The massive door groans open, exposing the dark, damp throat of the dungeon.
We cross the threshold, our nerves stretched thin. The interior is exactly how you’d imagine an RPG. There are stone walls dripping with moisture, a darkness barely pushed back by the greenish light of glowing moss, and a moldy basement smell that hasn’t been aired out in four centuries.
It’s cold, it’s gloomy, and the air is thick with dust. Not a sound, except for the clinking of Chris’s armor and the scuffing of my soles on the stone.
Suddenly, a sound reaches us from the end of the hallway. A wet, slurping sound. The sound of a heavy, gelatinous mass sliding slowly across the stone.
Schlorp. Schlorp. Schlorp.
The noise gets louder, multiplying.
“Contact,” Kim announces coldly, her eye already pressed to her scope.
Trembling shapes emerge from the darkness. Slimes. At least a dozen. Balls of translucent green snot the size of large dogs, crawling toward us.
I lower my shovel, disappointed.
“Seriously? Slimes? They’re moving at a snail’s pace. It looks like a slug race on Xanax. This is the deadly threat?”
Chris doesn’t share my disdain. He steps in front of us, plants his feet, and raises his shield, sword ready to strike.
“Be careful, Uncle Ben!” he says, trying to sound mature.
The Slimes continue their pathetic advance, lining up in the narrow hallway like bowling pins.
CLICK.
Kim doesn’t say a word. She just pulls the trigger.
The shot from her sniper rifle cracks like a whip in the silence. Thanks to her [Chaos Ballistics] skill, the bullet doesn’t stop at the first monster. It tears right through the column of Slimes in an explosion of green jelly. In a second, six monsters pop like water balloons. Only four survivors are left, splattered with the remains of their buddies.
“Not bad,” I whistle.
The four survivors, apparently lacking any survival instinct, keep moving toward Chris. The kid slams a shield bash to push back the first one, then brings down his sword. The blade slices through the jelly with a wet shhhuck.
The second one reaches me. It tries to… I don’t know, dissolve my shin? I raise my shovel and bring it down with a sharp, vertical strike, like I’m driving a stake.
Splotch.
The Slime collapses into an inert puddle.
“Recycling complete,” I mutter.
Chris charges the last two, sword forward, yelling like he’s actually doing something heroic, and mashes them into a pulp in two messy but powerful moves.
Silence falls again.
A few seconds after their death, the puddles of green slime start to shimmer. Like corrupted files being deleted, they vibrate for a fraction of a second, turn transparent, and suddenly vanish. No more slime. No more corpses. The floor is spotless.
Chris sheathes his sword with a theatrical flourish, wiping a green smudge off his breastplate. He turns to us, chest puffed out, grinning like an idiot.
“Moving on!” he yells, buzzing from the rush. “I’m gonna carry you guys, stay behind me!”
I look at Kim. Kim looks at me. I shrug, picking up my shovel.
“Yeah, yeah. Carry us, kid.”
We head down the corridor. It’s Level 1, so it’s basic. No traps, just a long tube filled with trash mobs.
The wet sound starts up again. Over. And over.
Waves of Slimes follow one another with the regularity of a metronome, probably set to an aggressive three-minute respawn timer. Groups of three, five, sometimes ten. Chris thinks he’s Achilles, blocking gelatinous charges with his shield and counter-attacking with huge sword swings.
Kim looks like she’s about to fall asleep standing up. She fires from the hip, not even using her scope, turning Slime heads into blue pixel fireworks before they even get within aggro range.
Thirty minutes. That’s how long it takes us to clear this hallway. Thirty minutes of splotch, bang, and Chris’s over-the-top war cries.
We must have exterminated a hundred of these snot balls. The corridor shimmers with monster particles vanishing, leaving behind absolutely nothing.
“A hundred mobs killed, and not a single gold coin, not a single item,” I note, tossing a stone into a pixel puddle that evaporates. “The drop rate is absolute dogshit.”
“Uncle Ben, look!”
Chris points his sword toward the back of the room. The corridor finally widens, opening into a vast antechamber. In the center, a spiral staircase made of white stone rises toward an open ceiling, bathed in a soft light.
[System]: Safe Zone reached.
[Spawn]: Tier One Guide.
The light fades to reveal a woman in a strict gray suit, hair in a tight bun, glasses on her nose. She looks like a stereotypical librarian.
She clears her throat and addresses us in a professional tone.
“Welcome, Tourists. I am here to validate your progression.”
She sets her gaze on Chris and frowns, pointing at his shiny new leather breastplate.
“However, your equipment leaves much to be desired. This armor looks ‘fake’… it looks like plastic.”
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The instant she says the word, her face freezes. Her eyes go wide, she takes a rigid doll-like pose, arms at right angles, and screams in a high-pitched voice:
“I’M A PLASTIC KID! IN A PLASTIC WOOORLD! WRAPPED IN PLASTIC, IT’S PATHETIC!”
We stand there, the three of us, completely stunned. Chris looks like he wants to plug his ears.
“What is she doing?” Chris asks.
The Guide stops dead, fixes her hair, and instantly goes back to her monotone voice.
“Ahem. Please excuse me. A reflex. Let us move on to the lesson.”
I rub my temples, exhausted.
“Oh no,” I mutter. “She’s a Human Jukebox. The kind of person who turns every sentence into an unsolicited karaoke session. I hate these people. It’s the worst breed of NPC. The ones that make you want to play with the sound off.”
She turns toward Kim.
“You have weapons, but do you have the aggression? You must not endure the fight. When the monsters are there, the best defense is offense. You must love the fight.”
Her left eye twitches. She starts jumping in place, arms in the air, and screams with the voice of a lemur king on ecstasy:
“I LIKE TO FIGHT IT, CRIT IT! I LIKE TO FIGHT IT, CRIT IT! YOU LIKE TO…”
She thrusts an invisible mic toward Kim.
“… SMASH IT!”
“NO!” Kim yells. “Not that song! I have dignity!”
The Guide stops, adjusts her glasses.
“Ahem. Pardon. A pop interference. As I was saying. Intensity is the key.”
She snaps her fingers and brings up a complex hologram.
“Effort without danger is useless,” she cuts in softly, her voice becoming that of an expert lecturer. “The System is designed for adaptation, not accumulation. If you lift a feather a thousand times, you will not get strong, you will just get patient. Growth feeds on adversity. The weaker the enemy is compared to you, the less your body will learn from their defeat. Killing inferior beings will bring you nothing but fatigue. It is the Law of Diminishing Returns. Comfort is the death of progression.”
Chris raises his hand, looking worried.
“But it’s too hard! If we have to suffer to level up, I’m not gonna make it. I’m not strong enough! I’m not the best!”
The Guide looks at him sternly. She grabs a cap, which wasn’t there a second ago, and puts it on backwards with a determined look.
“Come now, young man. To conquer this dungeon, you must not just be good. You have to be the very best.”
I feel the disaster coming. She strikes a dramatic pose, fist clenched toward the sky, a tear in her eye.
“I WANNA BE THE BEST CARRY…”
“NO!” Chris yells, tackling her.
The Guide chokes with a squeak under the kid’s weight.
“Shut up, you crazy woman! You want to get us copyright-striked out of existence?!” I yell, panicking. “Their lawyers are apex predators! They don’t just sue, they’ll come seize the walls, the floor, and even the air we breathe! We’ll all end up on the street selling kidneys to pay back the royalties!”
The Guide pushes Chris away with a sharp gesture, stands up, brushes off her suit, and the cap vanishes. She catches her breath and regains her composure.
“What a difficult crowd. Fine. Listen carefully.”
She locks her gaze into mine.
“True power is acquired at the edge of the abyss. The System invests in those who refuse to die, not those who are content with surviving. It is when death brushes past you, when your muscles are paralyzed and your spirit is broken, that the System rewards you the most to keep you alive. Survive the impossible, and you will become gods. Crush the weak, stay in your comfort zone, and you will stagnate until the end of time.”
She looks up at the glowing ceiling.
“It is the cycle of life. Everything has a beginning, and everything has an end.”
She lifts a piece of rubble above her head like it’s the future king of the savannah.
“Oh god,” Kim whispers. “Not this one.”
The Guide opens her mouth and lets out a tribal scream that makes the walls shake.
“NAAAAAANTS! SEE-GONNA-YAAAA-MA! WHAT-A-PITY-BA-BA!”
I chuck a rock right at her head. The Guide collapses.
“Shut the hell up!” I yell, my voice cracking. “Stop summoning the Mouse! They’ll buy the Tower and turn us into tourist attractions before we even hit Floor 10!”
She scrambles back to her feet, dusting off her suit.
“One last thing, GodRunner. A vital rule for your mathematical survival.”
She snaps her fingers, and miraculously she doesn’t sing this time. A holographic blackboard appears with a formula written in glowing chalk.
Damage = (Attack x Attack) ÷ (Attack + Defense)
She taps the board with an imaginary ruler.
“For the slow ones in the back, let me clarify. Attack is the stat of the one hitting. Defense is the stat of the one taking the hit. Many novices think that if the enemy has armor that is too thick, your hits will not do anything. Zero. Nada.”
She wags her index finger in my face.
“That is false. Defense does not subtract damage. It acts as a divisor. It is the Golden Rule of MOBAs.”
I narrow my eyes as I analyze the formula. I don’t need to read it, I’ve coded it a thousand times.
“It’s the basics of balancing to keep players from becoming mathematically invincible by stacking defense,” I mutter. “Basically, it prevents immunity. It means we always do damage, even if it’s minimal. The ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’ strategy.”
“Exactly!” she exclaims. “Let’s take a practical example. You, the Garbage Man.”
She points to my shovel.
“Let us say you have 82 Attack. If you hit a small monster with 50 Defense, you crush it. But imagine you face a Boss… let us say, a Monster with 300 Defense.”
Numbers dance in the air, performing the calculation instantly.
Damage = (82 x 82) ÷ (82 + 300) = 17
“Seventeen damage,” she announces proudly. “It is low, yes. But it is not zero! That is the beauty of it! You can kill a Titan with a spoon if you have enough time and you do not die! It is a war of attrition!”
So my destiny is to land 352 shovel whacks on a Boss without getting hit once? That’s not a fight, that’s manual labor.
The Guide smiles, satisfied with her lesson.
“That’s the game, sweetie. You have to keep the rhythm. You need energy! You need… Joy!”
Her left eye starts twitching again. She raises her arms in the air, hips swaying like she’s on an airplane wing, and belts out the most famous Romanian anthem in history.
“MA-YA-HI! MA-YA-HU! MA-YA-HO! MA-YA-HA-HA!”
I cover my ears.
“No!” I beg. “Anything but the Numa Numa!”
“ALO? SALUT! …”
She keeps singing the lyrics with consuming passion, spinning around.
“Get out!” I scream, at the end of my rope. “Get out of my head!”
The Guide stops dead in the middle of a hip sway. She smooths her skirt, tucks a stray hair behind her ear, and adjusts her glasses. Just like that, the pop star persona vanishes, replaced by the austere librarian.
She raises a professional finger.
“One last clarification. This formula is universal. It applies to brute force, but also to Magic. But be careful, attributes are not everything. Every monster has its weaknesses. If you find them, your damage can double, triple, or worse.”
She mimes a gun with her fingers and aims at her own temple.
“Take a bullet to the head, for example. If the enemy’s Defense is lower than your Attack, it is instant death. On the other hand, if it is more resistant… let us just say it will have a very big boo-boo.”
She swipes away the blackboard.
“Good. Class dismissed.”
She makes a move to leave, then stops abruptly.
“Ah! Wait! Movement speed! Do not be disappointed if you do not run at Mach 2 with 100 points in Speed.”
She brings up a new graph showing a curve that rises quickly and then flattens out.
“The System applies the Rule of Air Resistance. It is a logarithmic progression. To double your current speed, you must multiply your stat score by 10.”
She points to the milestones on the graph.
- 4 points: 22 km/h (Normal human)
- 40 points: 45 km/h (Usain Bolt)
- 400 points: 90 km/h (Cheetah)
Chris frowns.
“Wait… To go just twice as fast as Usain Bolt, you need 400 Speed? That’s insane!”
“That is the wind wall, sweetie!” she exclaims. “At first, it is rewarding. You go from 4 to 20 and you feel like you are flying. But the higher you go, the harder the air is to pierce. At high levels, gaining 50 points will not change a thing. You will need to gain 1,000 to even feel the difference.”
She consults an imaginary watch on her wrist.
“Anyway, my airtime costs too much mana. Gotta go.”
CLICK.
In a silent flash of blue light, she’s gone, leaving nothing behind but a lingering smell of old paper and dust.
I rub my face, relieved.
“Phew,” I sigh. “At least she stayed professional at the end. I really thought she was gonna pull some Queen on us for the end credits.”
A silence falls over the group.
“So,” Kim summarizes. “If we stay here killing Slimes for ten years, we’ll never get stronger?”
“In principle, yeah. Killing weak mobs gets you nothing,” I reply, stretching. “She just confirmed the Zenkai Boost principle. Basically, Shonen logic.”
Kim looks at me, lost.
“The what?”
“Battle manga logic. You know how it works? The hero gets his ass kicked by someone stronger. He ends up on the brink of death, coughing up liters of blood… And then, a miracle. He comes back the next day and hits twice as hard. Basically, their training is trauma. The more they suffer, the more they level up. We’ll be stronger after defeating the enemy… on the condition that we survive the beating.”
I turn toward the spiral staircase leading to Floor 2.
“Come on, we’ve wasted enough time with the musical. We’re heading up.”