Aria threw a rock at Zeros face.
It hit his cheek with a sharp crack. Splinters flew. Zero did not move. He stood rooted, arms spread slightly, chest out, the perfect target stance he had held for one thousand years.
"DODGE, YOU IDIOT," Aria screamed.
Zero blinked. He checked his skill interface. The list scrolled endlessly. **[DODGE]**, **[EVASION]**, **[FOOTWORK]**. He had them. He had been hit by attacks that used these skills 847,000 times. The proficiency levels were there, stored like compressed data.
He tried to activate [DODGE].
Nothing happened.
His body refused. The muscle memory, if it could be called that, was locked. He was built to receive, not avoid.
"You cannot just stand there," Aria said. She picked up another rock. "You are not furniture anymore."
"I do not know how," Zero said. His voice was steady but hollow. "I never learned to move. Only to stand."
Aria lowered the rock. She stepped closer, peering into his eye sockets. "Show me your interface. The full list."
Zero opened it.
The air between them filled with glowing text. Skill after skill scrolled upward, a waterfall of violence. [CLEAVE], [BACKSTAB], [ULTIMATE SACRIFICE], [DRAGON SLAYER TECHNIQUE], [REALM OF ANNIHILATION]. Most glowed faintly at 0.01% proficiency. Some, like [BASIC SLASH], burned bright at Level 999.
Aria stared. Her mouth opened slightly. She scrolled through the list for three full minutes. The sheer volume of accumulated data seemed to make her dizzy.
"You have [ULTIMATE SACRIFICE]," she whispered. "A suicide attack used by S-Rank holy knights. But you do not have [WALK]?"
"I learned what they used on me," Zero said. "They did not walk on me. They hit me."
Aria sat down hard on a fallen log. She ran her hands through her messy hair. "This is insane. You are a library of god tier attacks but you move like a drunken puppet."
She scrolled faster. Her finger stopped. "Here. [EVASION]. Level 412. [FOOTWORK]. Level 89. [ROLL]. Level 56. Buried under ten thousand attack skills."
She looked up at him, eyes sharp now. "We start with these. Forget [CLEAVE]. Forget everything that hurts. You need to learn how to not be hit."
Zero nodded.
Three hours later, he was bleeding light into the grass.
Aria had found a sturdy stick. She used it like a sword, striking at his knees, his elbows, his ribs. She varied the rhythm. She faked high and hit low. Zero kept defaulting to his spread arm stance, trying to block with his face.
"MOVE YOUR FEET," Aria shouted.
She jabbed at his exposed knee. Hard. The pain flared bright and sharp.
Instinctively, Zero tried to raise his arm to block, the old habit of protecting his nonexistent vitals. But Aria had taught him something in the last hour. She had taught him that his arms were not shields anymore. They were tools.
The pain triggered something. **[PAIN AVOIDANCE]** flashed in his vision.
Zero sidestepped.
It was clumsy. His wooden ankle twisted nearly to the breaking point. But the stick passed through empty air where his knee had been.
"AGAIN," Aria said, and she swung horizontally.
Zero ducked. The stick whistled over his head. Without thinking, he stepped into her space, inside her swing. His own stick, the one she had given him for practice, came up in a sharp arc.
[CLEVE] activated involuntarily.
The combination created a notification Zero had never seen before.
[NEW SKILL SYNTHESIS DETECTED]
[DODGE + CLEAVE = RIPOSTE]
[Current Proficiency: 0.01%]
Aria blocked just in time. The impact sent her stumbling backward. She looked at him, breathing hard, then grinned.
"There," she said. "You moved."
Zero looked at his own hands. The stick was splintered but intact. He had not taken damage that time. Not a single hit.
A crash in the underbrush interrupted the moment.
A [DIRE BOAR] burst into the clearing. Level 15. Three hundred pounds of tusk and aggression. It had been drawn by the noise, or the smell of Zeros blood from earlier. It lowered its head, squealing, and charged.
Aria stepped back fast. "Your test," she said. "Do not tank it. Use what you learned."
Zero hesitated.
The boar covered the distance in two seconds. Its tusks were aimed at Zeros chest, right at the target circle painted there.
Zero almost defaulted to the stance. Arms spread. Take the hit. Absorb the skill.
Then he remembered the dodge. The sidestep. The freedom of empty air.
Zero rolled.
[ROLL] at 0.05% proficiency sent him tumbling clumsily through the mud. His wooden joints screeched in protest. But the tusks missed his chassis by a hairs breadth.
Zero came up swinging.
The boar turned for a second pass. Zero did not wait. He stepped into the charge, just as he had stepped into Arias swing. He ducked under the tusks, feeling the wind of their passage, and brought his broken stick up in a precise arc toward the beasts eye.
[RIPOSTE] triggered.
The impact was calculated. Perfectly timed. The wood punched through the thin bone of the eye socket and into the brain.
The boar dropped. Dead before it hit the ground.
Zero stood over it, breathing hard. He was not breathing, not really, but his chassis was cycling air to cool his core. He looked at the corpse. He had killed something without taking a single hit.
The [SYSTEM] did not scream this time. It sang.
[CLASS EVOLUTION CONDITION MET]
[TUTORIAL TARGET] >>> [ADAPTIVE COMBATANT]
[EVOLUTION IN PROGRESS]
Zero felt his chassis shift.
The wood densified. The grain compressed, hardening into something between oak and iron. The golden light leaking from his cracks turned a brilliant, blinding white. His interface reorganized itself, the 10,049 skills sorting into categories. Attack. Defense. Movement. Utility.
He could feel his joints lubricating, smoothing. He could feel the ground through his feet with sudden, painful clarity.
Aria backed away, her hand over her mouth. "You are leveling up," she whispered. "NPCs do not level up. NPCs do not evolve."
Zero flexed his fingers. They moved without creaking. He picked up the boar corpse, three hundred pounds of dead weight, and lifted it effortlessly with one hand. His strength stat had just increased by orders of magnitude.
[EVOLUTION COMPLETE]
[NEW CLASS: ADAPTIVE COMBATANT]
[SKILL SYNTHESIS UNLOCKED]
"I am not an NPC anymore," Zero said. He looked at the horizon. "I am not a target. I am... adapting."
Aria started to say something, then stopped. Her head turned sharply toward the ridge above the clearing.
Black smoke rose in three distinct columns.
"Hunter signals," she said. Her voice went flat. "They use smoke to coordinate. That is the encirclement pattern."
Zero saw the scout at the same time. A figure in leather armor, crouched in the branches of a pine tree sixty meters away. The scout was watching them through a spyglass. Watching Zero glow with the afterlight of evolution.
The scout saw Zero see him.
The scout dropped from the tree and ran, crashing through the underbrush toward the east.
"He saw you evolve," Aria said. She grabbed her staff. "They know your location. They know you are getting stronger. They will bring the entire guild."
Zero dropped the boar corpse. He picked up [HEAVENFALL] from where it leaned against a tree. The blade felt lighter now. Balanced.
"Then we move," Zero said.
He started walking, not toward the village, not toward safety, but deeper into the wild woods. His gait was smooth now. No longer the stiff stumble of a broken puppet.
Aria followed, her robes snapping in the wind.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
Zero did not look back.
"Where they cannot find us," he said. "Until I am strong enough to hunt them instead."
[CLASS: ADAPTIVE COMBATANT]
[SKILL SYNTHESIS: UNLOCKED]
[HUNTERS: TRACKING]