"rrrRAGH!" With a last, mighty roar, the Alpha Beowolf fell, a [Power Slash] having taken away the last remaining dregs of it's health.
Boss defeated!
Wheel of Fate spin obtained!
Level up! Level up! Level up!
I wiped the sweat from my brow, drops coming from my golden locks of hair. That was an incredibly tough fight. Had I taken so much as 20 points of damage more, I would have died. It would be a test of whether or not there was a respawn function, sure, but not a welcome one. Thankfully, I had stat points from previous level ups that I'd used at the last second to increase my strength.
The boss dropped some loot, but I set it aside for the moment. I was more interested in this 'Wheel of Fate'. As a person who bought Yu-Gi-Oh booster packs in my previous life, I was what was known as a hardcore gacha addict. The opportunity to fuel that addiction had grabbed my attention and kept it.
"Wheel of Fate," I tried, nothing happened. "Wheel. Fate. Rotund object." This was part of the process with my system. Instead of snark, sarcasm, or a devoted lover like other people got, my system made it a chore to find the correct commands to open menus. It had taken hours to discover that the command to open my status was 'portfolio'.
"Spin." To my surprise, this was the command that pulled up a menu. A wheel that looked as though it was supposed to be massive, but someone had lowered the dimensions appeared on the screen in front of me, already spinning. The words on each section of the wheel were so small that they barely registered as pixels on the screen. Of course it was. While other gamers got the triple A version of their system, mine seemed like it was made by a 12 year old with a budget of 6 dollars.
The wheel stopped spinning on a segment that might have had a long name? I couldn't quite tell, as I still couldn't make out so much as a letter. A popup overlaid itself on top of the wheel, glaring orange with 'CLAIM YOUR REWARD' in a pale yellow within. Rather than an actual feature of the game, it looked more like a popup one would get from a shitty file torrenting website. That was how my game had functioned so far, so why would I have expected anything better?
I pressed the button, and an unassuming silver ring appeared on top of the back of my palm. I tossed an appraise skill at it, examining the engravings on the side as I waited for the skill to load. They weren't anything I could comprehend, seemingly random clusters of lines spread throughout the ring. I shrugged, nothing to see here.
I put it on my middle finger. If it came from an in-game gacha, it couldn't be bad, right? I heard something pop when it passed my metacarpals, but I wasn't feeling any stat bonuses. Was it an item that gave an ability, or just a normal ring?
All of the game windows that had been open suddenly closed, even the still-buffering appraise skill. In their place, an orange window appeared. Strange, the normal ones were blue.
Entering sleep mode for updates. Teleporting player home and setting player to sleep mode.
My eyelids felt heavy, but I tried to fight it, the sense that something was wrong, had been wrong, surged into my brain like a flood. Why had I put on the ring without question? Gamer's mind was supposed to protect against that.
I fought to move, to take the ring off, but my struggles proved futile. I couldn't move a muscle as my consciousness began to fade.
