The path narrowed. What started as a winding trail through the foothills of the Dragon's Tooth Peaks had become a treacherous goat-track clinging to the side of a sheer cliff. A biting wind, thin and cold at this altitude, whipped past Kage, threatening to unbalance him. Below, the Whispering Woods were a distant, hazy carpet of green. Above, jagged grey peaks clawed at the sky.
His minimap showed the quest objective shimmering just ahead, hidden behind a sharp turn in the pass. He was close. The calculation had been correct.
He rounded the final bend, and the path opened into a slight, sun-drenched ledge before continuing into a dark fissure in the rock face—the entrance to the cavern.
But the way was blocked.
Coiled on a flat, sun-warmed stone was a creature that looked like it had been carved from the mountain itself. It was serpentine, about the size of a large wolf, its body a dense coil of muscle covered in scales the color of granite and shale. A wingless dragon-kin. Its head was raised, and two eyes, cold and reptilian pits of ancient intelligence, were locked directly on him. They had been waiting.
[Ridge-Scale Wyrmling - Lvl 12 (Area Elite)]
HP: ???/???
Kage's eyes narrowed. Level 12 Elite. He was Level 3. A nine-level difference was a chasm most players would call insurmountable at the launch. An invitation to a swift, humiliating death and a long run back from the graveyard. He scanned the area. Apparently, four times the level meant the system withheld the data.
The ledge was barely twenty feet wide. To his left, a sheer drop into nothing. To his right, a smooth, unclimbable rock wall. There was no sneaking past. The Wyrmling's gaze was too fixed, too aware.
Intentional placement. This was a gatekeeper. A purpose-built guardian placed here to stop anyone from reaching the place where words have no echo. A conceptual lock made manifest as scales and fangs.
Unavoidable combat encounter, the Operator in his head noted calmly. Need more data.
He drew his [Novice's Rusted Sword]. The reflection in the cheap, pitted steel was distorted, but his stance was not. He planted his feet, centered his weight, and held the blade in a low, ready position. The Wyrmling watched, unmoving, its forked tongue flicking out to taste the air.
It was waiting for him to make the first mistake.
He wouldn't.
He took a single, deliberate step forward. The Wyrmling uncoiled with terrifying speed. Kage didn't attack. He didn't even prepare to. This was the data-gathering phase. Survival first, analysis second, victory third.
The creature lunged, its maw gaping in a blur of motion. A telegraphed, snapping bite aimed for his throat. Kage's mind registered the animation instinctively. 0.9 seconds from start to impact. His sword came up to intercept.
CLANG!
No echo.
His skin prickled. A reminder of the quest's phrasing. Seek the place where words have no echo. He was at the door.
The force of the perfect parry shuddered up his arm, but his form held. The bite was deflected, but the Wyrmling's level and strength were too high to inflict stagger. Without pausing, it used its forward momentum to transition into a wide, powerful sweep of its tail. A classic follow-up.
This one was slower, more telegraphed. 1.4 seconds. He didn't parry. A tail that size could potentially chip and stagger him even if he perfectly parried it. Gambling wasn't an option. Instead, he took a quick step back, letting the bludgeoning appendage whip through the air a foot in front of him.
He was still in its range. Before he could transition, the Wyrmling's throat began to glow with a sickly green light. A ranged attack. The charge felt different. More deliberate. He had two options: dodge to the side and hope the tracking was poor, or break line of sight. He chose the latter.
He darted behind a waist-high boulder on the edge of the pass. A split second later, a glob of hissing acid splattered against the rock. 2.2 seconds. The sound—a sharp, corrosive sizzle—was abruptly cut short, as if swallowed by the oppressive silence of the pass. The stone itself continued to smoke and dissolve where the acid ate into it.
Kage remained behind the rock, his breathing steady. The Operator's mind was a whirlwind of cold calculation.
Survival is possible. The perfect parry window on the lunge is tight, but consistent, and doesn't chip. Dodge roll for the tail sweep. Break line of sight for the acid spit. The pattern is standard, predictable. A simple mechanical check.
He mentally reviewed his own stats. His Strength and Agility were high for his level, but against a Level 12 Elite? His damage output would be pitifully low. He'd seen the faint shimmer around the creature's scales. Passive regeneration.
It's a battle of attrition. He concluded. My DPS versus its regen. The true limiting factor is weapon durability. Two Novice's Rusted Swords. 40 durability total. Failure is not an option; the cost of another trip here is too high.
He felt a spark of grim confidence. This kind of problem, a pure execution test against a predictable system, was exactly what he was built to solve. It was math. It was logic. It was a language he understood perfectly.
He stepped out from behind the boulder. The Wyrmling coiled again, watching him.
The analysis was over. The war began.
He approached, baiting the lunge. As the beast snapped forward, he perfectly parried, and in the tiny window of recovery that followed, he drove his blade into its stony flank.
Tink.
[-8 HP]
The number was pathetic. Insulting. A moment later, a faint green light pulsed around the Wyrmling.
[+3 HP]
His net damage per successful cycle was five points. The creature's health bar, which he still couldn't see the total of, didn't appear to move at all. He didn't use a skill. Power Strike would do more damage, yes, but it cost MP, a resource he might need for another maneuver later. More importantly, he had to confirm his baseline damage was enough. This fight could take ten, maybe fifteen minutes of perfect execution. MP wouldn't last that long. Only stamina and durability would. His calculations confirmed it. Victory was possible, just barely.
Now, it was a matter of rhythm.
He settled into the flow. Lunge, parry, strike. Tail sweep, dodge, strike. Acid spit, hide, wait, re-engage. It was a dance. A monotonous, demanding, but ultimately solvable dance. His movements were economical, precise. He was a machine processing a script. Step, parry, slice. Back-step, slice. Duck, wait, advance.
The rock of the pass became his arena, the wind his soundtrack. The Wyrmling was a machine, too, repeating its attack chains with unwavering consistency. Kage's health bar remained full. His first sword's durability ticked down with agonizing slowness. 20, 19, 18. The invisible health bar of the Wyrmling was slowly, grindingly, being chipped away.
He fell into the familiar trance of the grind. This was gaming. Finding the pattern, optimizing the solution, and executing it until the loot dropped. It was work. It was his job.
He moved to perfect parry the lunge, an attack he'd now seen a dozen times. His muscles were already locked into the motion, his brain having calculated the timing to the millisecond.
Then, it happened.
The Wyrmling's head, halfway through its lunge, stopped dead. The animation, the script he had memorized, shattered. For a fraction of a second, the creature hung there in a perfect feint before transitioning with impossible fluidity into a tail sweep.
The change was microscopic, but it threw Kage's entire predictive model into chaos. His sword was already moving to parry a lunge that was no longer there, leaving his body perfectly exposed. There was no time to think, no time to calculate. There was only a spike of pure, primal adrenaline.
Instinct took over.
He threw himself backward in a desperate, clumsy dodge that was nothing like his efficient, calculated movements from before. It was a raw, animalistic flinch for survival. He felt a sharp, tearing pain as the tip of the tail, barbed like a mace, clipped his leg.
[-89 HP]
He landed off-balance, his perfect rhythm broken. His mind reeled. That wasn't supposed to happen. The pattern was fixed. Mobs had patterns. That was the rule.
The Wyrmling didn't give him time to recover. It unleashed another lunge, but this time, it held the attack for a fraction of a second longer than before. Just long enough that Kage's muscle memory, conditioned by the previous dozen attacks, would be wrong.
He parried early. The creature's jaw scraped along his blade, knocking it aside, and its teeth grazed his shoulder.
[-24 HP]
[HP: 13/130]
He stumbled back again, his heart pounding with a shocking, electrifying realization.
The Wyrmling was learning. It had analyzed his perfect, robotic responses and was now actively dismantling them. It wasn't repeating a script. It was adapting. Punishing his dodges. Varying its attack timings. Mixing up its patterns.
Panic flared, hot and sharp, but was instantly extinguished by a wave of cold focus he hadn't felt in years. It was a feeling from a different life, from the polished wooden floors of a dojo, the scent of wood and sweat in the air, the weight of a bamboo shinai in his hands.
It's not a pattern, his mind whispered, the voice no longer the cold Operator, but something else, something older. It's an opponent. It's thinking.
He could no longer rely on his pre-calculated rhythm. He had to abandon the script. He had to abandon predicting animations and start reading the intent of the creature before him. He had to use something he'd buried long ago, something he considered a useless relic of a failed past.
Zanshin.
The lingering mind. The state of total, fluid awareness.
The fight transformed. It was no longer a player grinding a mob. It was a duel. He stopped watching the Wyrmling's health bar and focused entirely on its body. The subtle shift of its weight before a lunge. The coiling of its tail muscles a split-second before a sweep. The gathering of spit in its maw.
His world narrowed to the space between them. The numbers, the timers, the durability warnings—they all faded into white noise. There was only his opponent and the next moment. His movements became fluid, intuitive. He was feeling the flow of the battle.
A lunge came, and he met it with a flowing deflection that turned the creature's own momentum against it, creating an opening he exploited with a quick thrust. A tail sweep came, and he ducked under it, the wind of its passage rustling his hair, and scored a cut on its underbelly.
His first sword's durability hit zero.
[Your Novice's Rusted Sword has shattered.]
There was no pause. No break in the flow of the life-or-death dance. His right hand released the shattered hilt as his left hand was already pulling the second sword from his inventory. He seamlessly swapped grips, his feet never stopping their fluid, circular motion. The Operator's pragmatism had provided the tool; the Prodigy's spirit was now wielding it.
The fight raged on. An pure exchange of will. For every hit he landed, the Wyrmling adapted, forcing him to adapt in turn. It was exhilarating. It was terrifying. It was the most alive he had felt in years.
The Wyrmling was at a sliver of health. Kage could feel it in the creature's increasingly desperate movements. His own second sword was flashing a critical durability warning. One of them was about to break.
In a final, desperate gambit, the creature reared back and let out a piercing shriek. It then exploded into a flurry of attacks he had never seen before—a chaotic storm of bites, claws, and tail whips, chained together with no discernible pattern. It was pure, primal rage. Raw output designed to overwhelm and crush him.
Kage didn't think. He didn't analyze. He moved.
Running on pure instinct, he became a ghost in the storm. His body, honed by a decade of kendo training that his mind had tried to forget, remembered. A parry flowed into a dodge, a duck flowed into a sidestep. His movements were beautiful, a fluid and deadly dance of survival. The Prodigy was in full command.
For a split second, in the heart of the maelstrom, he saw it. A single, perfect opening. As the Wyrmling over-committed to a sweeping claw attack, its flank was exposed for less than a heartbeat.
It was all he needed.
He drove his failing sword home, putting all of his weight and will behind the thrust. The blade sank deep into the creature's side with a grating crunch.
The Wyrmling went rigid. A low gurgle escaped its throat. Then, it collapsed, its massive body thudding onto the stone ledge.
[You have defeated Ridge-Scale Wyrmling!]
[EXP Gained: 900]
[LEVEL UP! You are now Level 4!]
[You have unspent attribute points.]
At the exact same moment, with a final, muted crack, his second sword shattered into a cascade of dissolving blue pixels.
Silence descended on the pass, broken only by the whistling wind and the sound of Kage's own ragged, panting breaths. He stood over the dissolving corpse of the Wyrmling, his virtual body pushed to its limit, his hands empty.
And for the first time since logging into Crown of Destiny, a genuine ghost of a smile touched his lips. It was the pure, exhilarating satisfaction of a true victory against a worthy opponent. A forgotten thrill washed over him.
The voice of the Prodigy, unguarded and alive, echoed in his mind. The thrill... a real opponent, one that adapts... This will be so much more fun at the higher lev—
The thought cut off as if by a whipcrack.
The smile vanished. His face became a cold, unreadable mask. The Operator had wrested back control, slamming the door on the feeling, categorizing it as a dangerous inefficiency.
Focus. The objective is not 'fun'. Proceed.
[Loot Acquired]
[Ridge-Scale Shard] x 8
[Wyrmling Talon] x 2
[Corrosive Wyrmling Gland] x 1
[Crystallized Wyrmling Heart] x 1 (Uncommon)
99 Copper
He turned away from the dissipating pixels and stepped over the spot where the Wyrmling had died. The path ahead was clear now, leading deeper into the peaks toward his true destination.
But as he walked, something had changed. The crack in his carefully constructed facade remained, a hairline fracture that no amount of cold logic could completely seal.
He had remembered, for just a moment, what it felt like to be an artist instead of an operator.
And despite his best efforts to dismiss it, that memory felt dangerously like coming home.