The "glitch" was more than a cover; it was a liberation. The Clerk's bored dismissal, the casual filing of his secret struggle as Anomaly #743, had carved out a space for him in the world's indifference. He wasn't a threat. He was a footnote. And in that footnote, he could move.
That night, the fear that had chilled his bones during previous excursions was gone, replaced by a cold, focused intent. The moon was a sharp sickle in a clear sky, casting deep, black shadows and pools of silver light across the menagerie yard. Leo moved through them like a ghost, the cracked mop held not like a burden, but like a tool of purpose. His heart beat a steady, determined rhythm, not a frantic panic.
He went straight to Pen Seven. The familiar stench, the rustling, the glinting eyes—they were no longer elements of his despair, but features of his new workplace. He was not a prisoner here at night; he was a foreman on a grim, silent shift. He scanned the rat colony, not for a lone, easy target, but for the right one. A rat that was separated, yes, but also positioned correctly. He remembered the guard's stance against the weasel, the solid footing.
He found his candidate near the back wall. A medium-sized rat, older perhaps, its fur slightly patchy, was digging half-heartedly at the base of the stones. It was focused, oblivious.
Leo didn't rush. He positioned himself carefully, a few feet away, his boots finding purchase on a slightly drier mound of packed earth. He didn't think about activating the skill. He thought about the result. He pictured the guard's sword, the brief, solid shell of brown light, the clean, final impact. He didn't imagine energy in his own arm; he imagined it traveling down the length of the mop handle, condensing in the heavy, filthy head, and detonating on contact.
He raised the mop slowly, his grip adjusting on the splintered wood. He didn't look at the rat's body. He looked at a specific point just behind its twitching ear. The head. The engine room. The guard had struck the weasel's neck. Janus had crushed the skull. Precision. A single, perfect point.
He inhaled, a slow, deliberate pull of the cold night air. His muscles coiled, not with rage, but with leveraged tension. He wasn't just swinging; he was dropping the weighted mop head, putting the full, meager force of his STR 6 behind it, guiding it along the invisible line he'd drawn in his mind.
As the mop descended, he exhaled in a sharp, controlled burst. He focused everything—his breath, his will, his understanding of the guard's efficiency—into that final microsecond before impact.
The brown light that answered was no longer a sputter. It was a faint, but distinct, flicker—a quick pulse of earthy energy that flashed around the mop head, there and gone, like a single, muted camera flash in the dark.
The sound was different.
It wasn't the wet THWAP of a non-lethal blow, or the THWUMP of a dazing hit. It was a short, sharp, wet CRUNCH. A final sound. The mop head, empowered by that faint brown flicker, struck the precise point behind the rat's ear with condensed, efficient force.
The rat didn't squeak. It didn't tumble. It simply folded. Its legs gave out. It dropped onto its side in the mud, a small, limp heap of fur, utterly still.
For a second, there was only the night sounds. Then, the notifications, crisp and blue in his vision.
```
ROCK RAT (Lvl 0) DEFEATED.
XP GAINED: 0
MP FOR [POWER STRIKE]: 1
TOTAL MP: 2/100
```
Leo didn't feel a surge of power. He didn't feel heroic. He didn't even feel relieved. He felt… nothing. A profound, empty clarity.
He looked at the dead creature, then at the mop in his hands, then at the notification. The numbers were everything. XP: 0. Worthless for leveling. MP: +1. The only currency that mattered.
He had hypothesized, experimented, failed, and now succeeded. The formula was proven. Power Strike + Precise, killing blow on a valid target = MP.
It was an algorithm. A grim, brutal arithmetic. The rat was not a monster he had vanquished; it was a unit of measurement. A single, bloody digit added to a progress bar.
He knelt. He didn't touch the rat with his hands. He used the edge of the mop head to nudge it. It was unequivocally dead. He felt no revulsion. The filth of the pen, the smell, the gore—it was all just environment. Data points.
He couldn't leave it out. A dead rat might be noticed, might raise questions, even from someone as bored as Clerk Fennel. He used the mop to drag the small corpse to a deep pile of soiled, discarded hay in the corner of the pen. He pushed the rat into the heart of the pile, then covered it with more hay, methodical, like a gardener planting a seed.
He stood back, surveying his work. No sign. Just another lump in a pen full of filth.
He looked at his status once more. TOTAL MP: 2/100.
Ninety-eight points to go. At one rat per night, that was over three months of this. Of sneaking, of swinging, of burying. The mountain was still vast, impossible.
But for the first time, he had a shovel. He had a method. He had proof the slope could be climbed, one grueling, insignificant inch at a time.
He left the pen, latching the gate silently behind him. The moon had moved. The night was colder. He walked back to the bunkhouse, the mop over his shoulder, not as a janitor's tool, but as a hunter's rifle. The despair was gone, burned away in the cold fire of that single, successful CRUNCH.
It wasn't hope that warmed him. It was resolve. The grind, the true, soul-wearying grind, had officially begun. And Leo, the Defective, the glitch, the footnote, had taken his first, firm step onto its endless, grey road.