Punish the System - 13

Connor had never trusted Maths.

He’d been good at it once, back when numbers meant actual things. Apples in a basket. Change from a fiver. The number of blows it took to break a padlock. Back in Year Five, he’d even won a laminated certificate with a cartoon owl on it that said “NUMBERS WIZARD.” He’d stuck it in his bedroom window until the sun faded the ink and some local kid told him wizards weren’t real.

But then the syllabus changed. He mastered addition and subtraction? Have some long division to the face! He began coasting through decimals? Try fractions, you smug little plank. Numbers too easy? Taste some algebra, bitch.

By Year Nine, it had felt to Connor that his Mathematic lessons had morphed into some sort of ongoing, escalating dare. Solve this equation but also learn Greek. Find the hypotenuse of this shape that no professional builder would ever use. And don’t forget to show your working, because your working is what we really mark.

However, he was realising, in real time, that his previous ambivalence to this subject was nothing. Now that he was all grown up and re-running a Dungeon in a universe that obeyed stats like a slot machine on fire, Connor had finally reached peak mathematical resentment.

“Point six drop rate,” he said, pacing over the fresh wreckage of another fallen Carsenil. “That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”

“I said approximately 0.6 percent.”

“Which should mean, worst case scenario, I run this place a hundred-odd times before I get a Sprite, right?”

“Oh, bless you, my sweet summer child. No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? That’s how odds work.”

Izzy waggled a finger back and forth. “No, that’s how some befuddled people think odds work. But drop rates in Dungeon mechanics are non-cumulative. Each run resets the probability. Think of it like rolling a die that hates you and then wiping its memory before you roll it again.”

Connor stared at her.

“Meaning,” she went on, misreading his glare for incomprehension, “You could run it eighty times and still get nothing. Or you could get lucky on the first try. Or the three hundred and forty-third. It’s an independent chance. Every. Single. Time.”

“You’re telling me this whole thing is just a random number generator wearing a horror mask?”

“Exactly! But I’m glad you were the one to say it. In my coding it is noted that Candidates get very testy when the Sprite is the one to mention the lack of fairness.”

Connor looked down at the spent husks of the six mobs he’d mulched in under five seconds. All these runs were making him even faster at dispatching them. His gun held twelve saturated shots now, Izzy said his inventory was nearly full and, apparently, he’d gained so much XP he was ‘fit to burst’.

“Maths,” he said again, kicking at a scorched piece of marble. “You absolute bastard. This is taking far too long, Izzy!”

“You’ve just cleared the Dungeon in four-point-two seconds,” Izzy said cheerily, now wearing a tweed blazer with elbow patches and tiny wire-rimmed glasses perched halfway down her nose. A blackboard pinged into existence behind her, cluttered with scrawled equations and diagrams that seemed to shift when he wasn’t looking. “New personal best.”

“It doesn’t feel any faster!” Connor said, increasingly frustrated. “By the time I loot, wait for the reset and check for rare drops, it's still what, five minutes a run? Jaz could be dead while I’m faffing around in here!”

Izzy adjusted her imaginary glasses and gestured to the board: TIME DILATION: A BRIEF AND UNFORTUNATELY COMPREHENSIVE OVERVIEW.

“If it helps ease your mind, Mr Connor, you should know that time’s not passing the same out there as it is in here,” she said. “The Dungeon is a closed-loop temporal frame, a bubble, basically. Think of it like you’re swimming laps in a sealed-off pool while the rest of the world is paddling through open water. Every second here is stretched and thinned. So while you’re in motion, especially during combat sequences, subjective time compresses externally. It’s a real phenomenon. There was a paper on it. I’d cite it but I sense you’d only get angry.”

“I’m already angry.”

“Good. Harness that to go even faster. Anyway, by my estimates, from the moment you re-entered the Dungeon to now?” She snapped her fingers. “Half a second. Maybe.”

Connor blinked. 

“Wait. So Moustache’s still out there and on the floor?”

“Absolutely. He’s somewhere between ‘offended’ and ‘going home and crying to his mum.’ But technically, he hasn't even had the time to stand back up yet.”

“More maths bullshit.”

“Physics,” Izzy corrected. “But I understand your emotional response.”

She let the moment stretch before leaning in conspiratorially and adding, “I am picking up on something interesting though, Mr Connor. Although the XP you’re generating is heavily reduced due to this being a complete baby dungeon, there’s still far more of it than there really should be. Way more. And none of it’s rolling into more Spine Points for you.”

Connor frowned. 

“Isn’t that something you’re supposed to be forcing to happen for me?”

“Yes, and that’s what’s most interesting,” she said, and tapped the chalkboard. The words ALLOCATION HALTED appeared in a glowing red font. “I can’t seemingly trigger them anymore. While within this Dungeon, I simply can’t force a distribution. It’s like the System’s just… holding it all there for you. Like it’s waiting for there to be enough for… something.”

“Any chance that something means anything good?”

“I don’t know,” she said and the blackboard disappeared with a pop. “But it bodes, Mr Connor.”

“Bodes what?”

“No idea, but it’s definitely boding.”

“You’re telling me I’m grinding a mathematically impossible drop rate inside a time-warped fog stadium while a mystery skill point logjam is building in my core like I’m some kind of XP abscess?”

Izzy gave him a thumbs-up. 

“That’s an accurate and colourful summary, Mr Connor.” 

A new pie chart popped into being.

YOU BEING UNLUCKY: 99.4%

SPRITE DROP RATE: 0.6%

Connor groaned and retriggered the Dungeon.

*

He lost count of how many times he reset the Dungeon.

Each run bled into the next like a looped fever dream of blood and fog. He hit the ground. He fired. He looted. The world went white. Reset. Again.

There had been enough runs for his gun to max out its Saturated Bullet load at fifteen. Izzy, ever helpful, informed him that any more capacity would require an upgrade of the weapon itself. A new barrel. Better mana-fibre channels. Maybe a secondary loop coil. Apparently most of that stuff could be looted in Dungeons… Go figure.

Connor had stared at her until she backed slowly into the fog.

He’d also levelled up his split-shot module so that it now fired six projectiles per trigger pull.

MAG-SPOOLER: Round Type Selection

TYPE: Split-Load Ammunition (x6 Bullets)

MAXIMUM LOAD: 15 Rounds

DESCRIPTION: Fires six mana-forged projectiles in rapid succession per trigger pull. Each shot deals 80% base damage but counts as a single round for cooldown and ammo count purposes.

NOTE: The bullets are optimised for crowd control and mid-range suppression. Recoil is slightly increased. Accuracy penalty applies after 20 metres.

The constant repetition meant that Connor had fallen into quite the little routine. The Dungeon launched. The fog twisted and roiled. Six targeting reticles flared in his vision to settle on six creatures hovering at the edge of sight. He’d squeeze once, sometimes twice, if they were cheeky and ducked behind a pillar as he destroyed them.

Then he looted. Would still find no Sprite. Reset. Again.

Izzy had begun humming during the runs, a tuneless little dirge that didn't match any music he'd ever heard. She cooed constantly over the growing pressure of his XP tally, which had started to climb past what, apparently, her System tracker could comfortably display. 

And there were still no Spine Point allocations. 

And still no Sprite.

Nothing except a fat pile of discarded loot clogging the back corner of the Dungeon which, oddly, didn’t dispel when everything else restarted. It was starting to look like a landfill site.

Eventually, he'd had to start leaving it there when his inventory couldn’t take any more. Helmets, belts, boots. Gloves. Trinkets. Mana-threaded cloaks. If it didn’t stack, or Izzy didn’t give it a slow, speculative hum of approval, he left it on the floor. Little gear cairns marking each new step of his descent into statistical madness.

“You are absolutely, positively certain a Sprite is supposed to drop here?” he asked her eventually, as the next reset began to form. Despite Izzy’s assurances about time dilation, it felt like most of his adult life had passed shooting creatures in here. His stubble had stubble.

“Oh, absolutely,” Izzy nodded. She was currently perched on a floating crate of unlooted boots, clipboard in hand, chewing on the end of a quill. “It’s right there on the drop table. A clean 0.6% rate applied to, let’s see, Dungeon ID 3X5Z: Stadium Collapse Instance. Subtier Variance: Low. Threat Modifier: Minimal. Troglonn-Carsenil Hybrid Mob Loop. Loot tier brackets C through B. Sprite classification: Minor Autonomous Data Fragment (Blue). Drop Source: Completion-Linked Probabilistic Dispensation node, tied to…”

She trailed off, which Connor wasn’t wild about. 

“What is it?”

Izzy cleared her throat. 

“Ah. Well. This is a touch embarrassing, Mr Connor.”

“Embarrassing like ‘oh dear, I ate the last of the shrimp at my boss’s BBQ’ or embarrassing like ‘whoops, I just shot the Dutch Ambassador.”

“Bit of both, really. You will remember,” she went on delicately, “How I said that collecting a second Sprite would be usually tied to a quest?”

“I do remember that,” Connor said, very slowly. “And I remember you saying that wasn’t the only way to gain one. I remember that distinctly because I was hanging a lot of hope on it.”

“Well,” Izzy said, noticeably shrinking down in size until it was actually difficult to see her, “It appears there’s a small addendum on the drop table, which I might have missed. Tiny asterisked footnote, really. Hard to spot unless you’re looking very hard. And in a very small System font. Which, by the way, I am almost entirely certain only I can read. Ahem. This addendum indicates, Mr Connor, that while Sprites do indeed have a 0.6% drop chance on Dungeon completion…”

She gave him a wide, tense smile.

“…the System defines ‘completion’ a bit more specifically in the case of the particular Sprite Collection Quest not being active for a Candidate. It turns out, in those specific circumstances, the Sprite drop rate is thus tied to the dispelling of the Dungeon core.”

Connor let that stir around his brain for a moment.

“Are you telling me,” he said eventually, picking his words carefully, “That the 0.6% drop rate isn’t for simply finishing the run? It’s for blowing up the actual Dungeon?”

“Indeed. It would seem the rate is artificially reduced to disincentivise Candidates from farming Sprite data outside of their designated quest lines.”

“You’re telling me I’ve just wasted… I don’t even know how many hours. Days, even! Doing speedruns with a mathematically impossible chance of success! Because the drop pool isn’t even tied to the monsters I’m killing?”

“I agree that when you put it like that, it’s not ideal.”

“Not ideal!” he echoed.

“Not ideal at all.”

“Izzy, you specifically said it was 0.6% from the Dungeon!”

“I said it appeared that way. Which it does. If you’re not reading the System metadata.”

“I swear this entire universe is a prank.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Izzy said.

“I would. I absolutely would.” He raised his hands to the fake sky. “WHERE’S THE HIDDEN CAMERA, YOU SADISTIC COSMIC GAME SHOW HOST?”

The fog chose not to answer and Connor just stood there, looking like a wannabe villain with a tragic back story.

Izzy mimed reaching out and patting his shoulder. Her avatar was too far away to touch him even if she’d tried, but she had a good eye for framing. The Sprite’s expression was tender, in the same way a used-car salesman’s might be during a particularly moving finance pitch.

“On the upside,” she said, “You’ve accumulated a ludicrous amount of locked XP and your body is now a powder keg of unallocated System potential. Remember that. Something big is going to happen. Any second. Any second now.”

“Great,” Connor snapped. “Because I came here for personal growth, obviously. Not to save Jaz. Not to help someone I dragged into this bullshit survive a catastrophic injury!”

The volume cracked in his voice. Izzy tilted her head, not smiling now.

“I mean…” He gestured helplessly around the fogged expanse of stone and collapsed archways. “I can now clear this place blindfolded. But if the drop rate’s tied to blowing up the bloody core, and that drop rate is less than one percent—”

“Zero-point-six.”

“Oh, sorry. Zero-point-six,” he said. “Well, that makes it so much better. God forbid I exaggerate the margin of utter futility.”

“There will be other Dungeons you can clear,” Izzy said after a pause.

“And you think that will help?”

She gave a tiny shrug, adjusting the spectacles she’d conjured when she’d decided her new persona was ‘dishevelled maths teacher who secretly runs a cult’.

“I’m just saying, Mr Connor, if you wanted to, statistically, improve your odds, multiple attempts across multiple low-level instances could…”

“But each will have the same fractional chance, right? And that still relies on me finding them. Let alone clearing them. Let alone them being accessible. Let alone not defended. And how many baby Dungeons do you think are lying around untouched, Izzy?”

Her silence answered that for him.

“Right,” he said. “Because as you keep telling me, this Dungeon is easy mode. And I still feel like I’ve been chewing sand for three days.”

“I must admit, Mr Connor, even with the time dilation, the odds of locating a Sprite via this method are… not encouraging.”

“You don’t say!”

“I mean statistically possible, yes. But collecting Sprites this way is obviously intended to be very rarely done.”

He closed his eyes, letting the silence stretch. The faint, ambient hum of the Dungeon was louder now, like the whole place was breathing around him. Waiting for his decision.

“Then I have to dispel it, won’t I?,” he said. ”I have to destroy the core and cross my fingers. It’s the only shot Jaz’s got. And my luck is so in right now.”

Without waiting for Izzy’s answer, he walked forward until the pedestal came into view and, atop it, sat the Core.

It still wasn’t very much to look at. The veins of black in the crystal sphere threaded out from its surface and spidered into the pedestal. He took a moment wondering why it was giving off such a sense of wrongness.

WARNING!

YOU HAVE DISCOVERED: Dungeon Core

NOTE: Destroying this object will collapse the Dungeon permanently.

REMAINING MONSTERS: 0

RISK: Minimal

He nodded. His hand hovered over the Core. Then he said, “Izzy.”

“Yes, Mr Connor?”

“If this works and we actually end up with a Sprite, it’s vitally important that you don’t do a dance. I don’t want you to say you always knew this would work out for the best. And no, absolutely no, confetti cannon.”

“I would never.”

“0.6% chance of this not being a wash. Here we go.”

Connor took the Core in his hands and then crushed it against the pedestal.