Chapter 52: RNG Is a Crime
Chapter 52: RNG Is a Crime
The second time Glitch fought the Moss-Crowned Slime King, he died once.
The third time, he didn’t die at all.
The fourth time, Jin discovered that random drops were humanity’s greatest mistake.
Four days had passed since the examination ended.
The results were still ten days away—ten days of thousands of candidates and their families holding their breath, refreshing a page that wouldn’t update.
Jin had stopped thinking about the page entirely.
There was nothing to optimize on the page.
There was, however, a boss.
Glitch’s real body lay curled on the blanket in the corner, sleeping off another enormous meal. The swelling in his leg had almost completely disappeared.
Jin still hadn’t touched Sync.
The leg looked good.
Almost good wasn’t good, and Jin wasn’t spending his partner’s body on impatience.
The digital avatar, meanwhile, had been going to war beneath a false green sky for four straight days.
The daily timer had reset on the morning after the first clear, and the Slime King had pulled itself back into existence at the bottom of Mossy Hollow as if it had never died.
Jin entered confidently.
He knew the battle now.
Phase one. Crushing slam. Blue core exposed immediately afterward. Brief attack window.
Jin sent Glitch forward to bait the slam, counted the exact number of beats from their previous victory and issued the dodge command on the same frame that had worked before.
The boss slammed half a second late.
Glitch had already committed to his sidestep. He was still inside the kill zone when the Slime King’s enormous mass crashed down.
The screen turned gray.
[Digital Avatar Defeated]
Jin stared at the notification.
It was new information.
He had been treating the boss like a recording. Same action, same timing, same result. Repeat the correct inputs and collect the reward.
But this wasn’t a recording.
The Slime King could vary its timing. Its attacks followed recognizable patterns, but those patterns breathed. A strategy built around one precise millisecond was a strategy built on sand.
Read it live, Jin corrected. Don’t memorize. Watch.
Glitch respawned.
They entered again.
This time, Glitch watched the Slime King’s body instead of trusting Jin’s count. He waited for its weight to shift and its moss-covered crown to compress—the real signs that the attack had committed.
He dodged.
The blue core surfaced.
Glitch shattered it.
The reward screen appeared, and Jin leaned forward.
[Coins Obtained: 40]
[Beginner Herb Obtained ×3]
[Moss-Crowned Slime Core Obtained ×1]
No regeneration fragment.
Jin stared at the screen in deep, offended silence.
He had assumed—reasonably, he felt, as the person who had killed the thing—that the regeneration fragment was a guaranteed boss drop.
It wasn’t guaranteed.
It was a chance.
"Oh," Jin said to the empty room, with the hollow dread of someone remembering every gacha game that had ever taken his lunch money. "Oh, no."
By the third day, Jin barely needed to guide Glitch at all.
That was the part that surprised him.
He would begin a boss run and realize halfway through that he hadn’t issued a command in ninety seconds.
Glitch baited the slam himself. He watched the live timing, survived the spreading mire by staying close and attacked the core the moment it appeared.
Jin had become, functionally, a spectator with veto power.
He discovered that he didn’t mind.
It felt less like controlling a game character and more like watching someone he had taught perform perfectly without needing help.
The feeling was unfamiliar.
It was also rather nice.
The third clear finally produced what he wanted.
[Skill Fragment Obtained: Lesser Regeneration — 2/3]
Two fragments out of three.
A warm, stupid certainty settled inside Jin.
The final one will drop next time. Obviously.
He knew better.
He had watched that exact thought empty other people’s wallets.
He believed it anyway.
The fourth clear was the cleanest battle Glitch had ever fought.
Jin watched with quiet pride because this wasn’t the lizard who had died in ninety-three seconds four days ago.
This was a professional.
Glitch waited for the real signs of the crushing slam and didn’t flinch early. He braced his hardened hide against the one spray of mire worth enduring and avoided the two that weren’t.
He didn’t waste a step.
When the mire expanded, Glitch remained close. Distance was the trap. He had learned that through death, and now the correct response had become part of how he moved.
When the blue core surfaced, Glitch was already attacking.
He shattered it before Jin’s finger reached the command.
The boss collapsed into a mound of dissolving moss.
The reward screen appeared.
[Coins Obtained: 38]
[Moss-Crowned Slime Core Obtained ×1]
No regeneration fragment.
Jin stared at the screen.
The healthy digital Glitch stared back at him, standing over a boss he had defeated flawlessly and clearly expecting a prize.
Neither moved.
The pipes ticked overhead. Somewhere along the corridor, a neighbour’s shift alarm began ringing.
"This," Jin said in a flat, haunted voice, "is why people commit crimes against game developers."
Glitch chirped, confused.
"There is no reward. The system rolled a die, and the die said no." Jin dragged a hand down his face. "Your flawless victory has been judged by a random number and found insufficient."
Glitch continued waiting.
"Welcome to gaming."
Between boss runs, the days developed a rhythm.
Jin was, for the first time in his life, managing things.
The irony that he was doing it for a game wasn’t lost on him.
He ran conservative AFK routes through the slime fields while the boss timer recovered. Small slimes only. Herbs prioritized. Manageable attacks endured to improve Harden. Retreat to the spawn rock whenever health crossed the safety limit.
Whenever the avatar died during an AFK route, Jin studied the log, identified the dangerous corner and adjusted the routine.
The routes became tighter.
The deaths became rarer.
Jin also began resting his eyes during the two-hour respawn timers.
During the first two days, he had stared at the screen throughout every countdown and earned himself a headache that sat behind his eyes like a heated coin.
The Engine’s fatigue was real.
It was a gray, soul-deep exhaustion that improved with food and sleep but became considerably worse when someone stared at a phone for eighteen hours.
So Jin ate properly when he could.
He drank water.
Occasionally, he looked at a wall on purpose, merely to focus on something that wasn’t glowing.
Several times every day, he checked Glitch’s injured leg.
Not through the Engine.
With his hands.
He felt for heat above the joint, watched the swelling recede and removed the wrap to check whether Glitch reacted to pressure.
Glitch no longer flinched.
He had started placing real weight on the leg around the apartment and could walk almost normally.
Jin recorded every improvement like someone watching a valuable resource bar refill.
Every day, the Sync panel became more tempting.
Several days of Combat Instinct, Agility, Vitality and Harden development waited behind one button.
Every bit of it would become real the moment he pressed it.
Jin didn’t.
The growth remained inside the bank.
The leg came first.
That was the rule.
And Jin, who broke nearly every rule anyone had ever given him, kept that one.