The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

Two weeks. I'd said two weeks. Standing on a broken street with a hundred worlds of cosmic homework and a one percent earthquake that couldn't tip over a stack of coins, "two weeks" had felt bold and heroic.

It took nine days, and I want to walk you through them, because this is the part nobody tells you about being the worst class in the apocalypse: the montage has no music, the numbers go up one at a time, and for the first three days you mostly look insane.

My status screen, day one, was a comedy in one act.

┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ Class: Copyist — Lv. 14Off-Ledger Skills(unrevocable): • [Straggler's Call] — Lv. 9 (9%) • [Clingstep] — Lv. 5 — acute hearing • [Threshold Hum] — Lv. 5 • [Amend] — Lv. 4 • [Earthquake] — Lv. 1 (1%) — ✦ raw · newDiscrepancy Rating: ⚠ HIGH └──────────────────────────────────────┘

"A natural disaster," Priya said, watching me stand in the middle of the mall's parking lot with my hand pressed to the asphalt, face scrunched up like a man trying to remember where he left his keys. "You copied an actual, literal natural disaster. Show me. Level a building. Crack the earth. Do the thing."

I did the thing.

The ground made a noise. A small noise. A polite, apologetic little brrt, the seismic equivalent of clearing your throat in a library, and a single pebble near my foot rolled approximately two centimeters and stopped, apparently out of embarrassment.

Priya looked at the pebble. Then at me. Then she picked up her cup of Noodle of Destiny broth, held it directly over the epicenter, and — nothing. Not a ripple. The broth sat there, flat as a founding father's morality.

I did warn you, said the System. One percent of a Tremor-Beast's earthquake. It is, technically, an earthquake, the way a hiccup is technically a diaphragm event.

"Give it here." Halloran, seventy-four and delighted, snatched Priya's cup and held it over the spot himself, as if his broth might respond to authority. It did not. "Ha! Boy, you've copied the world's angriest foot-tap."

"Everybody's a critic," I said, and did the thing you have to do, the thing my whole class comes down to: I stopped asking what the skill could do, and started asking what everyone was doing wrong with it.

Because here's the trick, the one nobody who rolls a real class ever learns. A Tremor-Beast throws its earthquake everywhere. That's what makes it a disaster — it's power sprayed across a whole city block, indiscriminate, wasteful, ninety-nine percent of it thrown at ground that doesn't matter. And a one percent copy of everywhere is, correctly, a hiccup.

But I didn't have to throw mine everywhere.

I had one percent. I had to put all of it — every scrap — in one exact place.

"Nour," I said. "Do me a favor. Set that empty can on the wall over there. Yeah. Balanced on the edge."

She did. Thirty feet away, a dented soup can, teetering on a lip of concrete. And I knelt, and I pressed my hand to the ground, and instead of shaking the whole lot — instead of a disaster — I sent one percent of an earthquake along a single seam of concrete, threading it (with a little help from Threshold Hum, which had taught me to feel where the ground wanted to move) all the way across the parking lot, up the wall, into exactly the one square inch the can was balanced on.

The can fell off.

There was a silence.

"...It fell off," said Priya.

"It fell off," I agreed, and I could not keep the grin down, "from thirty feet away, through solid concrete, without me touching it, and without moving anything else." I stood up. "I can't shake a building. But I can shake the one brick a building is standing on. I can't knock a man down. But I can shake the one bone he's balanced on, or the trigger under his finger, or the exact ledge his whole plan is teetering on." I looked at the fallen can like it was a trophy. "It's not an earthquake. It's a scalpel that happens to be made of earthquake."

...Huh, said the System, which is the highest praise it gives. Log updated. [Earthquake] recategorized: 'Precision Seismic.' The System notes it has never seen anyone do this and is choosing not to examine why that makes it happy.

Halloran held his broth over the spot one more time, hopefully. Still flat.

"Two weeks," I told the broth. "I'm coming for you."

You farm a skill by using it, and you use it by finding problems shaped like it, and it turns out a post-apocalyptic city is full of problems shaped like a scalpel made of earthquake. Reyes, who ran the mall on a principle of never letting a working tool sit idle, started handing me jobs before I'd finished explaining the trick.

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Day two. A Straggler nest had dug into the foundations of a collapsed parking structure, and nobody could clear it without bringing three floors of concrete down on their heads. The ice-throwers couldn't reach the angle. Halloran's fire would've cooked the whole team in the enclosed space. But I could stand outside, press my hand to the ground, and thread a precise tremor into the exact support column the nest was built around — not enough to drop the structure, just enough to make that one column shrug, and the Stragglers came boiling out into the open where Priya's shadows were waiting.

[Earthquake → Lv. 3.]Precision improving. You can now target a seam at forty feet.

Day three. A rival group of survivors — the "Northside" crew, mean, hoarding a water tower — had a Berserker who'd been shaking down smaller enclaves. I didn't fight him. I stood across the street, found the exact cobblestone his back foot planted on every time he wound up for a swing, and gave it a one percent hiccup at the precise instant he committed his weight. He didn't fall. He just missed, every time, his footing a half-inch wrong, until a man who'd never lost a fight in the new world sat down in the road, baffled and furious, and his crew decided the water tower wasn't worth whatever I was.

[Earthquake → Lv. 6.]Breakpoint approaching. Seam control refined. You can now target something moving.

"That's the scary one," Priya said that night, over noodles. "You didn't touch him. You just made the ground betray him. That's — Leo, that's genuinely upsetting to watch."

"Thank you."

"It wasn't a compliment."

"It was a little bit a compliment."

Day six was the breakpoint, and breakpoints are where the number stops being the story.

I'd been treating [Earthquake] as a targeting problem — where to put the one percent. But at Level 10 something changed. The skill stopped being a single shove and became a frequency — I could feel the natural rhythm a thing wanted to vibrate at, the note that would make a wine glass sing or a bridge sway, and I realized I didn't need to overpower anything at all. I needed to find its rhythm and give it one percent of a push on the beat, again and again, until the thing shook itself apart with its own momentum.

I tested it on the parking structure we'd been meaning to demolish anyway. Found the frequency. Pressed my hand to the ground. And gave it one percent, on the beat, over and over — a hiccup, then a hiccup, then a hiccup, each one landing exactly when the last one's echo came back — and the whole structure began, slowly, to sway, and then to groan, and then to come down in a controlled, beautiful, deliberate heap, brought low by a man who could not, on his own, spill a cup of coffee.

[Earthquake → Lv. 12 (12%).] ✦ BREAKPOINT: Resonance.You no longer add your power to a target. You add it to the target'sownpower, on rhythm, until the target does the work for you.Leo. One percent, applied on the beat, is the whole earthquake. You just have to be patient enough to let the world shake itself down.The System would like to note, for the record, that this is horrifying, and it is proud of you.

Priya stood next to me in the dust of a building I'd resonated into rubble, and she was quiet for a long moment, and then she said the thing that I've decided is the whole point of this stupid, wonderful class:

"You started this week with a skill that couldn't move a pebble."

"Yeah."

"And you just took down a building with it."

"Yeah."

"With the same one percent."

"That's the trick," I said. "It was always enough. Everybody just quits before they find out where to put it."

Day nine. I sat in the mall's atrium with a cup of Noodle of Destiny broth on the table in front of me, and the whole enclave gathered around, because word had gotten out and this had become, somehow, a ceremony.

I pressed one finger to the table.

I found the broth's rhythm — the little natural sway of liquid in a cup, the frequency it wanted to move at — and I gave it one percent of an earthquake, on the beat, once, twice, three times, each hiccup landing exactly as the last ripple returned.

The broth climbed the side of the cup.

And spilled.

The atrium went up like we'd won a war. Halloran was on his feet. Priya was laughing so hard she had to sit down. Reyes — Reyes, who ran a hundred lives on the principle that only the strong were worth feeding — looked at a puddle of spilled broth made by the worst class in the apocalypse, and shook his head, and smiled.

┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ [Earthquake] — Lv. 15 (15%) — ✦ Mastered: Precision Seismic / ResonanceFrom "cannot spill a coffee" to "chose to spill a coffee, on purpose, as a flex."Discrepancy: HIGH. Something bright noticed that building come down. File that away, Leo. └──────────────────────────────────────┘

"Told you," I said, to the puddle. "Two weeks. Did it in nine."

That night, when the celebration had burned down to embers and Noodle cups, Sprinkles jumped up onto the table beside the spilled broth and looked at me with the flat ancient patience of a thing doing math.

You understand what you just did, it said. Not the party trick. The principle. 'One percent, on the beat, until the thing shakes itself down.' You didn't just learn an earthquake, Leo.You learned how to take down something a hundred times your size using one percent of the right thing, applied patiently, on rhythm, forever.

I looked at the cat. At the spilled broth. At the far, dark shape of a to-do list that ended with a pen the size of a hundred worlds.

"Yeah," I said quietly. "I noticed that too."

Good, said Sprinkles. Because the Author is very, very big. And you are going to need a very great number of small correct things, applied on the beat, before you're ready to spillthatcup.

Two weeks, I'd said. For the earthquake, nine days.

For the pen at the center of the world?

I picked up a fresh cup of broth, and I grinned, and I started looking around the ruined city for the next ridiculous thing to copy.

"Give me," I said, "a while."