Chương 40: The Hire mechanic.

Exiting Natalie's office, Mark remained silent for some time before heaving a long sigh. Smiling, he turned to the silver-haired girl waiting beside the door. She didn't need to ask for the result as his expression told her everything.

"We will be departing in an hour." He said as they made their way back to his assigned room. "It seems we will get to visit Amberwood after all."

"That's... unexpected." Lara mused. "Hope's End is understandable, but…"

"Yup. Something is definitely up." Mark said.

The sudden change in Natalie's position didn't go over his head. From the looks of it, the Head General recalled something that forced her to reconsider his request, and there is no doubt that she had ulterior motives.

Not that it mattered. It wasn't like she was entirely honest with him to begin with.

'Guess I won't have to worry about bodyguards…'

He took out his phone and unlocked the screen. The messenger app was already open, showing an ongoing conversation with a contact registered as "Dad".

Mark scrolled past the last few messages he sent, having received no response to any of them. He stopped at the last reply he received, which reached him while he was in a coma after the battle against Malarak.

[Dad: Don't worry about us. We will be fine.]

'The hell do you mean by that?'

The world was literally ending. How did he expect him not to worry?

There were occasions when Mark questioned his decision to move away for college, but this was the first he regretted doing it.

It wasn't his desire for freedom that drove him to that decision. The voices in his head were getting louder and he couldn't bear the thought of breaking down in front of his parents.

'Would it hurt to say a little more?'

His finger hovered over the keyboard for a few moments as he considered sending another message.

They were about to turn a corner, but since he was deep in thought, Mark didn't notice that someone else was coming from the other direction and ended up bumping into them, causing him to drop his phone.

Mark was static for a couple of seconds before anger began to take over. However, it didn't get a chance to manifest as the person he bumped into bent down and picked up the phone for him.

"Sorry about that, buddy." He said as he handed him the phone. "I was a little distracted, you see."

The friendliness in his voice chased away any anger Mark might have had, but that wasn't why he didn't blow up on him.

The man was strange, to say the least. He looked like a hobo, wearing old ragged clothes with a red cloak draped over his shoulder. The gray in his hair and beard and the wrinkles on his face said he was getting in on the years, but despite what all of that might have suggested, his height, build, and posture indicated that he wasn't someone with one foot already in the grave.

"I haven't seen you around before." The old man said. "Could it be… are you the Level 5 I have been hearing about?"

The old man glanced at Lara who bowed her head slightly in greeting.

"No idea what you're talking about," Mark replied as he grabbed his phone. "Sorry old man, we got stuff to take care of."

From that short encounter alone Mark made an assessment and decided that the rugged old man wasn't someone he wanted to be involved with.

He seemed to be the kind Mark hated to deal with the most: talkative, overly friendly, and handsome enough to ensnare any woman he gets involved with despite the way he dresses.

'Let's stay away from that guy.' Mark thought as he continued toward his assigned room.

~[ ]~

From everything Rebecca taught him to his current situation and the conditions Natalie sprang on him in their last conversation, Mark had a lot to think about.

He tried going through them in order, but soon enough he found himself drifting toward something he found more interesting: his System.

His first thought was to try and see if he could summon another maid.

The maids in Maids VS Apocalypse are characters the player meets throughout the story. Each one has her own quest line, and by completing some of those quests, the player gets the option to recruit the character to work for him.

Lara's quest line, for example, involves the MC visiting a certain village to deal with some monsters. While there, he gets complaints about a certain man and his daughter who's accused of being one of the monsters.

After some investigation, it turns out that the monsters weren't entirely responsible for the damages that befell the village, and that the poor girl who was accused of being a monster had been going around attacking people and stealing their blood.

After hearing her family's tragic story, she gains the MC's sympathy, prompting him to offer her his blood in exchange for her fighting by his side. That's how the Dhampir named Lara Becker became a maid at the MC's mansion.

Obviously, none of the events that led to that happened in real life. The silver-haired maid who had been with him the past few days knew nothing about the character she represented as well.

Since the world of the game didn't exist, Mark had no quests to finish, meaning he couldn't have recruited Lara the same way he would've done it in the game.

He expected that his System had created a way around the restriction. After all, the System doesn't really bring the characters from the game to the real world. It just creates a vessel based on those characters and summons a mysterious entity from another dimension to inhabit it.

Mark pressed the Start button on his imaginary controller, summoned his Player Menu then entered the Maids section.

A new window appeared displaying a character card containing a brief summary of Lara's stats along with her 16-bit character sprite from the game. The cuteness of the shibified sprite brought a smile to Mark's face, but he quickly shook it off and focused.

Beneath Lara's character card was a similar box with only a + symbol on it, and seeing it Mark understood that he was on the right track.

He imagined himself pressing down on the D-pad to select the second box, he then pressed A to interact with it. A new window appeared the next instant, but before he could get a good look at what it displayed, a System notification popped up.

[The LRGS belonging to Subject Mark White has been recalibrated to perform functions based on the electronic game "Maids VS Apocalypse"

Due to certain limitations, some functions have been altered or removed.

The Hire mechanic has been altered.

You can now summon Maid characters through the "Maids" section.

The summoned character will be chosen at random.]

Mark's expression froze when he read the last line. He closed his eyes and rubbed them, hoping that there was a problem with them. Sadly, he could still see the System interface even with his eyes closed.

He read the message again, and after failing to find any other interpretation, he finally gave in and recognized the reality of his situation.

"It's a gacha…" he muttered. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and exhaled. Lara noticed that something was off and was curiously observing him, but a second later she was startled when he suddenly screamed "IT'S A FUCKING GACHA!!!!!"

Gacha. Short for gashapon. A Japanese word used to call capsule-toy vending machines.

In game terminology, it refers to games where players spend an in-game currency to receive randomized virtual items or characters. Said currency can be obtained either by playing the game or by buying it with real money.

Of course, the first option is limited in many ways to incentivize players to spend real-life money in order to obtain what they desire.

Such a despicable mechanic has been in use since fifty years ago, surviving the Great World War and continuing to ruin many good games for the sake of profit.

And now it has claimed yet another victim: Mark White's maid summoning System.

That's right. The Lower Realm Guidance System, a powerful psychic program with unlimited possibilities, decided that the best way to overcome the story restriction is by turning the summoning process into a gacha mechanic instead of just allowing its only user to choose which maids to hire.

'Why, author…' Mark clutched his brown hair and growled weakly. 'Just… why?…'

Though he asked the question, Mark knew exactly why. There was no set order in which the player could get his maids. He made it that way himself, wanting to add some variety to the gameplay so it wouldn't turn out too linear.

But even then it didn't make sense for the summoning to be made into a gacha. After all, the player could still choose which maid to recruit first.

Mark had never been a fan of gacha games, which he considered to be gambling simulators more than anything. He couldn't count the number of times he got tricked into playing some games because of a cute character he saw somewhere only to find out he would have to do to get it.

'Don't tell me…'

His eyes widened as he recalled another infamous aspect of gacha games: the endless grind. In those games, the player would have to spend a long time accumulating whatever currency used in the gacha, as well as other resources used for the upgrades and other things.

They were specifically designed in a way that forces people to play daily or pay money to keep up, and just thinking that his own System might have the same problem pushed him a little more toward the brink.

'Don't tell me it added some random garbage in the pool to lower the pull rates…'

Mark began cursing the author for making his life unnecessarily difficult, but he soon started to see the logic in his circumstances. If this was a novel, and he was the protagonist, having things handed to him easily would have ruined the story.

Even webnovel readers who love power fantasies and overpowered MCs would get bored if the protagonist of a series gets everything handed to him without a struggle.

'That's right…' Mark nodded, agreeing with his own argument. 'A good novel will have its MC go through some serious shit so it would look like he earned the things he got.'

Still smiling, Mark opened his eyes and looked at the System screen. There was no light in his pupils. He remained still for a while then dismissed the System notification.

Whatever restrictions might get thrown in his way, he still has no choice but to keep going.

'Hm?'

As he looked over the "Hire" window, confusion seemed to slow his thoughts once again.

There was only a small square with the words "Hire" on it; no banner showing which characters he could pull, no counters showing the currency required to do so or how much of it he had. Just an icon with the word "Hire" on it.

'Is… is that it?' He covered his mouth while looking at the icon with suspicion. 'No, there is no way it would be that simple…'

Mark refused to believe that things would be so easy. He was convinced that the System was hiding something from him, a requirement he had to meet first before he could summon a new maid. But nowhere on the screen does it show any such requirements.

Could it be that all he has to do is press the icon and a new maid would be summoned?

There was only one way to know, and though he was expecting the worst, nothing could have prepared him for the notification that popped up the second he pressed the A button on his imaginary controller.

[Base has reached maximum capacity. Cannot hire new Maids.]

"GOD FUCKING DAMN IT!!!!!!!!!"