Two Seconds

The Blue Zone had a rate, and the rate was excellent for about eleven days.

An Iron Shell Beetle was worth fifteen percent. Gesbiek had spent five days in the Green Zone learning that nine kills bought him three and a half, and now one cobalt beetle on a root bought him more than a whole day of pits and flint, and the arithmetic of that never entirely stopped being funny.

He killed the first one with a rock, because he had a rock and the rock had four strikes left in it. He killed the second with a better rock. By the fourth he had worked out that the cobalt shell had a seam along the third plate junction where the armour overlapped rather than fused, and after that he stopped needing to be lucky.

Level 13 arrived on the second day. Level 15 on the fourth. He put the free points where the System had stopped putting them for him, which was a small ceremony he enjoyed more than he expected to.

By the eleventh day he was Level 19 and had begun to notice the shape of the wall coming.

* * * *

"You are going to do this again," he said to the menu, in a hollow under a fallen Sequoia that he had improved over four evenings. "I can see you thinking about it."

[CORE SATURATION: 78%]

"There it is."

The Tier-2 ceiling was arriving the way the Tier-1 ceiling had arrived, and he had a great deal more information this time. He could feel it coming in the returns: the first Blue core of a day did what a Blue core did, and the fifth did about half of it, and after the seventh his chest simply declined to take any more and the taste went flat and unpleasant, like biting a coin.

Four to seven Blues a day. Then a wall until morning.

He had solved this once by finding a higher tier. That solution was still available in principle. The Yellow country began somewhere past the eastern ridges where the Blue thinned out, and the things in it would kill a Level 19 goblin with the same effort a Leaf Chicken had once required.

He looked at the locked line in his menu, which he had been looking at for eleven days.

[MERGE: LOCKED, LEVEL 25]

Six levels. At his current rate, roughly nine days, assuming the saturation ceiling did not tighten, which it would.

Nine days of eating five beetles a day and waiting.

Gesbiek sat in his hollow and disliked that intensely, and started thinking about the other problem instead, which was the one he had been circling since the spring.

* * * *

The Leaf Chicken had died because time stopped.

He had gone over that afternoon a great many times. Under the Ironwood root with the beak coming down and a river stone in both hands, and the world had stuttered and held, and the bird had hung in the air vibrating while dust motes sat motionless in the light.

He had not caused it. He had been very clear with himself about that at the time and had stayed clear about it since, because getting that wrong was the kind of error that killed a goblin.

But something had caused it, and he had been standing inside it when it happened, and in two months of walking through the Darkwood he had never once seen it happen again.

He had tested for it. He had tested in fear, deliberately putting himself into positions that produced the pure animal terror he had felt under the root, on the theory that the trigger was panic. The result was that he had been frightened a number of times for no benefit.

He had tested in exhaustion, in the low grey hours after a bad night, on the theory that a tired mind put more load on whatever was carrying it.

Nothing.

The Grey Shard had cracked open and become a Silver Core and he had eaten a spider the size of a wagon, and time had never once stuttered for him again.

He got out the flat stone he used for thinking on, scratched a line down the middle of it, and started listing what had actually been true in that clearing.

* * * *

The list was short and he wrote it four times before it said anything.

The System had been three days old in him. Newly installed, badly calibrated, running in a body it had classified as acceptable rather than suitable. It had spent that morning drowning him in rock data and he had been forced to learn that the Analytical Sight had to be aimed rather than switched on.

It had been under load.

He looked at the word for a long while.

Load.

In the clearing he had been holding the Sight open on a hostile creature at close range while his own core flared in a body that had never processed anything of the kind. Everything in him had been computing at once and none of it had been built for the volume.

The fault had not come from fear. It had come from the System being asked to do more than it could do, and failing, and the failure spilling outward into the geometry of the world.

Which meant the trigger was not an emotion.

The trigger was a workload.

Gesbiek put the stone down and looked at his hands and said, out loud, to a hole under a tree, "That is a very stupid idea."

Then he went to find something complicated.

* * * *

The first attempts produced nothing but headaches.

He held Analytical Sight open at maximum on a stand of ferns for ninety seconds and got a nosebleed and a comprehensive education in fern taxonomy. He held it on running water, which was better, because water refused to hold still and the System had to keep recomputing it, and he got dizzy and had to sit down.

He held it on a beetle swarm, four hundred small bodies moving on four hundred separate vectors, and the world went briefly soft at the edges and came back.

Soft at the edges. He wrote that down.

Then he understood the last piece, which was that he had been asking the System to work hard and had not been asking it to work hard and do something else at the same time.

In the clearing he had been running the Sight, and running whatever his core did under threat, and moving. Three demands, concurrent.

So he stacked them.

He found a section of the Blue Zone where a waterfall came down over broken rock into a pool full of moving fish, opened Analytical Sight to maximum on the whole of it, held the Possession reticle on a beetle at the water's edge, and ran full-speed at a tree.

The world went white at the edges.

The waterfall slowed, and did not stop, and the sound of it dropped an octave and stretched.

Then his legs went out from under him and he lay in wet gravel for a while with blood coming out of his nose and both ears ringing.

[WARNING: PROCESSING LOAD CRITICAL]

"Yes," Gesbiek said to the sky, from the gravel. "I know. That was the point."

* * * *

It took him six more days to make it reliable, and by the end of them he understood what he had actually found.

He was not learning a spell. There was no spell. What he was doing was deliberately overloading a piece of administrative machinery installed in a body that had never been rated for it, and catching the fault as it fell out.

The System, asked to do three impossible things at once, did what it had done in the clearing: it stopped updating the world for as long as it took to catch up.

Everything except him. He was not part of the world in the way the rest of it was part of the world. That had been true since a beetle made of metal cracked open in his chest, and it was the reason the fault threw him clear instead of catching him in it.

He got it to a full second on the fourth day.

He got it to two on the sixth.

Two seconds cost him roughly a third of everything he had and left him with a nosebleed and a temper, and two seconds was two seconds.

[SKILL ACQUIRED: FREEZE (v0.1)]
[DURATION: 2.00s | COST: 30% MANA]
[WARNING: THIS IS NOT A SANCTIONED PROCESS]
[REPEATED USE MAY DEGRADE LOCAL STABILITY]

Gesbiek read the last two lines with a certain amount of satisfaction.

Nobody had given him this. It was not on the menu and it was not in the tree and there was no unlock condition anywhere that had been waiting for him to meet it. He had found a place where the world broke, and had learned to break it on purpose, and the System had noticed afterward and written it down.

He was becoming aware that this was going to be the pattern.

* * * *

He went to find the cat.

The Azure Stalker had humiliated him twice in the spring. Once at a stream, where it had looked directly at him through undergrowth he had been certain he could not be seen through. Once outside a moss-lined log, where he had lunged and it had twisted in mid-air in a manner spines were not supposed to permit, and had been in the ferns before he finished falling over.

He had never worked out how it knew.

He worked it out now, at Level 22, lying flat on a branch with the Sight aimed properly at last.

The Stalker's shard was in its chest and there was a second smaller node at the base of its skull, and the two of them were talking to each other. It was not hearing him or smelling him. It was reading the mana displacement of a body moving through a space, the small wake anything living pushes ahead of itself, and it had been doing that since before he could see it.

He could not hide from that. Nothing he did about noise or scent or shadow would matter.

He spent an afternoon working out what would.

Then he came down out of the tree onto open ground and let it see him.

It came the way it had come before, low and fast and pouring around the rocks instead of over them, and the mana wake of it arrived first, and Gesbiek stood still with his hands at his sides and let it close.

At twelve feet he opened the Analytical Sight on the whole clearing.

At eight he put the reticle on a beetle behind him.

At four he threw himself sideways as hard as a fully-allocated Agility could throw him.

Pop.

The world went grey and stopped, and the Azure Stalker hung in the air three feet from his throat with its jaws open and its eyes fixed on a target that was no longer where it had computed him to be.

Gesbiek walked round it, in no hurry, and looked at the exposed line of its neck.

"You have been very annoying," he told it.

Then he put the river stone into the base of its skull, where the second node was, and stepped back out of the way.

Time came back and the cat came down and did not get up.

[TARGET DESTROYED: AZURE STALKER]
[XP: +11%]

Eleven percent, which was less than an Iron Shell Beetle had been worth eleven days ago. He ate the core anyway, because he had learned in a hole under an oak tree never to walk past food, and because some kills are not about the number.

* * * *

Level 25 arrived four days later, on a wet morning, while he was prising a beetle off a root.

The chime went off in the middle of his skull with the small self-satisfied quality it always had, and a line in his menu that had been red for a month went white.

[MERGE: UNLOCKED]
[COMBINE LOWER-TIER CORES INTO A SINGLE HIGHER-TIER CORE]
[RATIO: 10:1 | COOLDOWN: 24H]

Gesbiek sat down on the root, next to a beetle he had not finished killing, and worked out what it meant.

Ten Green cores made one Blue. The Green cores were worthless to him now, a tenth of a percent each, the kind of thing he walked past.

They were not worthless. They were currency in a denomination he had not been able to spend.

He thought about the fifty stones buried under a marker in a hollow under an oak tree on the other side of the Darkwood. He had put them there when a fish head was a good day, and had thought of them as five and a half days of eating.

Ten to one. Fifty Greens made five Blues, and five Blues made half of something he had no name for yet.

The beetle on the root took the opportunity to leave. He let it go.

* * * *

He worked the ratio for the rest of the month and the ceiling stopped mattering.

The rule turned out to be that saturation applied to the tier, not to the total. He could eat his seven Blues, hit the wall, and then spend the rest of the day killing Green-tier animals that no longer frightened anything, stockpiling their cores to become tomorrow's Blues.

He was not grinding any more. He was manufacturing.

Level 31 by the end of the month. Level 38 a fortnight after that, once he had built the second cache and started running two merge cycles against each other on alternating days.

He got taller. Not much, and he noticed it because the hollow under the fallen Sequoia had stopped being a comfortable fit and had started requiring a stoop. His claws came in harder. The plated emerald across his shoulders thickened until the old rag of a shirt stopped closing over it and he took it off and did not replace it.

He talked to himself the whole time, in the way he had been doing since a hole under an oak tree, and by then he had stopped noticing he was doing it.

* * * *

At Level 44 he stood at the eastern edge of the Blue country and looked at what came next.

The Sight went out over the ridge and came back with a colour it had not used before. Not the vibrant blue of the zone behind him. Something denser, banded with gold at the edges, sitting on the landscape with visible weight.

The air over there was thick enough to see, the way air is visible over hot stone.

He held Freeze in his mind, which cost thirty percent and bought him two seconds. He held Merge, which was making him rich in a currency the world had not intended anybody to spend. He held Possession, which he had used forty or fifty times now on beetles and rats and once on a rabbit, and had stopped feeling strange about somewhere around the twentieth.

He was aware, distantly, that he had stopped feeling strange about it.

He filed the awareness and did not look at it directly, in the way a person does not look directly at a thing they have already decided not to change.

[FORGE: LOCKED, LEVEL 50]
[SPAWN CONTROL: LOCKED, LEVEL 50]

Six more levels.

Gesbiek looked at the gold-banded country over the ridge, where everything living would be a full tier above him and none of it would care how clever he had been in a lower zone.

"Right," he said, to a forest that had never once answered him.

Then he went to build a bigger cache.