I Maxed Out My Luck Stat

Richard had slipped into the Adventurer ranks with embarrassing ease.

The truth was that the Adventurers Guild had a process for official registration—a formal system involving documented history, ranked assessments, and verified completion of preliminary missions.

Richard had done none of this.

He was, in the strictest technical sense, a complete fraud.

And yet.

The Adventurers had looked at him, noted that he was armed and hooded and carried himself like someone who had walked into bad situations on purpose before, and simply absorbed him into their ranks without much ceremony.

A few had given him looks.

One had even squinted at him for a long moment before deciding something and nodding.

No one asked for documentation.

This was, Richard realized, the fundamental cultural difference between Adventurers and Explorers.

Explorers maintained records.

Adventurers simply maintained vibes.

’But those two... they seem different from the others!’ Just as Richard was about to approach them, he heard something.

"Oi." A voice came from beside him.

Richard turned.

The Adventurer who had settled next to him was a woman roughly his height, with short copper hair and a jaw that suggested she had absorbed a significant number of punches in her lifetime without flinching.

She had a crossbow on her back and a short blade on each hip.

Her rank insignia—copper grade—was stitched to her collar.

She was eyeing him with the particular blend of suspicion and curiosity that seemed to be the default expression of most Adventurers.

"Don’t recognize you," she said.

It was neither an accusation nor a greeting.

Simply an observation.

"I’m new," Richard said simply.

"New." She repeated the word like she was testing its weight. "To the Guild? Or new to existing?"

"The former."

"Hm." She seemed to accept this. "Name?"

Richard had prepared for this.

"Lock," he said.

His Luck Stat had carried him this far—the name felt appropriate. Also, more importantly, it was not his actual name.

"Lock," the woman repeated. "Copper? Iron?"

"Take a guess."

The look she gave him then was something special. A rare and beautiful artifact of an expression that contained, in equal measure, disbelief, amusement, and a grudging kind of respect.

"Hmm," she said slowly. "You can’t be that high in rank, or I would have recognized you right away. But you can’t be copper, since you’d be my peer."

"I wonder..."

The best thing Richard could do was be as vague as possible, and that was what he chose to do. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The woman stared at him for another moment.

Then she laughed—a short, sharp sound, like a bark.

"Alright, Lock. I’m Carra. Try not to die before we get to the interesting part." She turned back toward the front of the gathering. "That’s when the good stuff happens anyway."

Richard filed this away as a successful social interaction and felt quietly pleased with himself.

By the time he returned his gaze to the duo, they were nowhere to be found.

’Sigh...’ He was a little disappointed, but chose to let it go. ’Maybe I should just make do with the others around. My interaction with Carra wasn’t so bad, so maybe I just need to be more open-minded.’

Since he was stuck with this group anyway, he might as well make the most out of it.

Thus, Richard made two more acquaintances in the following minutes.

The first was a large, barrel-chested man named Dort who communicated primarily in grunts and affirmative nods. He had apparently taken a liking to Richard based entirely on the fact that Richard had nodded back at him across the crowd and not immediately moved away.

The second was a sharp-eyed young man named Vesh who was also, as it turned out, relatively new to the Guild and therefore possessed a kindred uncertainty that he was managing through a very aggressive display of confidence.

These three people now stood loosely around Richard.

He wasn’t sure when this had happened.

He had been a lone wolf for approximately seven minutes before acquiring companions.

His Luck Stat, he suspected, was doing something again.

’Well... might as well go along with it!’

Carra, Dort, and Vesh—they would be his new companions in this expedition!

"...."

A hush suddenly fell over the Adventurer side.

It was not because they were particularly attentive. Rather, because the man who stepped to the front of their group had a presence that simply demanded quiet. Not through elegance or authority—but through sheer, blunt mass.

He took up space the way mountains took up space—unapologetically.

Zarius the Berserker.

He stood before them with both arms crossed over his considerable chest, sleeveless as always despite the chill, his many rings catching the pale silver light overhead. He surveyed his people with the deeply unimpressed expression of a man who had seen worse and done worse and was prepared to do worse again at a moment’s notice.

"Right," he said.

His voice carried without effort. "You all know why you’re here. I’m not going to stand up here and make a speech, because most of you would stop listening after thirty seconds anyway."

Several Adventurers in the crowd did not deny this.

They even chuckled aloud.

"The Mountain Range is open. The Rouge Family owns first rights. We’re here as contracted parties, which means our job is to explore, catalogue, and retrieve whatever we find. You are not here to start conflict, steal from each other, or do anything that’ll embarrass the Guild so much that I’ll have to hear about it from the Explorers." Zarius paused. "Because that is the single outcome I cannot tolerate."

Muffled laughter rippled through the crowd.

"We’re going northwest. The terrain is going to be ugly, and it’s going to get uglier the deeper we go. We already conducted a pre-survey and found some interesting things. Apparently, the entire land has been mutated, so you’ll encounter things we don’t have names for yet. You’ll deal with them as Adventurers deal with things—decisively and without complaining to me afterward." He unfolded his arms. "We reconvene at the central marker in twenty-four hours. If you’re not there, we assume you found something very interesting, and we’ll come back for you. Or we don’t."

"Try to make the right choices." Zarius smiled thinly.

Then, his tone grew grave as he uttered the last word of address to everyone.

"Survive."