"Trin" I ask as calmly as I can.

"Y-yeah?" She doesn't dare look me in the eyes, she knows what she did.

"I was promised adventure, I was promised ancient ruins and artifacts." I take a deep breath. "Now, tell me, what are you seeing here?"

"Well, there are ancient ruins to explore if you pay a small fee and also it's mostly already explored and there are artifacts that are all sold at a store because there's nothing left in the ruins. " she mumbles under her breath as if it would downplay the gravity of the situation.

"Don't go to the awesome cursed forest you said, the tunnel is more interesting you said."

"Listen! It wasn't that bad last time I went here! It used to be really dangerous and everyone was afraid of going here!" she looks around, as if she's also rather disappointed with the lack of adventure this place presents. "How was I supposed to know they were going to turn it into a theme park!"

Yeah, turns out the entire tunnel, full of forgotten architecture, powerful monsters and who knows what else, has been...repurposed to be a little more "family friendly" so to speak. The entire place is full of obnoxiously cheery music, all the dungeons only have monsters who have been specifically bred to avoid killing adventurers. Everything of value has been stripped, and every item still in the ruins was put there manually to give an artificial sense of discovery. It's a glorified Easter egg hunt, basically.

I tap my foot impatiently. We'll just have to leave this place as soon as we can. But as we both navigate the crowds, I get a glimpse of it.

A giant frog plushie.

I look into its big, round, marketable eyes, it stares back. I want it.

"Hey! Trin! Can I get the cool frog?"

"The...frog? It's a game prize, so I can't just buy it. You'll have to win whatever stupid rigged mini-game they have set up." she answers, rather confused by my sudden change of mood.

I don't know why I want the plushie so much, but it reminds me of something good. I can't tell exactly what, though. A lot of my memories are blocked at the moment, after all.

We both approach the stand, as the owner gives us a big, predatory smile. Probably thinking of how he's going to keep that amphibian all for himself. In a dramatic fashion that I wish I could replicate, he presents the rule of the game.

1. The cotton ball must bounce on as many of the floating metal plate as possible.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

2. The game ends when the ball bounces on anything that isn't a metal plate.

3. No active skill.

Trin places 5 copper coins on the table, clearly annoyed at the fact she has to fork over even more cash to keep me happy. I can actually create money pretty easily, but I want to see how much she's willing to spend just for me. Although I'm not going to try and ruin her on purpose.

The plates are positioned in such a way it should be obvious where it's going to bounce. But since they are magic, it's pretty clear the bouncing will be rather unpredictable. So I look at the plates souls instead, and I notice the underlying logic behind them. The plate will make the ball bounce at the worst possible angle, and no one would be able to tell, as it's clearly designed to make the ball bounce faster than anyone could realistically follow with their eyes. So even if someone has the perfect throw, it's rigged to be completely outside the player's control.

So we'll simply have to throw the ball so fast that the plates don't even have time to readjust the bouncing trajectory. Although it means I'll have to be extremely precise in my throw. I'll limit myself to my normal bystander stats, so this might actually be kinda hard.

I throw the ball as hard as I can and it- CLINK

I can hear Trin facepalm behind me. The stand owner's jaw dropped and everyone stops to look at us.

The cotton ball pierced the metal plate and lodged itself so far into the rock walls that it was now impossible to recover without mining the surrounding rocks.

The stand owner slowly turns his head to face me, with a mixed look of fear, awe and anger.

"I should have added a rule about needing to refund any permanent damage the ball caused." The stand owner says before regaining his composure, he then gestures towards the prizes behind him. "But now everyone is looking at us, so maybe I can turn this into a publicity stunt somehow, just...take whatever you want and never come back."

I happily grab the frog and ignore the depressed look on Trin's face.

"Cotton. How is that even physically possible? Shouldn't it have disintegrated the moment it was thrown if it was that fast? I don't understand..." She mumbles under her breath. I don't pay too much attention to it, I have the cool plushie and that's all that matters.

Still, it's weird that my throw was that strong. Bystander mode gives me above average strength and speed, but that shouldn't be nearly enough to do something like that. Maybe it's a paper world?

Paper world is a term I came up with for worlds that voluntarily make everyone really, really weak so them becoming very strong doesn't break too many things.

The best way I can explain it is...

Let's just say a normal human has 1 strength, and the maximum amount of strength the universe can give them is 10. Then that means a person could only be 10 times as strong as a normal human. Which isn't inherently bad, but it means there won't be any legendary person that can take an army of a hundred people or something.

However, what if you made every human in that world have 0.001 strength instead by default? Then the strongest human can now be a thousand time stronger than the average guy. But you of course have to build the entire universe with everyone being weaker into account.

However, this does mean that if some random guy from another universe were to be thrown here, they would be way more powerful than everyone else by comparison.

What I'm trying to say is that my bystander mode makes me way more powerful than expected, I can only hope I won't kill the big dragon in one hit or something, that'd be anticlimactic.

I look at Trin, who stares back at me with a forced smile. Her soul shifts again, but I can tell the emotion clearly this time.

It's fear.