Why a High School Girl (19) Is Stronger Than a College Girl (20)
What do I do?
Now that I'd confirmed this difficulty was Hard and that the level penalty was active, this fight had become completely meaningless. An unwinnable, reckless battle we could never clear.
In a game, failure would only cost you an attempt. Buy another challenge ticket and you could retry without issue. But this was reality — even a Major Unit would hit a death ending in an instant.
...Would retreating be the better call after all?
The only real shot at survival was a deliberate full retreat. Honestly, pulling out now, grinding a little more, and coming back stronger would be the smarter play... Of course, this whole area would get torn apart and there would be countless casualties. But if even we could hold out...
"Captain!? What's wrong? Is something the matter?"
"...It's nothing. Focus."
I couldn't bring myself to pass on the information. Telling them we were up against an opponent we could never beat wouldn't help the battle in the slightest — it would only chip away at the confidence they'd built up through all that hard-earned power-leveling.
Should I just fire off my ultimate and retreat even now?
The biggest reason players saw Jasmine as a trash character was her ultimate. And yet, ironically, it was the only skill that gave her any real utility. Under normal circumstances you'd never use it, but against certain bosses, a special ultimate like hers could counter a pattern and earn a slot on the team.
Jasmine's ultimate lowered the accuracy of everything around her. If no attack could land, the pattern itself became meaningless — so using it to dodge was perfectly viable. Was there no potential? Not exactly. It wasn't a full 100% reduction, so if you got unlucky it would still hit even after casting. But you could just keep retrying until the dodge worked, so the ability itself wasn't bad.
...That is, until the moment that kind of tactic became necessary and Cypress dropped as an event freebie — a straight upgrade. Cypress only lasted a short time, but she offered a full 100% accuracy reduction and scrubbed away every other downside of Jasmine's ultimate. She was complete.
The other flaw in Jasmine's ultimate was that it made no distinction between friend and foe. In other words, the idiot skill slapped the accuracy debuff on your own allies too. After casting, your entire team's attacks would start missing — pure trolling. If her other skills had been decent it might have been forgivable, but she was stuck with support stats and a handful of damage skills. She had buffs, sure, but the numbers were so pathetic that every other support outclassed her.
There was a reason nobody used this character and treated her like garbage.
Since our hits won't deal damage anyway, using it wouldn't really matter...
But if I was already certain we couldn't win — like right now — what if I fired it off to cut the hit chance and then retreated? For that purpose alone, it might be worth using.
"...Huh?"
Something was off. This was the timing when the tank's HP should have been getting critical, and I'd been about to use my ultimate to keep her alive somehow. But strangely, the tank still had a lot of health left.
"...Master, could you briefly read me the damage numbers coming in right now?"
I couldn't make sense of the situation, but the thought that it might be a thread of hope made me grab onto it. And the damage information Master read out was, astonishingly, nothing like what I'd calculated at the start.
...What on earth?
My own hits are still going in reduced.
But everyone else's damage was abnormally high. No — looking at it the other way, the damage the tank was taking was also abnormally low. At this rate, you could almost say the level-difference penalty wasn't applying at all.
...Hold on. I'm level 37 and the penalty is working. But the level 19s aren't getting it?
A hazy memory surfaced — something I'd seen on the community boards. A newbie who'd started late and publicized how the damage felt completely wrong.
The Level Penalty Non-Application Bug.
The level penalty was set to stack an extra 4% for every level of difference — but it wasn't a formula. Each gap had been individually hardcoded: 4%, 8%, 12%, and so on. And because they were individual values, any difference greater than 20 levels had simply never been registered. Twenty-one levels or more had no entry, so the system treated it as 0% and the penalty evaporated.
Against an enemy at level 40, a character at level 20 took an 80% damage reduction penalty. Drop to level 19, and the penalty vanished — full damage went through. The bug had existed since launch. It only got publicized in an era when the baseline was to hit max level first and ask questions later, and even after the community raised hell, it was left unpatched and forgotten.
The bug carried over too?
It was an utterly stupid reason, but I let out a breath of relief at the fact that the level penalty wasn't applying. That meant we could fight. I'd already planned for a no-penalty scenario for different reasons, so the strategy was already sitting in my head.
...For phase one, we just need to put out stable damage like this.
Fortunately, this wasn't a boss that demanded anything specific in phase one, so even if I zoned out for a bit it wouldn't be a disaster.
...Time to start prepping for phase two.
"Master, please report the HP status."
"Currently 75 percent."
"Make sure to tell me at 71 percent. Everyone, conserve your mana from now on!"
"71 percent."
"Everyone, fly!"
Once the Sand Ghost entered phase two, it gained a distinctive new pattern: it stopped attacking and buried itself in the sand. The moment that pattern started, you had to dump every scrap of mana into frantically repositioning the team. The Sand Ghost under the sand would form strange, round pit-like depressions, then fire lightning skyward that inflicted stun across that radius. Get stunned and fall, and it would open its mouth from the sand and swallow you whole.
In short, it was an instant-death pattern.
From the very first Deadly Battle, this was the pattern that drilled into you how much of a control game this really was.
In Princess Fourmi, even moving a character cost mana, so repositioning itself was a DPS loss. On top of that, manual emergency movement overworked the Wings and slapped a cooldown on them. If the AI ignored the move command, you just burned mana and cooldown for nothing — a truly miserable design.
Since this is reality, as long as we plan ahead, that kind of problem shouldn't come up.
I'd already briefed everyone on the pattern. Of course, with my eye for the fight, I planned to call it out as best I could in real time.
"Fruity, fly from there toward six-thirty. Stop when your wings get tired."
"C-Captain. My wings still won't move...!"
"Stay calm. I'm coming to get you right now."
Having to issue commands out loud was inconvenient — but the freedom to physically grab someone and pull them out of danger was a real advantage. In the game, your only options would have been to let them die or die in their place. And frankly, people who could talk and think straight were better than that brain-dead game AI any day.
God, though — dodging this pattern yourself was a whole different circle of hell. Cylindrical bolts of lightning-like energy were erupting from the ground, and watching one skim right past me sent a chill down my spine.
"Are you okay?"
"Yes, Master. Everything's going well."
To be blunt, if all we wanted was to survive, we could just keep running. But once we'd entered phase two, even if we fled and came back later, the fight would pick up right at phase two — so there was no point. And if it stayed in phase two forever, when were we supposed to deal damage?
...There's the groggy state.
Most bosses had a "groggy gauge" system — take enough hits and they'd briefly stop their patterns and turn into a punching bag. That gauge usually rose from the attacks you landed, but in phase two, when you couldn't hit it, the boss would raise its own groggy by spamming the pattern instead. In other words, it would thrash around with the pattern until it collapsed on its own — and that was when you poured on the damage.
"Now! Everyone land and hit it with your strongest attacks!"
For a first fight, they were adapting remarkably well. I'd been worried someone might panic and troll the run, but you were all so much better than the AI.
"Seriously, without you, Captain, we'd have been eaten already."
"Everyone, manage your mana carefully. We'll need to fly again once it starts waking up."
With our current specs, finishing phase two in a single groggy window was impossible. Ideally you'd see this pattern as little as possible, but the gear gap was what it was. Honestly the pattern itself wasn't that hard — but every so often the attack would drop right on the spot you'd just dodged to. A pure bullshit pattern. Phase three was higher difficulty, but at least it didn't have that kind of cheap shot, so it was actually better.
I spread my Wings and dodged the pattern, praying that no one would die to a stroke of bad luck...
"Ah."
"Jasmine!?"
Whoever designed this pattern, I was going to haunt them for the rest of eternity even after I died....
A trap laid dead-center at an angle where no one could reach me. Looking down, a round sand pit like a mouth of hell stared up, ready to swallow me whole. No matter how much mana I poured in, my Wings wouldn't move. I let out a hollow laugh, realizing I was going to die.
So all that good luck today was just mean reversion catching up to kill me?
"No...! Jasmine, please!"
"Master. I'm sorry. Looks like this is as far as I go. If I'd known it would come to this, I would have told you more."
"Don't give up. Please...."
"This is a first. Seeing Master make a face that despairing."
...If you make that kind of expression on our last video call, it makes me want to cling to hope even in a situation this hopeless.
You're a truly terrible person.