Achievement Hunter

The chat was moving so quickly that it blurred into a wall of colour on the side of the screen. Emotes, capital letters, arguments, and panic all slammed into each other in a constant cascade.

‘Rook’ leaned back in his chair, one arm resting lazily on the desk while the other hovered over his mouse. His expression was relaxed, but the way his eyes tracked the animation on screen said otherwise. On the monitor, the new gacha banner for Ashes of Men gleamed like a slot machine built by sadists– which it technically was.

LIMITED UNIT: “REQUIEM” ANOMALY DPS

DROP RATE: 0.003%

Below it, the pity counter ticked upward with a quiet electronic chime.

30

The game had been called Ashes of Men, a title so aggressively edgy that half the internet mocked it before launch–and then promptly ate its words.

It should’ve died in obscurity. A men’s visual novel with hardcore combat mechanics, gacha teammates, branching morality, and romance paths in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Reddit called it a niche masterpiece. Twitter called it problematic for its harem plotline. TikTok ignored it, probably didn’t even know it existed. Roughly ten people knew about it.

Then Rook streamed it.

Messages exploded across the screen so fast that the overlay struggled to keep up.

Isismywife: No way.
OmniscentGamer: 30 pity???
OmniscentGamer: He’s about to do it.
Gabrielalover69: If he gets her again I’m uninstalling.
Nolife (mod): REQUUUIEEEEM

Rook watched the chaos for a moment, then scratched absently at the side of his jaw. “Statistically speaking,” he said in his usual flat, thoughtful tone, “Most of you will die before pulling Requiem.”

Someone accused him of being the developers’ favourite streamer. Someone else simply typed BRO DEADASS CALLED US MORTAL over and over. 

The pull animation began to spin. Light flared across the screen, colours swirling together before splitting into the rarity indicators. Red.

Then–

Gold.

The character portrait slowly formed out of the silhouette.

A tall woman with long black hair tied back in a high ponytail, fiddling with the gloves wrapped around her hands. Her dark eyes were half-lidded in quiet disinterest, but a smirk was playing on her lips like she knew something the players didn’t.

The name appeared beneath her.

Requiem.

The streamer threw his hands up in the air. Chat detonated. Messages poured in so fast they blurred together. Half the viewers celebrated while the other half threatened to quit the game forever. His mod spammed C5??? about thirty times in a row.

Rook calmly opened the character menu.

The constellation indicator confirmed it.

Constellation Five: Requiem– Grandeur of Delusion.

He nodded, satisfied. “Excellent.”

To most players, pulling Requiem even once bordered on mythological luck. Her drop rate was so low that petitions were signed by over a million people to get the game to raise the chances of getting her. Some players had spent thousands of dollars chasing her and never succeeded.

Rook had just pulled his fifth copy on stream.

He rested his chin in his palm as he exited the gacha screen to test out her C5 abilities. “It feels good to win.”

Requiem raised her hands and threads of red light erupted from her fingers– thin, luminous filaments stretching across the battlefield like spiderwebs. Enemies walked into them and simply… fell apart, sliced open like ham.

“Most DPS units rely on burst damage,” he continued, slipping into the analytical tone that made people watch him in the first place. “Requiem controls territory. Once her webs are placed, the battlefield stops belonging to the enemy.”

He pointed at the screen.

“Notice the persistence timer. Even if she dies, the filaments remain active for several seconds. She can continue dealing damage after death.”

The chat slowed slightly as people actually listened.

Eventually, someone typed the question that had become something of a running joke on his streams.

Spider_quiem: Youre telling us all this as if we’ll actually ever get to play her

Rook read the message and tilted his head thoughtfully. “True. But doesn’t hurt to know.”

The chat quieted a little.

He tapped the desk lightly with one finger. “As I was saying, other units telegraph loyalty. You save them in the story, and they join your team. You flirt with them, they romance you. Their morality is predictable.”

His cursor hovered over Requiem’s portrait.

Her idle animation played. She stood still, hands folded loosely in front of her as faint red threads flickered between her fingers like nervous energy. She smirked, clenching her fists so the threads dissipated into nothing.

“She’s not recruitable through story progression,” Rook continued. “You can only obtain her through the gacha system. That means she doesn’t belong to anyone.”

The stream continued for another hour. Rook cleared several high-level trials while demonstrating exactly why Requiem’s kit was so terrifying. Entire arenas turned into glowing lattices of death, enemies dissolving before they could complete their attack patterns. She was the most overpowered character in the whole game, and only 6% of the playerbase had her.

Eventually, he paused the game.

The character roster appeared on screen.

Rook– real name Jason Crowe, twenty-three, sharp-tongued, pro basement dweller, and statistically the best action-combat player on the planet– picked it up on a bored Tuesday. By Friday, Ashes of Men was everywhere. Clips of brutal hand-to-hand combat, hyper-realistic physics, and emotionally charged dialogue flooded timelines. Fanart exploded. Lore threads multiplied. Thousands of streamers on Twitch started playing. Everyone and their mother knew this game.

And no one–no one–played it like Rook. He had the most obscure achievements. He beat every boss in the hour they came out. He updated all of his characters to the highest possible level with the best stats. He was God, and even the developers had begged him to stop and touch grass in a joke tweet that time he streamed a guide on how to speedrun the game.

The world of Ashes of Men was a broken one: civilisation reduced to walled city-states and criminal empires after an unnamed cataclysm. Powers manifested in survivors: pyrokinesis, regeneration, gravity control, aeromancy, while others were left painfully, humiliatingly ordinary.

The main character was one of those. A nameless, magic-less prisoner that the player could insert themselves in was locked inside Last Rite Vault, a colossal vertical prison owned by the most feared man alive: Don Vittorio Caligari, the Syndicate King.

From the depths of the Vault, the MC built a crew (or harem, as was the running joke in the fandom). 

Isis Lovelace (healer), a gentle nurse whose healing light cost her a year off her lifespan.

Estelle Holt (defence), a stoic guard of Last Rite Vault specialising in kinetic shields.

Nyx Riven (melee), a feral rebel who fought with her fists.

And Gabriela Caligari (range), the cold boss’s daughter, every bullet she fired was guided by probability manipulation.

All of them were romanceable in the story campaign.

Then there was Requiem.

Rook hovered the cursor over her portrait in the character roster, red letters horizontally barring him from clicking on it– ‘Not Romanceable’.

“Still unfortunate,” he sighed.

The chat perked up immediately.

What’s unfortunate?

He clicked her character details.

“She isn’t romanceable.”

Accusations of simping flooded the screen.

Rook sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m not simping,” he said. “I’m pointing out wasted narrative potential.”

He stretched his arms above his head. “Anyway, that’s enough for tonight.”

Requests for one more pull came in, but he shook his head.

“No, stop trying to make me go broke.”

He closed the game and switched back to his camera.

His room was simple– two monitors, a desk, shelves full of old consoles and textbooks from a college he technically still attended on paper.

He gave a small wave.

“Goodnight.”

The stream ended.