Scratch Cards, there had never been two jackpots within fewer than seventeen pulls of each other.
So why, then, had Maples, Mistblade, Fat Goose—and even Motor—all hit jackpots instantly on their very first card? Four in a row, no less. Two Epics, one Legendary, and even an Ancient.
What explained that?
Could it really be Luck?
Their Luck stats were all set at ten.
Her own was twelve. Even with [No Logic] having sealed away three points during the team battle, she still had nine. That couldn’t possibly explain the gap. She should have had at least the sa odds as they did.
But then she rembered. GodDraw77’s very first Scratch Card had been a jackpot too—a pair of fist blades.
That was it.
It wasn’t about the players. It was about the weapon types they had chosen.
Lightchaser had chosen daggers. Mistblade had picked long blades. Motor had gone for guns. Fat Goose had taken fist weapons. Maple Syrup, lances.
GodDraw77 had jumped around—daggers, bows, wands, fist blades. Whenever she seed bored, she switched.
And Rita? She had almost always chosen daggers, the sa as Lightchaser.
The overlap had tanked her odds.
She hurried back to the start of the parchnt trail, retracing the sequences with new eyes.
That seventeen-card interval? The jackpots had been a dagger and GodDraw77’s fist blades.
The twenty-five card interval? A bow and a dagger.
And the brutal one hundred ninety-two streak? All three of them had been scratching for daggers at the sa ti.
So the truth was clear now.
What determined the drop rate wasn’t whether the player was lucky, or whether they were new to the ga or not.
It was the weapon type being designated.
The more often the sa weapon type was chosen, the lower its odds of appearing.
She looked back at the earliest stacks of Lightchaser’s pulls. In that first hour alone, Lightchaser had sped up her card-making with every buff she had and had scratched nearly six hundred cards.
Eleven daggers had co out of that stack.
The largest gap between jackpots had been one hundred cards. The smallest had been thirty.
But once GodDraw77 joined in, the pattern shifted. Whenever jackpots ca less than thirty cards apart, the weapons had always been different types.
Rita sat cross-legged in the sand, her mind racing. Then she pulled out her unfinished stack and resud scratching.
By the hundredth card, she felt it. The strange, uncanny certainty.
And then the gold shimr revealed itself—a fish rod etched into the parchnt.
Her pulse spiked. She shoved her hand into the glowing card and pulled out a gleaming white fishing rod.
Epic-tier.
She almost laughed and cried at the sa ti.
A hundred-pull pity. This damned thing really did have a ceiling.
At last, the logic was clear.
Any weapon type could jackpot on the very first try. But once it did, the sa type wouldn’t appear again for at least thirty more cards.
Keep forcing the sa type, and the odds plumted lower and lower. But at one hundred, the system guaranteed a hit.
Multiple players scratching at once didn’t share the sa counter either. Each person had their own tally. That was why, when she, Lightchaser, and GodDraw77 had all gone for daggers, it had taken one hundred ninety-two cards before anything appeared.
But if you switched weapon types, the counter reset, and the odds often spiked dramatically.
That was why GodDraw77, Mistblade, Maple Syrup, and the others had all hit jackpots instantly. They had chosen weapon types no one else had touched.
So why was she still cursed?
Why had her first fish rod only shown up at pity?
Was it because the three Luck points [No Logic] had drained hadn’t returned yet?
But even then—losing three points of Luck shouldn’t drag her all the way to hard pity.
It was maddening.
Rita shook her head, still unable to make sense of it. But at least one thing was clear: she could now trade away twenty-nine of her Scratch Cards in exchange for bait.
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