It had been a good plan.

Not, perhaps, a great plan. She hadn’t had one of those since this whole integration thing had started. But it was a decent, unspectacular one. Solid. The sort of plan that Jason Statham would play in a movie. Nothing earth-shattering, but it would get the job done without anyone feeling too dirty in the morning.

The plan had three major steps.

Step One: Hide in the bandstand at the bottom of this hill. Which she had managed to do; even before the screaming had started. Good. Sound start. When about to come under attack by people significantly tougher than you, you leg it to a nice, safe, defensible position. She had located a convenient place to shelter and was all set to weather whatever storm was approaching. Well done, Lorelei. Spot on. No notes.

Step Two: If you’re feeling punchy, use your ability at covert range attacks to snipe at the attackers from cover. Okay. So, step two was a little more off-brand, but it’s not easy to watch the wholesale slaughter of people who aren’t really able to defend themselves. The way she figured it, it shouldn’t hurt too much to try to load up some negative debuffs on the attackers using whenever it was off cooldown. She just needed to make sure they didn’t notice her and come exploring.

Unfortunately, Step Three was where the shitshow had begun.

For whatever reason, she was five in and just couldn’t seem to trigger a positive result. On the plus side, it wasn’t that the negative results were too terrible for once. Only one of them - It’s all in the wrist – caused her any real immediate issue, and she had enough Mana left over to use fairly liberally to repair the strange crab claws that had replaced both of her hands.

But that wasn’t the point. Lorelei understood that it wasn’t all upside having a chance-based Class, but it seemed pretty unlikely that she’d just keep coming up negative. Apropos of nothing, she was reminded of the opening of ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’ – Tim Roth has never looked hotter – where there were ninety-two coin tosses with the same result in a row. “A weaker woman might be moved to re-examine her faith, if in nothing else at least in the law of probability,” she misquoted. Going for another throw.

Somewhat inevitably, though, it was her sixth failure in a row that drew the attention of one of the fuckers who had broken into the gardens. The shady-looking one who was being extremely liberal with the old stabby-stabby action. Lorelei swore, ignoring that had just given the assassin walking towards her a +10% Strength buff. That she was able to let this slide had more to do with the fact that the dude was already so far above her in Level that a little stat polishing was hardly the biggest issue she was about to have than any great magnanimity on her behalf.

“Guide, what the fuck is going on? This is an insane run of negative results.”

*** Help Message ***

Normally, I’d tell you to ‘suck it up, buttercup’, but – looking at the logs - I think you might have a point. Bear with me for just a moment.

“Sure, no worries. The guy with the knives coming this way seems like the friendly sort. Chatty. I’m sure he’ll be happy to postpone whatever horrible future he has planned for me. Take your time.”

*

The System A.I. – or at least the very small, infinitesimally redundant sub-routine that was concerning itself with Fortuna’s Herald – once again parsed the code connected to Lorelei’s run of negative outcomes and frowned. Or would have done if it had anything as mundane as a face to show expressions.

For the sake of narrative fluency, however, let’s anthropomorphise things just for a bit.

Sure, it knew that things were not going as well as could have been hoped during this integration. As the A.I. in charge, a significant proportion of the blame there would fall on its shoulders. There was a defence to be made, of course. There was no way this planet was ready to be Systemised. The levels of violence witnessed were beyond any parameters it had ever heard of. Someone somewhere had dropped an almighty clanger, and heads, thoraxes, and mandibles would roll once the full extent of the snafu became apparent.

But that didn’t absolve it of all blame. There were decisions that it had made, and hotfixes it had introduced that – if not exactly made things worse - then certainly hadn’t resolved the ongoing skip fire. Almost from the very first moments, it had found itself on the back foot. Excitement at new powers was all well and good, but these guys had been something else. It did not think it had ever heard of such a speedy population reduction, and it was not sure the steps it had taken to halt this had quite worked out.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Take just this latest idea—to try to separate out the players of different levels to give those in the early stages of progression a chance not to be murdered horribly. A perfectly viable strategy, and one with a long history of such a tier-system being implemented on countless other planets. On any normal world, the beings would have settled down into their new zones and began to grind experience – farming or cultivating or chopping trees down and the like.

That was what civilised creatures in a Systemised universe did.

Here, however? There was none of it. Instead of stabilising things, the plan seemed to have increased the levels of chaos. The first thought of all the guys in the Red Zones was to seek out lower-tier zones and begin slaughtering everything they found. As approaches to levelling-up went, the A.I. could agree there was a certain bloody-minded focus to that. But as a worldwide response to being told to leave the little people alone? Fucking hell, these things were nasty.

Although, maybe, it had aggravated things a touch with all the emotional dampening . . .

But no one liked a Monday morning System A.I and the fact remained whatever was going on was so far removed from all training models that it was winging it on a second-by-second basis. However, when that was the case, it also gave others the opportunity to play up.

The A.I was already pretty brassed off that one of the Old Ones had slipped in under its radar. Again, there were mitigating circumstances for not noticing the arrival of that particular horror show, but now she was here, he felt he had made the best of a bad deal with her. Which made what was going on with her Herald particularly aggravating. Fortuna had only really asked one thing of it, ‘you do not deal to my Herald from a marked deck’. It could live with that. There was no way a luck-based Class wasn’t going to fuck itself up eventually. No need for it to do anything other than wait for that to happen.

However, from everything it could see in the logs, something – or someone – was trying to fiddle the books.

For example, the second of Lorelei’s should have realised a positive result, dealing some fairly sizeable psychic damage to one of the Level 9s, causing chaos in the Amber Zone. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, there had been six negative results in a row, and Fortuna’s Herald was about to get shish-kabobbed. This gave the A.I. two major problems.

Firstly, Fortuna was going to be pissed if her Herald was rubbed out on loaded dice. It spent a moment wondering if there was a chance she wouldn’t find out and then gave that sort of wishful thinking up sharpish. Secondly, though, was the more sizeable problem. It didn’t know who was playing games. Or, more importantly, why.

*

“Guide, I don’t want you to think I’m being needy or anything. But if you aren’t planning on helping me soon, I don’t think it’s going to matter . . .” Lorelei slowly backed around the edge of the bandstand away from Drax, who was very much in ‘playing with his food’ mode.

By his reckoning, he only needed to kill one more Level 4 to get the XP to crossover into his next level. That this particular Level 4 was separated from the crowd and appeared to have no offensive skills at all was going to be a good end to a pretty decent day.

He glanced back up the hill to see how the rest of his group was doing. From what he could tell, only Seraph was still actively hunting and killing. The others had retired to the strangely sexualised flower gates and were obviously preparing to leave. From their somewhat anxious expression, Drax assumed they’d caught wind of the rest of the Red Zone about to descend on this place, and they were not too anxious to get caught in the carnage. He figured he would be wise to join them.

Using his enhanced Speed, he blurred towards the young woman, twin knives raised, going for the kill.

In response, Lorelei threw herself over the edge of the bandstand’s rail, narrowly avoiding the attack, just as some words fluttered across her vision. She landed in a flowerbed – an unnecessarily thorn-filled one, she thought - and began running away, reading as she did.

*** Help Message ***

Okay, so – without getting into the whys and the wherefores – it appears there’s something a little odd going on with your last few rolls. I want to make clear for the benefit of anyone – say a wandering Old One - who may be observing what is occurring and taking a dim view of my handling of the situation that I’m on it. While I work out how to squash the bug, I am going to award you a very temporary buff. Don’t get used to this sort of treatment, sweet stuff.

There was a soft ding, and a notification appeared.

Congratulations! You are the beneficiary of an administrative fuck-up. For a limited time only, all will be resolved in your favour. There is also no cooldown to using this skill. You will need to dance like a legend, though. Please mention my speedy resolution process to your patron if she should bring it up.

*

Drax had seen many sights in the last few hours.

Most of them were truly horrific, although - for reasons he did not quite understand – none of them bothered him at all. After all, he had seen things and done things that he would have expected would have him monologing lyrically about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. However, no. He remained resolutely without PTSD. Or guilt.

Or really any feeling at all.

Nevertheless, for all his grim and bloody experiences of late, he still did not have a context for his latest victim to stop trying to escape, turn around and approach him doing a dance routine he recognised as being from Thriller. It took all sorts, he thought. And threw a dagger at her face.

Drax had just a moment of surprise that, rather than take the dancing woman in the eye, the knife struck a slate that, coincidentally, had fallen from the roof of the bandstand at just that second. The dagger clanged off the dislodged tile, reversing course in an entirely unlikely change of direction and sailed backwards to go straight through his throat. Killing him instantly.

Ignoring a rush of XP that left her quite dizzy, Lorelei turned to look up the hill where the rest of the group that had caused such destruction to the Amber Zone were waiting in a conveniently tightly packed circle.

“Oh. It’s so on,” she whispered.