damn, you really changed it up there

yes

If they wanted us not to use built-in functions:

1. they would've written tests to prevent that
2. the kata most likely wouldn't be 8 kyu, as most 8 kyu katas take <10 seconds to solve and just want you to do one basic operation

must've been an error on my part

What is that last line doing there?

Instructions for the problem say "The tests will always use some integral number, so don't worry about that in dynamic typed languages."
Otherwise, yeah it'd be an issue.

This problem was so trivial that I figured they wanted us to not use the built-in functions as an exercise lol

The function can only return one thing; once it gets to a return statement, the function is done being executed.