Chapter 21: From Poverty, Opportunity: Putting the Market to Work for Lower Income Families by Mark Fellowes – Part 2

September 27, 2652 – 366 Days Before Judgment Day

After a good night’s rest at the Collingwood Inn, the trio hit the markets in the early morning to offload their drops and replenish their inventory with heals and other consumables. With fully stocked inventories, the trio made their way back to Mt. Inferno to grind the rest of the trophies that they needed to survive.

Like yesterday, making it down the rings consumed about 10% of their consumables, which was really inconvenient because it meant that every round trip used up 20% of their total maximum inventory space and only left 80% to be used against the Betrayer. The resource allocation was bad but the really bad thing was that it was getting much harder to defeat the Betrayer as the Betrayer leveled up.

Because the Betrayer only offered 10 EXP per defeat, it wasn’t really possible to get stronger by defeating the Betrayer but the Betrayer kept getting stronger anyway. The Betrayer was designed in such a way that eventually, it would become impossible to defeat the Betrayer unless you leveled up elsewhere. This meant that not only was the Betrayer getting stronger every level, every battle with the Betrayer also used up a higher portion of their consumables but there would be no way to get more because they always needed 20% to make the way up and down the 9 rings. Eventually, they’d have to start making more frequent trips to restock consumables per battle with the Betrayer until they wouldn’t be able to defeat the Betrayer at all. By the level 7 Betrayer, the diminishing returns became extremely evident.

And that’s not even taking equipment durability into account.

Since there was absolutely no way to regain equipment durability without DIY kits, extreme rationing had to be instituted. Since the beginning, Lucius’ equipment had been neglected because he contributed almost nothing in DPS beyond casting buffs so there was no change with him. Riley was extremely good at dodging and repositioning, so the only thing she needed to repair was her rifle. But Aaron – Aaron was a melee character and as a tank, he had to take both armor damage and sword damage when he struck. As a result, he would need a lot of DIY kits and they only had 3 left.

In chess, it’s called a zugzwang. A zugzwang is a situation in which any move the player makes will result in a disadvantage. If Aaron saves the DIY kits for his armor, he can’t DPS with his sword. If he saves them for his sword, he can’t tank. If he uses both DIY kits for his sword and armor, he’ll run out of reserves and be down to 1 DIY kit, which Riley will probably need.

As it currently stood, to climb out of the bottom 20% in terms of trophies collected, the magic number was 56 rare spawn trophies. That meant that they needed the equivalent of 112 rare spawn trophies in boss trophies, they could gain if they defeated the Betrayer 24 times.

But they had only defeated the Betrayer 21 times and by now, their equipment durability was about to run out. Riley needed a DIY kit to fix her equipment, so there were really only 2 DIY kits left for Aaron to ration. So should Aaron use both now, or only use one on his equipment and if so, which one?

In the end, Aaron decided to only use the DIY kit on his sword and save the other DIY kit as an option to use on either armor or sword durability and this decision would prove to be his undoing.

Having already defeated the Betrayer 22 times, the trio had managed to secure 110 rare spawn trophy equivalents, which equaled 55 a piece once split both ways. This meant that if they left now, they stood a very good chance of collecting the other rare trophies through random encounters in easier environments.

However, in his distracted haze, Aaron accidentally touched the touchstone by habit, which automatically triggered the forced encounter with the Betrayer.

And so, about half way through the 23rd bout with the Betrayer, Aaron’s armor durability was critically low and was very close to running out. Aaron’s armor had held out far better than he had hoped and it now looked like the Betrayer was about to be defeated. As Aaron disengaged to repair his armor, the Betrayer released a general Area of Effect attack with his wings which dealt just enough damage to his armor that the durability reached 0 and the item broke. With the loss of Aaron’s armor, Aaron couldn’t tank and as a result, the entire party got wiped.

It was agony to suffer the torture of Tantalus in so many ways. To have come so close to having defeated the Betrayer 23 times. To have come so close to reaching their goal of reaching 56 but only fall short at 55. To have come close to avoiding the culling but now no longer have the means of tanking and thus, never defeat any rare spawns.

Being poor sucks. It costs so much more money to be poor than it does to be rich. Let’s say it costs $200 for a tooth scaling but you can’t afford it because you’re poor, so you delay that procedure and now you need a $2,000 root canal to save the tooth. Or you can’t afford to eat well so you eat nothing but cheap processed food and now, you suffer from diabetes. Or you can’t afford a good education so you work minimum wage forever. And this is just a small taste the inequities that the rich don’t see or pretend don’t exist.

But Aaron and his friends saw it, they lived through it, and then to add insult to injury, they had to die another 9 times in order to exit the dungeon.