Vertical Slash took him longer to master fully than it had taken to first unlock.
Days folded into more days, the ache in his shoulders becoming a permanent, familiar companion rather than a fresh complaint, and every time he felt the motion sharpen he pushed more of his dwindling input points into the skill’s proficiency, watching the level climb one grinding step at a time.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
By the time it reached its ninth level, the strike no longer resembled the clumsy overextended swing that had sent him sprawling into ash so many times before.
It came down clean and fast enough now to split the jagged rock spur he’d been practicing against clean in half, the two pieces falling apart with a sound like a held breath finally released.
He pushed the last of what the skill required into it without hesitation, five hundred thousand input points draining from a pool that had once felt bottomless and now sat noticeably, uncomfortably thin.
**Vertical Slash Proficiency 10/10.**
**Evolution condition met.**
**Skill evolved: Hurricane Slash Lv.1**
The panel that followed showed him something new entirely, a description this time, the first skill description he’d ever actually been able to read since Gogohut explained why Input had shown him nothing before.
A single vertical strike now carried a following gust of compressed air behind it, extending the blade’s reach and doubling its cutting force at the cost of a brief, unavoidable moment of recovery afterward.
He tested it against the same broken stone, and the resulting gust tore a groove through the ground three times longer than the blade itself should have reached.
He allowed himself, for the first time since waking on that battlefield, something close to satisfaction.
With two hundred thousand input points left, he turned his attention to the smaller things Gogohut had mentioned in passing, instincts and reflexes he’d been running on instinct alone since arriving in this place.
He spent focused effort on staying alert to every sound and shift in the ash around him, and Perception unlocked faster than any skill before it, requiring only a fraction of the discipline the sword skills had demanded.
A hundred thousand input points pushed it to a threshold he hadn’t expected so early, and the skill evolved before he’d even finished celebrating its creation.
**Skill evolved: Mind’s Eye**
The world sharpened around him the instant it settled into place, edges crisper, distances easier to judge, the faint disturbance of dust settling somewhere behind him registering now as clearly as if it had happened directly in front of his face.
He spent what remained more cautiously after that, fifty thousand into something he came to think of as Stable Mind after Gogohut’s warning about beings who could bend a person’s will with a single command, and another fifty thousand into a small, imperfect healing skill he named Quick Heal, testing it on the split blisters along his palms and watching them knit closed, slower than he’d hoped but faster than nothing at all.
The last hundred thousand went into Quick Steps, a movement skill built from the same instinct that had once let him dodge Fragg’s petty tricks back in Teria, though it barely registered as more than a marginal improvement in his footing by the time the pool finally ran dry.
He stood in the ash, completely spent of input points for the first time since Gogohut’s death, and felt, despite the exhaustion, more solid in his own body than he had ever felt in sixteen years of living.
That was, of course, the exact moment something arrived that made all of it feel like nothing at all.
He noticed it first through Mind’s Eye, a presence settling over the battlefield from somewhere beyond the ridge, quiet and controlled in a way that felt almost deliberately unremarkable, nothing like the earth shaking violence of the fight he’d witnessed between Gogohut and Deatharo. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
That subtlety made it worse, somehow.
Hoju flattened himself into the shadow of the crater’s edge and watched a figure walk into view, dressed in something that looked absurdly, incongruously like a butler’s coat, tailored and pressed despite the scorched wasteland surrounding it, moving with unhurried, precise steps toward the exact spot where Gogohut had died.
The figure crouched, studying the ground, the faint residue of purple light still clinging faintly to the crater’s edge, and made a small, thoughtful sound.
“Interesting,” it said, in a voice that carried none of Gogohut’s weight but somehow felt no less dangerous for it.
“Someone finished the job before we arrived.”
Hoju’s Mind’s Eye caught the exact moment the figure’s attention shifted, unhurried, toward the shadow he was hiding in.
“And that someone,” the figure continued, straightening, “appears to still be here.”
There was nowhere left to run.
Hoju stood, sword already in hand, every instinct honed over a hundred days of grinding screaming that stillness would not save him this time the way it had against Gogohut.
The figure studied him with open, genuine curiosity, tilting its head slightly.
“A human,” it said, sounding almost delighted by the novelty of it.
“In a star domain.
I did not think that was possible.”
“Who are you,” Hoju managed, forcing the words out steady despite everything in him wanting to run.
“Jerry,” the figure said, with a small, formal bow that felt entirely at odds with the pressure radiating off it.
“A butler in service to the stars.
We recover the remains of the fallen.
Quietly.
Efficiently.
Without drawing attention.” Its eyes settled back on Hoju with renewed interest.
“You, however, are drawing quite a lot of attention just by existing here.”
Hoju raised his blade, Hurricane Slash already coiling beneath his stance, and Jerry laughed, soft and genuinely amused.
“Oh, you intend to fight me,” it said. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“How wonderful.”
It did not draw a weapon.
It simply stepped forward, and the pressure that had been radiating off it politely, almost apologetically restrained until that moment, expanded outward in a wave that drove Hoju to one knee before he’d even understood what had happened.
He forced himself upright and swung anyway, Hurricane Slash tearing forward with its trailing gust of compressed air, everything he had built over a hundred days of relentless practice poured into a single desperate strike.
Jerry caught the blade between two fingers.
Not deflected.
Not blocked with a weapon of its own.
Caught, casually, between thumb and forefinger, the way a person might catch a falling leaf out of idle curiosity rather than any real concern.
“Level 800,000,” Jerry said conversationally, as if introducing itself properly for the first time.
“Forgive me.
I should have mentioned that before you decided to test it.”
Hoju barely had time to register the number before Jerry’s other hand moved, an almost lazy backhand that connected with his ribs and sent him tumbling across the scorched ground hard enough to crack stone beneath the impact.
Pain exploded through his chest, sharp and immediate, and Quick Heal flickered weakly to life at the edges of his awareness, trying and failing to keep pace with damage on a scale it had never been built to handle.
He tried to stand.
His legs would not cooperate.
Jerry approached at an unhurried walk, studying him now with something closer to clinical curiosity than any real malice.
“Truly fascinating,” it said.
“How did a level two human end up here at all.
This should not be possible.
Someone, somewhere, is going to receive a very stern conversation about oversight.”
Hoju’s vision blurred at the edges, blood filling his mouth, every instinct he had left screaming at him that he had seconds, maybe less, before this conversation ended permanently.
His eyes fell on the ring, still sitting on his finger where it had been since the day he found it near Gogohut’s crater, forgotten in the chaos of everything that had happened since.
He had no time to think it through properly.
He simply reached for it with the last coherent thought his battered mind could manage, willing it to work, willing it to save him the way nothing else in that moment could.
The world folded around him and vanished.