Nobody tells you that grinding is just chores with a number attached.
There is no music. There is 6 a.m. at the mouth of the Threshold, and there is a Straggler, and there is me putting three percent of a flame into the exact seam of its armor for the fortieth time in a row, because forty in a row is the price of the next percent, and the next percent is the price of everything.
And I'd copied Priya's shadow-grab by now — stood beside her while she flicked a chunk of rubble across the street, felt the System's quiet click — so I had a second thing to grind.
┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ Class: Copyist — Lv. 4Copy Slots: 4 Copied Skills: • [Minor Flame] — Lv. 6 (6%) • [Umbral Grip] (copied from Priya) — Lv. 3 (3%) • [ — empty — ] • [ — empty — ] └──────────────────────────────────────┘
Two skills. And on the third day, grinding them side by side, I found the thing that made my whole stupid plan real.
I was cornered — got greedy, let two Stragglers box me against the shard — and in the panic I threw everything at once. Three percent of Priya's Umbral Grip snagged one Straggler's leg for half a second. And into that half-second, while it was hitched and stumbling, I put six percent of my flame straight through its opened seam.
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The Grip didn't kill it. The flame didn't kill it. But the Grip made the flame land, and the two of them together did what neither could do alone.
I sat in the rubble afterward, breathing hard, and the truth of it opened up in front of me like the purple door.
Everybody else had one hammer. I had a toolbox. And nobody builds a toolbox, because if you already own a sledgehammer, why would you? They all stopped at one percent. They never found out that one percent times one percent times one percent, aimed right, stacked right, is not a rounding error. It's a machine.
Observation, said the System, unprompted. You have now independently derived a strategy the System has never seen a Copyist reach.The System is required to log unusual class behavior.The System is choosing, for reasons it will not examine, not to.
"Why not?" I asked.
Inquiries denied....Keep grinding, Leo.
By the end of the day, [Minor Flame] hit Level 10 — and something changed. The number stopped being the whole story. At ten percent the flame didn't just get bigger; it got hot, hot enough that a Straggler's armor cracked from the inside when I placed it right. A breakpoint. A real one. The first time in four days the world felt like it was tilting my way instead of the other.
I was still grinning about it when the Threshold stopped humming.
Everything on the street went quiet at once, the way a room goes quiet when someone important walks in. Priya's shadows snapped rigid. Halloran's fire guttered.
The purple door was getting brighter.
Something was coming out.