The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

The Straggler came up the last flight of stairs, and I did the math on my own death.

The math went like this. My [Minor Flame] ran at one percent of a real Flame Warden's fire. One percent of an inferno is a birthday candle. You do not kill a monster the size of a Rottweiler — a Rottweiler wearing the skin of a scallop and hating you specifically — with a birthday candle. That's not pessimism. That's arithmetic.

So I didn't try.

Here is the thing I understood in the eleven seconds I had to understand it, standing on that landing with a candle on my fingertip: everyone else on Earth had just been handed a hammer, and every one of them was going to spend the apocalypse looking for nails. Mr. Halloran, two floors up, would throw a fireball the size of a car at this thing. It would splash across the scallop-armor in a beautiful, useless orange bloom, and ninety-nine percent of all that power would go into heating a shell that was built — specifically, evolutionarily — to take a hit like that.

Because that's what armor is. Armor isn't strong. Armor is a machine for wasting the other guy's power.

I couldn't afford to waste power. I had one percent to spend. I had to put all of it — every scrap — somewhere armor couldn't be.

The Straggler lunged.

I want to be honest: I am not a fighter, I have never been a fighter, and the noise I made when it lunged was not a war cry. But I'd spent the last eleven seconds watching it breathe, and when a thing that size lunges, it opens. The armored plates along its flank spread — just for the length of the lunge — and underneath, in the gap, something pale and wet pulsed in time with its breath.

A big fireball couldn't fit in that gap. Too fat, too fast, too proud.

A birthday candle fits anywhere.

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I didn't dodge so much as fall sideways, which happened to be the correct move, and as the thing sailed past me with its plates open I reached up and pressed my one percent of fire directly into the wet pulsing gap where its armor wasn't.

One hundred percent of a birthday candle, placed exactly on the one spot a birthday candle can kill.

The Straggler landed, took two more steps out of momentum, and then folded up like a beach chair and stopped being a problem.

I sat down on the stairs. My hands were shaking. This is not, I feel, a thing the montages tell you: that winning feels almost exactly like losing, right up until you notice you're still breathing.

A box opened, patient and blue.

[Threshold Straggler defeated.] +40 XP. Method: precision strike, exposed core.The System notes — and it wants to be clear it is not impressed, it is simply noting — that you did that on purpose.

"I did," I said.

Copyists don't do that. Copyists panic, throw one percent of a fireball at the armor, watch it do nothing, and get eaten. Every time. For six weeks now.You aimed.

I didn't answer, because the second box had opened, and it was the first time I'd seen the whole thing laid out — the shape of what I actually was.

┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ Name: Leo Class: Copyist — Lv. 2XP: 40 / 100 Copy Slots: 2 Copied Skills: • [Minor Flame] — 1% ▸ Level 3 (3% effective)Class Evaluation:"Useless with scaling potential." └──────────────────────────────────────┘

Three percent. It had climbed to three percent from use — from the forty times I'd practiced with it before the Straggler even arrived. It leveled. The copy leveled.

And I sat there on the stairs with my hands shaking and did a different kind of math.

If a copied skill gets better with use — if one percent can climb — then the ceiling I was climbing toward wasn't mine. It was the ceiling of whoever I copied. One percent of a candle is nothing. But one percent of the biggest, most broken, most world-ending thing I could ever find a way to witness...

...is one percent today.

"System," I said slowly. "If I keep grinding a copied skill, where does it stop?"

There was a pause. Not a comedy pause. A real one.

That's not a question you're supposed to ask this early.Inquiries denied.

Which, I was starting to learn, was the System's way of telling me I'd found something.