"I`m not sure that makes sense. It`s just an endless war? That takes balancing. Probably pretty careful balancing and a lot of thought, right? You could be talking about millions and millions of monsters and people wrapped up in this thing. That`s not a small job, and if there`s one consistent thing about the system, it`s that it doesn`t like to do work. Neither of us would be here if it did."

　　Lucy nodded.

　　"Normally, I`d agree with you. But the guardian in that amulet had been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. And as rare as travel between realms might be, it still happens occasionally. It had either gone to or heard reports about dozens and dozens of different worlds, and on every one of them it was the exact same story. Reincarnators on one side, some great evil on the other. Sometimes stretching back hundreds of years, and nobody ever took down whatever that planet`s big-bad was, unless there was something evil right behind it waiting to move in and fill the power vacuum."

　　"Why would the system maintain that? Again, that seems like a ton of work."

　　"Maybe it isn`t. For something like the main system, with all that power? It might be something it spins up based on algorithms."

　　"Sure. I don`t know. It would have to keep track of every interaction through system instances if what Barry told us is true. Even if it does delegate a lot of that work to system instances, it`s still& Actually, it might do it, so long as it got something big enough out of the deal."

　　That last bit made Matt thoughtful. From what he could tell, the energy that was called mana and the energy that the system used seemed to be close cousins. There was a chance that they weren`t the same thing, but with how the system instance was struggling with Gaia`s poor energy environment, Matt was willing to be on his hypothesis.

　　"But still," Matt continued, "You are telling me nobody ever figured out an exploit? Something the system missed? What`s to keep some guy from finding something the system got lazy on, making it big, and breaking the balance?"

　　Lucy grimaced. "I don`t really want to say it this way, Matt, but why do you think you are alive?"

　　"Huh?"

　　"Alive. You are alive, right? I`m not saying this to be mean, but it`s not exactly because you are a genius mage, or a physical phenomenon. And you may have got just the right class, made just the right plans, gotten lucky, all of that stuff, but could you have survived ten times that much? A hundred times that much? The system here can only throw so much at you because it goes energy-broke every time it tries something new."

　　The relevant lightbulb finally flicked on in Matt`s head. "But on a planet with a decent population, and lots of mana in the air&"

　　"Yup. Dead Matt. No question. And I`m guessing that`s what happens when someone pushes too far into the no-no zone of system exploits. A quest line gets sent out explaining how the bad blood mage is doing bad blood-mage stuff, and suddenly, there`s no more blood-mage. Or some monster just gets stronger mid-battle and boom, no more threat."

　　"So that`s where we`re different. There`s no evil here, or any bad guys for that matter," Matt said.

　　"That`s where you are wrong, I think," Lucy said. She had a bit of a smile playing on her lips.

　　"How so?"

　　"Think about it. The system probably can`t directly lie in quests, right? But every asshole who shows up here to kill you says the same thing. That they`re here to scoop up the quest rewards from killing a demon lord."

　　"Lucy, I`m pretty sure that`s just hyperbole."

　　"Is it? Because if the system has these planets automated at all, that demon lord title is probably attached to something, some metric. Total landmass controlled, total kills, whatever. And as soon as you got a class related to doing well by surviving, the system or something else suddenly gave you some kind of authority in a way that doesn`t show up in any of the guidebooks."

　　"So you are saying I`m not the good guy? I`m actually the bad guy?"

　　"Technically, the bad guy. That`s the best kind of bad guy." Lucy snorted at her own joke, then continued. "But no, I`m not saying you are the bad guy and not the good guy. I`m saying you are the bad guy AND the good guy. That`s not balance, Matt. That`s everything on one side of the table, and probably the only reason it hasn`t been a bigger deal for us is that it comes in the form of Gaian Authority, and there`s nothing here to have authority over. If we figure out how to use it, even a little, just for anything at all besides opening doors and making the soil slightly better, I`m guessing it`s a big deal."

　　Matt thought for a moment. "So we need to find the Gaians` stash even more now."

　　"The stash, whatever alterations to powers we can get, as much weird shit as we can squeeze out of Barry and the system. The whole shebang."Stolen novel; please report.

　　Lucy and Matt walked for a few minutes, wordlessly.

　　"Don`t think I didn`t notice though, Lucy."

　　"Notice what?"

　　"You buried the lede. Did you find anything out about guardians?" There was no way Lucy got a download of a bunch of guardian stuff without checking for that. She didn`t talk about it a lot. That didn`t mean Matt didn`t know how important it was to her. "Where do guardians come from?"

　　"You see, Matt, it`s like this. When a mother guardian and father guardian love each other very much&"

　　"Lucy."

　　She sighed. "No, I didn`t. For some reason, he thought this stuff about systems was important enough to remember, to keep conscious for instead of just letting himself go completely insane. If he knew anything about guardians, he had forgotten it a long time ago."

　　They kept wandering for a few more hours, hoping to find Leel`s corpse, or at least a still-living Leel they could interrogate about the amulet breakage. Over that period of time, the system had still yet to ping Matt for anything. Since the guardian in the amulet was about as far from being a threat to him as possible, he supposed that made sense. He had just about accepted the fact that very weird did not equal gets upgrades when danger wasn`t a component. Then, he finally got a ping.

　　Ding!

　　Achievement: Wizard Warded

　　Okay, Matt, I`ve got good news, bad news, and weird news.

　　"It`s Barry`s colors!"

　　"Well, that`s good news."

　　"Maybe. He`s saying more of a mixed bag. One sec."

　　The good news is that paying this one out, the system instance seems to have bankrupted himself again. He would have been running pretty lean after his last summoning, and this is a pretty big payout.

　　By the way, did you know we mostly work from templates? It`s not exact, but there`s a general way these messages usually go. Consider it a system laziness thing. Here`s what the default message for this thing should have been:

　　A magical assassin came, saw, and got conquered. As the only contributor to his fatal downfall, you get 100% of the spoils of war. Enjoy!

　　I bring this up as a way of saying, "no, I don`t know what happened here." Yes, he died. No, nobody but you had a hand in it. I overheard enough during your last excursion to know that you didn`t plan for this, but even though I doubt "tripped over a rock" was his cause of death, it must have been something like that. No other thinking being had a hand in this.

　　The bad news is pretty simple: the system paid you out entirely in consumables that will bring it back faster. Because they are the kind of consumables you will probably use right away, there`s nothing I can accuse him of. Enjoy, but know there`s no plasma knives or adamantium armor in the package.

　　Now for the weird: The system instance didn`t take the time to alter that message or to pay this out himself. He just left it lying around for me to pick up and deliver. But he did take the time to leave you a note, and it`s a bizarre message if I`ve ever seen one. I`ll send it separately after you`ve had a chance to assess the loot. It`s a doozy, and deserves your full focus.

　　This is an old instance, and unless I miss my guess, it spent a lot more time dormant than is normal, followed up by a lot of stress, courtesy of us three. Before, I would have said it was impossible for a system instance to go insane. Now I`m not so sure.

　　Rewards: 30,000 repair stones, Analysis Wand (100 Charges), Single-purchase estate voucher

　　"Oh, wow."

　　"Good stuff, Matt?"

　　"Yeah. For one, it looks like Leel isn`t a problem anymore. Thirty thousand repair stones, what I`m guessing is some sort of identify item, and an estate voucher."

　　"What!? An estate voucher? Single purchase or multi-use?" Lucy suddenly lit up.

　　"Single use. Why is that important? What is this thing?"

　　"It`s expensive, is what it is. It allows for the purchase of any estate item. It`s like a choose-whaterver-you-want coupon. Mana generator? Fine. An entire castle? No problem. The only catch is it has to be a single purchase. You can get one golden wheelbarrow, but not two toothpicks."

　　"They have golden wheelbarrows?"

　　"It`s an example. I was joking."

　　"Damn, got my hopes up. Still, free mana generator."

　　Matt accepted the rewards immediately, half-hoping the repair stones would come in a big stack. Instead, he got a much more manageable bag of a few hundred slightly different colored repair stones. Eager to test out the analysis wand, he pointed the plain-looking metal stick at one of them. Luckily, just wanting it to work was apparently enough to activate it.

　　Greater Repair Stone

　　Each greater repair stone holds the power of 100 repair stones. Greater repair stones have slightly increased functionality to avoid waste, and a single stone can be used multiple times. The stone will only disappear once its entire value has been exhausted.

　　Charge: 100/100

　　"Cool. It works."

　　"Yeah, but that`s boring. What else do we have that didn`t come with a description?"

　　Matt made a mental list of unidentified objects. It wasn`t much. Most of their possessions were specifically granted by the system or dungeons. He was able to see what they were at the time he acquired them. But he did still have some loot from the first Gaian invasion by sword-guy, which mostly consisted of some stones he carried around as hail-mary last-ditch objects. He pulled one of the repair-stone-like objects from deep in his pack.

　　Dungeon Break Stone

　　This item forces a controlled dungeon break. It is usually used to train troops or adventurers in remote locations, or to clear a dungeon that is known to be ready for a break when time is at a premium and available force is plentiful.