On second thought, it couldn’t be as simple as climbing up a few ranks and then pushing the big red ‘Off’ button to shut down the System. The System might be alien, but it acted enough like a person that I couldn’t see it going out of its way to lead someone into discovering how to kill it. Besides, if it was that easy, surely someone would have done it by now.
Or would they?
The System had made it clear enough that there were lots of other worlds out there, and Earth was just another in a long line of targets it had subsumed. But it also went out of its way to comment on how anomalous humans were. How did it describe typical civilizations? Cooperative herd animals, or hyper-competitive predators?
For the first time, I tried to picture what the System’s arrival would look like for them. Say you’re a peaceful race of pseudo-cows, with advanced technology and a globe-spanning civilization. You still need cops, because crooks and crazies are inevitable regardless of your predispositions, and there are still political factions and struggles due to fundamental game theoretic reasons. But you only need one cop per thousand civilians, and even the most insane warmongers barely spend 1% of GDP on a military. You’ve probably never even had what humans would consider a real war, because your people aren’t so eager to die for glory and honor.
Heck, you might have a bigger population than Earth, and better technology. Dozens of space habitats, science bases and colonies all over your solar system, the whole 1970s-era peaceful exploitation of space thing. You probably think disease and natural disasters are the major threats to civilization, because even though you’ve had nuclear power for generations no one has ever conceived of an atomic bomb.
Then the System arrives, and suddenly monsters are everywhere. Even if your people are quick to group up and work together the casualties are going to make Earth look like a walk in the park. Here in America the typical monster attack ends with some dead and injured humans and a bunch of dead monsters. On cow world the monsters win 90% of the fights, which means they gain some XP and then do it again.
If the monsters leveled up as fast as my team had, cooperation and improvised weapons wouldn’t be nearly enough to stop them. Most of the cow people would be dead in a matter of days, and the ruins would be overrun with creatures that had dozens of kills. There would be no time to adapt their superior technology to making weapons, and fighting endless monster respawns with just System abilities was a losing proposition.
Sure, simple statistics said there would be a few people who got lucky enough to score some initial kills, form viable survival bands and try to level up enough to eke out some kind of long-term existence. But it would be a zombie apocalypse scenario, only with super zombies and no guns. In the long run you’d end up with a few tiny groups holed up in defensible locations, and a world completely overrun by monsters. Every now and then a fortress would fall, and eventually they’d end up extinct.
As for the space colonies, they were even more doomed. I had no doubt the System could make monsters anywhere if it wanted to, so they’d still come under attack. But a Mars colony or space habitat where the technicians keep getting attacked will stop working in short order, and when the life support fails everyone dies.
Would the predators have it any better? Say our wolf people can form tribes the size of a Viking band before the infighting gets too bad, and they’ve got castles and medieval technology. Everyone knows how to fight, and there might not even be a distinction between civilians and warriors. On day one everyone is armed and organized, even if they have no idea what’s going on.
But without the equalizing power of high-tech weapons, every fight was still going to be a horrifying meat grinder. A skilled, disciplined force might eke out an even exchange ratio against the early monsters, and the wolf people would tend to hold the field at the end of most fights. So they’d get to collect the XP and level up, which helped their survival prospects. Not to mention the advantage of having a fortified location to retreat to if necessary.
Some monsters could get into a castle, by some combination of stealth or unconventional movement abilities, but most would be reduced to beating ineffectually at the walls. The wolf people could farm a lot of kills if they had decent missile weapons, and injured warriors would have a decently safe place to hole up and recover. The most critical thing, though, was that the point totals of the monsters didn’t get artificially inflated by massacring billions of helpless people.
So, did that lead to some kind of LitRPG scenario? Everyone kills monsters for points, spends them on cool powers, and fifty years later your whole society runs on System-granted powers?
Maybe. But what about the casualty rate? The wolf people didn’t start out with a huge population to soak up casualties, and if my own experiences were any guide there was going to be a lot of fighting. If everyone fights two or three monster encounters a day, and has a 50% chance of surviving each encounter, your initial band of five hundred wolf people is down to a few dozen survivors by the time the adventure zones reach full strength.
After that the people keep getting tougher while the monsters don’t, so the casualty rate should start trending down. Bands of survivors can merge to form viable groups, with the manpower to defend a castle properly. Here and there someone will manage to clear a dungeon, get access to the respawn mechanics, and stabilize their situation. But you’d end up with maybe 1% of the original population, and the survivors would be completely dependent on System abilities to survive. Would they ever recover even their original technology, let alone anything more advanced?
More to the point, would they ever form teams capable of climbing the rankings? I was skeptical. Once again, the challenges the System set up were just too difficult for anyone sane to risk them without an edge. Maybe some of the wolf people would be crazy enough to spend a few years farming Bronze League dungeons for loot and bragging rights. But without technology to give them an edge the casualty rates would be high, and the more points you have the more painful the losses from a respawn would get.
So maybe every wolf person settlement has a few adventuring teams who dive the local dungeon. The chief and his team of badasses cleared the place once, and maybe his son wants to duplicate the feat. But going on to find and challenge a Silver League dungeon is crazy, and actually clearing it would take a miracle. Maybe it happens one in a while, and the guys who do it are hailed as heroes. Then they marry the princess and retire, or whatever the equivalent is for wolf people.
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With a tiny population overachievers would be rare, and the older generation would have a vested interest in suppressing any rising stars. After all, they’d almost certainly be running their society by virtue of having the highest point totals. Why would they want to encourage competition? Better to aim for a basic level of achievement that maintained their civilization, and didn’t create unwanted rivals. It was the kind of setup that could lead to thousands of years of stasis.
We could do better.
The moment people found out there were dungeons, adventuring teams would start to form. Hundreds of thousands of them, with modern weapons and armor to bolster their System powers. Soon arms manufacturers would design specialized anti-cyborg weapons, and mass produce them. Armies would form special dungeon clearing units, figure out how to reliably beat them, and then cycle training groups through them to farm respawn unlocks. The revelation that higher tiers existed would spawn a whole industry devoted to working our way through them, and unlocking whatever benefits they gave. The payoff for clearing a Bronze League dungeon was enough to make sure of that. Eventually there would be Silver League delving teams, then Gold League and whatever else might exist. Humanity would never run out of hotheaded young men willing to risk death to make a name for themselves, and eventually someone would fight their way to the top.
Assuming we still had a civilization in a year.
Having seven billion people on Earth was as much a curse as a blessing. How bad would the monsters get, in places where they could farm crowds of unarmed civilians for points? Would they stay put when they ran out of prey, or go looking for more? How well would the rest of civilization hold up? Could we keep the factories and mines running, to supply a rapidly growing military with weapons and ammunition? Or would those fragile modern global supply chains collapse, leaving every town to make do with whatever they could produce locally?
“Hey, Tom. I think we’re ready to call it quits.”
Jenny had another stack of bronze tokens, and Jason had picked out a few odds and ends to take. Nothing caught my eye, so I just nodded and turned to go.
“Good. I think we’ll have just enough time to let everyone take a short nap before we need to clear out. Obviously I want to be well clear of here before the next monster is deployed.”
“Obviously,” Jason agreed. “Man, I am so wiped. I could sleep for a week.”
“Me too,” Shasa agreed.
I made small talk as we walked back to the stars, and made sure we kept at least somewhat alert. There was always the risk that the System would spring some new surprise on us. But my thoughts were mostly occupied by a whirl of plans and ideas.
Obviously we needed to put an exclusion zone over the hotel, and make a soul beacon for our own use. But we could do more than that. Sheryl gave us an in with the sheriff, who seemed to be coordinating a lot of the town’s defenses. If we told him about the dungeon and its rewards, we could probably get some kind of official support. Maybe set up some exclusion zones protecting key parts of the town, and a soul beacon for the police and militia to use. They could collect points to support them, or maybe we could put Bob’s new skills to use rendering down monster bodies for points.
That would help to secure the town, and the apples we carried could help get some veterans and retirees back into action. With the rep from all those accomplishments, finding new recruits for my team should be easy.
I’d bill it as a monster hunting team. Form a corporate structure of some kind, so it can hire people and have assets. Maybe see if the town would pay us to help fight off monsters, or do jobs the deputies didn’t want to risk their necks on.
What resources would a group like that need?
At least two squads of shooters. An A team I could lead into the field to hit objectives, and a B team to stay behind and guard our vehicles. Some big trucks to move us around, because I wasn’t trusting my life to a car again. Plus a support team, because a team like that needs armor, weapons, ammo, specialized clothing and all sorts of other gear. Some of it we might be able to buy or scrounge, but some we’d have to make. Plus a medical team, and with that many people we’d end up needed other staff. A cook, an accountant, maybe a manager or two.
All to support my new ambition. Right now I was number six on a global ranking list, but that wouldn’t last long if I rested on my laurels. It would take some time to expand the team, gear up and farm enough points to make dungeon monsters a manageable problem. But once we had a good way to kill steampunk cyborgs?
We’d be back. Again and again, until we could clear a fully-deployed Bronze League dungeon for real. Then we’d be off to find a Silver League dungeon. No matter how things played out there would be plenty of work for a roving band of elite monster hunters in this deadly new world. We’d make a living solving monster problems for whoever was hiring, and farm tons of points in the process. We’d negotiate for support with the friendly System gods, and take advantage of the opportunities they gave us. We’d keep an eye out for new developments, because I was sure the System hadn’t run out of curve balls to throw at us.
And when we were ready for new challenges, there would be tougher dungeons waiting. Higher leagues, with better rewards. We’d go further than any of those peaceful herbivores or feral carnivores ever managed, and someday we’d find out exactly what administrative tools the System had.
We finally reached the top of the stairs, and I was reminded that we had more immediate problems. Most of the group was passed out around the cave, with just Earl and Mitsi keeping watch at the entrance. The rain had eased up considerably, which dealt with one of my worries. But even if it stopped before we had to leave, we had a long walk ahead of us.
I cast a weary gaze to where Tyler was sleeping. We were going to have to carry him back, which meant a stretcher. Plus Anthony’s body, because I wasn’t leaving it here to get eaten by some monster. Plus the radium core, which probably weighed a hundred pounds. I’d scavenged some steel rods and fabric to make stretchers out of, but that was still a lot to manage. We weren’t going to be at our best if we got attacked again.
Who was I kidding? Of course we were going to get attacked. We couldn’t walk for fifteen minutes in these woods without meeting something that wanted to take a bite out of us.
“I’ve got signal!”
Jenny’s excited announcement pulled me out of my thoughts. “What?”
My girlfriend was standing in the cave mouth, holding her phone up just short of the curtain of rain.
“Two bars outside,” she clarified. “Barely a sliver where I’m standing, but I can still text and… yes! We have GPS! Check it out, we’re only like a quarter mile from the road. Want me to text Beth, and get someone out here to pick us up?”
Oh, thank god. “Yes! They might need to wait for the rain to stop, but it looks like it won’t be long.”
Jenny nodded, and tapped away at her phone for a moment. “Hmm. Yeah, here’s the weather radar. Looks like the storm is mostly past. The forecast says it’ll clear up in another half hour or so.”
I grinned, thinking of all those zombie apocalypse stories I’d read where civilization had vanished in a matter of hours. Nope. The internet still works, the weathermen still go in to work, and we’re not the only people fighting to keep it that way. It would take more than a few giant animals to beat humanity.