The single point of MP glowed in Leo's mind, a fragile, hard-won ember in a vast darkness. It was proof. It was also a terrifying liability. The dazed rat from the night before was still out there, a potential witness to his clandestine, failed experiment. He spent the next morning in Pen Seven in a state of coiled anxiety, his eyes constantly scanning the grunting, writhing mass of rodents for any sign of the one that moved with a wobble, any creature that might betray his secret with its unsteady gait.
The work was a mechanical blur. Push the mop, scrape the wall, ignore the ache. His mind was elsewhere, replaying the sputtering brown flicker, calculating the impossible mountain of 99 more points, and dreading discovery.
The inspection was routine. Once a week, a clerk from the Guild's administrative wing would make a perfunctory tour of the menagerie, checking livestock counts, feed supplies, and the general state of the Guild's "assets." Today's clerk was a man named Fennel, whose most defining characteristic was his profound, soul-deep boredom. He moved through the pens with a ledger under one arm, his nose wrinkled as if the smell were a personal insult, his eyes glazed over.
He was marking something down near the Glitterhen pen when it happened. The dazed rat—Leo recognized it instantly by the slight, off-kilter tilt to its head—chose that moment to wander out from behind a water trough, directly into the clerk's path. It didn't scurry like the others. It ambled, confused, its coordination visibly impaired. It bumped into the trough, shook its head, and stood still, swaying slightly.
Clerk Fennel stopped. Not out of concern, but because the rat was in his way. He made a shooing motion with his ledger. "Go on. Shoo."
The rat didn't shoo. It blinked up at him with glassy eyes.
Fennel's brow, which had been smooth with disinterest, furrowed slightly. This was an anomaly. Anomalies, however minor, were a break in the monotony. He sighed, as if the universe were personally burdening him, and set his ledger down on a dry patch of wall.
He raised a hand, his fingers moving in a quick, practiced pattern. A faint, utilitarian grey light—the colour of unpolished steel—emanated from his fingertips and washed over the listless rat.
SKILL DETECTED: [ANALYZE] (MINOR)
Leo, frozen mid-scrape with his squeegee, watched in silent horror from fifteen feet away. His heart seemed to stop.
Fennel peered at the rat, his eyes seeing more than the physical. "[Analyze] indicates… minor blunt trauma to the cranial region. Concussive symptoms. Impaired motor function." He muttered to himself, tapping his chin. "Not a disease. Not a birth defect. An injury." He looked around the pen, his gaze passing over the other rats, over the filth, over Leo, without seeing any of them. "From what? No signs of rat-on-rat combat of this severity. No falling debris."
His bored eyes finally landed on Janus, who was overseeing the repair of a fence post nearby. "Stablemaster. This creature is injured."
Janus lumbered over, glanced at the dazed rat, and snorted. "So? They're rats. They get hurt."
"Blunt force trauma to the head," Fennel pressed, his bureaucratic mind latching onto the irregularity. "Specific. Unexplained."
Janus's gaze, heavy and dismissive, swung towards Leo. It was not an accusation; it was the offering of the most obvious, least troublesome explanation. "Him. The new Defective. Was waving his mop around like an idiot yesterday before the weasel thing. Probably clipped it. Clumsy oaf."
All attention—Fennel's bored scrutiny, Janus's contempt—fixed on Leo. He felt exposed, naked. The squeegee handle was slick with his sweat.
Fennel approached. He didn't look at Leo's face. He looked at his hands, then at the mop leaning against the wall. He picked up the mop, examining the cracked handle and the filthy head with detached interest. "This the weapon?" he asked nobody in particular.
He then looked directly at Leo. "Show me your skill. The one that did this."
The world narrowed to a pinprick. Panic, cold and sharp, flooded Leo's veins. Show him? He couldn't show [Arcane Replication]. That would be a death sentence. But he had no other skill to display. The [Power Strike] was a copied ghost in his machine, not a manifested ability he could demonstrate on command.
His mouth was desert-dry. "I… I don't…" he stammered, his voice a rasp. "I don't have a skill. Not one that… I just hit it. By accident. I was swinging the mop and it was there." He gestured weakly, hopelessly.
Fennel stared at him. The silence stretched. Leo was certain the man could hear the frantic drumming of his heart. He was going to be found out. They'd brand him again, or throw him in a dungeon, or dissect him to see how a Defective could mimic a skill…
Then, Clerk Fennel did something miraculous. He sighed. A long, weary, put-upon exhalation that seemed to deflate his entire body. The light of inquiry in his eyes died, replaced by the familiar, comforting glaze of bureaucratic ennui.
"Of course," he murmured, more to himself than anyone. "A Defective. Manifestation instability." He flipped open his ledger, licked the tip of a pencil, and began to write. "Record: Menagerie, Pen Seven. Rock Rat specimen shows minor cranial trauma. Cause: accidental impact from stable hand, a designated Defective. Likely exacerbated by a minor system feedback loop—an uncontrolled mana echo from his defective skill matrix. No pattern. No utility. Just random discharge."
He spoke as if reciting from a manual. "It's a known, if rare, anomaly. The flawed skill matrix sometimes spasms, throwing off useless kinetic energy. Harmless. More likely to break a tool than a monster." He closed the ledger with a definitive snap. "Just don't make a habit of damaging the livestock, boy. They're Guild property. More valuable than you are."
He gave Leo one last, utterly dismissive look, picked up his ledger, and walked away, already forgetting the incident. Janus shrugged and went back to his fence post.
Leo stood rooted to the spot, the squeegee hanging limp in his hand. The cold terror in his gut didn't warm into relief; it solidified into something else—a profound, dizzying understanding.
He was safe. Not because he was innocent, but because he was broken. The very label that condemned him—"Defective"—had just become his shield. His fumbling, sputtering attempt at [Power Strike] hadn't been seen as a skill. It had been classified as a glitch. A random, meaningless burp of a malfunctioning system. An "Anomaly." A number in a ledger.
To the Guild, to men like Fennel, he wasn't a threat or a mystery. He was a mildly irritating paperwork footnote. #743: Minor Kinetic Discharge.
The perfect cover.
He looked at his branded palm, the yellow glow seeming to pulse in time with his slowing heartbeat. For the first time, he didn't see just a mark of shame. He saw a camouflage. A license to be overlooked. They expected nothing from him but incompetence and occasional, harmless weirdness.
And that, he realized as a slow, grim smile touched his lips for the first time in weeks, was exactly what he needed. He could be a ghost in the machine. A glitch in the system. And while they were busy ignoring the error, he could grind.