The bot cleared the arena. It didn't die more than a person does. And it still walked out with two to three times the damage a human takes doing the same job. This round chased that gap down to its root — and ended with the bot beating the person who designed the game it plays.
The wrong number
The first surprise was in our own bookkeeping. The bot's "deaths" counter was firing every time it got hit while healing — a run logged as "died eleven times" was really one or two real deaths, about what a human racks up. Once that was fixed, we stopped counting damage per run and started counting it per second. The bot bleeds at almost exactly the human rate, around 1.7 points a second. It's just as safe as we are. It simply takes twice as long to finish the job — two hundred seconds instead of ninety — and equally-safe-but-twice-as-slow means twice the damage. Not worse play. Slower play. Speed is defense, because every enemy killed a second sooner is a second of incoming attacks that never happens.
The right place
Kill faster, we said. That's when we took the damage apart by source, not amount — and found seventy percent of it was plain skeleton melee, taken point-blank, often from two directions at once. The bot wasn't fighting badly. It was fighting from the wrong place: the middle of the crowd, exactly where our own advice ("keep the pack tight for a big swing") had put it.
Two changes, one idea. First, never be surrounded — a rule that shoves the fighter toward open ground the instant two enemies close in; it cut damage a fifth on its own. Then the one that broke it open: reach. A skeleton's arm reaches about two metres; the Penitent's cleave reaches past three. We'd never used that gap. The bot stopped walking in to swing and started cleaving the pack from outside its reach — same fat three-target swing, but thrown from a spot the skeletons simply cannot touch back.
Damage-per-clear fell off a cliff — down about seventy percent over the session, from more than double a human's to comfortably under it. The bot now clears all three waves taking less damage than the designer does, without dying. One of those runs is on video, because it's the first time the machine has cleanly beaten the person who built the game it's playing.
What it says about Dreadmark
This was never really about the bot. The safest damage is the damage you deal from outside the enemy's reach. Spacing isn't the timid option — it's the strong one, as long as your swing is long enough to punish from out there. Reach is a stat. Where you stand is a build. Old bones of the genre, rediscovered by watching a machine walk into the middle of every fight until it finally learned not to: keep your distance, never get surrounded, hit them from further away than they can hit you.