Let me tell you what I had, so you understand it wasn't luck.
I had a ten-percent flame that ran hot enough to crack armor. I had a three-percent copy of Priya's grip that could hitch a leg for half a second. I had a two-percent Warden's Inferno — a campfire, useless as a weapon. And I had the one thing none of the others had, which was that I had spent four days learning the exact moment a big armored thing opens up, because I'd killed forty smaller versions of exactly this problem.
A Guardian is just a Straggler that got everything it ever wanted. Bigger, meaner, and armored the same way — which means wasteful the same way. Which means beatable the same way, if you refuse to waste a single point.
"Go," I said.
Priya's shadow closed on its front leg. Three percent. Not enough to hold it — just enough to make it stumble, and a thing that big, mid-step, has to choose between catching its balance and looking at you.
It chose its balance. Which meant, for half a second, it wasn't looking at me.
I threw the Warden's Inferno — my useless two-percent campfire — not at the Guardian, but up, past its face, a bright cheap flare of light in the dark street. Every living thing flinches from a fire in its eyes. It flinched. The plates along its flank spread — just for an instant, just the way the small ones did, the way I'd watched happen forty times at 6 a.m. — and there, underneath, pale and wet and pulsing, was the one spot armor is a machine for protecting.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I put ten percent of my own flame — the candle I'd ground to a blade — straight into it.
Not one percent of a fireball splashed across the shell. One hundred percent of everything I had, hot enough to crack, placed precisely where the armor wasn't, at the exact instant the armor wasn't there — because I'd built the instant myself, with a stumble and a flash, out of two skills that couldn't have done anything alone.
The Guardian made a sound I still hear sometimes. Then it came apart from the inside, and the street was very quiet, and Mr. Halloran was still standing behind me, and he did not have to go under a coat.
The System took its time before it spoke. When it did, the jokes were gone.
[Threshold Warden defeated.] +500 XP. [Threshold Collapsed.]First Tier-1 Threshold cleared in your region.[Level Up! ×4] Copyist → Lv. 8
And then, smaller. Careful.
Leo.The System has run the Copyist class since the Integration. Every Copyist before you saw one percent and quit inside a week. Every single one.You didn't. You did something none of them did — you kept going long enough to reach the top of the number and feel it.And now the System has to tell you a thing it was told not to tell you.The one-percent cap is not a flaw in your class. It's a leash. Someone tied it there — deliberately — because a Copyist who never quits is the single most dangerous thing this System can produce. They set the number low enough that everyone would give up before they found the knot.You found the knot.
Across the street, in the wreckage where the vending machine used to be, the small black cat looked up from a stolen packet of fig cookies. It stared at me. And a box opened over its head, in a font I had never seen the System use before — older, and colder, and not the System's at all.
[ ??? ]"1%? Cute."