PROLOGUE
MEMORIES OF MY OLD LIFE flickered through my mind like a candlelit shadow play. Were they real or just my imagination? I couldn’t hold on to any of them.
I shouted, “Hey, you! What’s-your-face! I’ve got no clue who you are, but we could stop fighting. I’m bored!”
“Damn it, I told you my name two minutes ago!” the stranger answered. “Just wait till you see the true extent of my powers. You don’t stand a chance against me!”
He was exhausting all of his precious skills trying to kill me. With that brilliant mind of his, he’d assembled what he believed was the ultimate combination of skills, a combo that could kill anyone. He wasn’t holding anything back.
We weren’t the protagonists of this world, but he was trying to become one. We were just a bunch of kids, dropped into this world as minor characters. We ended up pointlessly slaughtering each other. Believing that he was a main character was his first—and greatest—miscalculation.
This isn’t the prologue to your reign as an invincible hero, I thought. This is the end of your tale.
“Goodbye, what’s-your-face.”
In his quest to become invincible, he had killed my other classmates and copied their skills. He roared in anger as he stabbed at me with his sword, shot deadly magic spells, and launched every skill imaginable my way, but I wouldn’t die.
He finally snapped and started screaming at me.
“Why?! Why won’t you die?! According to my calculations, I should’ve killed you five times by now! Just die already!”
He attacked me with powerful, surefire skills—skills that should have been 100 percent effective, attacks that I shouldn’t have been able to escape. His initial assumptions were wrong. He didn’t understand all the variables. That was his own bad luck.
“What’s the point of these skills if they won’t work? Why won’t you just die?!”
He gathered every last skill that had a 100 percent chance to kill its target. If probability meant anything, they should have devastated me. Go ahead, use them all, I thought. When you run out, you’ll die. I’ll be the one who kills you.
Untiring, he struggled to manipulate my body. I hadn’t felt anything from the start, since I’d blocked all my nerve signals. My body was such an exhausted mess that it could hardly do anything, anyway. He kept fruitlessly flinging spells my way, trying to kill me.
As I swung my wooden stick at him, I thought about how unfair this matchup was. He had acquired a magic shield that even god-tier swords couldn’t pierce, and he was immune to all magic spells. Then I thought about how ridiculous it was to even try to “calculate” what was going on in this world. A fantasy world didn’t obey the rules of logic. Death and survival depend more on trickery than calculation, I thought, no matter who you are.
Once more, he took aim with his invincible killer skills, launched them with a roar, and continued to beat my body to a pulp. He wasn’t even bothering to copy skills from me—not that I had anything worth copying.
As our battle went on, he burned away more cheat skills stolen from his murder victims. He had yet to realize that using those killer skills would only get him killed.
I had lost my right hand, and my elbow was broken so badly that my arm dangled limply at my side. Half of my face was probably burnt charcoal, and my legs were stumps. Somehow, I still limped toward him. He stared at me, unbelieving.
“What a monster…”
That’s how he saw me…an incomprehensible monster. Even his precious calculations and probabilities had no explanation for me. He still didn’t understand the situation he was in.
He was just another self-declared math genius who didn’t realize that in this world, one plus one didn’t have to equal two. His calculations could only have failed him. In this world, dice could roll numbers that didn’t exist. Here, impossible things happened, and inevitable things didn’t. Probability was fundamentally broken.
Yes, he was a genius who could calculate the probability of anything. But his axioms were off from the start. He swept away our classmates like pawns, took risks, set traps, tricked, deceived, and overcame the chaos of the mid-game to arrive at his perfect endgame. But when it arrived, his calculations fell apart. He encountered a monster that broke the laws of probability.
He needed to refactor all the possibilities. As he tried to account for all of them at once, he pushed against his own limits. System overload. Meanwhile, I relied on my well-honed instincts. He tried to map his formulae onto a die that might not even roll a number, to establish constants for a world of variables beyond his understanding. Garbage in, garbage out.
In a continuous movement, I took a half-step and swung my staff. Your HP will hit zero, despite your overpowering defenses and immunity to magic, and you won’t even know why. That was the only accurate prediction.
Must’ve seemed pretty unfair to him, huh?