The countdown ticked closer and closer to the final value of zero. At the same time, Lewis approached the rock formation, feeling its texture with his fingers.
“What are you doing?” Asked the mini-AIDE with him.
“Try to get a feel of my grab,” answered the boy, still touching the rocks in an almost trance-like state. “After all, if I can’t actually climb, everything would be meaningless anyway.”
It was one of the faults that Lewis could detect when he remembered the rulings from Yusei. “Climbing isn’t affected by your physical condition” doesn’t necessarily mean “you can immediately climb without knowing how to actually climb” after all. However, with him feeling the rocks around, the robot had also noticed another potentially deadly flaw, but to their advantage:
“What time is the countdown now?”
“Huh?” Lewis blurted out, flicking his other hand to the holographic screen that appeared according to his need. “Like, a minute left?”
“Okay, then answer me this: what’s stopping you from climbing now?”
“What do you mean ‘what’… Oh.” The boy hit the realization. He was touching the rocky ledge just fine. The timer still went on without a hitch. Meaning that right now, he could cheat the clock by climbing.
“Isn’t this cheating?” but that wasn’t Lewis’s way of doing things.
“Huh? Of course, it’s cheating,” answered the mini-AIDE. “But since when is cheating a bad thing?”
“Huh?” This time it was Lewis who was sent to confusion. Never did the boy expect a robot, and not just any robot, the prison’s healthcare robot of all things to suggest cheating to its inmate.
“Don’t you understand?” The AI sounded. “In the Course, there is no ‘fair fight’. The only way to win is by exploiting the rules that the wardens had set up to grab onto victory. Even the ones who managed to escape used that strategy.”
Lewis could understand the logic behind that. No, he could even imagine it perfectly. In a world without law and order, the only way to survive was to adapt to it. Outwit the horrible conditions, twisting yourself to escape the rules, that was the way to survival. And to escape this place, when it was still filled with outlaws from every corner of the world… there was no wonder that the two of them had to resort to that tactic.
However, this time, it was different.
“I’m not them,” Lewis shook his head. “I’ll show it to you by winning this game, fair and square.”
It was a bold claim coming from a boy that was scared to death just mere minutes ago against his opponent. And if he had known that the game was already rigged horribly in his favor, he wouldn’t have said it so confidently from the start.
Nonetheless, the clock was still ticking down… and finally, the fated time arrived.
“Game, Start!” Following the number turning to zero, a prerecorded voice of the original AIDE sounded from the screen, prompting the boy to immediately start his race.
“Hup!” Lewis jumped forward, tightly grabbing hold of the ledge. As he turned his gaze upward, the boy spotted a single ledge sticking out of the formation – his first cue to the path of victory he perceived.
Climbing is only a small part of this game, thought the boy. In reality, this is an optimization problem. I have to pick either the short and straight path, but without the ability to recover, or the long and zigzag path while always being full of health.
And he was indeed correct. The temptation of recovering your lost stamina and advancing in a slow and steady pace or betting it all on going straight and reaching the summit before you fall – that was the name of the game. But what if that wasn’t the case?
It might have been the intended way to play the game, but there was a glaring error that could have been used.
“Hah!”
With a mighty scream, the boy put all of this strength into his upper body… and flung himself forward.
The existence of the variable “jumping” – that was Lewis’s true answer, and his major bet for the win. Jumping – an act that cost the most stamina bar, was in fact his winning ticket at the game. It was a simple thought process: if climbing took a small amount of stamina, while “jumping”, or in this case, leaping from rock formation to rock formation with only your upper body strength, cost much more, what kind of distance would be considered “fair” for a jump to cover?
The same, if not a bit less, as the distance between the protruding rock formations, of course.
Lewis bet on that intuition. And his intuition proved to be correct.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
With a single “jump”, he had propelled himself from the bottom of the mountain right to the platform awaiting his arrival. As the boy finished his final steps to the first rest stop, he glanced towards the depleting stamina bar next to him.
That one took about a third… And it seems like the recovery rate looks about to be one percent per second…
He needed to do the same thing seven times. Meaning that it would take about 5 minutes at best for Lewis to climb to the top. A smile formed on his face as he clutched his hands. He knew that victory was his.
Of course, victory was always his from the start, since the Yusei clone had already disappeared as soon as the five-minute timer was up.
Back to the present.
As Yusei logged into the virtual world, the mountain before him had already been scaled on the other side, shown by the sign of the “victory” announcement floating in the air.
“That was a lot faster than expected…” mumbled the young man. “Has he won already?”
Eyeing the mountain, Yusei started climbing. And soon enough, the limitations of the game rules caught up to him.
“Why did they design this stupid game in the first place…” the young man complained as he was almost tired after just a few jumps already. However, he was still on track – the fact that Yusei was jumping from platform to platform the same way as Lewis did showed that the boy’s intuition was indeed correct.
However, what would happen if two people went on the same path? Would they end up in a draw?
That would, of course, be impossible, since the game had to have a winner and a loser. And as such, even if Lewis had figured out the path to winning the game, his method was still far from being entirely accurate.
Instead of resting himself after every jump, Yusei chose to blitz through without regard to his own stamina. Only when the young man was out of stamina did he reluctantly take a break, and even then, only barely enough to make another jump. This was the key difference between Lewis and Yusei – the will to attempt a gambit that would result in a loss with a single mistake.
And as such, he had only taken half the time as the boy to get to the same spot – just shy over two minutes, instead of the full five.
Of course, the result still didn’t change, and greeting him was Lewis’s triumphant, mixed with a bit of smug, grin:
“Heh, what took you so long? I’ve been here for hours.”
“… Congratulations, you’ve won your first challenge of the Course,” Yusei tried his best to fake a grumpy expression, holding back the smile that was waiting to escape. “You can log out now and return to your cell, but mark my words: this is only the beginning.”
“I’d like to see you try,” the drug of victory was getting to Lewis’s head, erasing all of his fear towards the man that once physically beat him, and so, Lewis only responded with a confident smile before logging out of the system. “I’ll win the next one too.”
As soon as he returned to the real world, the boy rushed off to the infirmary right in an instant.
“AIDE! Guess what, I won! Let’s get some more training…”
Upon entering the familiar white room, the boy stood agape in surprise. It was empty, without a single sign of the robot in his sight.
Meanwhile, back in the virtual world, Yusei hadn’t logged out just yet. Still standing on the mountaintop with his arms crossed, the young man called out to seemingly nowhere:
“Well? The kid is out already, what are you waiting for?”
Slowly flying out of the bushes on the mountaintop was a metallic sphere body of a familiar AI.
“Yusei Kotaro,” sounded AIDE. “Capturing innocent civilians, initiating the once shut-down Course, deliberately faking your loss… no, it couldn’t count as a loss, you weren’t even here most of the time. What are you up to?”
“What am I up to… A fascinating question,” Yusei, unfazed by the sudden inquiry, chuckled. “Do you honestly think that a mere shadow can help to such thing as free reign?”
“Ah, yes, the age-old excuse of you old-timer shinobis to dodge my question,” the robot scoffed. “Must be really nice of you to take advantage of your so-called allegiance, huh?”
“I only learned from the best,” Yusei still grinned in front of the accusation. “After all, who would have thought that mere artificial intelligence can ponder such grand detail of things?”
“… This is why you don’t have friends.”
“I have friends,” Yusei, this time, finally had his mask torn off as the young man scoffed.
“No, your fellow ninjas don’t count, shut-in. I can’t even believe you managed to climb to the seat of Student Council President in your school.”
“How did… oh, right, you probably heard it from Lewis.” Yusei’s brows furrowed before relaxing once more, as the young man regained his composure and continued with a nonchalant voice. “So, you know what I’m up to? That depends; which side are you on?”
“Side? What do you…”
“I mean regarding the World President’s will.” Gone were the smile and joking attitude, Yusei’s face grew to a freezing cold as he continued. “If you’re the so-called closest AI to human evolution, made by the greatest mind in the world, then I’m sure you must have developed a kind of free-will on your own… or am I wrong, and you remain a puppet whose only use is serving in this facility?”
“I’ll have you know, insulting any of my functions means insulting my creator,” the robot, also growing serious by the second, flashed its red eye repeatedly as if trying to intimidate the opposition with its mechanical bloodlust. “And I’ll have no one insulting my creator, not even the World President himself, let alone his mere lapdogs.”
Before the threat, however, Yusei only chuckled, ridding himself of any tension he might have built up. “Then I’d take the answer as a ‘yes’. Well, your opinion?”
“This whole place is bullshit, of course,” answered the robot without a shred of hesitation. “Ther guy built the prison with the intention of housing dangerous criminals, locked up a bunch of nobodies instead for years, all of a sudden letting them go without any repercussion, and now doing it all over again? That’s the worst case of a nutjob I’ve seen in my service years, and I’ve served this place a damn long time.”
As if waiting for this answer, Yusei formed a smile on his face. “Well, there’s something that you’re wrong here. My bringing of Lewis to this facility…who said it was the World President’s idea?”
“Then… you don’t mean…” It wasn’t hard for AIDE to put together the pieces of information it managed to acquire.
“Remember this, healthcare robot: you and I, we serve the same Lord. I can only tell you that much right now, but I’ll leave Lewis’s training to your capable hands.”
Before AIDE could absorb the answer, Yusei had already issued a logout command, and soon enough, his virtual body dissipated into bits of data, leaving the robot alone pondering its next move.