I slowly moved around my apartment and touched my precious desk, laptop and other items to make sure I wasn't dreaming. Meanwhile, Furukawa was silently staring at me with a smile, which turned into an angry yet cute look.

“Hey, Mikan. Society is cruel, isn't it?” Furukawa started talking.

So much stuff happened that I couldn't even be bothered listening to the classmate sitting on my favourite chair. As usual, I took a leap of faith to my beloved bed.

“Not so fast!” Before I knew it, I was floating just before I could hit my bed. The comfy sensations that I should've received by now were disrupted by the fact that I was… floating in the air?

“Hey! That's not nice– wait a minute.” I stopped my complaint mid sentence to the smug silver haired girl sitting on my chair as if she won. She probably thought that she had beaten me because I wasn't able to use the same trick twice, ignoring the reality and going back to bed.

However, she'd be wrong. The floating sensation was surprisingly comfy. So I closed my eyes and simply just… lay down in the air. This was surprisingly better than my bed.

I took a sneak glance at Furukawa and saw her pouting adorably. She snapped her fingers, and all of the sudden that comfy feeling of being in the air was replaced by a sudden fall which hurt my entire body.

“Listen to someone when they're talking, will you?!” Furukawa yelled.

I took a mean shot at her, “why would I listen to a murderer?!”

I tried to touch the spot where Furukawa stabbed her knife in, but it didn't hurt. I looked into the mirror in my room to see that I returned to my normal body. So I could only conclude that everything that just happened was a dream, after all it wasn't the first time I dreamt about Mashiro.

“Blame it on society!” Furukawa yelled.

This time, I yelled at her even louder than her, “Can someone just please tell me what's going on?!”

I stared at Furukawa meanly. However, she seemed happy that I was finally gonna listen to her. She pretended to cough and talked.

“This world is designed so irrationally. Remember what you told me before? About you not being a gacha addict, even though you clearly are one? Well, why did you keep lying about that?” Furukawa asked.

“Huh? Why would it matter?! I don't need to give any reason to you!” I yelled at the absurdity of her line of questions. Even if I was a gacha addict, I certainly wouldn't reveal it to her. I was expecting anything from her, but not this.

“Exactly! Society has shaped you into not letting you say that you're into gacha! That is why you're the perfect person for this, Mikan,” Furukawa stared at me menacingly while her eyes stopped fooling around.

Furukawa stepped out of my chair, and walked around my room. She grabbed a pair of scissors from my desk and smiled at me.

“Until you can understand that gacha should be the universal love in this world, you won't be able to escape your life as a gacha character, no matter how many millennia it would take.” Furukawa smiled.

While lying in bed, I yelled, “Stop this! I don't understand your obsession with gacha! I'm just a college girl that likes to play gacha! What do you expect me to do?!”

“Just enjoy your life. You're already dead after all.” With an alluring aura, Furukawa smiled with a pure appearance, enough to make me blush. She handed me a ticket with the name Redshift on it.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“This is…” Still lying on the bed, I took the ticket from her with a glaring curiosity in my eyes. I couldn’t help but smile as I inspected the ticket. Redshift, the name of a live house inside the world of Luminous Dream.

Furukawa stared at me while playing around with her scissors. She spun it around while her eyes were glued at my smile. Realizing that, I immediately coughed and erased any trace of pleasantness, looking at her lazily while lying on top of my bed.

“My my, look at you, smiling at a piece of paper that you spent most of your savings to get. Well, the first one is a freebie from me, and I’ll even give you a rate up for legendary items. You know what to do, right?” Furukawa asked.

Of course, I thought. I immediately ripped the ticket right away as it disintegrated into non-existence as shiny light with various colors took its place. It’s a sensation I knew too well. I spent countless hours trying to get as many tickets as I could to do precisely just that, rolling gacha.

The shiny light switched colors rapidly from switching with various colors of white, blue, purple, gold and rainbow. It took quite a moment before the light finally slowed down its color changing and rest with the color white, the common category. The light took shape into a sword made out of steel and its sheathe, with a floating text appeared beside it.

Physical Attack +3

“Rate up is a lie!” I yelled on top of my lungs. I sighed as I laid down on my bed with a disappointed look. I scorned Furukawa as she smirked.

“Well then, have a fun trip!” Furukawa laughed as she put the scissor above her head to a string. The string attached to something above the ceiling, rather, directly on top of the bed I was lying on. She snipped her scissors to the string which made a knife in the ceiling fall directly into my heart.

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“Aaah!” I screamed in a disgusting manner as I got up on the rusty bed I was sleeping on. I slowly put my hand on my chest as I could feel my heart beating rapidly. I kept a steady rhythm and my heart rate started to fall down.

“Miss, what happened?!” Roy was knocking on the door outside. A hint of worry and anxiety could be heard from his voice.

“Nothing! It was just a cockroach!” I tried to playfully deflect his questioning. I took a deep breath and looked around my surroundings once more. The bed I slept in was rougher than the one I used to, and a sword with a simple design was sitting on top of me.

I grabbed the sword and left the comfort of the bed I was in to open the curtain and prepare for the day. I could hear Roy outside the room with an unsure voice as he once more asked if I was okay.

“You’re such a worrywart, Roy. I told you I’m fine–” Just before I could finish the sentence, the sword I was holding gave me a creepy sensation as I inspected it closer. I immediately rushed towards the door as I flailed around the sheathed sword I was holding. My fox ears and tails were flapping around without control. “Aaah! Cockroach!”

Roy’s eyes were in disbelief as he saw me open the door hurriedly and try to get rid of the cockroach that was sitting neatly at the tip of my sheathed sword. With great effort, I finally managed to flick the cockroach away, which was followed by Ron’s quick reflexes to smack it down with a broom in the hallway.

“My hero…” I cried out to Roy.

The look on Roy's face was a mix of embarrassment with a puzzled look as he coughed, trying to regain his composure. He looked at the sword I was holding with a curiosity.

“Miss, where did you get that?” Roy asked as he pointed at the sword I was holding.

I was unsure on how to approach the question, so I simply said, “Hm? What do you mean? I’m not holding anything.”

I hid the sword on my back, away from Roy’s eyes. However, Roy didn’t accept my excuse and immediately ran towards me and tried to look behind my back.

“Wait, where did it go?” Roy asked, with a puzzling expression as he walked in a circle around me.

With a dry laugh, I tried to assure Roy. “Nowhere. You were just imagining things. Well, it’s still early after all, you need breakfast.”

Roy didn’t seem convinced, but he dropped the topic and led me to the dining room like yesterday. I sat down on the chair as we ate breakfast together. The old man was nowhere to be found, so I assumed he was already out working.

As we both ate together in silence, I secretly put my hand below the table. With a slight control of imagination, I pictured holding the sword. Just as I did that, I could feel the sword appear within my grasp under the table. I let go of the sword and imagined it would disappear.

“Huh, neat…” I muttered, while eating my breakfast with Roy.

I could see an empty plate in front of Roy as he gazed at me with a confused look. “Is something wrong, Roy?”

“Nothing. I’m just wondering how I watched the sword disappear in front of my eyes. It wasn’t a hallucination, I really saw it!” Roy pleaded to me to believe him.

“Yeah, yeah. As if they could just disappear like that,” I muttered while finishing my breakfast.