Look, I'm not gonna pretend I had some tragic backstory that justified what I became. Born into money so old it had its own marble wing of the mansion, John was the family embarrassment, and honestly? I earned that title.
My siblings were out there launching fashion brands and crypto wallets, doing all that shit our parents wanted, while I was buried in manga and web novels, anything that wasn't another goddamn lecture about quarterly projections and maintaining the family image. The pressure to succeed crushed my soul slowly, like drowning in expensive cologne, and I fucking hated every second of it.
Though comics and all those Anime did help, but it was the Gambling that finally gave me air.
I can still remember my first basement poker game in Chinatown, clear as day. I watched these grown-ass men's faces twist when I swept three months' allowance on a pair of sevens, and something in my brain just... clicked and rewired itself. For the first time in my entire suffocating life, I was good at something without trying, without grinding and without my father's voice in my head going on about standards and expectations and not embarrassing the family name.
The high hit different than any power fantasy I'd read about in those manga. This was real and mine.
So yeah, the rich kid with the trust fund chased that feeling until the fund ran dry, then just kept chasing it anyway because stopping wasn't really an option anymore, was it?
By seventeen, I'd burned through nearly a million. Liquidated it, fed it to the tables like kindling, and I didn't even feel bad about it. Ming vases my great-grandfather smuggled out of China during some war I never bothered learning about? Pawned. Grandfather clocks that had ticked through generations of family dinners I'd been forced to sit through? Sold to collectors who probably appreciated them more than I ever did. Oil paintings of stern ancestors who'd built the fortune I was pissing away? Funded poker games and really, Who was gonna miss them anyway?.
But here's the thing about gambling addiction that nobody really tells you until you're neck-deep; it stops being about money fast. Like, really fast. Money's just fuel at that point, just a means to keep playing. The real drug is that moment between bet and result, when your entire existence narrows to the turn of a card, when your whole life is just suspended on chance, where nothing else matters, not your family, your future or even the fact that you're destroying everything.
Just that moment. That perfect, crystalline moment where you go 'ALL IN' and anything's possible.
I knew this. Yet I kept going anyway because what else was I supposed to do? Stop? Face reality? Fuck that.
My family caught me three weeks before my eighteenth birthday. They found the pawn receipts, the transaction history, the whole paper trail of our bloodline being liquidated piece by piece. Weirdly, they didn't rage, which honestly would've been better. No, they just waited, timed it perfectly like the calculated bastards they were.
"Happy birthday, John. You're disowned from the 'Fake' family."
Now I had no mansion, no trust fund, not that lame last name even. Just a gambling addict with six-figure debts to loan sharks and a family that erased him from the Christmas card like he'd never existed.
Which is how I ended up in Viktor's warehouse at 2 AM on my eighteenth birthday, watching a loan shark spin a revolver cylinder and wondering if this was rock bottom all those self-help books talked about.
The warehouse smelled like desperation and bad life choices which, to be fair, was just rust and old concrete. Viktor sat behind a card table missing most of its felt, the revolver spinning between his fingers like this was just another Tuesday for him. 'And maybe it was, who am I to judge a guy's hobby?'
The loan shark had fronted me hundreds of thousands over six months, just watching me spiral with that same clinical detachment you'd use watching a bug caught in a spider's web.
"You know why you're here." Just a statement of fact.
Yeah, I knew. Had known since my family's lawyer read the disownment papers with that professionally sympathetic voice. The debts weren't the kind that disappeared just because Daddy cut you off.
Viktor set the gun on the table. The tool was pure black metal, with its cylinder cracked open enough to see one brass cartridge nested among five empty chambers. "Russian roulette, you must be familiar. We play until one of us wins. Or..." Gold tooth catching the dim warehouse lighting. "You call your family. Beg real nice and maybe daddy feels generous enough to write a check to make his embarrassing son's problems go away. No parent could deny their child, especially on their birthday!"
I stared at the gun. Oddly, my hands weren't shaking, which was wrong, right? They should have been. I should have felt something beyond that familiar itch toward the bet, that pull that had destroyed everything I'd ever had.
"Kid." Viktor's voice almost sounded kind, which was somehow worse than if he'd been threatening. "I've done this plenty. Rich boys like you thinking they're tougher than they are. Make the call. I'll sweeten the pot and even spot you the first month's interest."
I reached for the gun instead.
Heavier than I expected. The grip had texture, little diamonds carved into metal pressing against my palm, and I checked the cylinder myself because I needed to see it with my own eyes. "Trust nothing, verify everything" - only lesson from dear old dad that actually stuck.
One bullet. Six total with five empty chambers. The cartridge sat in the third position.
One in six odds on the first spin. Sixteen point six-seven percent chance of death.
"Nice."
Better odds than yesterday's poker game, where I'd lost three grand on an inside straight draw like a complete fucking idiot.
"One last gamble." The words felt natural, like my whole life had built toward this warehouse without me realizing.
I pressed the barrel against my temple. Metal cold against my skin, and I could feel each heartbeat pulsing against it like my body was trying to remind me I was still alive…for now. My finger found the trigger.
Viktor shifted in his chair. "Wait, you're actually..."
I squeezed.
The trigger had resistance; it required real pressure, and for half a second, I wondered if I'd actually go through with it or if this was just another bluff. The mechanism clicked inside the cylinder.
Click.
Empty.
My heart hammered, and adrenaline flooded through my system, sharp and electric like lightning in my veins. My hands were shaking now, trembling as I set the gun back on that shitty card table.
That rush. That fucking rush. Better than any poker pot I'd ever won, better than any winning damn streak. For ten seconds, I'd existed in pure luck. Schrödinger's rich kid, huh?
The ultimate bet and I wanted more.
Viktor took the gun, his face now unreadable, spun the cylinder with that ratchet sound echoing through the empty warehouse, then pressed it against his own temple. His hand was steady, like he'd done this a hundred times before and would do it a hundred times more.
Click.
Empty.
Back to me. I grabbed the gun, lined it up. My hands had stopped shaking. The first pull was terror mixed with thrill and ran on pure emotion. This second pull was like muscle memory for suicide, and wasn't that a fucked up thought?
The cylinder hadn't been spun with two chambers cleared now. One-in-four odds. Twenty-five percent chance.
Click.
Empty.
Three chambers down, three more to go. Thirty-three percent now.
'This is getting spicier.'
Viktor took the gun, didn't even spin, just raised it and squeezed, and I realized he was playing the same game I was. Neither of us spinning. Both of us riding the sequence.
Click.
Empty.
Two chambers left with one bullet between them. Fifty-fifty now. Pure coin flip.
No skill, no tells, no edge to exploit. Just a threesome between me, Lady Luck, and a bullet that had my name on it or didn't.
I took the gun, didn't spin the cylinder because that would ruin the rhythm we had going.
I thought about my father's face during the disownment, all cold and disappointed like I'd confirmed everything he'd ever suspected about me. Thought about my siblings at their next family dinner with that empty chair no one would mention, as if I'd never existed in the first place. Thought about how gambling had never really been about winning for me, had it? It was just about that moment between bet and result where anything was possible, where I felt alive instead of suffocating.
Viktor's voice cut through. "Kid, wait, maybe we should-"
John pulled the trigger.
The sound was different this time.
Not a click but a bang that swallowed the whole world. I felt the impact before I heard it, felt my head snap with a whiplash, my body losing connection to itself like someone cut the power cord. It wasn't an instant shutdown as I thought it would be. It was like signals cutting out floor by floor, room by room, systems shutting down in sequence.
My vision already gone, but I could still sense Viktor's face frozen in shock or disgust or just that worry over how to recover his money.
The warehouse floor came up, and I didn't feel it, just felt the strange floating sensation of consciousness untethering from meat, from the body that had carried me to this stupid, inevitable end.
My last thought: 'Fifty-fifty odds, huh? Could've been worse.'
[A/N]: The gacha system in this story is the Chaos Gacha by BronzDeck (go check out his fics, they're great). Since gacha by nature is unpredictable, planning everything out isn't really possible so I'll mostly be letting my impulses take the wheel.
With that said, enjoy.
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