The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

I want to start this one with a confession: I copied regeneration because I was tired of bleeding, and it did not, in any way that mattered that week, stop me from bleeding.

This is not one of the ones where I look like a genius by Friday. This is one of the slow ones. I'm telling you now so you don't get your hopes up like I did.

It happened because of a doorframe.

Not a monster, not a Guardian, not a cosmic anything. A doorframe, in the mall's east corridor, with a nail sticking out of it that I'd walked past forty times, and on the forty-first time it caught my forearm and opened a long shallow line from wrist to elbow. Stupid. Domestic. The kind of injury that has no business happening to a man who's been personally bookmarked by God.

I stood there dripping on the tile, and Nour came over with her gold light, and — she hesitated. Just for a second. And I saw why: her light was thin. It had been thin for days. She'd been spending it on a fever going around the enclave, on Reyes's ribs that still wouldn't fully close, on a hundred small hurts, and here was one more scratch on a man who'd walked into a nail like an idiot.

"I've got it," I said, pulling my arm back. "Save it. It's a scratch."

But it got me thinking, the way things do, and that night I went looking through the enclave's monster-lore for anything that healed — not to be strong. Just to stop being one more line on Nour's list.

The lore had exactly one entry. A Knitfly. A fat, slow, harmless thing that lived in the wet dark of the drains and, when you cut it, simply... closed. Over and over. You could not kill a Knitfly by cutting it; it just sewed itself shut and looked at you, mildly, and waited for you to feel bad about it.

So I went down into the drains, and I found one, and I did the thing where I stare at a creature's one attribute until it's mine, and I watched it seal a gash in its own side like a zipper, and the System clicked.

[Skill copied: Mend-Flesh (1%)]Source: Knitfly. Off the ledger. Unrevocable.Effectiveness: one percent.Leo. At one percent of a Knitfly's regeneration, a wound that would take your body two weeks to close will now take... slightly under two weeks. The System has done the math. You have purchased, at great personal risk, approximately eleven hours.

"Eleven hours."

Slightly under. Don't spend it all in one place.

Here is where a normal skill chapter would pivot to me discovering the broken trick, and I want to be honest that day one, there wasn't one.

I tried. God, I tried. I sat in the atrium and concentrated on the cut on my arm, willing one percent of a Knitfly into it, and Priya sat across from me eating noodles and providing color commentary.

"Anything?"

"...It itches?"

"Is that healing or is that a scab?"

"I genuinely can't tell."

It's a scab, said the System. That's just your body. The one percent contributed roughly the amount of healing you'd get from thinking positively about the wound.

Because this is the thing about regeneration, and it's the opposite of the earthquake and the strength — there's no keystone. There's no clever one square inch to put it. A cut is a cut all the way down; you can't heal the "load-bearing" part of a laceration faster than the rest. My whole trick, my whole precision-over-power gospel, my entire personality — none of it applied. You cannot out-clever a scab. It heals at the speed it heals, and one percent faster is one percent faster, and there is no angle.

I sat with that for a while. It was, weirdly, humbling in a good way. Not everything wants to be a scalpel. Some things you just have to have, small and slow, and let them be small and slow.

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"So it's useless," Priya said.

"No," I said, slowly, turning my forearm over. "It's just not fast. Those aren't the same thing."

You farm regeneration by getting hurt, which is the worst farming loop in the game, and I am including the one where I curled a rebar down the south road like a lunatic.

I didn't go looking for injuries — I'm stupid, not suicidal — but the apocalypse provides. And I started noticing, over the next several days, that the value of [Mend-Flesh] was never in the moment of the wound. It was in the after.

Day three. A Straggler clipped my shoulder during a nest-clear — not deep, but the kind of thing that'd normally sideline you for a week and get infected in a world with no antibiotics. It closed in four days instead of seven. And it closed clean. No infection. That was the first real thing: one percent of a Knitfly didn't heal you fast, but it healed you right. Nothing I took went septic. In a world where a scratch could kill you slow, "your wounds don't rot" turned out to be quietly enormous.

[Mend-Flesh → Lv. 3.]Wounds close clean. Infection resistance climbing.

Day five. I gave blood.

That's not a euphemism. Nour had a patient — the kid with the fever, the one from way back, still hanging on — who'd lost too much, and the enclave had no way to transfuse, and I found out that a body running one percent of a Knitfly makes it back faster. Not dramatically. But I could give more, more often, and refill without folding. I sat there four times that week with a tube in my arm, doing nothing heroic, nothing clever, just being a man whose blood came back, and the kid's fever broke on day six, and I have grabbed a lot of skills in this apocalypse and I'm not sure any of them have felt like that one did.

Nour looked at me over the sleeping kid and didn't say anything. She didn't have to. It was the first time my worst-class-in-the-apocalypse garbage had healed someone instead of hitting them, and it did it by being slow and steady and reliable, which is a thing I am not, and maybe that's why I needed it.

[Mend-Flesh → Lv. 6.]Recovery rate improving. You can now safely overextend and pay it back.

There was no breakpoint this week. I want to be straight with you about that, because I've spoiled you with breakpoints, and this skill didn't get one, and that's the truth of grinding: sometimes the number just goes up and the skill just gets a little better and nothing turns illegal.

By day nine, [Mend-Flesh] was Level 8. That meant: a bad cut closed in three days instead of seven. My wounds didn't get infected. I could bleed and bounce back. That was it. That was the whole haul. A scalpel it was not.

And I found that I didn't mind, which surprised me.

"You're weirdly okay," Priya observed, "with having spent a week to get slightly harder to kill in the least cool way possible."

"Yeah." I flexed my forearm, where the doorframe scratch had finally, unremarkably, closed. "You know what everybody with a real class does when they get hurt? They stop. They wait. They spend Nour's light. This just means I keep going, quietly, and I don't cost anybody their gold to do it." I shrugged. "Not everything has to be broken to be worth having. Some stuff's just worth having."

The System would like to note, it said, in a smaller voice than usual, that this is the healthiest thing you have said since the Integration, and it is a little worried about you.

That night, Sprinkles found me on the roof, and for once it didn't have a grand pronouncement about the shape of my climb. It just sat, and watched the skyline, and after a while it said something that landed sideways and stuck.

You know what [Amend] costs you, it said. Every true thing you make permanent, you pay for with one of your own. A memory. The color of a kitchen. A name. You've been spending yourself a piece at a time to make small things stay.

"Yeah." I hadn't liked thinking about it. The pen took the good ink same as the dull. Someday, for something big, it'd take something I couldn't stand to lose.

A body that regenerates, the cat said, mildly, not looking at me, heals what it's lost. Slowly. A little at a time. If it's yours, and it's slow, and it's stubborn — the way you are — I wonder what else it might, given enough levels and enough years, learn to grow back.

I looked at the cat.

The cat looked at the skyline.

"...You think this heals memories," I said. "The thing [Amend] burns."

I think it's Level 8 and it barely heals a scratch, Sprinkles said, standing, stretching, entirely unbothered. I think it's the least impressive thing you've grabbed. I think you should keep it, and grind it, quietly, for a very long time, and not tell yourself a story about what it might be yet. It hopped down off the wall. I only wonder. Cats wonder. Goodnight, Leo.

And it padded off, leaving me on the roof with the least cool skill in the apocalypse, a closed-up scratch on my arm, and the first faint, patient thread of a hope I decided — for once — not to grab at too fast.

Not everything has to be broken this week.

Some things you just grind quietly, and let them be small, and find out what they are much, much later.