The aftermath of the weasel breakout was a quiet, simmering tension that settled over the menagerie like a fine dust. The two remaining weasels had been recaptured—one subdued by the Silver-rank's swift net, the other limping from a blow by a guard's shield—and were now locked in the reinforced pen, where they paced like caged shadows. The air, however, still thrummed with the echoes of panic and violence. For the workers, it was a stark reminder that their world of muck and monotony existed in the shadow of teeth and claws. For Leo, it was a lesson engraved in blood and brown light.
Leo didn't see Elara for the rest of the day. The yard was cleared, an unnatural quiet descending as everyone returned to their tasks with a skittish haste. He was pushing a particularly stubborn clot of muck when Janus found him.
The Stablemaster didn't yell. His anger was a colder, more contemptuous thing. He stood at the rim of Pen Seven, looking down at Leo like a man examining a disappointing stain.
"You," Janus said, his voice a low rumble. "The hero."
Leo stopped pushing, leaning on his mop, heart sinking.
"Thinking of charging a Level 2 predator with a broken mop," Janus continued, shaking his head slowly. "What was the plan, Defective? Bore it to death with your stupidity? Scare it with your smell?"
Leo said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"Your job is to move shit," Janus enunciated, each word a hammer tap. "Not to interfere. Not to think. You get in the way of a guard doing his duty, and you don't just get yourself killed. You make his job harder. You become a problem he has to solve instead of the monster. You are a liability. A walking, glowing liability." He jabbed a thick finger towards Leo's branded hand. "The next time you feel like playing adventurer, remember: the only thing you're qualified to kill is your own chance at a meal. Now clean this pen until it shines. It won't. But you'll do it until the bell."
He turned and walked away, leaving Leo standing in the muck, the words settling into him with the weight of truth. He hadn't been brave. He'd been an idiot. A distraction. The guard's sneering "Defective!" echoed Janus's lecture. They were the same message from different mouths: Know your place. You are not part of this world of action and power. You are the scenery, and poorly painted scenery at that.
That night, in the chill of his bunk, the humiliation was a cold stone in his gut. But beneath it, a sharper, more analytical part of his mind was working. He replayed the guard's perfect strike, the clear brown flash. His System had seen it. It had even tried to replicate it.
He pulled up his status screen, the blue light a private constellation in the darkness.
NAME: Leo
LEVEL: 1
XP: 0/100
SKILLS: [ARCANE REPLICATION] (Mythic)
COPY SLOT: [POWER STRIKE] (0/100 MP)
MASTERED SKILLS: NONE
He focused on the Copy Slot line. It still said [POWER STRIKE]. It didn't say [POWER STRIKE] (Janus's Version) or [POWER STRIKE] (Guard's Superior Version). It was just the skill. And the MP was still zero.
A crucial, subtle understanding clicked into place. When the guard had used the skill, the System had recognized it, acknowledged its higher mastery, but had not initiated a new copy. It had stated the skill was already in the slot.
Rule learned, Leo thought, the cold analysis pushing back the warmth of shame. I can only copy a specific skill once. Seeing a better version doesn't overwrite it. It just shows me what the finished product should look like.
It was a limitation, but also a clarity. He didn't need to hunt for a hundred different users of Power Strike. He just needed to use the one he had. To grind it from its pathetic, nascent state into something resembling the guard's lethal efficiency. The template was set. The gap between his zero MP and that vision was the work to be done.
The 'how' remained. He couldn't practice in the open. Janus's warning was fresh. The other workers would report anything strange. He needed secrecy. Isolation.
The answer, as it had been since his first day, was in the pens themselves. After hours. The menagerie wasn't unguarded, but the night watch was thin, more concerned with the perimeter walls and the valuable creatures than with the Rock Rat pits. The rats themselves were nocturnal, active in the gloom.
A plan, simple and desperate, formed. He would wait for full dark. He would sneak back to the pens. He would find a rat alone, away from the herd. And he would try again. Not a wild shout. Not a panicked swing. A deliberate, focused attempt to replicate the feeling of the guard's strike, to channel that brown energy through his mop and into a living target.
The goal wasn't grandeur. It was data. One point of MP. Proof of concept.
Waiting was its own torture. He lay on his cot, feigning sleep as the other laborers snored and shifted. He watched the faint square of the high window turn from deep blue to the velvet black of true night. When the sounds of the bunkhouse settled into the deep rhythms of sleep, he moved.
He'd hidden his oversized boots under his cot; the soft, thin soles of his own worn shoes were better for silence. He slipped out into the cold night air, the brand on his hand a faint, shameful beacon he kept tucked into his sleeve. The mop, his "weapon," felt absurdly conspicuous as he skirted the edges of buildings, moving from shadow to shadow. The night was alive with unfamiliar sounds—the hoot of an owl from the forest beyond the wall, the distant clank of a guard's patrol on the battlements, the soft rustle and squeak from the pens themselves.
He reached Pen Seven. The wooden gate was barred from the outside with a simple iron latch. He lifted it slowly, the rust groaning a soft protest he was sure could be heard for miles. He slid inside, closing it most of the way behind him.
The pen was a different world at night. The moon, a sliver of silver, cast long, deep shadows. The rats were awake, their eyes glinting like tiny chips of obsidian in the dark. They moved in packs, a rustling, grunting tide. He needed one alone.
He crouched by the fence, his heart a frantic drum in his ears, and waited. Time stretched. He watched the patterns. Eventually, a smaller rat, perhaps a young one, strayed from the main group, drawn to a gnaw-marked post in a moonlit patch near the wall. It began to worry at the wood, its back to him, absorbed in its rodentine task.
This was it.
Leo rose from his crouch. He hefted the mop, not like a spear, but like the guard's sword. He planted his feet, feeling the unstable muck beneath him. He didn't think of the rat as a pest. He thought of it as the weasel. He thought of the line of the strike, the tight arc, the moment of release.
He inhaled, the cold air sharp in his lungs. He focused not on his arm, but on the end of the mop, on the point of impact. He imagined the brown energy not as a flash he summoned, but as a force he channeled through the tool, accelerating it into existence at the final instant.
He exhaled and swung.
It wasn't graceful. It was better than his panicked shout from days before, but it was still clumsy. However, as the mop head descended through the moonlight, he saw it—or felt it, more than saw. A sputter. A faint, guttering cough of earthy brown light that clung to the filthy strands for a fraction of a second, like a dying ember.
THWUMP.
The impact was solid. The mop head struck the rat squarely on its side. There was no crunch. The rat let out a sharp, startled squeak, was knocked sideways into the mud, and lay there for a second, stunned. Then it scrambled up, shook its head, and scurried away into the shadows, moving with a slight, dazed wobble but very much alive.
Leo stood, panting, the mop now heavy in his hands. He had failed. Again.
But then, the notification. It appeared not with fanfare, but with the quiet inevitability of a dripping tap.
SKILL USE RECOGNIZED: [POWER STRIKE]
PRIMARY ACTION: INCOMPLETE (TARGET NOT ELIMINATED)
MANA EFFICIENCY: POOR
CONTROL: MINIMAL
MP GAINED: 1
TOTAL MP FOR [POWER STRIKE]: 1/100
He stared at the words, the blue text glowing in the night. MP Gained: 1.
A wild, disbelieving laugh, silent and choked, bubbled in his chest. It wasn't triumph. It was the sheer, ridiculous relief of a machine finally responding to a command, even if the result was pathetic.
He had done it. He had activated the skill. A sputter, a flicker, a weak knock-down instead of a kill—but it was real. The System had acknowledged it. He had gained a single, miserable point of Mastery.
The elation was brief, crushed under the immediate, practical weight of the numbers. 1/100.
One point. From a failed strike on a Level 0 creature. He needed ninety-nine more. At this rate, if he could even land a hit every night, it would take over three months. And that was if the rats cooperated, if he wasn't caught, if his mop didn't disintegrate, if he didn't die of exposure or despair first.
The cold night air seemed to pierce his thin coveralls. He looked from the notification to the now-empty spot where the rat had been, to his own trembling hands.
The skill worked. But it was a ghost of what it should be. A whisper where there should be a shout. To make it stronger, he needed to use it successfully. To use it successfully, he needed to be stronger, or more precise, or both.
The grind, he realized with a cold, sinking certainty, was not a metaphor. It was a mathematical reality. A mountain of tiny, bloody increments. And he had just taken the first, microscopic step.
He slipped out of the pen, latching the gate behind him, the single point of MP burning in his status screen like a lone, distant star in an impossibly dark sky. It was a start. A pathetic, grueling, almost hopeless start.
But it was his.