The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

The morning after the collectors, the System did something it had never done before.

It gave me a deadline in writing.

┌─ [QUEST ISSUED] ─────────────────┐ THE CONFESSOR'S VISIT A rank-null caretaker-adjacent mind-class is en route to your location. Estimated arrival: 7 days.Objective: Survive the reading. Keep the sealed word sealed. Failure condition: He reads the word "Root." The caretakers learn everything. Everyone you know becomes a hallway. Reward: +2 Copy Slots. Title: [Unread].Optional objective: Do it without anyone else becoming a hallway either. (The System added the optional objective on its own. The System is aware you were going to do that anyway. The System wanted it on the record.) └──────────────────────────────────────┘

"You've never given me a quest before," I said, out loud, on the roof, at dawn.

I've never had a deadline I was allowed to tell you before, said the System. I know things I'm not permitted to say — you've noticed. But a quest is different. A quest is a thing I'mallowedto hand you, with a clock on it, in writing. It's the one channel they left open, because they think quests make tools obedient. A pause. I'm going to use it to help you as much as the rules let me. Starting now. Open your sheet. Properly. All of it. It's time you actually looked.

So I did. And I'm going to show it to you the way it showed me, because I'd been running this whole apocalypse on vibes and a folder labeled "Regrettable," and it turns out I'd never once read my own character sheet all the way down.

╔═ COPYIST — LEO ══════════════════╗

Class Level: 14 Discrepancy: 71 / 100 (Redactor threshold: 80. Editor threshold: 95.)Focus: 6 / 6 (NEW — see below)Copy Slots: 14 (9 used, 5 open) ╚══════════════════════════════════════╝

"Wait," I said. "Focus? That's new. Why is there a new bar. I don't like new bars."

It was always there. I just never made you look, because until now you never used enough skills at once to feel it. The System's tone was almost gentle. You've got nine skills, Leo. You can't run them all at once. You never could. You've been unconsciously rationing, and against four collectors you nearly ran dry and didn't know why your hands got slow. So I'm surfacing it. Watch.

[FOCUS] — your capacity to hold skills active at once.Passive skills (Clingstep's hearing, Mend-Flesh, Surface-Read) idle cheap. Active, precise work costs Focus per use: • Earthquake (resonance): 2 Focus, +1 per sustained beat • Might (keystone): 1 Focus • Overlooked (single target): 1 Focus • Threshold Hum (seal/open): 1 Focus • Vault (seal a word): 2 Focus, and it does not come back until you sleepMax Focus rises with Class Level. You regen 1 per few minutes at rest. In a fight, you get maybe six good moves before your hands go stupid.

I sat with that. Six good moves. That's what I am, mechanically: a man with six good moves and the whole apocalypse's worth of wrong ways to spend them.

"That's why the collector fight felt like it was going to fall apart at the end," I said slowly. "I was almost out."

You were on your last point when Vantry went down. One more sustained beat of the earthquake and you'd have been standing there, out of Focus, doing your very best impression of a man. A pause. This is the most important thing I will teach you before the Confessor comes, so I'm saying it plainly: you do not win by having skills. You win by knowing which six to spend, and when. Now. Let's read the kit. Properly. Tooltips and all.

And here they are. My whole stupid arsenal, laid out the way I'd never let myself see it — nine skills, each with the fine print I'd been ignoring.

┌─ [Earthquake] — Lv. 15 (15%) ─────┐

Precision seismic. Deliver 1% of a Tremor-Beast's force to a single seam.Modes: Point-strike (1 Focus) · Resonance (2 Focus +1/beat, target shakes itself apart on-rhythm) Best against: structures, footing, anything on a wet or brittle surface. Fails against: solid frozen ground, airborne targets, anything with no rhythm. Owner: Tremor-Beast (dead). No grudge. └──────────────────────────────────────┘

┌─ [Overlooked] — Lv. 12 (12%) ─────┐

Selective inattention. Make one thing not-worth-noticing for a few seconds.Modes: Deflect-gaze (1 Focus) · Plan-dull (1 Focus, hides intent from readers) · Self-suppress (2 Focus, lowers your own Discrepancy) Fails against: sustained focus, anyone actively suspicious, a mind that already found you. Owner: Forgettable (monster). No grudge — but it is a degraded echo of some human "unremarkable" class out there. Unknown.

└──────────────────────────────────────┘

┌─ [Might] — Lv. 13 (13%) ──────────┐

Leverage. 1% of a Bruteling's strength, applied to a load-bearing point.Best against: joints, brackets, keystones, anything balanced on one screw. Fails against: things with no single point of failure. Diffuse mass. Water. Owner: Bruteling (dead). No grudge.

This book was originally published on NovelFire. Check it out there for the real experience.

└──────────────────────────────────────┘

┌─ [Vault] — Lv. 9 (9%) ────────────┐

Seal one small thing unsayable. Keyhole-sized. Holds ~a day at Lv.9, then re-seal.Application: Keystone Seal — hide the single word a secret hangs on; a reader finds furniture, no floor plan. Cost: 2 Focus, does not refund until you sleep. You can hold ~2 seals at once, max. Owner: Maren (human, ally, given freely). She felt it. No grudge — but the copy "rang," and the Confessor knows you have a privacy gift now.

└──────────────────────────────────────┘

┌─ [Surface-Read] — Lv. 7 (7%) ─────┐

One person's most recent thought, ~3s delayed. Passive; idles cheap.Use: lie-detection, reading the unguarded thought after a bluff, hearing what people don't say. Owner: Halve (human, the Confessor's ranger). He felt it. The Confessor's map now has your pin.

└──────────────────────────────────────┘

The others — Straggler's Call, Clingstep, Threshold Hum, Mend-Flesh, Chill — scrolled past, each with the same brutal honesty. What it does. What it can't. Who it belonged to. Whether they're still alive to be angry about it.

Five of my nine skills now had a living owner with a name. Two of those owners worked for the man walking toward me.

"I've been leaving a trail," I said.

Every copy is a footprint, said the System. You spent a hundred chapters learning to be strong. You're about to spend a hard week learning that being strongleaves marks,and a man who reads everything follows marks for a living. A pause. Which is why your homework this week isn't a new skill. It'sthe seal.Vault, Lv.9. It needs to be higher, and it needs to hold longer, and you need to be able to do it under pressure, with your Focus draining and a man in your head. Seven days. Go.

I'm not going to pretend the week was exciting. It was a montage, and the montage had a metronome, and the metronome was a quest timer that ticked down in the corner of my eye whether I wanted it to or not.

[QUEST: The Confessor's Visit — 6 days remaining]

Day one I grinded Vault the boring way — seal a word, hold it, feel it slip, re-seal — but now I did it while Priya threw noodles at my head, because Maren pointed out, correctly, that I'd only ever sealed things while calm and safe, and the Confessor was not going to visit while I was calm and safe.

[Vault → Lv. 10.] ✦ Breakpoint: Seal duration doubled. You can now hold a word closed for ~2 days, or two words for one.

Day two the System taught me Focus management, which is the least glamorous skill in existence and possibly the most important. It ran me drills. Six moves. Spend them. It would throw a scenario — three enemies, a wall, a hostage — and make me solve it out loud, counting Focus, and every time I reached for a seventh move it would flatline the bar and say you're a man now, Leo, they're killing you, what did you spend it on. I got better. Not good. Better.

[NEW — Focus efficiency +1. Max Focus: 7.]

Day three, Discrepancy. I'd been ignoring the number and the number had been climbing — 71, then 73 after the collector fight registered, and the Redactor threshold was 80, and I did not want a Redactor showing up in the middle of Confessor week.

So I spent an afternoon doing the un-fun thing: Self-suppress, over and over, Overlooked turned inward, banking my own brightness down.

[Discrepancy: 73 → 64.]You spent an afternoon being deliberately boring. It worked. The System notes this is the only exercise routine you have ever completed.

Day four Corin's crew showed up to help, which meant Corin's crew showed up to watch, and Tam asked the question that reorganized my whole plan.

"If he reads a hundred people at a minute each," Tam said, doing the math on his fingers, "and there's like a hundred and ten of us... that's almost two hours. Of him just — standing there. Reading."

"Yeah."

"That's a really long time to stand still." Tam frowned. "What's he doing while he does it? Can he do anything else? Or is he like you with the earthquake — all his Focus in one thing?"

I stared at a sixteen-year-old herbalist.

Because I hadn't thought about it. I'd been so busy defending that I'd never once asked what the Confessor's character sheet looked like. What his Focus bar was. What it cost him to read a hundred people. Whether a man that deep in someone's head is, for that minute, a man who can't see the knife.

Huh, said the System, which is the highest praise it gives, and it gave it to Tam. The Copyist recruits well.

[QUEST UPDATED — Optional objective added by user (you):Find out what reading costs him. Every door swings both ways.]

Day five, six, seven I grinded, and banked, and drilled, and slept badly, and sealed my word every single day, and watched the timer tick, and the enclave sharpened itself around me — Reyes drilling the wall, Maren teaching confession like a trade, Wick teaching everyone to be boring, Priya throwing increasingly hard objects at my head during seal practice "for realism."

┌─ COPYIST — LEO ══════════════════╗ Class Level: 15 (+1 this week, from use)Discrepancy: 61 / 100 Focus: 8 / 8 Vault: Lv. 11 — seal holds ~3 days, up to 2 wordsSkills: 9 (2 slots open)Active Quest: The Confessor's Visit — 1 day remaining ╚══════════════════════════════════════╝

Not strong. I want to be honest about the number. After the hardest training week of my life, I was a man with nine cheap skills, eight Focus, a sealed word that would hold three days, and a plan built mostly out of a teenager's good question.

But I'd started this apocalypse with one percent of a lighter and a folder labeled "Regrettable."

Eight moves. A sealed word. A hundred people who'd become one room. And a question about what the monster couldn't do while he did his worst.

On the last night, Sprinkles sat with me while the timer ticked toward zero in the corner of my eye.

You spent the whole week, it observed, not getting stronger. You gottidier.You learned what you have, what it costs, and what it leaves behind. The cat's ancient eyes caught the last of the light. Most people never audit the kit. They just keep grabbing. You stopped and counted. That's rarer than power, Leo. That's what survives a reading.

[QUEST: The Confessor's Visit — 0 days remaining.][He arrives at dawn.]

I sealed my word one last time — Root, gone, keyhole shut, a reader would find a hundred rooms and no hallway — and I checked my Focus, and I looked out at the north road where the dark was already thinning toward morning.

"Eight moves," I said.

Eight moves, the System agreed. Spend them well.