DAY 24: EVENING — THE CAVE

DAY 24

EVENING

All I needed was that less-than-one-percent chance.

THE CAVE

 

FOR A GOOD LONG WHILE, I’d been dodging his endless combinations of sword attacks. He had an inexhaustible supply of techniques.

Natural genius was real. It had nothing to do with personality. This kind of genius wasn’t born from hard work and lived experience—it was innate. Tanaka-kun was known as a math savant. It was clear that he had disguised his mathematical genius in the real world. He was nondescript in every way.

Our battle must have been frustrating him. His calculations weren’t working. He recalculated the odds over and over, but they were always off. He just didn’t comprehend. My luck went beyond any probabilities or formulas.

Even though his attacks missed less than one percent of the time and he had performed thousands and thousands of them, that tiny probability of failure kept me alive. All I needed was that less-than-one-percent chance. It could never become zero. My maximum luck broke all the laws of probability. It shattered the scales of fate. With his odds, he could never kill me.

That didn’t discourage him. He kept slinging spells and slashing his sword, indiscriminately using techniques.

His skills stopped working, one by one. He grew frustrated. Whenever his calculations went awry, it inflamed his anger.

“You’ve got quite the array of skills,” I said. “How many people did you have to kill?”

Distance wasn’t a factor in our battle; we fought at close- and mid-range. I didn’t bother with spells, since they couldn’t damage him. I focused on baiting him into using up his skills instead. I just needed to survive long enough.

“Haruka-kun,” he said, his voice calm like we were still in class. “Why are you alive?”

“Uh, I guess I don’t want to die.”

His eyes narrowed in disappointment. His mood only worsened. Was hunger making him angry? Have some nice fish—it’s good for you!

Logically, I should have been killed hundreds of times over. You couldn’t predict this, could you?

“How the hell are you doing this?! Answer me!”

Every time he missed, it wounded his pride.

“What exactly don’t you get?”

“You’re a puny level 11! No matter your skills, there’s no way you should stand a chance against me!”

In terms of probability, that was basically true. I avoided thousands of all-but-inevitable deaths, what were a few more? My survival was an anomaly—infinitely improbable. But so long as my survival was possible, no matter how unlikely, I would live.

“Whoa there, Mathlete, are you running numbers in your head in the middle of a battle? Very impressive.”

Oops. Sweeping my staff, I was able to absorb his spell, but I nearly lost my grip on it when he feinted and slashed at my hand instead of my neck. He had to go all out if he wanted to kill me. What was holding him back? I was bloodied, battered, and exhausted, so why was he fighting so defensively?

“You shouldn’t be able to move, let alone fight back! You shouldn’t even be able to see! It’s impossible!”

He finally let his mask of normalcy slip. This was who he really was.

“Do you want to know why?” I said. “Why Copycat and Meddle aren’t working?”

“You know about them?!” he cried. “You shouldn’t be able to use Appraisal! How…how?”

I didn’t need to use Appraisal, I knew he took those skills as soon as I spotted them back in the white room.

“Copycat is a worse version of Hijack,” I said. “It only lets you use a weakened skill a limited number of times, doesn’t it?”

“Even an inferior copy of Power Word Kill should’ve destroyed you! You’re only level 11! Tell me how you’re doing this!”

Even Power Word Kill didn’t have a 100 percent chance of working. Because of the level wall, I shouldn’t have been able to resist status ailments and special attacks. But I could, because—

“I’ve got the General Health skill, got it? That means I’m healthy! Take care of your body, and it’ll take care of you!”

The meatheads didn’t stand a chance. He inflicted Blind, Paralyze, and Poison on them, tricked them with Katsuyama’s Illusion skill, and used Meddle to make their attacks miss and their attempts to dodge fail. He broke their minds and their bodies.

Meddle interfered with their bodies just enough to alter the trajectories of their attacks without them realizing. That’s why they couldn’t hit him.

He was using Meddle on me this entire time, of course. But it wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, I ignored it completely.

There was a reason I acquired and leveled Manipulation skills so quickly. Meddle was just a knockoff of the skills I’d been training all along.

“Do you know what my Blockhead skill does, mathlete?”

“It’s just another useless skill, obviously! It suits you perfectly!”

Wrong answer, genius. Being good at math didn’t make him any good at reading comprehension.

“There’s a reason it references those wooden puppets, Tanaka-kun,” I said. “You’re using Meddle to interfere with my movements, but I can just block my own nerve signals with Blockhead and keep control of my own body.”

That was why I could fight back. There was no way I could win, but I could keep fighting. Blockhead allowed me to control my own body like a marionette. I practiced walking using Magic Manipulation. Having made it routine, I was eventually able to force my body to take an impossible half-step and discovered Life or Death. Blockhead made that technique possible. I manipulated my body, channeled all my abilities into a single moment, and delivered a life-or-death blow.

Thanks to my Mistletoe Sprig absorbing combat spells, I could avoid succumbing to a battle of attrition.

He lurked in the woods, picking off classmates for their skills. Meanwhile, my classmates dragged me to town and kept me from leaving. In a way, that was why we turned out so different. I learned to see the humanity of my classmates.

Until he used all his skills in an ultimate attack, there could be no checkmate.

I just had to stick it out until then. Crushing my legs with magic didn’t stop me, and Illusion was useless to begin with. Thanks to God’s Eye and my contacts, I couldn’t be fooled. As long as I was still alive, I could puppet my tattered body and keep fighting.

“You doin’ all right, Tanaka-kun? Those stolen skills can’t be used infinitely, can they? Do you really want to use them all up like this? The rest of our class is strong, too!”

He spat. “Then I’ll just steal their skills!”

Bingo. Copycat limited the number of times he could use a stolen skill. Sooner or later, the show had to end. I was his worst foe because I had nothing he could steal. All my skills were either useless or too difficult to control.

If I could force him to use all his skills, I would win. It would all be over. He wouldn’t be able to defeat the Class Rep and the others. He’d no longer have any of the cheat skills that helped him so far. I had to make sure that he used them all.

From the moment we were summoned to the white room, he was furiously calculating everything he might have to contend with. He had formulated the exact steps to take to become the strongest person in the world.

If he took Hijack, the others would have sealed the skill immediately, if they didn’t just kill him. The Class Rep would’ve made sure of that. So this mathlete calculated the route with the highest probability of becoming the strongest.

As he forced our class apart, his chances of success increased all the more. Doing that eliminated unknowns from his equations.

When an opportunity presented itself, he used Copycat on Hijack and began hunting his classmates, now spread across the forest. He killed them and took their skills, making a point to get Magic-Proof, Inflict Ailment, and Illusion as fast as possible.

He believed that Meddle made him invulnerable. According to his calculations, no one could threaten him any longer.

He wanted to be unbeatable in battle. He had become a Cheat Slayer.

At last, his preparations were complete.

There was only one step left. He needed to replace the copy with the real Hijack. He needed to kill the Class Rep. He knew that the copied skill could only be used one more time. That’s why the Class Rep was his next target.

Then he would have been able to kill the rest of our classmates, steal their legendary skills, and become an invincible, unstoppable, perfect monster.

The meatheads survived because he couldn’t waste that last use of Hijack. He crushed them, but he wouldn’t kill them yet. Hijacking the meatheads’ skills this early would’ve ruined his plan.

He likely wanted to kill the nerds first and get his hands on Mesmerize and Puppetry. So he allowed the delinquents to live for a while. But when the meatheads came close to taking out the delinquents, he decided they’d outlived their usefulness. He worried that he would lose the opportunity to steal their skills, so he betrayed the delinquents, killed them all, and used the skills he stole to defeat the meatheads.

He blended in with the normal guys and fooled the wannabe delinquents. When he was afraid that he’d lose his coveted skills, he slayed them without mercy. Now, he was alone. Could you kill me if you still had your friends?

All the people with the skills he wanted had run away to town. This was his last chance to get the real Hijack, but I was in his way.

Normally, he would have bulldozed straight through me, but he couldn’t defeat me. He didn’t know how to finish me off. None of his moves had a 100 percent chance of landing.

My abilities were weird unknowns to him. They upset all his careful calculations. I was a complete mystery, so he kept me isolated and under observation. He even killed off his last two companions to get Power Word Kill. With our level gap, he thought he’d couldn’t lose.

But he couldn’t kill me. His three greatest skills—Meddle, Illusion, and Inflict Ailment—had no effect on me.

Even though he had an overwhelming level advantage, he had only won in the past by tricking and surprising his targets. That’s why he panicked when he couldn’t beat me.

He really did screw up, didn’t he? I thought. It’s almost disappointing.

I’m going to slip through this genius’s probabilities, wait for him to use up his abilities, and put an end to him!

His plan to kill me had failed. He probably could’ve pulled off a 100 percent foolproof attack if he combined all his skills into one massive finishing move, but if he did that, his plan would fall apart, and the others would take him out easily. Even if I died, he still lost. But that one hypothetical hybrid attack was still possible, even considering everything he’d already used up. I couldn’t let up, couldn’t slip for a moment.

That was my biggest fear, but he disappointed me. He misunderstood probability in such a devastating way. He thought that five or six attacks with a 99 percent chance to kill was better than a single attack with a 100 percent chance. He mistook something that was almost impossible for something that was impossible. Of course it wasn’t! This strategy hasn’t worked so far, so why do you think it will kill me?!

 

It must have felt unfair.

“Hey, you, uh, Yamanaka-kun? We can stop fighting. I’m bored.”

“It’s Tanaka! You literally just called me Tanaka two minutes ago!”

Huh? His name wasn’t Yamanaka? He was boring, so I stopped paying attention.

“You’ve gotten too greedy. You’re just a background character, Yamamoto-kun,” I said. “You shouldn’t have stepped out of line. You don’t belong in the limelight. Not even I belong there. No matter how much you tried to change that fact, we’re not protagonists. You went too far, and now you’ll die an unimportant background character. Farewell.”

He should’ve anticipated that I was trying to make him waste his skills. So why did he fall for such an obvious strategy?

Mistaken-kun here wasted all of the incredible skills that he copied. What a shame.

His calculations promised that Instant Death and Inflict Ailment were enough to deal with me. He ignored his limits to the very end. Even skills like Sword Mastery Max, Sublime Spell Mastery, and Perfect Evasion went to waste.

How did he make such a stupid mistake? He really thought he was the main character here? What an idiot!

To try to kill me with probability… I literally have unlimited luck! He couldn’t have made a worse bet.

I didn’t have cheat skills, but my stats changed everything. Infinite luck wasn’t on the list of skills, so it was beyond his imagination. He probably wouldn’t have screwed up if I weren’t so lucky.

“Goodbye, Yamamura-kun.”

I took a half-step into that moment between life and death, and killed him.

I have no idea who he was, oh well.

Oh shit. I just remembered that my last words to the Class Rep were “Sorry for being stupid.” Why would I admit that?!