The Luckiest Hero
"You put ALL your points into luck? Again?" Marcus groaned, staring at my status screen in disbelief. His muscles bulged beneath his plate armor, testament to his maxed-out strength stats. Next to him, Elena sighed, her mage robes shimmering with the power of her intelligence-focused build.
"Listen," I said defensively, "luck is a perfectly valid stat!"
Nobody believed me, of course. When we were summoned to this world to fight the Demon King's armies, everyone else chose sensible builds. Warriors, mages, healers – you know, the classics. Meanwhile, I just kept dumping every single point into luck, watching that number climb higher and higher while my other stats remained painfully average.
The first sign that my strategy wasn't completely insane came during our encounter with the Demon Lord of the Eastern Wastes. We were all tensed for an epic battle when he suddenly started coughing. "Just a moment," he wheezed, reaching for his water goblet. Somehow, he managed to swallow his own saliva wrong, choked, and passed out. His head hit the corner of his throne at just the right angle, and... well, that was that.
"That doesn't count," Sarah, our cleric, insisted. "It was just a coincidence."
But then there was the Demon Lord of the Frozen North. We tracked him to his icy fortress, prepared for a grueling siege. Instead, we found him lying at the bottom of his grand staircase. Apparently, one of his minions had recently polished the steps. He'd slipped on the first one, tumbled down all fifty floors, and landed on his own sword.
The pattern continued. The Demon Lord of the Burning Deserts was struck by lightning on a clear day. The Demon Lord of the Deep somehow got his head stuck in a bucket and drowned in three inches of water. But the piece de resistance – the event that finally made everyone acknowledge my luck stat wasn't useless – came during our confrontation with the Dragon Queen of the Mountain Peaks.
We were cornered on a cliff, the massive dragon hovering before us, ready to unleash her legendary breath weapon. I closed my eyes, hoping my luck would save us once again. There was a screech from above, and we all looked up to see a flock of migrating birds passing overhead. One of them, suffering from some bad timing and questionable dietary choices, released its payload at that exact moment.
The single most precisely aimed bird dropping in the history of this world or any other struck the Dragon Queen directly in her left eye. She reared back in surprise, lost her balance in the strong mountain winds, and crashed into her own crystal fortress. The entire structure collapsed, taking out not only the Dragon Queen but also three other Demon Lords who had gathered there for their weekly evil poker night.
"Okay," Marcus admitted later, as we watched the remaining Demon Lords surrender out of sheer superstitious terror, "maybe maxing out luck wasn't such a bad idea after all."
I just smiled and flipped a coin, catching it without looking. "Want to bet on it?"
He quickly backed away. "No thanks. I've learned my lesson about gambling with you."
Elena approached, shaking her head in amazement. "You do realize you've completely broken the hero's journey narrative, right? This isn't how epic quests are supposed to work."
"Maybe not," I agreed, watching as another Demon Lord in the distance tripped and fell into a conveniently placed portal to the Void Dimension. "But you have to admit, it's much more entertaining this way."
The last we heard, the remaining Demon Lords had all retired, citing "suspicious coincidences" and "pattern recognition" as their primary reasons. Some say they started a support group for evil overlords who suffered from improbably comedic defeats.
As for me? I'm still putting all my points into luck. After all, why fix what isn't broken?
Though I do feel a little bad about that last Demon Lord who got attacked by an unusually aggressive group of vegetarian sheep. That one was just weird, even by my standards.