Alex stared at the chart for a long moment.
Seven ranks, seven ranges. They sat on the page in clean black ink, and he knew them already, but seeing them again did something to him. In the prison room they had been words on a wall. Here they were rules.
’What do all these mean?’
He did not mean the letters. He meant the numbers. What were they actually measuring? What was being taken out of a person, and how much of it?
He kept his finger on the page and read on.
The text beneath the chart was short and direct. The synchronization percentage, it said, was the proportion of a suit’s total output that a pilot could draw upon. A pilot at fifty percent used half of what the suit could give. A pilot at ninety used almost all of it. The rank followed the percentage automatically, and it could rise as the pilot trained and grew more attuned.
Alex read that line twice.
’So this is what the doctor was talking about.’
He remembered her standing in that room with the tablet under her arm.
Anyone who does not begin at C rank or higher will be returned to the schedule they were on before I walked in. He had heard it as a threat. Now he saw it as a number.
His eyes went down the chart to the C line.
60 to 70%.
’Sixty percent. That’s the bare minimum.’
He sat back in his chair and let out a low breath. Sixty percent was a lot. It was more than half. Back in his old life it would have been a decent grade, something like a B in some colleges. Not a pass, a good mark. And they wanted it from convicts on their first attempt, with a month of training and a stack of unread books.
’And that’s the floor,’ he thought. ’That’s the cutoff to stay alive.’
The odds she had given came back to him. Point one percent. He understood now why it was so small.
He turned his attention back to the page.
’I’m guessing these numbers have everything to do with output power,’ he thought. ’How strong the suit hits. How much force it can put out.’
He kept reading, looking for confirmation, and found something different.
The percentage did not govern power alone. It applied to speed as well, the pilot’s reaction time and movement. It applied to stamina, how long the body could keep fighting. It applied to mana, the reserve of energy used for talents and Maximizers. And it applied to durability, how much punishment the pilot could take before the body failed.
Alex read the list slowly. Power. Speed. Stamina. Mana. Durability.
’So all of it gets buffed. Every basic human parameter.’
He blinked. It was exactly the kind of thing he had expected to find, only he had expected to find it on a glowing panel. He had imagined a status window with clean rows of numbers, strength and agility and endurance, ticking upward as he leveled. A system, in the way the stories described it. Here it was, in dry text, in a printed book, with a chart to go with it.
’It’s the same thing,’ he thought. ’It’s a system. It’s just built into the suit.’
The thought was strange. It was not a comfort, exactly. It was the shape of what he had lost, sitting right there in front of him, laid out in black and white.
A second thought followed close behind.
’Wait. So does that mean I’m not special?’
He stopped. His finger went still on the page.
’I mean, it seems like everyone here can have a Ravager suit. Everyone who awakens gets one. And of course they’ll be able to level up. They’ll get stronger, get talents, wield weapons. It’s a system for everybody.’
He looked around the room at the two people in it. Jerry was hunched over the evil textbook, fighting through his pages. Kelly sat behind her desk, reading. Either of them could awaken. Either could rise. There was nothing in this world that said the man in the orange jacket was any different.
’No cheat,’ he thought. ’No system. Nothing that’s only mine.’
It hit him harder than he expected. It settled somewhere in his chest and stayed there, heavy and cold. For a second he did not want to look at the page anymore.
But the page was still there. The book was still open. He was not done.
He set his jaw and turned back to the text.
’I’m not finished with the Maximizers.’
The section picked up where he had left off. A Ravager could wield only a limited number of Maximizers, it said, depending on their rank. The weapons were powerful, but they were not free. Each one drew on the pilot’s mana every time it was used. A pilot who equipped more than their reserves could handle would burn out, sometimes fatally. For this reason, Ravagers were advised to use only as many Maximizers as their rank allowed, and never to push past that limit.
Alex read it once and understood it immediately.
’Mana. So the higher your rank, the more mana you have, and the more Maximizers you can safely carry.’
He nodded slowly to himself.
Then something else fell into place, and he raised his head.
’That’s why they needed the criminals to awaken at C rank at least.’
It made sense now. The Foundation was not being cruel, or at least not only cruel. A pilot who started too low would have too little mana, too little strength, too little of everything. They would be a liability. They would die before they could level.
And leveling was the point. The next paragraph confirmed it. A Ravager grew stronger by destroying Beasts, gaining levels with each kill, becoming faster and tougher and deadlier over time. That was the real progression. The synchronization percentage was where a pilot began, but the kills were how they climbed.
He kept reading.
Alex expected the next part to be a simple explanation. He was already imagining a chart of levels and how each one worked. What he found was a short paragraph with a very different point.
The rate of growth, it said, was not equal across ranks.
He read the sentence carefully.
’This isn’t usually how it works,’ he thought.
In most stories, in most games, the weaker people seemed to grow the fastest. They had more room to climb. A beginner could jump ten levels in a week, while a veteran struggled to gain one. That was the rule he had always known, and it made a kind of sense. Catching up was easy. Getting ahead was hard.
But the book said the opposite.
The stronger the pilot, the faster they grew. A weak Ravager might take a full month to go from level one to level five. A strong one, in the same time, might climb from level ten to level sixty.
Alex stared at the numbers.
’Ten to sixty. In the time it takes someone else to go one to five.’
It was not linear. It was not even close. Power fed on itself. The higher a pilot started, the faster they could kill, and the faster they killed, the faster they rose, and the gap between the strong and the weak did not close over time. It widened.
He sat there with his finger on the line.
’So that’s how it works.’
It should have depressed him. It meant the strong would always outrun the weak, that the chance of a low rank catching up was nearly nothing. But for some reason, as the idea sank in, the corner of his mouth began to lift.
He could not say why. It was a feeling, like a door had swung open a crack. If the strong grew faster, then the trick was not to be weak. The trick was to start strong, or to find a way to become strong quickly. And that was a puzzle. Puzzles were something he knew how to chase.
The smile widened. He did not fight it.
Across the room, Kelly felt something shift in the air.
She turned her head, slowly, and looked over the top of her book.
Alex was sitting perfectly still, his head bent over the book, a strange, private smile on his face. His eyes moved along the lines with a steady, hungry rhythm. There was a kind of light coming off him. It was not literal, but she could feel it, the way you can feel someone about to laugh in a silent room.
’What’s up with him?’ she thought.
She watched him for a few more seconds, then lowered her eyes to her page. But she could not stop thinking about it. She could feel him shining, quietly, from somewhere deep within.