Dungeon Exploiter

They gave me a form.

Of course they gave me a form. I’d solo-cleared a team dungeon using a method the System couldn’t name, and the corporation’s answer to a thing it couldn’t explain was to make me fill out paperwork about it.

The office was on the fourth floor of a NexoDrive branch, between a smoothie place and a store that sold “recovery serums” for people who’d almost died. A woman named Priya sat across from me with a lanyard and a smile that had been trained, not felt.

“So!” she said. “We just want to understand your methodology. Circle back, align on a path forward. You’re giving real high-potential energy, Jon.”

“I walked out the door,” I said.

“Right, but the framework you used—”

“There wasn’t a framework. There was a door. I used the door.”

Her smile flickered, like a screen catching up. Her AI companion whispered something in her ear, and she nodded at it, relieved.

“We’d love to bring you on properly,” she said. “A real contract. Benefits. We could rank you. Wouldn’t that be nice — having a rank?”

“No.”

“...We could study your—”

“Can I get paid now?”

She got me paid. It took four signatures and a survey about my experience. I gave the experience three stars. It had a door in it, and I appreciated that.

* * *

Joe was waiting outside, and he already knew, because Joe always knows.

“You SOLO’D it,” he said, before I’d even cleared the door. “Sector 7. A team dungeon. By yourself. On your FIRST DAY.”

“There was a door.”

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“People die in Sector 7, Jon. Optimized teams die in Sector 7. You’ve been unemployed for eight months, your entire plan was to nap, and you walked in and—” He stopped, put both hands on his head, and walked in a small circle.

Joe processes things by walking in small circles.

“Do you understand you should be dead? Statistically. You should be a smear.”

“I’m not, though.”

“That’s not comforting! That’s the opposite of comforting!”

This is my best friend. He does marketing at a startup that makes an app that reminds you to drink water. He has a lanyard too, but he actually likes his.

He wants a nice quiet life with a nice quiet salary, and I keep threatening it just by being alive, and he loves me anyway, which I have never fully understood.

“Just—” Joe breathed. “Keep your head down. Please. Do a boring one next. Get eaten a normal, respectable amount.”

“Rent’s still due,” I said.

Joe closed his eyes. “You’re going to do another one.”

* * *

I did another one.

It was another NexoDrive gig: a Grade-C, a nest under a parking garage, because nests are always under parking garages. The job was simple on paper: kill the Brood-Mother, collect hazard pay, don’t die.

Six teams had tried it that week. None of them killed the Brood-Mother.

I could see why. She was the size of a bus and armored like one, and every time someone hit her she just didn’t care. Their AI companions all said the same thing — focus the carapace, stack damage, overwhelm — so everyone stacked damage and got overwhelmed instead.

Liya sat on a fire extinguisher and watched.

“You could help,” I said.

“I could,” she agreed. “Enjoy the show.”

I read the Brood-Mother instead — not the flashy stat card everyone was screaming at, but the real entry, three lines down, in the part nobody scrolls to.

BROOD-MOTHER — Grade-C

Feeds every 90s. Vulnerable while feeding. Window: 4s.

Four seconds, every ninety, sitting right there in the data for anyone who bothered to read instead of shoot.

So I waited. That’s the whole trick, honestly. I’m very good at waiting.

The min-maxers can’t — their companions grade them on uptime — so they hammered the armor for eighty-nine seconds, and on the ninetieth she opened up to feed, and they kept hitting the armor because that’s what the plan said.

I put a cheap crowbar through the soft part.

She fell like a building.

The room went quiet. Then a screen popped up, just for me, and I swear it sounded annoyed.

[UNAUTHORIZED METHOD — CLASSIFYING…]

SKILL ACQUIRED — EXPLOIT: ENEMY WEAKNESS

Note: please stop.

“It said please stop,” I told Liya.

“It’s going to say that a lot,” she said.

* * *

I got my hazard pay, gave it three stars, and never saw my crowbar deposit again.

Upstairs, in the building I’d never seen, the man with the nice view pulled up my file. There wasn’t much in it — no rank, no record, one customer survey where I’d given the apocalypse three stars.

“Find out who this is,” he said, to somebody who was already looking.