It's hard to keep the tension up when you're basically doing the same thing over and over. The human mind is the master automator. Why code out a new solution to the same problem? Don't Repeat Yourself. In short, Bob was getting bored.
Six challengers had come in and six challengers had been met full in the face with a signature mud-stomp. The bodies were starting to pile up and get in the way of new challengers. After enough time, they'd probably need a truce so the beetles could collect up and clear out their dead.
"How many beetles are still out there?" Bob grumbled to himself.
At least a hundred, potentially hundreds. It's hard to judge numbers accurately beyond a certain point. The brain stops trying and decides the problem isn't worth solving. Bob was going to be here for a long time, certainly the rest of the evening and maybe all through the night and into the next day. He needed something to motivate him. Thank god this wasn't real life, but the game of life as presented by the system. Might as well pull up his status. Seeing experience gains in real time was exactly what would turn the repetitive grind into a progress marathon.
However, he was nominally in combat here. The only way he could mess things up would be to get overly distracted and let a beetle get the jump on him. Exploring stat gains or trawling through his several notifications was a shortcut to that very outcome. Everybody likes to think he's better at a thing than he actually is. But Bob knew he was a terrible multitasker. Easily distracted, easily absorbed, a master of forgetting exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. And was there ever a rabbit hole deeper than learning you had a new achievement or that your strength had suddenly hit above-average, etc... etc... Best to stick with the summary.
> Name: Robert Brown
>
> Race: Human (lesser)
>
> Class: Heaven's Fool
>
> Level: 8 (59%)
>
> Rank: E
>
> Wealth: 4,876,100 credits
Look at that boys. Look at that. Bob was level eight. He'd shot up two and half levels and it had only cost the beetles their whole civilization. Talk about a sweet deal. He kept his eyes on the level percentage as the next challenger sauntered through the opening. The courage of these animals is just unbelievable. What kind of selfish misconception lets you imagine you'll fare any differently from the six earlier challengers? The mistaken kind obviously. "Mud stomp!" Thud. The beetle dropped to the ground. Bob looked to his status.
> Level: 8 (59%)
"What? No experience gain. You're joking. That is unbelievable. That beetle was a level four. Don't tell me I've set up this whole experience farm and it's all for nothing? I couldn't take that. I'm supposed to sit here and kill these innocent creatures for hours and hours and I won't even get any experience. Is there a cap on how much experience you can get from a single monster species? Or is the level disparity just too great? "
"Mud stomp!" Thud. Another one bites the dust. "Level: 8 (59%)" No change. That rules out half-percentage experience gains and rounding errors. Bob was fuming.
"When I get my hands on you (completely immaterial and omnipresent) system, I'll, I'll..."
He made a series of threatening hand gestures that nobody saw, but which offered vast scope for interpretation. He stopped himself after thirty seconds and started mumbling into his beard fluff, "something doesn't add up; something smells fishy."
He'd had a piece of fish and chips stuck to his chin this whole time. How embarrassing. He picked it off and threw it to the dog. The sense of fishiness remained. You see, he'd never properly investigated experience division and assignment. Usually the answer was just kill more things, but 0% + 0% + 0% + 0% on and on and on was still a grand total of 0%. He could wipe the beetles off the face of the earth and he wouldn't be able to squeeze a single level out of their sea of corpses.
This was a problem beyond caveman Bob. He'd have to call in the big guns, the scientific crowd. Now where had he put his MQA hat? There it was. On the old noggin there Bob. Here we go:
Ahem, exhibit number one: the Case of the Winged Caterpillars (Raupenflieger Diaries).
Bob had shamelessly slaughtered countless Raupenfliegers. He did so unthinkingly in the way you might slap down a mosquito. Indeed, it so happened that he had killed a level one Raupenflieger while enjoying his pre-siege meal, and it had just so happened that he had had his status summary open at the time (he'd been fretting about shipping costs and lamenting the slow decline of his account balance). And, here it comes, he'd observed a 1% experience bonus. He remembered the fact distinctly, because he had been distinctly annoyed at just how little experience the creature gave him.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
In summary, killing a level one Raupenflieger at level six provided a single percent of experience. Bob had already killed dozens of Rapuenflieger at that point, so he should have long since hit any monster experience cap. And the level disparity was even greater than with the beetle duelists. That seemed to shoot down both his working theories. The problem demanded further investigation. He'd have to seek out root causes. Might as well begin at the beginning.
How did the system divvy up experience gains?
Badly, in Bob's humble opinion, but that wasn't really the question. There was one curious point Bob had noticed during his adventures, namely the system refused to divide experience among party members. Whoever dealt the death blow got the experience; contributions, assists, teamwork be damned. Credit for the system was a binary operation. Either you killed the thing or you didn't. It was a little like those first person shooters, whoever shaved off the final health point got the whole prize.
So the next question was: how did the system determine who had killed a monster? In a first person shooter every bullet, grenade, knife was linked to its owner. When a player died, the program could just check which object had depleted the final health point, look up its owner and increment their kill count. The system must have some similar way of determining ownership.
Let us reflect back on our experiences and see if we can't puzzle out any likely hypotheses. We'll take in on trust that murdering a creature with your own hands, strangling it or beating it to a pulp would count as you "killing" the creature. Mostly Bob just didn't want to have to test that point. He was already evil enough.
That brings us to exhibit number one, the Case of the Winged Caterpillars. The exhibit was relevant because Bob had not killed the Raupenfliegers directly. No, Bob had, whenever possible, never even touched the insects. Instead he'd delegated all such dirty work to his squasher-in-chief, Harry Mud. And yet, note, he'd still gotten experience each and every time. In other words, killing a monster via a companion object counted as killing the monster yourself.
Now on to exhibit number two: the Great Mud Wave (On a Rainy Night).
The mighty Bob had stood on the hillside and rained down a dark sea of death on his enemies. He'd brought down a mudslide on top of the swarm of worm-snakes and the system had recognized his achievements.
What had killed the creatures? Well either they'd been killed in the initial impact or they're suffocated under the weight of the mud. The common denominator was mud. And not just any mud, mud Bob had manipulated, which was to say mud he had infused with his own mana.
Aha, we seem to be on the right track. After all, Bob controlled Harry in the same way. There was some invisible connection that allowed him to affect Harry at a distance, but fundamentally Bob provided the mana for Harry to move and act. So if the final instrument of death was tied to your mana, the system seems to credit you as the killer. But, ladies and gentlemen, the plot thickens. I present to you exhibit number three.
Exhibit number three: the Monster of the Mud Labyrinth (Dancing with the Beetles).
Bob had bravely faced down a numerically superior force of beetle elites on the mud plains. He had dispatched them with a cunning tool of composite structure. With Harry Mud in the role of shaft and the system knife playing the blade, I give you the mud-scythe. Notice that the damage dealing component had not been the mana-infused cloak, but the knife. And yet going by his jump to level eight, Bob had been receiving experience.
Interesting. Bob wanted to say that since he'd been manipulating the knife with his mud cloak, which was mana-linked to himself, he'd still gotten the credit. But he was manipulating the beetle horn in exactly the same way and he was not getting experience.
Maybe the problem was organic vs inorganic substance. The beetle horn had once belonged to a living beetle. That beetle presumably had its own mana. What was the answer? In times like this we can only fall back on the motto of the Noble Society of MQA: test, test, magic.
Now there were no sharp stones in their little bunker, but that wasn't to say there were no stones. Bob dispatched the waiting challenger with a whispered mud-stomp and set about preparing a new weapon. Before we get into this, Bob wants to remind all viewers that the following experiment was done with no ill-will, with the best intentions and in the name of science. Because when the next challenger wandered into the funnel antechamber, navigated past the bodies of its companions and got within Bob's striking range, a quick, dignified death did not await it there.
Smack! A fist sized stone manipulated by Harry Mud laid into the poor beetle. The stone was blunt and the beetle's carapace was tougher than it looked. It wasn't like the movies where somebody trips, hits their head on a stone and dies instantly. No, it was more like the ancient biblical practice of stoning, where the whole community gathers together to pelt a poor sod to death with pebbles.
The affair took minutes. Bob was just lucky that the beetle had no way to actively resist him and could only lie there until it had been pestle-and-mortared to the ground. In the end, thank the system, it did finally die. And Bob gasping for breath (he'd been sitting down the whole time) checked his level percentage: "Level: 8 (59%)" .
Now that certainly violated his hypothesis. Bob was secretly a little glad. He didn't particularly enjoy the mud hammer and he was happy he wouldn't have to repeat the affair. So what made the knife different from a stone or the beetle's horn?
Bob scratched his head. He scratched his beard. He scratched his armpits. The answer eluded him. There was no discernible distinction that he could make out. The next best thing to knowing an answer is knowing where you might be able to find it. It was the system knife, wasn't it? You'd think it would be listed on the system store, wouldn't it? And said store might provide a description? Don't mind if I do.