Chereads / Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow! / Chapter 12 - Planning the trap

Chapter 12 - Planning the trap

If this world perfectly abided by the rules Theo knew from the games his system was clearly inspired by, things would be nowhere near as easy.

There would still be many possible ways for him to exploit the mechanics implemented by the developers to simplify more complex aspects simulated by the game…

But doing so would require him to reach a certain level of development, a level he couldn't achieve with just a bit of wood and some stone.

Thankfully, this world didn't seem to apply those mechanics fully. Or rather, after a moment of consideration, those mechanics only applied to stuff Theo actively did.

And so, he could craft things in ways possible only in games. He could build structures out of blocks of materials he gathered. And yet, when subjected to something as simple as gravity, when deprived of proper support—a structure would collapse rather than just floating away, forever locked in the invisible grid of the world.

The considerable gash on the side of Theo's arm was the best possible proof of it, just like his memory of the tree suddenly toppling over when he removed a cube of wood from the middle of its trunk.

"The question is, how do I exploit those vulnerabilities?"

As great a help as various subroutines of Theo's system were, they didn't really mesh well.

The very way in which he obtained nearly a full stack of wooden planks was the best example of it—by cutting down a single tree through survival-based means, he obtained a total of sixteen pieces of wood, each of which he could later turn into four planks.

To nail the point down, he could get a full stack of wooden planks… just by felling, harvesting, and then quickly processing material he obtained from but a single tree!

'Thinking about this, what if…'

Prompted by nothing more than a feeling, Theo turned his attention over to the crafting bench again, only to bring out the remainder of his survival-sourced wooden chunks and then just… slap it in the central point of his crafting grid.

"This is really starting to get ridiculous…" Theo muttered, watching how the familiar picture of a wooden plank appeared in the result window…

An icon that was accompanied by six times the number of the eight pieces of wood he put into the crafting window to begin with!

'I guess that's another benefit of improving my crafting potential with the bench, even if there was no mechanic like that back in that blocky game.'

That made things a little bit easier… but still left the question of dealing with the Oilrat open.

'No matter how much I think about it, using gravity seems like the best possible way of ensuring its death,' Theo thought as he stretched his legs out, happily immersing himself in the warmth still offered by the fire burning in the furnace's bellows.

"It's easy to imagine dropping a massive stack of stone blocks right on top of it, but… how do I trap it to keep it in place? And how do I even go about putting the stones up in the air in a way that would allow me to safely drop them down?"

This wasn't a question of merely building a support structure and then stacking the stones on top—Theo still needed some quick, decisive means of collapsing the whole thing at once, all the while in a safe spot where neither the falling weight nor the Oilrat's claws could reach him.

"Let's stop thinking about all of this as one singular problem and divide it into separate tasks instead," Theo muttered to himself, only to push his ass to the back, all the way to the point where it pressed against the side of the crafting bench, only for the young man to lean in and lock his eyes on the stone floor just ahead.

"First, I need to trap it in a spot it won't be able to quickly run away from. Second, I need to be able to drop a huge amount of weight precisely into said trap. And lastly, I need a way for the whole process to be as safe as possible."

Theo breathed out, feeling his mind somewhat unclog now that he took one unsolvable problem and divided it into a series of smaller, perfectly solvable issues.

The trap itself was something he didn't even need to waste his time thinking about.

With the image of the Oilrat's claws clearly burned into Theo's memory, he could somewhat estimate its size, and through it—the size necessary for his trap to work. As for the trap's design… having real-life experience of constructing makeshift traps for actual rats, Theo didn't even need to think hard to come up with one.

'Judging how the rules of real life apply here, all I need is a single, sturdy beam and then a light, thin plate.'

By building up a thin surface atop a long, round beam, Theo could use it to cover a considerable hole in the ground. And with nothing to keep the whole thing from moving around, as long as a great enough weight was applied to one end of such construction, the entire thing would flip.

"But that only solves one of the problems," Theo thought as he brushed his chin, picturing all sorts of designs directly on the cold, gray surface of the stone. "And it comes with the prerequisite of the weight appearing on either of the swinging sides. Because if the rat steps directly over the support beam, the whole thing would have no reason to tilt over at all…"

Before Theo could utter as much as another word, his lips froze as a certain design suddenly came up in his mind.

A design he used tens if not hundreds of times when playing a game that could be broken and simplified when one took into account the pathmaking of the enemy units.

It was a simple design, using the trick of lifting the structure just a bit off the ground and then providing the player's enemies with a seemingly clear path of least resistance leading straight to him… only, for the final few steps, to be made with blocks that were too tiny to serve as proper support for the models of the enemy characters.

In this way, the horde would run along the long, elaborate path, only to reach the player character's proximity… and fall back down to the ground, conveniently just a few steps away from where a ramp allowed them to return to their most optimal path.

'Building a ramp up is out of the question; it would make the whole thing too vulnerable to direct attacks,' Theo thought, already imagining how the Oilrat would go on a rampage and end up destroying the support columns necessary to keep a survival base up in the air. 'So, a tunnel spacious enough for the Oilrat to enter, a trapdoor pitfall right near my position, a stack of heavy stones above it, and then a safety bunker at the end, with an escape shaft leading to the deep underground in it.'

What Theo thought would take him days to figure out turned into a logical blueprint in a matter of mere moments.

It was as if…

It was as if his systems influenced his mind, making it somehow easier for him to plan his projects in his head, something he would never even attempt back in his modern life without either a piece of paper or proper blueprinting software on his PC.

Yet, even without the paper for Theo to pour his creativity on and then take a look at how his imagined project shaped in a more visual, concrete form, there was one aspect of this whole enterprise that the young man conveniently overlooked.

'While building all of that would be quite easy… it's going to take a crapton of blocks to complete, isn't it?'