Olga was already there when I stumbled toward the gap, her body taking the brunt of the storm. She planted her feet wide, magic greatsword wedged sideways across her chest like a steel crossbar, and every time a minion slammed into her, sparks leapt off the blade.
She wasn’t built to tank, not like the shield-bearers, but she gritted her teeth and held on all the same, roaring curses so vile I thought even the monsters might be offended.
"Hurry the fuck up, you bastard, someone gotta fill in this gap, god damn it, fine, I’ll do it!" she bellowed at us, muscles straining as another three bark-things clawed over her sword onto her pretty face.
I hestitated for a moment.
I guess this was where I have to make a stand for myself.
"I’ll be there!" I yelled.
Not before long, I stood still in the middle of formation, next to archers pumping arrow, supports drinking mana potions, and mages trembling fingers.
I clicked through my inventory on the floating UI, while my mind, however, did what it always did when things got dire... It started wandering.
And among my arsenal of game-breaking inventions... There’s one that I always could rely on.
The word popped in like a spark, and I clung to it like a lifeline.
Navigation mesh, most players never think about it, but to me it was everything I need in this situation to be a pseudo-tank to hold a formation, now...
Every creature in a 3D game, whether some slobbering raid boss or a shopkeeper NPC humming in town, all moves on paths the devs baked into the world.
You can’t have a monster walking through a wall, right? Obviously, so you build the world into blocks, nets, chunks... polygons stitched together into an invisible lattice, telling them where can they walk, where they can’t walk, even better yet, how’s their Line of Sight for stealth stuff.
And then you feed it to the NPC’s behaviour system, or what the community simply calls AI (for some reason that still irks me because AI is not real in my opinion), we get what we call a navmesh. A giant web of "yes, you can step here" and "no, idiot, you can’t walk through that table."
It’s dynamic, too, and that’s the beauty of it.
You drop a crate in front of a door? The game updates the navmesh by linking the two.
Suddenly that straight line from A to B is blocked, and the AI reroutes, maybe it decides to climb? Maybe it circles around another door? Every update, every new object, the web shifts and warps, teaching the NPCs what’s solid ground and what’s forbidden.
That’s the very basic concept of navigation in 3D gaming, but letting the players update your environment can make the navmesh very buggy, hence why 90% of games have objects that are immovable and indestructable (cough cough bushes and trees in GTA), or in singleplayer puzzle games, you can move stuff, but there weren’t any NPC around to mess up with the game’s physic... Unless you’re a Source engine game maker, those dudes are very wild... But that’s a different can of worms.
And me? I knew something about nodes that the monsters didn’t.
After searching my inventory... I found it, my beloved game-breaking instruments.
With a grin, I pulled from thin air a massive cloth sack, sealed tight with rope at the mouth.
It dropped into my arms with a thump heavy enough to rattle my shoulders. To anyone else, it looked like a bag of potatoes, or maybe sand, harmless and pointless. But only I knew the truth...
Inside was something heinous, something unthinkable, something that no player even thought about bringing with them onto the dinner table, much less a raid battle field.
Inside was cheese, wheels of it. Dozens, maybe hundreds (exaggerating of course), of cheesewheels stacked on top of each other until the bag bulged like a barrel.
Food were not objects the devs considered to be an obstacle.
Cheese so dense, so perfectly round and weighty, it might as well have been wheels.
Olga risked a glance over her shoulder, face twisted in fury:
"What the hell are you doing with that bag?!"
"Trust me!" I yelled back, sprinting toward her, "Now move aside!" Follow current ɴᴏᴠᴇʟs on novel(ꜰ)ire.net
She swore something in Russian but quickly obeyed, shifting just enough for me to barrel past and drop the bag with a ground-shaking thud right in the center of the gap.
Then I hopped up, boots landing square on two of the cheesewheels pressing against the fabric.
It squelched faintly under my weight, but I try not to notice how disgusting it was, because what mattered was the reaction.
The minions came at me, claws raised, jaws snapping.
But the moment they reached the sack, their heads jerked sideways in unison. Their bodies lurched left, right, skirting around the bag like a river split by a boulder.
None of them touched me, none of them even saw me or acknowledges my existence.
The navmesh had updated, the sack was now a solid object that were unmovable. To the AI, I didn’t exist, in their graph 3D head, the entire sack and whatever on top of it were a giant hole inside a chunk that if they step in, they’ll fall to their death, like the void or something.
"Hoh..." A sound of recognition was directed towards me.
The mage’s voice carried through the din, amused in that maddeningly cool way only powerful casters managed.
He folded his arms, elements and arcane still glowing in his eyes and mouth, and tilted his head like he’d just discovered an interesting dollar bill on the sidewalk.
I couldn’t help but laugh, loud and unhinged, as I swung my sword into the crowd.
One hand cut through bark-flesh while the other punched whatever strayed close enough or tried to walk past me, my body moving with the relaxed rhythm of someone punching a practice dummy.
The monsters ignored me, sliding past in a neat, useless parade, and I carved them down like tall grass.
"Formation is stable!" I shouted, high on adrenaline and disbelief, my voice cracking with manic pride, "Avenge the fallen, my comrades, Stalin would be proud of your unwavering strength! Do not let her death be in vain"
Is it racist to assume they’re communists just because Olga’s Russian? Eh, whateves.
Dozens of heads turned toward me. Allies froze mid-swing, healers peered out from behind their trees, even tanks risked a glance over their shields.
All they saw was me, standing a head taller than before, balanced on some bulging sack of who-knows-what, cutting down minions that didn’t even try to fight back.
And the truth was absurdly simple.
It was a god-spot exploit.