The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

Of every stupid thing I have copied — and the list is long, and the System keeps it in a folder labeled, I am not joking, "Regrettable" — one percent of super strength is the one that made a grown man laugh at me on the street.

In fairness, the man was about to try to rob us, so his day got worse. But we'll get there.

It started because Priya asked the question that starts most of my bad decisions.

"You've got the earthquake for hitting things and the overlooked for not getting hit," she said, over breakfast noodles. "What happens when something just... grabs you? You're a scalpel, Leo. Scalpels lose arm-wrestling matches. You have the upper body of a man who copies skills for a living."

She wasn't wrong, and that's the worst kind of wrong. My whole build was precision and misdirection. The day something big and dumb got its hands on me before I could set up a beat or a blind spot, I was going to fold like a lawn chair, and everyone in the enclave knew it, and a couple of them had started a betting pool about it that I was not supposed to know existed.

So when the Bruteling wandered out of a cracked Threshold that afternoon — a squat, boulder-shouldered thing that punched a delivery van and folded it, like the van was a suggestion — I didn't do the smart thing and leave. I did my thing, which is stare at a monster's stupidest attribute until I want it.

[Bruteling — raw physical class]It is very strong. That's the whole entry. There is nothing else to say about it. It is a bicep with opinions.

I watched it lift the folded van over its head and throw it at a wall for no reason I could determine, and I copied the one thing it had.

[Skill copied: Might (1%)]Source: Bruteling. Off the ledger. Unrevocable.Effectiveness: one percent.Leo. One percent of that creature's strength means you can lift approximately one percent more than you could this morning. The System has run the numbers. That is the weight of a medium sandwich. Congratulations. You can now, in a crisis, lift a slightly larger lunch.

The man who laughed at me was named Kessler, and he ran a little crew that shook down travelers on the south road, and he made the specific mistake of catching me alone-looking on that road two days later, in the middle of me farming.

Because how do you farm one percent of strength? You lift things. Constantly. Everywhere. Reyes had me hauling rubble at the mall until my arms sang, and the number ticked up one agonizing point at a time — Might Lv. 2, you can now lift a large sandwich; Might Lv. 3, a small backpack; Might Lv. 4, congratulations, a medium dog — and I'd taken to carrying a stupidly heavy chunk of rebar everywhere I went, curling it as I walked, like the world's most apocalyptic gym bro.

Kessler saw a scrawny man on a road, curling a metal bar and talking to himself (I was talking to the System; the distinction is lost on strangers), and he did the math that everyone does about me, and he did it wrong.

"Nice muscles," he said, cracking his knuckles, four guys behind him. "Hand over the bar, the bag, and the noodles."

"You can have one noodle," I said. "As a gesture."

He reached out to grab me by the collar — big hand, confident, the grip of a man who wins fights by being the heaviest thing in them — and this is the moment I want you to understand, because it's the whole trick, the thing that turns a medium-sandwich of strength into something that made Kessler's crew leave town.

I didn't try to overpower his arm. One percent of strength versus a shakedown artist is a joke. I couldn't move him.

But a grip isn't strength. A grip is a structure. And every structure — every joint, every stack, every clenched fist — has one small piece doing most of the work, one keystone, one screw that the whole thing is secretly balanced on. Kessler's entire grip, all that confident weight, funneled down through one thumb joint, and one percent of a Bruteling's strength, applied there, at that exact angle, in the exact direction the joint did not want to go—

His thumb popped open. His whole hand followed. And the heaviest thing on the south road grabbed a fistful of my collar and then, baffled, grabbed a fistful of nothing, because his own hand had betrayed him at the one point it couldn't afford to.

"It's not about how much you can lift," I told him, while he stared at his own traitorous hand. "It's about where."

Log updated, said the System, with what I can only call relish. [Might] recategorized: 'Leverage.' You cannot move a man. You can move the one knuckle a man is built on. The System finds this deeply satisfying and refuses to elaborate.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Here is the thing that makes [Might] the sneakiest skill I've grabbed: once you stop thinking about strength and start thinking about keystones, the whole world turns into a series of load-bearing screws.

Day three. Reyes needed a barricade of wrecked cars moved to reinforce the east wall — a job for six men and a Bulwark. I did it alone, and I did it in an afternoon, because I didn't lift the cars. I found the one point in the tangle where the whole stack's weight balanced, gave it one percent of exactly there, and the entire pile shifted itself into place like I'd asked it politely. Six men watched a scrawny guy rearrange three tons of steel with one finger and a thoughtful expression, and one of them quietly paid out the betting pool.

[Might → Lv. 7.]You can now find the load-bearing point of a complex structure by feel.

Day five. A Guardian.

Not a big one — a Tier-1, wandered up from a shallow Threshold — but a Guardian is armor and mass and everything my build hates, four tons of walking fortress, and the enclave's fighters were lining up to break themselves on it the honest way. I asked for ten minutes.

I didn't fight it. I read it. All that mass, all that armor, all that terrible weight — and every bit of it balanced, when it took a step, on one ankle joint, for one instant, the way everything heavy is briefly balanced on one point when it moves. I waited for the step. I found the joint. And I put one percent of a Bruteling's strength into the ankle, sideways, at the exact instant its whole four tons committed to that one point of contact.

The Guardian's own weight did the rest. It went over like a felled tower, crashing onto its back, armor-plated and helpless as an upended turtle, and the enclave's fighters — who'd expected a bloodbath — got to walk up and finish a fortress that had been defeated by its own ankle.

[Might → Lv. 9.] ✦ Breakpoint approaching.You are no longer lifting things. You are asking things to fall over, and they are agreeing.

Priya, watching a four-ton Guardian lie on its back because a scrawny man had poked its ankle, made the face she makes.

"That's the upsetting face again," I said.

"It's the only face you've earned," she said. "You keep taking the most macho power in the game and using it like a — like a locksmith."

"A locksmith is exactly right." I was genuinely delighted. "Strength is just a very rude way of asking the world to move. I ask nicely. I just ask at the exact right screw."

Day seven was the breakpoint, and it turned the locksmith into something worse.

I'd been finding keystones one at a time — a knuckle, a stack, an ankle. But at Level 10 I stopped seeing objects and started seeing load paths — the invisible lines of force running through everything, the way weight travels down through a building to the ground, through a body to the feet, through a machine to its mount. I could look at anything and see, glowing, the one screw it all hung on.

I tested it on the old parking structure's neighbor, a half-collapsed office block everyone had written off as too dangerous to demo.

I looked at it. I saw the load path — all those tons of concrete, the whole leaning weight of the building, funneling down through the years into one cracked support pillar on the third floor. One screw. I walked up (Clingstep on the walls, Overlooked so nobody watched me do something this stupid), put my hand on that one pillar, and gave it one percent of a Bruteling's strength, in the one direction it was already failing.

I was three blocks away, drinking Priya's noodles, by the time it came down — a whole office block, brought to its knees by one finger on one screw, folding into its own footprint as neat as a closed book.

[Might → Lv. 13 (13%).] ✦ BREAKPOINT: Load Path.You can now see the single point of failure in any structure, and apply your one percent to exactly that point.Leo. You cannot lift a building. You never needed to. You needed to find the one screw a building is afraid of, and everything heavy in the world has one.The System notes that "medium sandwich" has become "any structure, on request," and the System would like to formally apologize for the sandwich joke.

I looked at the neat pile of former office block, and Priya looked at it, and she said the thing that is, I've decided, the entire point of the worst class in the apocalypse:

"You started the week able to lift a sandwich."

"A medium sandwich."

"And you just closed a building like a book."

"With the same one percent," I said. "It was always enough. Buildings are held up by one scared screw and everybody's too busy being strong to go find it."

That night, Sprinkles sat on the wall beside me while I looked out at a skyline I could now, apparently, disassemble one keystone at a time.

Earthquake, the cat said. Overlooked. And now the strength to unmake any structure by finding its single point of failure. It looked at me, and the ancient math ran behind its eyes. Tell me, Leo. When you finally stand in front of the pen at the center of the world — the whole Root, a hundred worlds pressed into one impossible structure — what do you suppose a thing like that has?

I thought about it. About load paths, and keystones, and the one screw everything heavy is secretly afraid of.

"A point of failure," I said slowly. "Everything does."

Everything does, Sprinkles agreed. And you are teaching yourself, one absurd percent at a time, to find it.

I turned it over — the earthquake that shakes a thing down on the beat, the overlooked that walks me in unseen, the strength that finds the one screw. Three party tricks. Three tools. Three small correct things aimed, eventually, at the biggest structure there is.

Down in the atrium, Reyes shouted my name. There was another job. There was always another job.

I picked up my stupid heavy bar, curled it once out of habit, and went down to go find something else ridiculous to copy.

Two hundred more parts, I figured. Give or take.

I was going to enjoy every dumb one of them.