Baseline Human Male
Archetype:
Deprived
Equipped Perks Level
Cold-Blooded Murder-Guy
You have an intuitive understanding of the vulnerabilities of Tier 1 enemies. Some features are still hidden.
1 Unequipped Perks
NaN Active Skills Level NaN 1 Passive Skills
Level
NaN
1
Afflictions
Hidden Effect: (531 Seconds)
I considered the wall of glowing text that overlaid my visual field. So this was what my Sensei had been trying to show me. It was beautiful. A harmony of understanding swept over me, the deeper truths of the universe unfolded like a sacred lotus and...and...I was kidding myself. As much as I tried to force it there was simply very little to go on.
Breaking it down into parts was barely better; ‘Baseline Human Male’ was fairly self-explanatory, even if the specification of ‘Human’ raised questions about alternatives.
Beyond that... Perks offered some kind of advantage? I’d received the ‘Perk’ from killing the creatures, the name even reflected the dark thoughts I’d foolishly entertained before I came to understand that everything I was experiencing was normal and good. How should I feel about my innermost thoughts being reflected in the naming of the Perk? That’s an invasion isn’t it? A transgression into my last and first sanctum? Eh, it’s probably fine. Nothing deeper to read into there.
I moved on to Skills, feeling oddly pressed against lingering on those thoughts, which came in two varieties. I had examples of neither. Moving on.
Finally, Afflicti—hmm what was I thinking about? Ahh yes I was just about to ask my Sensei to explain...to answer the question...to tell me the meaning of life. Yes, that felt right.
“Sensei...What is my purpose?”
He looked at me with a grave expression.
“My dear boy, you’re going to save the world,” he let the weight of those words settle, locking eyes with me as if to seek whatever depths might live within me, the hero’s mettle that would drive me onward, “...or die I suppose. That’s rather more likely. You have only managed one room after all. It’s just been such a long streak of failures, it’s exciting to have even a little success.”
“Not to worry sensei, I just know I can do it! After all, like you said, I am the Chosen One!”
Sensei had an expression which, if I didn’t know better, I would say looked rather like a mixture of exasperation and dismay. But of course, this was just my own feeble attempt to understand the nuances of his wise visage. I decided it must be some kind of cultural difference, and that the expression he was making must indicate supreme confidence, and it was only in my limited experience that it looked otherwise. Naturally, I attempted to mirror the confidence he was showing in me and arranged my features akin to his own. I pulled my face into what (if I didn’t know any better) could be described as a grimace, and began to roll my eyes energetically.
“What uh... whatcha doin’ there champ?”
“I’m practising my heroic expression!”
Then sensei said something under his breath that sounded like ‘too much pep... practically lobotomized with pep’ but of course couldn’t be. Finally, he hummed and everything went black for a while.
----------------------------------------
The voice and I regarded each other. Him with the faintly regretful expression of a mind controller who’s been caught out at their game, and me with the furious glare of the mind control-ee who’s finally free.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“I think we can both agree that wasn’t terribly productive hmm?” I said.
The voice at least had the decency to look somewhat chagrined. As much as his meddling with my mind infuriated and terrified me, I couldn’t exactly argue with the final outcome. My existential despair had ebbed to a low hum, like the sound of a refrigerator quietly working in the background. My despair fridge, always on but ignorable at least.
“Let’s tack the brass crap down okay? You tell me what’s going on, and I’ll avoid freaking out. Distribution of labour yeah?”
The voice gave me a puzzled look, only to shake his head and finally nod.
“May as well,” he tried to intone, but it came out more resigned than anything.
Then he spoke for a while, and I learned the nature of the world for which I had been created.
This was a pocket universe, a place out of time that had been manufactured for a single purpose: generating heroes. The ‘Voice’ was named Galathon the Great XVI, but he was only the imprint of the real Galathon, a sentient construct meant to keep the automatic functioning of the Dungeon slightly on rails. He was apparently bad at this.
“Now hold on,” Galathon interrupted, his eyebrows flexing spasmodically producing a faint wind upon my face, “I’m very good at this. Thousands of heroes have left this realm and gone on to perform great deeds!”
“Counterpoint!” I gestured vaguely at myself, and then more pointedly at the gore covered surroundings, the piles of viscera, the corpses—
“Fine! Fine! Yes, there have been... setbacks. The ‘deprived streak’ has a low baseline success rate—but you! You’re progress! Maybe the start of a local optima eh?” His accompanying eyebrow waggle attempted to throttle my attention, but nevertheless I retained focus.
“Local optima?” The horror of this place was slowly dawning on me, pieces of things Galathon had said swinging into my mind with sudden context. “This place runs on a genetic algorithm.”
“Yes! That’s exactly right! Clever lad. We learned the method from a hero summoned in the old way, it’s quite streamlined the process. No more fussy rituals to transport souls across dimensions! We just POP together a mixture of heroic traits, followed by a series of fitness tests and voila: Hero!”
“But there have been thousands of failed generations—you’ve killed thousands—without any gains. This process is monstrous!”
“Ahh well, omelettes need making!” Galathon said cheerily, “Hello egg!” he added with a wave.
I stared at him with hatred until he moved on. “In our defence, it’s usually much quicker. The fitness function might have been a wee bit stringent this time around, the dungeon has been a little...demanding.”
It’s demanding nature was evident on the walls all around me. But something still wasn’t adding up.
“What’s the ‘deprived’ archetype you keep mentioning?”
“Ooh yes, well, private joke, essentially you get nothing. No early advantages. The dungeon’s been pumping you out for well, it just seems like ages!”
“How could that possibly be a high fitness model? Shouldn’t some brave, tall, buff fellow in armour have come along a long time ago and minced the crew in here before going on and escaping this hell?”
"Yes! Exactly right, oh the strapping lads and lasses who usually appear! With grins that glint in the sun and a song on their lips!" Galathon lapsed into a silent reverie, clearly imagining charming youths going around being tall and handsome. "Yes, they're all dead."
"What?"
"The dungeon, well, it grew a touch temperamental. All the usual winners met their end in some trial or another. After a few thousand failures it started getting creative, trying to find 'pockets of utility' as it were. You have to understand the possible 'hero space' is vast and complex, so once the usual templates started to fail we started getting weird." I didn't appreciate the look he gave me with that word, a look ripe with an undeniable disappointment towards my evident lack.
“So all of this... is the dungeon hunting for an edge case?”
“Precisely! It has a sort of, low animal intelligence you know, quite ingenious design if I do say so. Unfortunately, it grew a touch frustrated with the repeat failures, and well,” he gestured helplessly at me once again, “But!” he exclaimed with a clap, “You could be the beginning of turning things around! Somewhere near your template could be a heroic island of stability, surrounded by failure on all sides! Maybe you’re even there!”
“Do you think that’s likely?”
“Oh no, vanishingly unlikely, but you know, maybe!”
I took a moment to process all of this. I was a test case, worse yet, I was a fringe test case after all of the low-hanging fruit had already been plucked and found wanting.
I had literally been created to die, so a dumb dungeon could interpret my data. A part of me yearned to protest, to simply keel over and die at the next available opportunity and ruin Galathon’s flash of hope. But that was only a single data point, the dungeon would simply write me off as a loss and move on quickly. No, I was going to do much more. I was going to create as much bad data as possible, and spoil the algorithm for generations.
“So what’s next?”
And like it had been waiting for my words, the dungeon walls started to morph before my eyes, consuming the viscera around us even as the stone began bubbling up my legs like an excited puppy.
Galathon’s eyebrows danced in excitement, “You begin your trials!”
I stood still as the cool stone covered by body, and then, just before the liquid rock enveloped me, I heard: “Cut the crap, Down to brass tacks! Of course! His idiom superstructure must be utterly—”