I Coded the Perfect Death Trap — Then Spawned Inside It

One Point Per Minute

The healing salve came next.

I uncorked the small bottle and got my first proper smell of it: mint and something sharper underneath, medicinal in the way that things which are about to cause you pain are often medicinal. I had sourced that scent profile from a list of real antiseptic compounds and asked the olfactory system to approximate it. I had thought it added authenticity.

I applied it to the gash across my ribs with two fingers and made a sound that I was grateful nobody was around to hear. The sting was immediate and total, far worse than the throbbing had been, a bright chemical burn that overrode everything else for about four seconds and then settled into a deep, bone-level ache that was somehow more unpleasant than the sharp version had been.

"Authentic," I said, when I could speak again. "Really immersive. Great call."

The pain did dull after another minute, not gone but receded to something I could think around. I worked the salve into the shoulder wound next, slower this time, braced for it. The bracing helped slightly. Not much, but slightly.

I saved the potion for last because I had a feeling I was going to need the psychological lift of watching my HP bar actually move.

Minor Health Restoration. I had designed it to be exactly what it said: minor. A first rung on a ladder of healing items that escalated through Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Epic tiers, each one requiring progressively harder-to-source ingredients. The Minor version was craftable from herbs available in the starting zone, cheap to buy from any vendor, and deliberately underwhelming. A stopgap. Something to keep you alive long enough to find something better.

I uncorked it and drank it in one go. It tasted like cherry cough syrup mixed with something that had been left in a cabinet too long. I had thought that flavor profile was funny when I approved it.

MINOR HEALTH RESTORATION CONSUMED. PLUS 20 HP RESTORED. HP: 58/110.

Twenty points. I stared at the bar. Twenty points out of the seventy-two I had lost, and that was with the bandage and the salve doing their part first. The potion I had designed as a meaningful emergency resource had moved my bar from critical to merely terrible.

"Twenty points," I said aloud. "I bled on the forest floor for twenty points."

The RECOVERING status replaced BANDAGED in my effects list. Natural regeneration would resume now, one point per minute at base END stat, modified down by the FATIGUE debuff I was still carrying. Roughly one point per minute and twenty seconds, if I did the math, which I did because apparently my brain had decided that calculating my own recovery rate was a productive use of whatever focus I had left.

It was not productive. It was just the only thing I could control right now.

I sat back against the tree and let myself stop doing anything for a moment. The forest was quiet around me in the way forests are quiet when they are not actually quiet: leaves moving, distant birds, something small rustling in the undergrowth that my threat assessment system flagged and then released when it failed to produce a mob indicator. The bodies of the three bandits lay where they had fallen, already developing the slightly waxy quality that NPC corpses got in the first hour before despawn.

Gareth was the closest one. I could see the name tag floating above him if I focused on it. BANDIT THUG LV.2. GARETH. DEFEATED.

I looked away.

I thought about Priya instead, which was safer. About the meeting in conference room B and the thing she had written in her notebook that I had never asked her about. About the eleven beta testers who had filed reports about pain feedback. About ThornwickPlays and the hunger system. About Marcus saying the death mechanics were too hardcore and me laughing and calling it the point.

I had built this world to be unforgiving because I had thought unforgiving meant meaningful. I had confused difficulty with depth, suffering with stakes, and I had done it with complete confidence while the people around me tried to tell me I was wrong.

Every single one of them had been right.

I pressed the back of my head against the tree bark and looked up through the canopy at the sky, which was still too perfectly blue, still lit with that natural, unfiltered light that my saturation system had never produced. Whatever this world was built from, whatever had put me here, it had kept my worst design decisions and improved everything else. The beautiful parts were more beautiful. The brutal parts were exactly as brutal as I had intended them to be, which was apparently very brutal indeed.

"Okay," I said, when my HP had ticked up to sixty-one and the shaking in my hands had slowed to something manageable. "Lesson learned. More healing supplies. Better preparation. Don't let the shoulder take a hit in the first exchange."

I pushed myself to my feet, slowly, using the tree for support until my legs remembered what they were for.

"And maybe," I added, looking at the STATUS EFFECTS still listed in my HUD, looking at the FATIGUE and the PAIN and the RECOVERING that would be with me for the next hour at least, "don't design the game to be quite so authentic."

But even as I said it I knew that particular lesson had no application. There was no patch I could push from here, no design document I could revise, no meeting I could call where Priya would look at me with the expression of someone who had already been right and say nothing while I caught up. Every fight from here would leave a mark. Every drop of blood was cumulative. Every point of damage mattered in a way I had always wanted it to matter and had never once imagined experiencing from this side of the screen.

I was going to have to get used to pain.