A month after starting Evo Gals, Youko saw her credit card bill, and she was astonished. 600,000 yen had vanished into thin air. Of course, she’d spent it all on Evo Gals. This was clearly far too much. Her savings were for the future, not something to allow her to change the drawings on the screen of her phone.
Youko was filled with regret. “You fool! You’re a total idiot!” she cried, punching herself in the head. She resolved to spend as little as possible and go back to f2p.
Despite Youko’s regrets, it never crossed her mind that she should quit Evo Gals.
Evo Gals was the source of approval she’d been craving for some time. It occupied a critical place in her identity. She’d always been the type who really worried about what people thought, and thus people rarely thought of her at all. She was starving for validation and Evo Gals was a safe way to earn that validation. Plus, it came in the form of easy to interpret numbers. Her place in the rankings, the number of Likes... And even without her need for approval, parting with all the Girls she’d gathered would simply be awful. All these characters, with their prehistoric names like Dickinsonia-chan, Anomalocaris-chan, Convexicaris-chan, Bandringa-chan, Arthropleura-chan... Out of all of them her favorite had to be Yunnanozoon-chan. This was a character that could probably be classified as tsundere. She tried to make herself look strong, but there was always something lonely about her. In college, Youko had spent a lot of time with girls like that. You know, the type of girl who was too awkward to join the cliques and had never really made any friends. Youko wasn’t the most outgoing girl, but she was good at drawing out girls who were even more socially outcast than she was. Once girls like that opened up, they all became really reliant on Youko. Part of the reason she was still playing Evo Gals was because she missed that kind of validation. Quitting Evo Gals felt like abandoning a part of herself. Youko simply wasn’t decisive enough to do that.
Players who didn’t whale could only improve their ranks by pouring time into the game. To play the game, you needed points called stamina. Stamina gradually recovered over time but would never go over a certain maximum value. To maximize returns from the stamina regeneration, you had to start the rhythm game at the exact moment it hit that maximum value. If you let time pass beyond that, then the stamina you could have recovered during that time was lost. Stamina would recover fully in approximately two and a half hours. In other words, she absolutely had to play the game at least every two and a half hours. That was fine. Youko was totally prepared to set her schedule to the demands of Evo Gals. The problem was that she was gainfully employed. It was a long time since college, when she’d had all the time in the world. The bulk of every weekday was not hers to use as she pleased.
Youko was not about to give up so easily. Even at work, she persevered, finding ways to keep up with the game through trial and error. First, she memorized the rhythm game’s songs. It wasn’t enough to know them in her mind. She had to hammer them home to such a degree her fingers would move reflexively. So much so that all she had to do was put her fingers on the screen and her fingers would move on their own. Her hard work paid off, and Youko got so she could clear hard mode without looking at the screen.
She activated this technique during meetings. However boring they might be, she had to pay close attention, so by resting her phone on her knees and letting her hands do their thing, oh, how strange, suddenly it didn’t seem like such a waste of time. Time spent off-site was also critical. Who cared if her performance evaluation dropped as long as her game rank rose?
At lunch, Youko had to take special care not to run into any colleagues. If she did, she’d be forced to talk to them. She couldn’t exactly ignore the person sitting opposite her and talk to her in favor of tapping on her phone. At this point in time, Youko still maintained baseline societal standards.
After work, she was finally free. This was where Youko’s real job began. It went all night. Youko had no time for sleep. A restful six-hour slumber was a luxury she could not afford. She set an alarm to go off every two and a half hours so she could tap on her phone some more. She was always sleepy. But she powered through. All so she could get Ultra Rares, Legendary Rares, and God Rares. The characters’ faces filled her dreams. Oh! Look! That’s the fabled God Rare! Only a 0.005% chance of pulling one! To think they really existed... Wait! Wait, please! Don’t leave me here... The next thing she knew she was tapping on her phone, still half-asleep. She could hear sparrows and crows outside. It was time for work. Right, got to get through another day.
Living like this was not sustainable. She started making mistakes. Typing in the wrong numbers, forgetting to contact the right people. All common enough mistakes, but as they stacked up, the rate at which people glared at her was steadily rising. Then one day she made a fatal mistake. She was in the café at lunch, playing her game. She’d turned texts and calls off so she could concentrate. That day, the game had gifted players a bunch of stamina recovery items to make up for an operational issue. And she got a level up at just the right time, which refilled her stamina and allowed her to play continuously without running out. She played for such a long time that the next thing she knew it was already evening. She glanced at her call history and found a bunch of missed calls from her boss. The stress felt like stomach acid trying to melt her entire body. No matter how many times she bowed her head, the trust she’d lost would never return.
Despite all her hard work, Youko’s rank began to drop. She did the events, but the SR prizes were out of reach. Sheer time spent couldn’t make up for money spent. Youko made up her mind to whale again. For her own health. She couldn’t make up for lost time, but she could get the money back eventually. It was better to waste the money she earned than ruin her life wasting time. A string of similar rationalizations led to her gradually increasing her expenditures. And the result was that she spent even more time playing. Of course it did. She could spend money to refill stamina, so she didn’t need to waste any time waiting for stamina to refill. The more time she spent on an event, the higher her ranking, and the better the prize cards she got.
Youko’s deck became filled with rare cards. Dozens of SR, a dozen UR, a number of LR. But her appetites were never satisfied. She never found a finish line. The more she gathered, the more new cards she got. And these cards seemed very attractive. She wanted them all. She wanted them more than anything. To satisfy these urges, she tore through all her money, pulling on that gacha. But once she got the card she was after, she just found another one to crave.
There were event-limited cards, too. If you didn’t reach the top ranks of a time-limited event you would never be able to get them. They were a race to see who could devote themselves to the event the most. To see who could sacrifice themselves more than others. It was a fight to show your love. How much love — money and time — could you squeeze out?
Before she knew it, she hadn’t gone to work in a week. It was the strangest thing. The number on the calendar had gone up by seven without her noticing. Her list of calls and texts had filled up, but that had nothing to do with the game, so she never bothered looking. Her room was filled with empty drink bottles and convenience store meals. She hadn’t taken a bath, so her body was starting to reek. How much had she spent? Probably about a million yen that week alone. But she had 1.5 million saved so she was still fine.
It was about time for her one daily meal. Youko no longer felt hunger. She felt a strange detachment, like she was looking at herself from a step outside her body. She knew she was hungry, but that didn’t seem urgent — it was simply one more piece of objective data. And not particularly accurate data, at that. Sometimes she lost track of the condition of her stomach altogether and only realized she hadn’t eaten anything after passing out for a while.
Still tapping her phone, she stood up and went outside. Her right thumb kept the phone balanced, her four fingers tapping the icons just as they appeared. She used her left hand to open the door. The light was blinding, and the sun was nearing the horizon. She wasn’t sure if it was morning or evening. She didn’t know which direction was which. Either way, she just had to get to the convenience store to buy water and food.
It was a five-minute walk from her home to the store, but Youko never once took her hand off her phone the whole way. She was right in the middle of an event. A single point difference might decide the value of the cards she earned. That thought made the very idea of placing her phone out of eyesight unbearable. By this point it was a part of Youko’s nervous system.
Her feet knew the way to the store. She didn’t need to look up. She took the elevator to the ground floor, turned right, and walked to the corner. She didn’t need to check the signal. If there were cars coming, she’d hear them. It wasn’t a busy intersection, anyway.
This conviction proved her undoing.
A six-ton truck coming from the blind spot to her right ended Youko’s life. What a foolish life it had been. So addicted to a mobile game she’d ended up dying because of it. And the biggest irony was that the data she’d devoted her life to was gone. The overwhelming pressure from the six-ton truck’s tires had smashed her phone to pieces. Not just the phone; they’d smashed Youko’s spine, too. Fortunately, she died instantly. The impact stretched her cerebral nerves, and most of them snapped. If she’d survived that, she certainly would have been in so much pain she’d have been begging to be put out of her misery. It was a stroke of luck that she died before that pain arrived. It wasn’t every day a blessing like that came along. A painless death was the greatest treasure of all.