Dungeon 13 of 17 — added v259 · level 780 to enter

The Halved Claim

Somebody else is in this room, working the boss down beside you — and the payout peaks exactly when your share and theirs come out even

Twelve dungeons already existed, and every single one of their axes read a quantity that belonged to the player alone — every one of them could have been scored identically in a room with nothing else alive in it. The Halved Claim's thirteenth axis is the first that structurally cannot be: how much of it you left for somebody else.

The Coheir: a second party that isn't your enemy

The Coheir stands on the far side of the Apportioner, working at it steadily the entire fight. It never looks at the player, it cannot be hit, and it isn't an enemy — it doesn't even spawn as one. It's simply also bringing the boss down, on its own schedule, and every point of damage the player deals is a point they took instead of leaving it to the Coheir.

Assessments: paid on parity, not on total

The Apportioner's health bar is cut into six equal assessments. While one is open, the room tracks exactly two running totals: Yours — points taken off the bar by the player — and Theirs — points taken by the Coheir. When the assessment closes, the room doesn't ask who contributed more. It asks how even the two totals were:

parity = min(Yours, Theirs) ÷ max(Yours, Theirs)

The payout is a fixed base amount multiplied directly by that parity, banked the instant the assessment fills. Below a 50% parity threshold, the assessment is void and pays exactly zero.

Why the habitual play style pays nothing

Holding the trigger down with the strongest available weapon drives Yours toward the entire segment and Theirs toward almost nothing — parity collapses toward zero, and the assessment voids. The single best pure-damage run this game can produce is worth exactly zero in this room. Standing still and firing nothing at all fails for the mirrored reason. The only play that actually pays is holding a deliberate share of somebody else's work — which means there are real, measurable stretches inside every assessment where the correct action is to take a finger off the trigger and let the Coheir close the gap.

Scale-free by construction

Because parity is a ratio between two damage totals, it contains no player stat anywhere in its formula — it cannot break at either end of character progression. A stronger player doesn't get a bigger number out of this room, only a shorter amount of time they need to hold their fire before the gap closes. Playing well changes the rate at which assessments close, never the power of anything the player owns.

The Coheir's rate is published, and it changes every time

Each of the six assessments has its own fixed rate for the Coheir, painted on a board beside the stair before the fight even begins — so the throttle a player has to hold isn't the same one twice, and the room can't be reduced to a single learned rhythm. Three cede stones stand on the ring; interacting with one multiplies the Coheir's rate for the remainder of the currently open assessment by 0.5, 1, or 2, resetting back to 1 once that assessment closes. This is a supply line, not a reward on its own — it pays nothing directly and changes nothing about the player's own damage.

The killing blow is always yours

The Coheir's own damage is clamped every frame so the bar can never fall all the way to zero from its side alone — the very last of it always has to come off the player's own weapon, routed through the game's ordinary kill path. Standing back and letting the Coheir do everything cannot actually finish the fight.

Why this differs from The Sparing Floor's axis

The nearest claimed axis is The Sparing Floor's Witness, "what you leave alive" — a rule about something that must never be touched at all, scored on a single bit where one point of damage voids the entire line. The Halved Claim is scored on the very thing being attacked, and it pays most at the exact moment the player's own contribution and someone else's contribution are equal — making zero effort and total effort worth precisely the same nothing, while the true optimum sits at a fraction the player has to deliberately hold onto.

Balance

The Apportioner reuses an existing enemy template, its damage set to 95 — identical to the eleven bosses before it. Its health pool was reduced substantially in later balance passes, from 125,484 originally down to 40,445 at the Boss Pass (v363) — see the axis dungeons overview for the shared balance history behind all seventeen doors.

How it's found

Found by the same three signposts every keyless dungeon in the series relies on: the structure itself, a one-time toast within 500 metres, and a bearing-and-range line on the idle prompt within 900 metres.

Version history

v259 — added. Ships as the thirteenth dungeon and thirteenth boss, claiming the axis of shared attribution — the first fight in the game with a second, non-hostile party whose presence the player's own performance is measured against. The next dungeon actually shipped, The Conning House (v268), claimed a fourteenth axis some versions later.
v362 — level requirement lowered from 2,420 to 780, part of the game-wide compression of all seventeen axis dungeon doors into the early game.
v363 — boss health rebalanced from 125,484 down to 40,445, and its displayed nameplate number changed from a deterministic 3,020 to a deterministic 941, as part of the Boss Pass that made every dungeon's boss survivable at the level its own door actually admits.

Trivia

The game's own development notes document an honest edge case: attribution is worked out purely by comparing the boss's health from one frame to the next, crediting the Coheir with at most what it applied itself and the player with the remainder. Any hypothetical third source of damage in the room would therefore be misattributed entirely to the player — but nothing else spawns in this dungeon and the Coheir isn't a true enemy, so the case is written down as a design note rather than something that can actually occur.
Is one of seventeen axis dungeons on Earth. It's the only one in the series whose scoring depends on the actions of a second character the player doesn't control.