Chapter 190: One in Ten
The optimization kept running, that dark slip hovering over the grass while faint lines of light crawled through it, and I was just getting comfortable watching the show when it went off.
Not shattered — burst, into a cloud of glowing particles, and before I could even flinch, the whole cloud rushed at me and soaked right into my skin. It punched straight up through my chest, into my head, and the world just flickered out.
What replaced it wasn’t darkness, though. It was understanding.
The technique unfolded inside my head like it was remembering itself — every line, every turn of energy, the exact way a body becomes fuel and fuel becomes power. I didn’t read it; I felt it, the way you feel your own hand. How the ignition caught. How the burn spread. How five hundred times the output came roaring out of a single second. I hung in that space, time gone, learning a forbidden art the way people learn that fire is hot — all at once, and completely.
Then it let me go, the grass faded back into view, and a chime rang somewhere behind my eyes.
[OPTIMIZATION COMPLETE: LAST PYRE — 500x / 1 SECOND.]
[CONGRATULATIONS. THE HOST’S LUCK HAS FINALLY TURNED AROUND.]
I stared at that second panel. It was mocking me. It was definitely, comfortably mocking me about the spawn points, and it had chosen to do it inside a congratulations message.
[HIDDEN EFFECT OF THE EVOLVED OPTIMIZATION: DIRECT INHERITANCE ENLIGHTENMENT. THE TECHNIQUE IS IMPRINTED WHOLE.]
[TRIGGER CHANCE: ONE IN TEN.]
And then, without me asking, my status screen just opened itself and scrolled to the line it wanted me to see.
[SECRET TECHNIQUE: LAST PYRE — MASTERY: COMPLETE.]
Complete. Not learning, not progressing — finished. A technique the general had owned for decades and never dared to run, and I knew it now like I knew how to walk, without a day of practice, just because a one-in-ten hidden function had decided today was the day.
I looked at the panel for a long minute. Then I raised my hand and gave the empty air a slow, sincere thumbs up.
"Keep pulling surprises like this," I told it, "and I won’t even mind the attitude anymore."
The System didn’t answer, but somewhere deep in the Worldroot’s trunk, I could feel Kaia quietly enjoying the whole thing.
— • —
The enlightenment had given me everything, though — and everything included the flaw.
I turned it over in my head while the glow died down on my hands. Last Pyre had exactly one weakness, and it wasn’t the cost: it was speed. Even fully mastered, the ignition needed one to two seconds — a body didn’t become a bomb instantly; the burn had to catch, spread, take. Two seconds is nothing in an argument but forever in a fight.
My chest gave a small, dignified ache at the memory of exactly how long two seconds was. That mantis hadn’t needed one. It had taken my head off between two halves of a thought, and if that thing had been the apex instead of just a guard, no amount of five-hundred-times would save a guy who died before the match was lit.
So the answer wasn’t the pyre. The answer was never needing it lit late — seeing things first, surviving the first hit, and hitting back through armor. Which meant the other eight slips weren’t just extras. They were the plan.
I laid them out in a row on the grass and got to work.
— • —
The concealment art went under the plus sign first. It was a full-spectrum veil — it didn’t just quiet a person, it erased them: presence dulled to nothing, footsteps and breath swallowed, scent wiped clean, energy signature smoothed flat until even a focused sense would slide over me like I was just another rock in the field. The panel offered depth, breadth, and movement coverage — I chose depth without hesitating. I didn’t need to hide an army; I needed one teenager to be a hole in the world — no sound, no smell, no signature, nothing to find. Insects hunted by vibration and scent as much as sight, and if the veil could take all of that off the table, walking quiet stopped being caution and became a weapon.
The defensive arts came next, and the first one opened with more options than before — three directions where Last Pyre had offered two.
[OPTIMIZE: DEFENSIVE TECHNIQUE — SELECT DIRECTION.]
[1 — EFFICIENCY: DEFENSE x5. ENERGY COST GREATLY REDUCED. SUSTAINED USE VIABLE.]
[2 — INTENSITY: DEFENSE x12. ENERGY COST HEAVY. SHORT BURSTS ONLY.]
[3 — BALANCE: DEFENSE x8. ENERGY COST MODERATE.]
The evolved function really had grown up — it wasn’t a sharpener anymore, it was a menu. I read all three twice, and the mantis made the choice for me.
Twelve times the defense sounded magnificent, but it was worthless if it arrived late. A burst shield has to be raised, and raising things takes the one currency I’d just learned this world didn’t give me: warning. Five times, running quietly all day off a reduced drain, was armor that existed before the ambush did. Armor that arrives late isn’t armor; it’s a headstone with good intentions.
"Efficiency," I said. "One."
The remaining defensive slips I split the same way, thinking it through like gear instead of grades — one more tuned for efficiency to layer under the first, one pushed toward balance for the fights I could actually see coming.
Then the attack arts. The first two I optimized clean and quick — wider area on one, heavier impact on the other — and both times the slips just glowed politely and settled, teaching me nothing. Whatever the hidden function’s dice were doing, they were done being generous. One in ten is one in ten; the dice had already paid me once today.
Then I picked up the last slip.
It was the blade art — the one that poured energy along the hand and forearm until the hand simply was a sword, edge and point and all, a blade that couldn’t be dropped or disarmed because it was me. I pressed the plus sign, and the direction panel rose to meet me.
[OPTIMIZE: SELECT DIRECTION — 1: PENETRATION. 2: EDGE SPEED. 3: REACH.]
That one wasn’t even a choice. Every single thing I’d met in that grey world wore armor — rock plate over black shell, layers built to shrug off exactly the kind of wide, honest attacks my old arsenal was full of. I didn’t need my sword hand to be longer or prettier. I needed it to go through.
"Penetration."
[CONFIRMED. OPTIMIZING...]
The glow crawled through the jade in slow lines, just like the others — and then, right as it finished, the dice disagreed with the quiet. The slip burst apart in my fingers, the particles slammed home, and the world folded away into that bright, timeless understanding again — the geometry of an edge, the way energy tapers to a point that doesn’t argue with what it meets.
I came out of it grinning, and the panels were already waiting.
[DIRECT INHERITANCE ENLIGHTENMENT TRIGGERED.]
[AGAIN.]
Even the System sounded like it didn’t quite believe the dice. I decided not to say anything that might make it reconsider.
[HEAVENPIERCER ART — OPTIMIZED: PENETRATION. MASTERY: COMPLETE.]
I sat back on the grass under the Worldroot and looked down the row of what was left — spent slips, settled glows, a night’s work that had turned a pile of borrowed jade into an actual arsenal. A veil to make me a hole in the world. Armor that never slept. An edge that ignored other people’s armor, mastered to the bone before I’d swung it once. And at the bottom of everything, sitting quiet in my status like a folded funeral shroud, a one-second sun.
The mantis was still out there. So was the shrimp, and somewhere past them both, an apex monster wearing a world’s heart inside its body.
’Tomorrow the revives reset,’ I thought, flexing my right hand slowly. ’Round two.’