“Okay, what the hell. When we killed that Chubrat, there were no experience points, just stat increases?” Marco’s frustration overrode any fear he might have had. “How do we know when we level up?”

  “Remember what the imp told us? Levels are just the average of all our skills, rounded down. No XP, just skill points that build slowly over time.” Samantha shrugged, the slow progress making the ordeal feel even more drawn out and sinister. Her attention snapped back to the dungeon, her eyes locking onto two more Chubrats skittering in the distance. They paused, fixing on her and Marco. “All right, Gandalf Jr., why don’t you try that fireball?” she challenged, pushing him toward his designated role.

  Marco squared up to the Chubrats, determined to prove his understanding of the system. He aimed his staff down the corridor. “Fire!” he bellowed, his voice echoing through the stone hallway.

  Nothing. The staff remained inert.

  The Chubrats paused at the loud, confusing sound, then shrieked and charged, interpreting Marco’s failure as an invitation to nibble on his flesh.

  “For fuck’s sake, Marco.” Samantha lunged forward, covering him. Her sword flashed as Marco abandoned the staff’s magical function and swung it wildly like a club. The squealing monsters went down in a messy flurry of blows and blood, their health bars emptying.

  Samantha wiped her blade on a strip of white linen robe protruding from beneath her chainmail, muttering as she looted another greasy hunk of low-value Chubrat meat. “You do realize you picked wizard gear, right? Not janitor gear? The staff is supposed to cast spells, not swat vermin.”

  “Sorry…” Marco kept his gaze low, stung by shame. “Plus, no stat increases this time. What bullshit!”

  “Guess that’s just how it works. A slow grind like old MMOs.” Samantha’s tone was sarcastic. “Try your fireball again, big fella.”

  He closed his eyes and tried again, forcing focus. He imagined heat flooding from his palm into the wood, imagined fire curling, swelling, roaring outward into a burning sphere. He focused on the robe’s tooltip instructions and yelled, “Fireball!”

  Still nothing.

  “Is this staff just deadwood?” he shouted.

  Samantha gave a humorless chuckle as they pressed deeper into the corridor. “So. How do we get out of this nightmare?”

  “It’s simple,” Marco muttered defensively. “Kill mobs, get the key, fight the boss, the door opens.”

  This was mostly his dungeon after all, a predictable RPG structure he had designed as a child. So why was it proving so impossible to progress beyond a single corridor?

  “Right… and you can’t even cast a simple spell…” Samantha scraped her sword tip along the cold stone, the grating sound echoing. The absence of XP and the difficulty of performing basic spells proved ALAN was not a simple game. It was neural remapping.

  Marco fell silent, retreating into his own head. Watching him crumble—the disappointment etched into his face like a sculpture chiseled too deep—sparked a memory in Samantha. She thought back to the day she met Marco Hernandez, blinded by his sheer brilliance.

  She had been twenty-three, fresh from Idaho State, a graduate intern who possessed more relentless drive and curiosity than anyone else in the lab. With a notebook clutched tight and thick glasses slipping down her nose, she had trailed him constantly—eager, green, and undeniably brilliant.

  Back then, Marco had been defined by sharp edges. He was sharp in his posture, sharp in his relentless questions, and sharpest in the way he could glance at her notes and immediately see the crucial thing she had missed. He was the kind of mind that burned ahead of itself like a fuse—brilliant, relentless, and magnetic. Handsome, too, she conceded, a truth she had tried desperately not to admit.

  But looking at him now, seeing the hollow failure in his eyes and the deflation of his ego, she remembered a different day. It was the moment in the lab when the shine wore off, and she realized the dangerous truth: for all his genius, Marco Hernandez had a massive blind spot. His over-reliance on his mind to brute force any problem.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  His early work on the Neuralchip had been a disaster. He had designed it for seamless integration, but the tests resulted in chaotic growth: neural pathways that fired unpredictably, destabilizing neurotransmitter expression. It seemed to render all his hard work for naught.

  Then came Samantha's breakthrough. Building upon Marco’s original model, she discovered that by applying micro-pulses at carefully modulated thresholds, she could subtly nudge neurons to release targeted neurotrophic factors—specifically BDNF, dopamine, and serotonin. Crucially, with the right rhythmic pattern, this growth became directional and controlled.

  It was a pivotal moment. In essence, Samantha found a way to bypass trauma pathways, creating new neural routes—like building detours around bombed-out roads in the brain. This technique allowed for the controlled structural reorganization of the cortex. Colleagues recognized the immediate, fundamental shift in the project's direction, swiftly naming the core technology the "Falk-Hernandez Protocol."

  Charity Figueroa, recognizing the revolutionary potential of a systemic, experiential therapy, secured the crucial grant. The project, and its promise of true internal recalibration, lived.

  Now, years later, the ultimate irony settled heavily upon Samantha. She watched the co-architect of this therapeutic marvel trek down a digital hallway—a corridor within the very maze he designed. He held a staff in hand, the implement of a role he couldn't even fulfill, listening to her bitch as they looted repulsive meat from mutant rodents.

  They had built the system to heal the mentally wounded by confronting metaphorical monsters. Now, they were trapped inside their own creation, forced to fight literal monsters while trying to figure out the most basic function of their software.

  Another Chubrat skittered into view. Before Marco could raise his staff, Samantha reacted with brutal reflex. She pinned it with her boot and drove her sword through its skull.

  “What! You got a stat boost?” Marco griped.

  “Damn it, Marco, stop that…” She trailed off, agitated. Why was he obsessing over stat boosts when their entire reality had collapsed?

  Just hours ago, they were scientists. They were parsing code, analyzing data, and designing protocols to cure the human mind. Now, they were standing in the mossy rot of Marco’s childhood dungeon, fighting off oversized rodents.

  “How the hell did we get here?” she whispered.

  She wasn't asking about the code. She was asking about the chain of choices—the ambition, the betrayal, and the blind hubris—that had dragged them from a pristine lab into the claustrophobic rot of this bloody, digital dungeon.

  “Hey, why didn’t you let me try fireball again?” Marco harrumphed, adjusting his purple-and-red robe with indignant frustration. “I need to practice or I’m never going to get it.”

  Samantha almost laughed—almost. His fumbling, childish annoyance was utterly absurd against the backdrop of the horrifying reality they were in. And yet… it tracked. This wasn’t the first time Marco’s attempt at brute-forcing a complex system had failed. This current magical impotency was a perfect echo of the initial fiasco with the Neuralchip.

  Marco had missed the nuance then, and he was missing it now. He was attempting to brute-force a subtle, complex system with raw, unfocused will.

  “Ok, Marco—this is basically Neuralchip, translated,” Samantha explained, the urgency of their situation forcing her to revert to her clinical, instructional voice. “Brute force won’t do. How are you visualizing the spell?”

  Marco dropped his staff slightly, sheepishness creeping into his tone. “Uh… I’m just thinking of some flames shooting out of my staff. You know, like, boom.”

  Samantha took his robe, pinching the purple fabric between her armored fingers. “No wonder,” she stated, a dry note of certainty in her voice. The missing ingredient wasn't power; it was the correct access key, something the cerebral Marco always missed. “Remember why we created the system? To heal the mind. You’re way too much inside your head right now, and I bet the system is trying to coax you out of it. Have you tried channeling your emotions into it?”

  She watched as Marco's body went limp with defeat. He was a man who deliberately suppressed his emotions, who relied on cold logic. ALAN had read this in him and created a circumstance to challenge his pathological stoicism. The magical system wasn't fueled by mana or logic, but by the thing he spent a lifetime suppressing.

  “The robe,” Samantha continued, tapping the material. “The tooltip said it grants Heal and Fireball with the appropriate channel. Obviously, intellect and imagination don't work. So why not try something different?”

  Marco’s shoulders slumped, his expression filling with dread.

  “Channel your emotions. Think about the system; it's meant to be therapeutic. I bet that healing requires something like care or empathy. Fireball—a destructive, uncontrolled force—might require anger or rage. So you don’t get Fireball with 'boom.' You get Fireball with 'I hate this fucking dungeon, and I hate being trapped, and I hate Sebastian, and I want to burn it all down.' You have to feel it, Marco. Just give it a shot.”

  Marco stared at his staff, then at the bloodied stone floor. Samantha had a point; he hadn’t tried to channel his emotions yet. The system wasn't using Dungeons and Dragons rules; it was using their own Falk-Hernandez Protocol rules.

  He had to become the emotion to trigger the neurological function. He had to stop being the scientist and start being the patient.