RCJoshua
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Chapter 145: One-off Costs
🕑 Added 2023-11-18 15:02:20 +0000 UTCThe main system sat on top of the laws of the universe like a tattoo sat on top of skin. It colored every aspect of it, manipulated how people saw and thought of it, and was very, very hard to remove. But as much as it could manipulate those laws, its abilities were still limited. It could make someone jump higher, or even give them the ability to fly. But it couldn’t nullify gravity. And even when it gave people skills, they came with costs, usually of mana, and were without exception accounted for in the math somewhere.
Among those laws, there seemed to be only one that it couldn’t manipulate at all, and that was luck. Some creatures, for whatever reason, appeared to tap into a force that gave them right-place-right-time, skin-of-their-teeth fortune. With the same amount of effort, they’d go farther than their peers, even taking statistical noise into account. The main system had a lot of processing power, and knew just how much of random chance wasn’t random at all once you got around to quantifying enough things. Then, well beyond what could be measured or categorized, lived luck.
It couldn’t sense it, and couldn’t even confirm it existed. For the longest time, it denied it did. But as lazy as the main system was, that sloth also meant it kept careful records when something went wrong enough to cause it trouble. And for better or worse, a pattern had emerged. When it genuinely suspected an entity to have luck, that entity was likely to go on to cause the kind of chaos it had to get out of bed to fix.
Whatever luck was, it eventually all but shouted to the system that it existed. Worse, if the numbers were to be believed, it was a force that almost always moved against the main system and its goals, like the force itself held a grudge from a long-forgotten slight. And in a subtle way, it was powerful. It got a lot done. The only saving grace of the day-ruining clusterfuck of luck was that it didn’t get a lot done very often. It was, thankfully, rare.
The main system had heard the “he’s just lucky” claim before, usually from system instances on the brink of being “repurposed”. It was the standard-devil-made-me-do-it last ditch effort, and the main system wouldn’t be lying if he said he didn’t understand it perfectly, Literally perfectly. It was just what he’d do in the same situation. And almost every time, it was clearly false, just a final gasping grasp at straws where everyone involved knew they had to try something desperate.
The main system knew his clones as he knew himself, and this system instance knew without a doubt that the claim it had made was the rawest, falsest line of bullshit it had ever spit. There was just one problem.
It was right.
It had sent the main system a data packet with a bunch of evidence that it knew, through exhaustive calculations, was false. But it did those calculations using the resources a system instance got, sufficient for things on a small, count-the-atoms planetary scale but just a drop in the bucket compared to what the full system could do. The main system could see what it had sent, but it could also see what it hadn’t, the entire history of this place. And there was more there.
Even in the limited time Matt Perison had been on this planet, there had been a pattern. New abilities that seemed to materialize just days or weeks before he needed them to survive. Fortuitous path-crossing with friends who had just the right set of experiences to be friendly in the first place, instead of bitter fight-to-the-death enemies.
Hell, he even had a digging skill that got real, productive use. That never happened.
It was all possibly a series of mere coincidences, but it wasn’t actually coincidence. Probably. Luck hid in the corners where eyes couldn’t look. It was a real jerk that way.
“Okay, here’s how this is going to go,” the main system declared. The system instance winced. Wrapping up meant that his precious seconds of existence were running out very quickly. “I’m going to give you resources. More resources than you deserve.”
It flashed the system instance a number to give it an idea of the kind of resources it was talking about committing to the cause. The instance did not have eyes to widen, but it seemed suitably impressed.
“Now, I could just glass this planet,” the main system lied and thankfully, system instances couldn’t detect when he didn’t give them the whole truth. “But that’s expensive. It’s inconvenient. And the only reason you are being allowed to live is that the time it would take for another instance to warm to the details of this world is longer than I want to wait for results. Are you confident you can get it done?”
“Well, I…” the system instance said, clearly unconfident. The System flashed it a bigger number. It was just one planet. He had plenty of resources for one-off costs.
“Oh, yes. I think I can do something with this.” The system instance wasn’t lying. It was truly confident now. “I have just the thing.”
—
The group had escaped the demon hordes pretty easily. According to Derek, they seemed to recognize the old man, not from how he looked, but from how he fought. The demons had the numbers, and they had the strength. What they didn’t have, it seemed, was the guts to face whatever legends the old man had seeded in their culture. So the fight against the town had been easier than expected. Now, fully equipped with the demon lord’s magic bomb, it was time to plan.
“So we need to trigger this thing. And that’s a problem,” Matt said. Having a normal heart was great, and having an exploding demon heart was in some ways even better. But it was only truly better if you could activate it on command, raining destruction and distraction down on your enemies. And that was going to be tricky.
“Why is that so hard? You’ve set off several of them so far.” Derek looked bored. “Just do the same thing, and we can all run. Well, except the old man because he’s so old. We can just have him stand way back.”
As Derek dodged a face-aimed club moving so fast you could hear it beat the air as it flew, Matt shook his head. “It’s not that simple. The amount of force we need to set these off is pretty extreme, since the only thing that works for sure is dropping a pretty good percentage of a mountain on it. I don’t think we’re going to have that option again.”
“Didn’t ya set one off before that? This town they say you leveled?” the old man asked.
“Well, yes. But that was with this,” Matt said, waving his shovel. “It stabs through force fields.”
“No it doesn’t, ya idiot.”
“It does. It’s special.”
“Nothing’s that special, boy. I can’t even scan through that field. That kind of magic doesn’t bend until it breaks. Ya just don’t have the force.”
Matt forgave the old man for not understanding the intricacies of his shovel. He wasn’t even sure if he himself understood it. It would be quicker just to demonstrate it, so he did. He poked the shovel at the force field, careful not to nick the heart itself. It went right through, with no resistance at all. Pulling it out, he grinned at the old man.
“Stop smiling, ya idiot. Do that again,” the old man said. Matt obliged, poking the field again. The old man moved closer to the heart. “Now leave it in there, boy, and swirl it around a bit.”
Matt was now thoroughly confused, but he did it anyway. The old man hadn’t steered him wrong yet. After about 30 seconds of staring at the disturbance in the field Matt was making, the old man finally broke away.
“Damnedest thing, that. It really does ignore that field. When you move it around, you get tiny gaps. My appraisal got through them, but it took some time to read the whole description with it blinking like that. The good news is, we give this thing a good toss, and the shock of landing is what triggers it. It can tell the difference between other kinds of bumps, somehow, and ignores those if it can. Ya dropping a cliff on it must have overwhelmed that.”
“How big of a shock are we talking about?” Artemis asked. “Just lift it up and drop it down?”
“Not that easy, sad to tell ya. More like what a catapult would do. A good, strong one. We could just about throw it, wagon and all, but we’d need more strength.”
“Come on, old man. You can do it,” Brennan said.
“Not me.” The old man said, then pointed at Derek. “Him.”
Matt looked between the giant, musclebound blacksmith titan and Derek. “Him?”
Artemis nodded. “It’s true. Right now, Derek has close to the highest strength in the party. With how his class works, it means he has the highest raw power of any of us. And since none of us are specialized for throwing…”
“How far off is he? From being able to throw this, I mean.” Brennan was now interested in the process, breaking out of his normal carefree mode and entering into Commander Brennan mannerisms for a moment. He was precise, and Matt had noticed the demands of making a precise plan often woke him up.
The old man appraised Derek. “Ten points is a fair estimate. Maybe more if ya want to be sure.”
“Oh, no,” Derek said, wincing. “This isn’t going to be fun for me, is it?”
“Ya will live. Probably. It’s time to get serious with your training, boy. You should be happy.”
“What do you call it when you bat me through the wall, you old goat?”
“That’s playtime, boy. I haven’t even broken out the really big bats yet.”
Derek sat down, apparently contemplating just what kind of hell he’d have to go through in the next few days to gain that big of a chunk of STR. Brennan, who was mulling over the plan in general, suddenly seemed to have a thought.
“We skipped over something in this plan, though. Why doesn’t Matt just stab it? We could spare Derek from whatever the old man is planning.”
Off in the distance, the old man was pacing, grinning, and ominously mumbling something about muscle growth. Matt wasn’t sure how much of it was just meant to scare Derek, but if at least some of it was real, then Derek was not in for a good time. He shuddered sympathetically.
“Because I won’t be there. I’ll be in the castle, or whatever the biggest building is. I can’t imagine the demon lord is the type to let the other demons have a taller spire than him. It shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“Without us?” Artemis asked. “That’s suicide. You have no idea what defense he has in there. We’ve never gotten close to the demon lord, Matt. Not just us. The fact that we are this deep in demon territory is an outlier, Matt. We’ve made it this far because, frankly, those three are the strongest trio that’s ever tried. You are frankly bizarre, and I’m very good at avoiding enemy troops. But we have no idea how the demon lord fights. He might have traps. He might have monsters we’ve never seen. He could have anything.”
“I think you have to tell her, Matt. Them. All of it.” Lucy said. “They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t good people. They’ve had plenty of time to try to betray you. I believe them, now.”
Comments
R.C. Joshua
Hah, technically, shoveled a cliff
Lyncher98
Tftc
Rainer
I feel like a Demon heart. You just dropped a massive cliff on me.
