Dungeon Exploiter

The safety update dropped on a Thursday, because they always do.

SAFETY UPDATE v12.1 — PARTY COHESION REQUIREMENTS

All Grade-C and above parties must now be assembled via Ember™.

Ember™ matches raiders by compatibility, ensuring optimal team chemistry.

Manual party formation is deprecated. Friendship is not a safety standard.

Friendship is not a safety standard. They put that in writing. Eight million people read it and updated the app.

Ember was the party finder. It started as a dating app and pivoted. Or maybe it didn’t pivot and nobody noticed. You swipe raiders. Rank up front, parse history, gear photos. High ranks drown in matches. Low ranks swipe into a void.

My profile was two years old, auto-created with my temp badge. Total matches in two years: zero. You can’t be compatible with [UNRECOGNIZED].

Now the good gigs required the app. I applied to one, and Ember made a sound Rob says it only makes when a human overrides it.

PARTY ASSEMBLED (5 optimal + 1 manual fill)

Compatibility index: 96% (excluding manual fill)

Manual fill compatibility: —

A coordinator has been assigned to observe cohesion.

The coordinator was Jane.

“They flagged my profile after my report,” she said at the gate. She didn’t sound surprised. Jane has run out of surprise about these people. “Now I watch optimal parties be optimal, and I write down how optimal they were. Nobody reads it.”

She nodded at the five raiders ahead of us. They were comparing gear photos they’d already seen.

“You’re the manual fill,” she said.

“I’m the manual fill.”

“There’s a queue for people the algorithm gives up on. We’re both in it.” She almost smiled. “Unmatchable. Together.”

I thought about that word pair longer than I should have, and the dungeon punished me for it shortly.

* * *

The instance was a conservatory. A glass cathedral gone wild inside — green light through a mile of fogged panes, orchids the size of chairs, white gravel paths curving away under flowers that turned, very slowly, to watch us walk.

The quiet layer introduced the locals.

PAIRBLOOM (colony)

Blind. Roots read rhythm.

Targets: synchronized movement. The colony strikes the beat.

Soloists are weather.

Roots read rhythm. And thirty feet ahead, five optimal raiders walked in perfect step, because their companions all subscribed to the same pace-setting feed. Five sets of boots hitting gravel like one big confident animal.

In a garden made of ears.

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“Break step!” I called. “Walk messy! Walk like you’re lost!”

They checked their companions. All five companions said the same thing: maintain formation cohesion. So they tightened up. Which means they synchronized harder.

The flowers leaned.

The first strike took the point man’s boot off the ground. Vines on the beat. Five people whose training said stack up, and a colony built to strike the stack. They were good — I mean that, their gear was real and their reflexes were paid for and honest. They just moved like a metronome, in a room that eats metronomes.

I went in after them. Fast, low, no rhythm at all, which is the one thing I’ve never had to practice.

A vine came across for Tim’s ankle-height on the last raider, and I poke-checked it. Blade in, under, lift. It recoiled like I’d broken a rule it didn’t know existed.

Another one whipped in flat and I met it with a slapshot that sent its seed-head into the fountain forty feet away. Nothing in that garden could hear me coming, because I don’t keep a beat. To the colony, I was weather. Angry weather, with a stick.

But you can’t out-stick a whole garden, and the five were still locked in formation, still synchronized, still dying on schedule. The beat was coming through their earpieces from a server. I couldn’t unplug the server.

So I gave them each a different song.

“You — count three, then hop left. You — walk backward, slow. You — freeze till I say. You — drag your feet. You — run. NOW.”

Five people doing five different things is not a rhythm. It’s not anything. The colony’s roots lost the thread mid-strike. The whole conservatory went still, the way a room goes still when the music cuts, and five optimal raiders scattered out of the kill zone in beautiful, life-saving disorder.

Their companions logged it as a cohesion failure. All five at once.

Jane wrote that down, word for word, for a report nobody will read. She was smiling while she wrote it.

* * *

The clear condition was a pond at the center of the glasshouse. Reach it. Ring the old bell on the post.

The bell was green with age, rope worn soft. Second one of those I’d seen in a month. The bells are older than the buildings around them. I’m keeping a list.

We rang it together, since we were both standing there.

CONSERVATORY — CLEARED.

Clearing party: 2 (manual).

Cohesion index: [UNRECOGNIZED]

Note: the app says you two are incompatible. the app has been wrong once before. this makes once.

Ember pushed a notification while we stood at the pond.

EMBER™ — NEW MATCH!

You have matched with: JANE (coordinator).

Compatibility: [UNRECOGNIZED]

This match was not generated by our algorithm, and we would like to know how it happened.

“It matched us out of spite,” Jane said, reading over my shoulder.

“Or surrender.”

She looked at the pond a while. “Dinner?” she said. “I hear there’s a goblin.”

* * *

Dinner was the full table. That’s most nights now.

Bev had claimed the seat by the kitchen, because it has sight lines to every door, and some habits are load-bearing. She’d brought a casserole and a rule: nobody talks business until everyone’s eaten something. Rob tried to pitch Jane a coordinator-liability LLC at minute fifty. Bev pointed at his plate. He ate.

Jane fit in the chair that was always hers. That’s the only way I can say it. The one you don’t know is missing until everybody sits down.

Bev counted us before she served. Out loud, one hand tipping toward each head. “Six, seven — and the goblin’s eight, and the one I can’t see makes nine.”

The table went quiet for one second.

“The one you can’t see,” I said.

“Box kid.” She handed me the serving spoon. “Twenty-three years running floors. You think I don’t know when a shelf’s got one more thing on it than the manifest says? Somebody’s been sitting on your shoulder all night. Tell her she’s counted.”

Liya stood very still, tail wrapped tight, and looked at Bev for a long time.

“I like her,” Liya said finally, in a small voice. “Tell her she’s — tell her thank you.”

“She says thank you,” I said.

“Course she does,” said Bev. “She’s polite. You can tell by how she sits.”

I don’t know what Bev is. I’ve stopped asking what people are. I know what she does: she counts everyone, even the ones the manifest missed. There’s a kind of seeing that doesn’t need the quiet layer. She’s had it for twenty-three years, and it’s the reason her floors never lost anyone.

The courier page came at midnight. It’s comfortable now. It knows the way.

SOCIAL GRAPH: UPDATING.

New node: coordinator (QA, realigned).

New node: logistics (terminated, NexoDrive — 23 yrs).

Attachment velocity: notable.

VALUATION: IN PROGRESS.

JON’S DICTIONARY — attachment velocity: how fast you’re coming to love someone. They measure that too. There’s a team for it.

I read the two new lines on the list of everything I can lose, and then I went back to the kitchen, where everyone I can lose was doing the dishes and arguing about casserole.

“They watched you make two friends this month,” Liya said quietly. “And somewhere, a number moved.”

I know. I counted heads anyway, out of habit, out of her habit, and the count came out two bigger than last month, and I’d make the same trade every time.

That’s the flaw the whole tower is betting on. The terrible thing is they’re right.