Book 5. Chapter 40: Power leveling
“Consider me puzzled, apprentice.” Hexis said, sliding over a coin across the table. “I believe this constitutes your first victory.”
I grabbed that golden useless trinket as if it were the most priceless thing I’d ever gotten my hands on. And it really was the hardest I’d ever worked to get a coin if I were being honest.
The game Hexis introduced me to, we’ve been playing rounds each day as a warm up before we switched gears to studying mathematics and chaos theory. In all those days, I’d never once won.
Not a single gods damned time. Whatever was going on in Hexis’s mind, he could always visualize the graph exactly as the math showed, doesn’t matter how convoluted I made it.
This time, we’d gone back and forth with a stupidly complex equation, up until he challenged me to draw it. Maybe he’d lost sight of it himself, but I hadn’t.
“Hope you don’t mind, but I’m a firm believer in running with my winnings.” I waggled my single gold coin at him before quickly stuffing it into my pocket, planning to squirrel it away in my room for later. Don’t care how useless undersider currency is up here on the surface, this coin wasn’t money to me - it was a gods damned trophy about how I beat a living calculator at his own bloody game.
Hexis gave a tut, putting his pencil aside then bringing out the workbooks for the follow-up study session. “Consider me curious apprentice, you've shown rapid improvements beyond what's normally expected, even with your aptitude factored in."
"And what metric are you using to measure this?" I asked, grabbing the books and flipping over to our last discussion.
"It took me a year to begin winning against my mentors. And from then on, I remained undefeated. Neither by any of my students, nor any of the other masters within my branch. You are the first to defeat me in years, and you did so within two months. Worse, as much as I loath to admit it, I can detect no means of cheating in your work." He gave me a rather critical glare, the sort of look he gave whenever he spotted an insect on my plate. "Believe me, I have thoroughly checked, especially given your reputation."