Ryugi stared down another failed pull and felt the familiar rot settle in his chest.
Cosmic Kura. One card. That’s all.
The shrine had other ideas. Three sessions, two boosts, and a beauty shrine sacrifice later, he was sitting on a cosmic Asa he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t move. She smiled up at him from the screen like she knew.
“I just want cosmic Kura and you’re giving me everything but,” he said to no one. “Can’t get the cards I want to ten quality, can’t get the power shrine to cooperate, and half my muses don’t even have cards yet. Magenta, Chaehyun, Sohyun — nothing. Momo’s stuck at SR.” He set his phone face-down on the desk. “What the hell.”
His door hit the wall before he finished the thought.
He didn’t move for a second. Then he pushed back from the desk and walked out to the hangar’s living room, where a very small, very angry Japanese woman was waiting with her arms crossed and her patience visibly gone.
“What the fuck, Ryugi.”
He stopped in the doorway. “You want me to actually explain or just stand here while you yell at me?”
“Both.” Sakura’s expression shifted, something sharper underneath the anger. “You lost every single poca I of me, and then you’re on there talking about how the comeback is making you fall out of love with me? It was supposed to be us against the world.”
Ryugi laughed — short, tired — and sat on the railing. “You are the world right now. You’ve got multiple writers and more photocards than half the idols on the site.”
Sakura blinked. “What?”
He hopped down from the railing and gestured toward his drafting room. “Come on. Pull up Fanprose. My page.”
She followed, suspicious, and pulled up his profile on her phone while he uncapped a marker at the whiteboard.
“Go to my card section,” he said.
She did. A beat of silence.
“…You had so many yesterday.”
“The shrine ate them.”
“Okay, but—” She scrolled, brow furrowing. “Why do you have a cosmic Asa and not a cosmic me? And where’s Chaehyun? Why is Momo only an uncommon?” She kept scrolling. “Where’s Magenta? Ryugi, how do you not have the girl who gave you your name?”
“Search her,” he said. “Search Chaehyun too while you’re at it.”
Sakura typed. Her eyes went wide.
“They don’t have any cards.”
“Yeah.” He leaned back against the desk. “Almost half the idols I actually want to collect have nothing in the system. So I keep pulling randoms I don’t care about, beauty-shrining them to build trade value, and then sitting on them until the value drops because the people who want them either already pulled them or will eventually. I’m just holding cards I can’t move.”
Sakura looked back at the Asa cosmic. “Why didn’t you just trade her for me?”
Ryugi handed her his phone, already open to his trade block. She read it — Asa listed, asking for Momo secret or Sakura cosmic — and her face shifted.
“…Why don’t you have an epic Momo?”
“She doesn’t exist yet.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
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