Chương 11: Failure Is Only the First Step Toward Success

Lloyd lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling with a dreamy smile on his lips — though, if he was being honest, the day had been far from his best. Outside, dusk was already settling in, and the room slowly sank into a bluish half-darkness. Somewhere on the street cars hummed, the neighbour upstairs trudged around on schedule, and the bedside lamp barely kept up with the encroaching dark, throwing a warm yellow circle onto the worn poster on the wall.

The streetlights outside had already come on — their orange strips cutting diagonally across the ceiling, crossing with the shadow of the window frame.

"Can't believe I actually found it." Despite the exhaustion — eyes heavy, fingers aching from endless scrolling — something quiet and insistent pulsed inside him. Something that felt like hope. As soon as he'd gotten home — it had been around noon, his ribs still aching from everything that had happened — Lloyd had immediately grabbed his phone. Hadn't even bothered to change properly, just dropped onto the bed and started scrolling.

And by evening he'd finally managed to figure out what that horned girl had meant by the word "deficiency." When a person becomes a Player — receives a True Name — abilities come along with that name. But every ability has a flip side. A deficiency. Something like a price, only built into the very essence of the being, into their nature. It could be something relatively bearable — a heightened appetite, for instance, where you have to consume twice the normal amount just to keep your body functioning.

Inconvenient, but liveable. However, fate sometimes proved far less generous, and then the Player would get something truly heavy — something they'd have to live with every day, every hour, every minute. While Lloyd was scrolling through forums and themed websites, he came across the story of one well-known Player. His deficiency was called "Silent." Lloyd had reread the description twice, not quite believing what he was seeing. This man cannot speak a single word. Not one. For the rest of his life.

And it wasn't a curse, not some magical ailment you could lift with the right ritual or a skilled mage. The deficiency literally grows into a person — becomes part of them, just as inseparable as eye colour or the shape of a hand. Forever.

"A brutal fate... So that bastard's deficiency was that he caught fire or something like that?" Lloyd clicked his tongue in irritation, the memory of the recent clash surfacing. A face flashed through his mind — smug, twisted with pain at the last moment — and Lloyd almost felt the residual heat on his skin. He unconsciously brought his fingers to the burn on his cheekbone. It answered with a dull, familiar sting.

"Pointless to speculate. It won't get me anywhere." He shifted his gaze to the blue ceiling. In the right corner ran a crack — thin, winding, long since become a familiar feature of the landscape. Lloyd had been looking at it for years. Sometimes it seemed like it had grown a little, but he'd never gotten around to checking. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Well. Usually a deficiency barely matters. And sometimes it's so weak that the Player simply stops noticing it." Lloyd slowly exhaled, and in the silence of the room the sound came out unexpectedly loud. Beyond the wall — where Rozi lived — it was quiet. The music that had earlier been barely audible through the partition had long since died. The whole world seemed to have gone quiet along with it.

"Hope I get lucky." He picked up his phone again and kept scrolling. The screen glowed in the dark, lighting his face with a cold bluish light. The bruise under his eye looked almost black in that light. The next thing he managed to find out about was the system. It was called simply: X. The moment a Player first steps into a dungeon, X appears on its own. Something like a guide. Or an assistant. Nobody described it more precisely than that — every Player, it seemed, encountered it differently, and accounts varied.

But one thing remained constant: X appears. Always. From the very first step into the dungeon.

"Too bad nowhere does it say whether it'll be there if I'm not a Player." Lloyd grew slightly gloomier, and the smile on his split lip disappeared for a moment.

"Though... who in their right mind would go into a dungeon as an ordinary person." The smirk came out joyless. Further on he came across a description of levels. When you become a Player, the first level is assigned automatically. Just like that, as a given. And most of the time — it brings nothing with it. No bonuses, no special abilities beyond what's already there. Just a marker. A starting point. But. Sometimes — extremely rarely, practically never — a Player receives a second ability at the first level.

Something additional, beyond the usual. It happened once in a million, and people spoke of it in half-whispers, like something almost mythical.

"Knowing my luck — I might as well not even dream about it." Lloyd set the phone down on his chest for a moment and closed his eyes. There was still a faint ringing in his ears — either from exhaustion or from an old hit. The room smelled familiar: dust, faintly — solvent from the neighbour's workshop, and something else barely perceptible, something homely. The ceiling above him remained the same — blue, with the crack in the corner. But then something clicked in his memory and he snapped his eyes open.

His gaze immediately shifted — sharper, more alive.

"No. None of that matters." He raised the phone again, and in his eyes — dark, slightly tired, with shadows beneath them — something lit up.

"I found what I was looking for." After long hours of searching — through forums dedicated to dungeons, through Player communities and fragments of other people's stories, through dead links and pages in languages he barely understood — Lloyd had finally landed on what he needed. A website. Unremarkable, without flashy headlines or advertising banners. Just a page with a concise description of a service. Assistance with entering a green category dungeon. Lloyd reread the line once more. Then again.

Then he smiled quietly — genuinely, without bitterness. The corner of his split lip tugged upward, and he didn't even wince at the pain. Outside, it had gone completely dark. The city lived its usual evening rhythm — cars humming somewhere, lights glowing in the building across the street, passersby talking on the pavement below. A perfectly ordinary evening in a world where dungeons and Players had long since become as routine a part of life as traffic lights and supermarkets.

Nobody was particularly surprised by any of it. Nobody was particularly concerned — unless, of course, you were the kind of person who went poking around where you shouldn't. And Lloyd lay in his room, staring at the screen of his phone, and across his face — beaten, bruised, exhausted — a smile slowly spread. The smile of someone who finally had a plan.