The golem took a lumbering step towards me, its posture aggressive.
Suddenly, a memory cropped up. Invasive. Direct.
The world around me faded to be replaced by the inside of a modern warehouse. Dozens of colorful obstacles lay scattered across the huge, empty concrete floor. My colleagues and I stood in a line, some holding clipboards, others cameras, but all staring enraptured by the four-foot-nine-inch humanoid robot walking among the obstacles.
Atlas.
My beautiful creation had no wires connecting him to power or the servers. This was the first presentation on downgraded hardware. A robot burning five kilowatts continuous draw wasn’t sustainable to investors, so our team had been working nonstop to reduce that number all the way down to a measly 800 watts, and we could go lower. Much lower.
Atlas approached a set of plywood stairs. Their surface had been painted a bright red with white accents to help identify them in the image processing software. Without missing a beat, servos whirred in its torso and hip. The internal simulation processed the information streaming in from the LIDAR sensors in real-time as the right leg lifted and smoothly set down on the stair. Before the leg was fully set down, the left ankle whirred, lifting Atlas to transition up the stairs smoothly.
Wide smiles broke out around me, mirroring my own. Atlas was growing so fast ever since I managed to convince Steven that we should diversify beyond Optimal Control Theory. The technology had its place, and Atlas wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t begun with it, but model-based control systems were more adaptive and capable of handling the high dimensionality of the problem.
Atlas crested the stairs, standing heroically before he froze for a solid second. My smile shriveled as I suppressed a sigh. With robotic precision, Atlas crouched, jittering wildly as the preprogrammed routine took over. With a massive buzz, the VFD overloaded dozens of motors and launched the robot into the air. Eighty kilos of steel, plastic, and silicon flipped through the air, then landed with a creak of stressed joints at the bottom of the stairs.
A cheer broke up behind me, and this time, I did sigh.
“What an impressive display!”
I turned, smiling wanly at the huge military man standing at the ready beside me. He had three silver stars on his jacket, positioned in a row, with the center of the stars aligned vertically. He was important, not that it helped me remember his name.
“Yes, thank you. Our team has been working tirelessly to push the boundaries of robotics research and innovation. Thanks to your sponsorship, we can strive for even greater achievements,” I said, the words tasting bitter in my mouth. This slack-jawed idiot was the reason we'd wasted the last three weeks simulating flips instead of advancing the real-time model.
The general nodded regally as if he were wise. Preposterous. His beady eyes locked on the rest of Atlas’ performance. The instant my creation had landed, its movement fell back to the smooth organic motion that only my codebase could reproduce. Neither the audience, nor the general for that matter, seemed to notice, but I did.
Atlas straightened to his full height and rolled his shoulders. Then he turned to us and started walking. That wasn’t right. He should have walked to the balance beam next. Our group watched the robot approach, eerily frozen. Atlas broke into a jog, making an ungodly racket as its shock absorbers went rigid.
My frown deepened. That shouldn’t happen either. Was it some kind of hardware failure or...
The scene melted, and the rock golem slammed a fist directly into my jaw.
My head snapped back, and pain whited out my vision. A muffled groan sneaked by my broken lips as I took two steps back before tripping and slamming into the white ground.
Health:11/17
I gasped, arching my back in pain as a flood of adrenaline reset my frazzled thoughts. What had happened? Why had it happened? What was that place? And...what was Atlas? The memories felt so alien. So,...not mine. I didn’t even know anything about robots.
Or did I?
I shook myself, struggling to refocus as I suddenly understood Optimal Control Theory. How a machine could find the best action to take in order to maximize an objective function of the environment. I understood what an objective function was. I understood while simultaneously never remembering ever hearing those two words in conversation. I tried my hardest to dull the thoughts, but every time I shoved the previous thought down, a new one manifested out of nothing to stab into my psyche. A headache pounded as Markov chains, Pontryagin's Maximum Principle formulas, and so much more unfamiliar jargon stabbed through my temple. I tried to focus on the battle. I really did.
I failed.
Health:5/17
I ached. The world spun. I was looking up now, and was the sky red? That...was new.
Health:0/17
Blackness.
I floated in a familiar void. It was the same environment I had been taken to the first time I had completed the chunk objectives. Deep in my chest, I noticed the system making changes. The world updating.
It was calming. In this strange place, my head felt normal. Solid. As if it wasn’t going to split down the center any second. I considered briefly trying to think but scrapped the idea. Remembering was dangerous. Delving too deep would leave me a vegetable.
Instead, I focused on the now. My university training had taught me all I needed. Mindfulness Theory would help me here. Focus on the now instead of the future or the past to best get things done. That was what Jon Kabat-Zinn had—. I halted the train of thought before I accidentally delved too deep.
Focus on the now.
The world flickered into existence. Soft grass had replaced the ceramic white of the rolling terrain, but other than that, little had changed.
Exactly, I nodded. Ignore everything else and take care of the present. The two lamps stashed in the roots of the oak tree were gone, meaning that the entire world reset when I died. That was good to know, though next time, I wouldn't hold on to lamps if there was a risk of death.
Despite my resolve, I spent fifteen minutes grinding the rat until I gained another attack and health level before jogging to the mining camp. Scanning the area revealed numerous tiny changes. The rocks had moved slightly, but the biggest change was that the rock golem wasn’t hidden as an ore rock anymore. It patrolled the mine freely.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as I counted slowly to ten. When I opened them, I was ready.
A steady jog took me to the smithy shack, and I quickly picked up the small hammer sitting on the anvil. Then, I walked to the mining camp and stepped within five tiles of the rock golem. It instantly aggressed toward me. I strafed, letting it get closer until it attacked. Instantly, I jumped to the side, dodging the heavy strike and retaliating as hard as I could with the smithing hammer.
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My high attack showed its presence. A huge detonation of force smashed into the golem’s shoulder. Cracks propagated over its frame as it staggered from the heavy blow. Before it could gain its bearings, I hit it again, feeling the shock in my forearm as I drove the monster to its knees.
Quick as a whip, its arm snapped out and smashed into my shin. I staggered, nearly losing my balance but drowning out the pain with a hefty adrenaline spike. Its body was falling apart before me, with tiny stones crumbling off the main body with every passing second. I reared up and, with one final strike, obliterated the creature's head.
It froze for exactly one second, exactly like Atlas had down just before flipping, then melted into a gooey pile of clear, evaporating gel.
I panted, dropping to the ground to nurse my bruised shin. The system said the rock golem was combat level 7. Assuming that the calculation was identical between me and it, I could theoretically extrapolate its stats from that single data point.
I could clearly identify a pattern if I recalled all the times I had gained a combat level. Gaining an attack or health level prior to the last reset didn’t always increase combat level, but it sometimes did. Attack more commonly increased combat than health at one in three levels, while health was one in four. This was consistent with averaging health, attack, and defense with a lower weighting toward health. After the reset, my combat level decreased by three, which would make sense if recovery was considered a combat stat and had been added to the equation.
Without data points for when recovery or defense increased in level, I didn't quite know the exact formula, but I did have enough to extrapolate the rough stats of the rock golem. Given its damage, I could assume its attack was raised at least partially, but the fact that it had survived three solid hits meant that its health was huge. That or it had significant defense. I couldn’t determine exact numbers, but could define an upper bound. No level seven creature could have more than 39 health or 29 attack. That was at the extreme end, and it was far more likely that the rock golems stats hovered somewhere around its combat level. In other words, if my combat level was higher than the monster's, I was favored to win.
I shook my head, clearing the odd train of thought, then checked my health. It had only dropped three points and wasn’t regenerating naturally. I idly wondered what the recovery skill did if it didn’t recover health. At least the system had nerfed the rock golem's damage in the reset.
Speaking of, I kicked the last of the monster gel aside and picked up a small rock that the golem had dropped. It was lined in copper-colored veins just like the ore rock several tiles to my side. I picked it up and backed out of the mining camp before the rock golem could respawn.
I took the ore to the smithy and started up the forge with the tinderbox. After I had the fire burning hot, I placed the ore into the furnace. A second passed. Then another. Then the ore blinked, and a perfect copper ingot lay in the flame. I stopped pumping the bellows and let the flame cool for a couple of minutes. Gingerly, I knocked the ingot out of the forge with the hammer.
It clattered to the ground. To my shock, it was cool to the touch, so I picked it up as I tried to figure out what to do next. By video game logic, I should have melted the ore into a liquid and poured it into a mold or beat the ingot with a hammer on the anvil until something happened.
With no molds handy, I took the cool ingot to the anvil and started hitting it. Cold forging was a thing, but not with copper. If I were in the real world, I would have needed tongs to heat up the ingot before hammering away. Fortunately, this was a video game world, and after three solid strikes, I felt the system awaken in my core.
There was only one item on the list: an orange knife. However, if I focused more, I noticed I could create an axe and even a pick axe at levels 3 and 5, respectively. I would need to gain levels for that, though, and to do that, I would need to craft the knife in the interim.
I crafted the copper knife and wielded it as I went back to the mining camp. The respawn time for the golem was longer than the rats, at several minutes instead of only one, but I was patient. The golem respawned, and I took care of it as I had before. I managed to avoid getting hit by being more careful this time around. The knife wasn’t any more or less effective than the smithing hammer, which I found surprising. I would think a hammer would be strong against rock-type enemies, but I supposed that feature wasn’t implemented yet.
The golem dropped another copper ore, and I smithed it into another dagger. I got more experience but no level-up, so I repeated the process.
While I was waiting for the copper golem to respawn, I named all the things I hadn’t yet. The hammer, anvil, furnace, and rock golem all gave me a lamp, but when I named the ingot a copper ingot, it automatically named all related items. My knife became a copper knife, and the ore became copper ore. All in, I acquired five new experience lamps that I decided to put into defense.
...
Investing lamps into a level 1 skill was horribly inefficient, but there didn’t seem to be another good way to train the stat. With my defense at level two, I decided to return to the rat to see what the difference would be. When I arrived, I noticed something surprising.
The rat was no longer aggressive. The only thing I could think of was the rat was now ten combat levels below me. That would be nice later on because it meant once I was level 17, the rock golem would leave me alone to mine the copper rocks in peace.
I attacked the rat anyway, and it didn’t run as I kind of expected it to. I let it bite me, and I instantly noticed a difference. With two defense, its bites dimpled my skin as often as they pierced through. Once I got five or ten defense there was a chance the rat wouldn’t even be able to damage me at all.
Satisfied with the test, I returned to grinding the rock golem. After the third knife, I gained a level and was able to smith a copper sword. Hefting the weapon propagated a pleasant ripple through my status.
Attack:30/27
I guess I finally figured out why two numbers were displayed in the status sheet. The first number was the actual number used in calculations, while the second was the level. Items or other stat effects could increase the actual stat, with a copper sword increasing attack by 3. It made me wonder if there was a hammer I could make that would boost my smithing level.
Three more attack levels didn’t make a huge difference since I was already two-shotting the creature, but the extra reach of the longer sword certainly made fighting easier. Every once in a while, the rock golem would drop some silvery ore instead of copper. I set that aside as I couldn’t smith it in the furnace no matter what I tried.
At seven total copper items, I hit level three and crafted a copper axe. I decided to take a break then because I had taken a few more blows and was at risk of dying again.
I took my axe to the nearest tree and hit it a few times. After several blows, a small stack of logs appeared at my feet. I grinned ruefully at the silly representation of woodcutting but then shrugged and knelt down to light the wood. It caught after the fifth cascade of sparks from the tinderbox, and my stats changed unexpectedly.
Recovery:4/1
“Hmm,” I hummed to myself, stepping away from the flame on a hunch. After I had gone five tiles away, my recovery returned to 1 out of 1. Stepping back within 5 tiles of the fire increased it to 4/1 once more.
I took note of the change, then gently placed some rat meat on the flame. Three seconds passed, and the meat suddenly sizzled and turned golden brown. I snatched it out of the flame lest it burn and didn’t even care as it sizzled my fingers.
“Cooked meat!” I crowed, doing a little dance as several notifications buzzed in my vision.
I shoved the lamp gained from naming the new item into defense and then scarfed down the meat. There wasn’t even any ash on the meat.
Health:4/17 → 7/17
Cooked rat meat heals three points of health, I nodded to myself. Of course, the system no longer showed me decimals, so it was possible — likely even — that my recovery stat was multiplying the amount of healing by some constant.
I grinned, finally feeling like my feet were firmly underneath me. I returned to the rat and killed a bunch for their meat. I let the last rat chew on my leg as I munched on the cooked meat beside a new fire. Once I got to level 4 recovery, I noticed the rat meat started healing me for 4 points of health. I grinned at that and let the rat chew on me some more until I gained one more level.
I then went to the rock golem and kept grinding kills until I had hit level 5 smithing. On the fifteenth golem, I gained an attack level. I returned to forge after that and used my newly gained level to smith myself a copper pickaxe that I instantly took to the mine and hit the copper rock. After three hard blows, a copper ore materialized at my feet.
Perfect. Now, I had all the tools I needed to complete this chunk.
Combat level:11 Health:20/20 Attack:30/27 Defense:2/2 Recovery:8/5 Woodcutting:2/2 Firemaking:3/3 Crafting:1/1 Mining:2/2 Smithing:5/5 Cooking:2/2