Chương 202: B2 Chapter 202: One More Try

Aurelia was asleep under the covers, tucked in tightly enough that only part of her blond hair and one side of her face remained visible. Meno should have been asleep too. Instead, he sat at the workstation beside Hyperion's two-million-credit XAnnihilator and realized there was a chance none of them had ever come back through the wormhole. There was no way this was real. MINESWEEPER OMEGA 5 GLOBAL LEADERBOARD 1. Chadculator — Level 68 2. Solver — Level 61 3. BrineSaint — Level 57 4. VantaRush — Level 49 5.

Honeygrave — Level 49 6. Kestrel — Level 49 7. Oxy — Level 45 8. JaxxonVale — Level 45 9. Patience — Level 45 10. Miri — Level 45 Your Rank (HyperionGuestAccount): Unlisted Meno reread the top line. Chadculator — Level 68. Impossible. Minesweeper Omega 5 scaled difficulty hard enough that the last time Meno checked the leaderboard, random players around Level 27 had been fighting over rank one. Now Chadculator had more than doubled that while Meno was busy doing chores in space.

The level system did not count total clears either. That would have been casual garbage. It tracked consecutive perfect boards: clear one without touching a mine and you reached Level 1, then clear the harder board that followed to reach Level 2. Every level increased the difficulty, and touching a single mine killed the entire run and sent you back to zero. The rules were healer friendly. Hidden squares covered the board, some containing mines.

Clicking a safe square revealed either a blank or a number showing how many mines touched it, including diagonally. Blanks opened nearby space automatically, numbers gave information, and flags marked suspected mines. Reveal every safe square without touching a mine. That was the entire game. Meno looked at 68 again. Absolutely not. The worst part was the account.

Hyperion had Minesweeper Omega 5 installed on the workstation, but Meno had no admin privileges, could not sign into his normal profile, and apparently could not even change the local display name. HyperionGuestAccount. Unlisted. Zero ranking. Zero identity. Aurelia shifted beneath the blanket behind him and settled again. Meno clicked NEW RUN. The first board loaded. Level 0 was basically an insult.

Meno clicked an open area, a blank spread across half the grid, and the surrounding numbers exposed the remaining mines almost immediately. A 1 already touching one flag made every other covered square around it safe. A 3 touching exactly three unopened squares made all three of them mines. Flag, clear, flag, clear. Board done. LEVEL 1 The next few disappeared almost as quickly.

Once the opening exposed enough information, Meno turned into a sewing machine with the mouse, hammering flags into the grid with absolutely no respect while safe squares vanished around them. By Level 10 the boards had grown larger and denser, but nothing forced him to slow down. Level 15 made him actually look. Level 20 made him lean closer. At Level 23, a bad opening left a narrow section where several numbers shared the same covered squares.

Meno stopped clicking on instinct and traced the pattern across the grid. Two. Three. Two. The first 2 already touched one flag, leaving one mine between two covered squares. The neighboring 3 already touched two other flags, forcing one of those same two squares to hold its last mine. That meant the square shared with the next 2 had to be safe, otherwise the first number would end up with too many mines. Click. Blank. The whole lower corner opened, and Meno smiled. Fine. This had some juice.

He reached Level 27 without losing, matching the old rank-one range he remembered, except now that was nowhere near enough. Chadculator still sat forty-one perfect boards ahead. Levels 28 and 29 went down cleanly, but at 30 the game started fighting back. Mine density had climbed so much that blanks were becoming rare.

Instead of opening half the board with one lucky click, Meno had to chew through tight number clusters one section at a time, every flag creating enough information for the next safe square, which exposed the next flag, then the next click. It was Chain in a different skin. Same principle: do not break it. At Level 33, Meno reached a corner with four covered squares and no deterministic answer he could find. He traced every surrounding number twice, then a third time. Nothing. Two mine layouts remained valid.

Fifty-fifty. Trash mechanic. Meno clicked the left square. Mine. The screen flashed red. [RUN FAILED] Level Reached: 33 Current Level: 0 Meno nearly headbutted the keyboard. Thirty-three perfect clears, deleted by a coin flip. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Unacceptable.

"Okay." Aurelia stayed asleep behind him while Meno started another run. The early levels had become trash mobs. He barely registered them anymore: opening click, read the border, flag forced mines, clear forced safes, move on. The boards blurred together until the high twenties. The second run died at Level 31 because Meno clicked one square too quickly. A 2 had one confirmed mine and three covered neighbors remaining, but his brain processed it as if only two remained. Mine. Reset.

The third run reached 37, and for a while everything clicked. A 1-2-2-1 line along one edge collapsed into a flag pattern he recognized instantly, then one forced square in the crowded center revealed a blank and opened forty hidden cells in a cascade. Near the top, five covered squares formed another knot. Meno worked through them until only one remained. The neighboring 1 already had its mine, so the last square had to be safe. He clicked. Mine.

"No." He rebuilt the position from memory and found the mistake. The flag beside the 1 had never touched it diagonally. It sat one column too far away. He had hallucinated it. Absolute trash. Meno hit NEW RUN harder than necessary, and the fourth run died at 18. The fifth reached 41. That one hurt. By Level 41, Minesweeper had become a war. Every part of the board was dense enough that one pattern bled into another.

Meno could no longer solve a local section and forget about it, because a mine placement fifteen squares away could change which configuration was legal near the center. He spent nearly six minutes on that single board, staring at tiny numbers and getting tilted enough to consider finding an XTachyon, climbing inside, and raiding the orbital platform past the wormhole solo. The board eventually narrowed to seven covered squares with three mines.

He solved two of them, reducing the problem to five squares and one mine before the information ran out completely. Meno checked every number bordering the region, replayed flags from two earlier sections in case one was wrong, then removed one, recalculated the board, and put it back. Nothing. Two squares remained. One mine. Meno moved the cursor over the left square, reconsidered, then shifted to the right. This was not skill. This was pure gambling. He clicked. Mine. The board exploded red.

[RUN FAILED] Level Reached: 41 Meno slowly leaned back, relieved nobody had witnessed that. Good. Okay. Good. Okay. Okay. He immediately started another run. By the second hour, Level 20 was getting obliterated. By the third, Level 30 felt like the loading screen. Meno went into performance mode. One knee had come up onto the chair, his other foot stayed planted against the floor, and his face hovered close enough to the monitor for the board to reflect across his eyes. This was a nightmare.

One run reached 39 before Meno clicked a mine because his finger moved faster than his brain. Another died at 42 on a forced guess. Run Fifteen ended at Level 7 after a bad opening made him impatient enough to gamble early. Meno almost respected that one. The game had executed him before the run accumulated enough value to hurt. Efficient. The next run became his best. Levels 35 through 38 disappeared in a blur, and Meno stopped blinking.

At 39, he hit a center cluster that looked impossible until he noticed one 4 already touched three flags spread across separate diagonals. That forced a safe square beside it, which revealed a 1, which made two neighboring flags impossible and unraveled almost the entire right half of the board. Level 40 followed. The leaderboard cutoff was still 45. Just get there. Meno cleared 41 and 42 before Level 43 fought him for almost eight minutes. No huge blanks, no easy edge, just mine density everywhere.

He attacked one region at a time until a 3 with exactly three covered neighbors gave him three forced mines. Once those were flagged, the neighboring 2 had both of its mines accounted for, turning three more squares safe. Click, click, click. One of them revealed a blank and tore open the region. Meno kept pushing until only one square remained. The final 1 touching it already had its mine flagged. Safe. Click. LEVEL 44 Meno's pulse was climbing.

He had fought a raid boss at 110, 000 Chain without feeling this tilted. Level 44 opened terribly. His first click exposed almost nothing, then the next two gave him numbers without a single useful blank expansion. Bad board. He started from an edge and built information manually. Ten minutes became fifteen while the grid slowly collapsed until only six hidden squares remained with two mines somewhere inside them.

The surrounding 1s, 2s, and one 3 allowed Meno to eliminate configuration after configuration until only two remained. He checked again. Still two. Forty-four perfect boards behind him, and Minesweeper Omega 5 wanted a coin flip. There was no way Chadculator had survived this many guesses. Must have cheated. Meno spent another five minutes refusing to click before finally choosing the upper square. Safe. His body relaxed as the new number forced everything else.

One flag, one safe, another flag, then the final click. LEVEL 45 Meno opened the leaderboard immediately. 10. HyperionGuestAccount — Level 45"Yes!" Five hours for global rank ten. Meno should have stopped. He had ranked, completed the objective, and reached the exact cutoff he had been chasing. Meno looked at Chadculator sitting at Level 68 again and immediately found twenty-three reasons not to. That was nothing. One good run, and he was already on Level 45. He opened the next board.

The game responded by compressing everything awful about Level 44 into a smaller space. Mines crowded every region, numbers stacked against one another with almost no blank territory, and nearly every click exposed another number instead of giving him room. Meno started solving anyway. Ten minutes later, he had cleared one corner, opened another section, and finally reached the center. A forced flag gave him two safe squares, which revealed another mine. Good. He could do this.

Aurelia shifted under the blanket behind him, but Meno barely registered it. Three covered squares remained with one mine between them. The 2 beside the left square already touched two flags, making it safe. That revealed a number, which forced the middle mine and left the final square clear. Click. LEVEL 46 Meno refreshed the leaderboard. His rank moved, but Chadculator still sat at 68. He loaded the next board, and twenty-three minutes later, he hit a mine.

[RUN FAILED] Forty-six consecutive perfect boards disappeared. Meno stared at NEW RUN.

"One more try." The early levels vanished. Ten, twenty, thirty, then a mine at 38.

"One more try." The next run died at 26. Another reached 42. Again. At some point, the guest room stopped being dark as morning light began leaking around the curtains. Meno had no idea how long he had been sitting there. His eyes were dry, his shoulders hurt, and whenever he blinked he saw numbers. One. Two. Three. Flag. Safe. Mine. Reset. Chadculator. 68. The name had stopped belonging to a person.

Chadculator was a raid boss now, some hidden monster behind the leaderboard with a disgusting passive that let him see mines through the board. Meno reached 40 again and died. Then 43. Then 12. The Level 12 loss made him laugh, not because it was funny, but because his brain had started releasing funny chemicals. Aurelia woke during another run without Meno noticing. He was on Level 37, working through a strip along the bottom edge where three numbers overlapped six covered squares. One mine was forced.

Flagging it satisfied a 1 and opened two safe squares, one of which revealed a 2 that collapsed the neighboring pattern. Good. Keep going. Meno cleared the board and loaded the next before Aurelia had finished sitting up. She gathered the blanket around her waist and watched him from the bed, hair flattened on one side from sleep. Both of Meno's elbows were planted on the desk now, his face inches from the screen. The leaderboard remained open beside the board. 1.

Chadculator — Level 68 His own rank had fallen back to Unlisted. The Level 45 entry had only lasted until somebody else reclaimed the cutoff while Meno kept throwing runs. He clicked a safe square, flagged a mine, opened two more, and found a 3.

"One more try," he whispered. Aurelia knew enough to leave him alone while Meno kept his eyes locked on the screen.

"Just one more try."