Chương 3: A Mountain That Counted Back

Meno hit the cave mouth running and almost died before he reached the canyon. A cindermaw jackal lifted its narrow head from behind a black stone ridge, saw him, and came at him with two others spilling after it. He cut left through a slot he had used once before, scraped his shoulder on the wall, and heard claws hit stone close enough to spike his hands cold. The canyon entrance opened ahead. He dove through it, rolled badly, and came up with his sword already drawn.

The earth elemental turned its amber eye toward him. [Hostile: Dustbound Earth Elemental | Type: Elemental | Threat:??? | Trait: Tremor-Slam]"Again," Meno said. He struck the leg. [Compound Swing | Chain: 1 | Damage: +10%] Stone rang through his arm. He stepped with the recoil, cut the same spot, then the hip, then the hanging slab of its forearm. The elemental ground forward, slow enough to invite greed and heavy enough to make every step feel like a countdown.

[Compound Swing | Chain: 5 | Damage: +50%] Its shoulder lifted. Meno jumped back. The ground exploded where he had stood, dust blasting across his boots. He landed clean outside the ring and lunged forward, sword cocked for the re-hit. His blade scraped empty air beside the elemental's knee. [Chain Broken: Miss]"Angle," he snapped.

"Bad angle." The elemental swatted him with the back of its hand. [Death | Penalty: Dropped Item, XP Loss, Rank Slip] [Dropped: Cracked Clay Token x1] He woke on the cave floor with his teeth clenched so hard his jaw hurt. The sword was still there. That mattered more than the XP loss. Death chewed it backward, but the number beside his name stayed 5. The game did not de-level him. It trapped him at the floor and kept sweeping progress off the table. He ran again. The next death happened in the canyon.

The one after that happened on the runback when he took the upper ridge to avoid jackals and clipped the edge of a glassback scorpion's patrol. Its tail punched through his chest before he got both feet under him. [Death | Penalty: Dropped Item, XP Loss, Rank Slip] [Dropped: Broken Loom Peg x1] The cave accepted him back without comment. Meno stood, checked the sword, checked the junk, and spat onto the stone because his mouth wanted something to do besides curse. Every drop had come from the trash buffer so far.

Cracked clay. Broken wood. Splintered beads. Observed behavior, repeated enough to feel like a rule and still thin enough to snap the moment the system decided equipment looked tastier. The Common II sword rode his hip like a hostage. He went back anyway. The elemental killed him with Tremor-Slam when he jumped late. It killed him with a stomp when he circled too close between slams. It killed him with a slow, stupid-looking swat that covered more space than his body believed until the hitbox erased him.

One runback ended under an ashhide gorer's hooves because he cut across open ground to save eight seconds and the beast corrected that optimism with both horns. More junk vanished. [Dropped: Cracked Clay Token x1] [Dropped: Splintered Prayer Bead x1] [Dropped: Broken Loom Peg x1] His XP progress inside Level 5 fell to nothing and stayed there, a bar with no dignity left to take. The stream count rose to 17. Then 23. People were not coming because he was winning. where the hell is he lvl 5 in black mountain zone???

THREAT??? LMFAO go deliver flowers little bro no one knows this zone right? Meno read none of it fully. The words still hit his peripheral vision in bright little bites. The environment tag had given him away. Emberhollow. Badlands. Canyon. Threat question marks. A Level 5 Swing Master attempting a monster the system had stopped describing in normal terms. Failure had found an audience. He checked the leaderboard after one death because self-harm sometimes wore a UI skin.

[Launch Leaderboard | Global Level Rank] [Rank 1: BrineSaint — Level 12] [Rank 2: Kestrel_Crownfall — Level 11] [Rank 3: JaxxonVale — Level 11] [Rank 4: OxideChoir — Level 10] [Rank 5: Honeygrave — Level 10] [Your Rank: Unlisted — Level 5] Guild tags and stream names sat in the top slots like paid seating. Crownfall had momentum. JaxxonVale had probably turned every level into a clip.

Someone named OxideChoir showed an event marker beside their name, which meant a world event or dungeon chain had already paid out somewhere Meno had never seen. He closed the panel.

"Good for them." GOOD FOR THEM HE SAYS rank 1 is twelve bro ur bar is negative XP Meno muted nothing. He let the mockery sit there and ran the line again. The obvious solution kept failing. Hit five times. Count. The Tremor-Slam cycled around ten seconds, but the elemental lied with its body. It rolled a shoulder. It dragged an arm. It lifted its torso like a normal slam was coming, then the real attack came from its feet. If Meno waited for the ground cue, he was dead.

If he jumped back as the upper body began to shift, he survived and lost the chain. If he jumped back too early, the timer between contacts stretched long enough for the rhythm to die before he could lunge in. [Chain Broken: Tempo Break] He survived that one. The notice still felt like death wearing clean clothes.

"Swing Master doesn't care that I lived," he said, breathing hard near the canyon wall.

"Survival with no contact is just losing slower." insane sentence that's a quit quote bro discovered uptime he's actually counting? He was.

"One. Two. Three." Strike the leg.

"Four." Step under the elbow.

"Five." Cut the arm. [Compound Swing | Chain: 5 | Damage: +50%]"Six. Seven." The elemental's foot ground down. Its torso dipped half an inch. The fake shoulder rise came right after.

"Eight." Meno jumped back. Too sharp. He landed wide, lunged in, and his sword tip kissed stone too late to count. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. [Chain Broken: Tempo Break]"Too early." The elemental killed him anyway when he tried to salvage the dead chain. [Dropped: Cracked Clay Token x1] Again.

"One. Two. Three." The count became the only clean thing in the canyon. He stopped trying to feel the cooldown and started treating it like a bad metronome with a grudge. Roughly ten seconds. Cue beginning a breath before eight if the elemental had finished a swat. Later if it had stomped. Earlier if he stood near the right leg. The AI was not running a training loop for him. It varied just enough to punish lazy memorization. Viewers: 31. this is public self-own he's in a???

zone with a white sword common two, respect the poverty someone clip the junk count he has like twenty deaths left max The next attempt got him to ten. [Compound Swing | Chain: 10 | Damage: +100%] The damage number still looked like a joke against the elemental's health. A scratch on a wall. The monster had so much health that doubling his trash base damage barely earned a visible shaving. He saw the bar move only because he had trained himself to notice humiliating margins. Then Tremor-Slam started.

He jumped back, lunged, hit stone, and the chain survived for half a heartbeat. No notice. His chest lifted. The follow-up stomp killed him before he could use it. [Death | Penalty: Dropped Item, XP Loss, Rank Slip] [Dropped: Broken Loom Peg x1] At the shrine, he sat up laughing too loudly. The sound bounced off the cave walls and came back wrong.

"Okay. Okay, the backstep can work if everything is perfect. Perfect retreat, perfect landing, perfect lunge, exact reach, clean contact. Then I still need to dodge the follow-up from a bad stance." He stood and checked his inventory. The count had stopped being abstract. Every slot was a fuse. Cracked clay tokens had thinned to single digits. Loom pegs were going fast. Prayer beads rattled in the bottom of the bag like cheap teeth.

His sword had survived because the game kept eating garbage first, and that generosity looked more fragile each time it worked. He ran again, clipped a badlands jackal, and died twenty steps from the canyon. [Dropped: Splintered Prayer Bead x1]"Route death," he said from the cave floor, voice low.

"That one's on me." they're all on you king 37 viewers for dirt boss this is awful why can't I stop watching He did not answer. Backstep-lunge failed six more times. Once by miss. Twice by tempo. Once because he landed in a shallow crack and his launch angle went dead. Twice because the elemental's follow-up covered the exact spot his lunge demanded. Meno's anger changed shape after that. It lost volume. Rage was expensive, and he needed focus for the counts. The problem was no longer avoiding Tremor-Slam.

He could survive the shockwave by leaving. Any player with legs could leave if they knew it was coming. The fight demanded something meaner: remain in the chain while the floor tried to delete him. The first inward jump happened because he ran out of patience with backing away.

"One. Two. Three. Four. Five." He cut the elemental's wrist, then stepped closer instead of out.

"Six. Seven." The shoulder began its lie.

"Eight." Meno jumped in. His boot hit a sloped plate of stone near the elemental's knee. He swung down into its thigh while climbing, and the blade rang with valid contact. For a quarter second he was on the monster, fingers grabbing a crack in its torso, sword arm jammed between his body and moving rock. The shockwave detonated. It still killed him. [Death | Penalty: Dropped Item, XP Loss, Rank Slip] [Dropped: Cracked Clay Token x1] He woke with his hands open, staring at the cave ceiling.

"That was better." HE DIED how is that better inward was less doomed? bro is trying to mount the mountain It had been better. Backward movement protected his health and murdered the chain. Inward movement protected the chain and murdered his body. The first option led to slow failure. The second had a version where the body ended somewhere else before the slam finished. He returned to the canyon. The next five attempts tested height. Knee was too low. Thigh was too low.

Torso was possible if he jumped off the raised arm, but the arm came up late. Contact point mattered. If he touched the elemental like an enemy, he died. If he treated it like terrain that hated him, the timings started to connect.

"One second left" was a trap. He reached the arm as the shockwave fired, got a hit, and died with the chain technically alive until death broke it. Two seconds gave him room. The elemental swatted. Meno ducked under the slow murder arc, cut the forearm, and kept counting.

"Six. Seven." The torso dipped.

"Eight." He jumped at the rising arm before the obvious cue. His left foot planted on rough stone. His sword chopped into the upper arm. The impact jolted him upward instead of backward. [Compound Swing | Chain: 10 | Damage: +100%] He pushed off the arm as the elemental's feet drove down. Tremor-Slam burst beneath him. For the first time, he saw the dust ring pass under his boots. He was still alive.

"Ha!" The elemental's other arm swept through the air and caught him across the ribs before he landed. [Death | Penalty: Dropped Item, XP Loss, Rank Slip] [Dropped: Broken Loom Peg x1] The cave returned. Meno slapped both palms against the stone floor and laughed through his teeth.

"There it is." WAIT he cleared slam he actually cleared it then got deleted lmao 44 viewers airborne tech? that was disgusting don't encourage him His heart hammered hard enough that the haptic rig tried to smooth the sensation and failed. He had cleared the AoE. The solution had existed for less than a second before the next attack erased it, but it existed. Now the problem moved. Airborne survival killed ground leverage.

He could jump off the arm and clear the shockwave, but landing straight down put him inside the follow-up. Jumping high made him helpless. Pushing away too hard broke contact time. Pushing weakly fed him to the swat. The hit needed to do more than maintain chain. It had to redirect his body. Sword impact. Foot push. Elemental arm motion. Use all three. He checked inventory at the shrine. Cracked Clay Tokens: 4. Broken Loom Pegs: 3. Splintered Prayer Beads: 5.

Twelve failures before the sword started sweating, assuming the rule held. Fewer if the game decided coins or equipment were funny. Fewer if he died on a runback and dropped multiple items someday because launch rules loved little surprises.

"Count is twelve," he said. junk count confirmed twelve lives until sword gamba go back please Meno's mouth tightened. He went again. The runback tried to tax him. A scorpion shifted near the lower path, forcing him up onto a shale shelf. The shelf slid under his boots, and for two seconds he windmilled above a drop while a jackal pack sniffed below. He waited, still as a held breath, until they moved, then crossed with his back scraping hot stone. The canyon felt smaller each time.

The elemental felt less like an enemy and more like a moving map of hazards. Foot. Shin. Wrist. Arm ridge. Shoulder crack. Dust ring. Follow-up sweep. Landing pocket behind the left heel.

"First hit," he said. [Compound Swing | Chain: 1 | Damage: +10%] He did not care about damage yet. Damage was a future problem. Chain was the only currency. At five, he was under the right elbow. [Compound Swing | Chain: 5 | Damage: +50%] The elemental ground forward, forcing him to give two steps without stopping his swing. He cut the thigh while retreating, then the hanging fist as it dragged past. The count stayed inside his teeth.

"Six. Seven. Eight." Jump. Foot on arm. Sword into shoulder. Push with the hit, not after it. The blade bounced enough to throw his torso sideways. The elemental's rising motion added lift. Meno twisted in the air as the Tremor-Slam cracked the canyon floor below him. The follow-up sweep came. He tucked his knees and let the wind of it pass under his boots. For a blink, he hung behind the elemental's left side with no ground, no plan beyond the next contact, and a chain starving for another hit.

He landed badly, ankle folding under feedback pain, but the sword was already moving. The blade hit the back of the elemental's knee. No break notice. Meno's lungs forgot their job. Chat erupted. CHAIN LIVED NO BREAK WHAT disgusting he got behind it 49 viewers do it again do it again"Again," he said, voice scraped thin. The elemental turned. Slow. Lethal. The rotation itself threatened him because a brushing hip would kill him as surely as any attack.

He used the turn to walk with it, tapping stone with short, ugly cuts. Each contact bought another piece of time. [Compound Swing | Chain: 10 | Damage: +100%] At ten stacks, the health bar looked almost full. No, worse than almost. It looked offended by measurement. Meno wanted to laugh and vomit at the same time. He had built a movement cycle that required pre-counting, enemy climbing, airborne redirection, exact landing, and instant re-contact.

The reward was a doubled damage bonus on a weapon that still scraped a mountain like a spoon. He would need fifty. Maybe one hundred. Maybe more. The elemental's torso dipped.

"Seven. Eight." He jumped the arm again. This time he pushed too late. The sword hit, the lift came, and the follow-up sweep clipped one boot as he rotated. The world flipped. He hit the canyon wall alive for half a second, slid, and stabbed desperately at the elemental's side as it turned. The blade connected. Still alive.

"Still," he hissed. He landed behind it and cut again. Viewers: 52. The chat no longer moved like pure mockery. It moved like people leaning over a balcony above a crash. lvl 5 btw this is still dumb count is 8 before jump no it varies after swat chain 10 and hp is full, he's cooked cooked but moving Meno could not answer. Talking would spend timing. He made the loop two more times. Pre-count. Jump in early. Plant on arm. Strike during lift. Push through the hit. Clear Tremor-Slam. Twist away from follow-up.

Land behind or beside. Hit before the chain starved. At fifteen stacks, the numbers were still nothing. At twenty, the sword finally carved chips instead of dust. [Compound Swing | Chain: 20 | Damage: +200%] The elemental's health bar had moved. Barely. Enough. Meno's hands were shaking now, which was inconvenient and therefore banned. He tightened his grip until his knuckles hurt. The canyon narrowed around his target, his count, his landing pockets, the amber eye turning with slow hate.

The next Tremor-Slam came after a stomp instead of a swat. The cue shifted half a beat earlier. Meno read it late. He jumped anyway, got one foot onto the arm, and knew from the angle that the push would throw him forward instead of sideways. He tried to correct with the sword strike. The blade hit. The chain held. His body did not. The shockwave passed below. The follow-up hand filled his vision.

[Death | Penalty: Dropped Item, XP Loss, Rank Slip] [Dropped: Splintered Prayer Bead x1] The cave shrine glowed blue over him. Meno lay flat, chest rising and falling, and opened his inventory with one trembling hand. Cracked Clay Token x0. Broken Loom Peg x1. Splintered Prayer Bead x1. Two pieces of trash left. His Common II sword remained equipped. For a long moment, he did nothing. The stream chat scrolled in the edge of his sight, slower now, more focused. two junk stop bank sword?

he has no bank here genius that was chain 20 hp moved this is deranged hard part found now he needs deathless for like ten minutes??? he's insane Meno sat up. His XP bar inside Level 5 was empty. His rank did not exist. The top of the leaderboard was a country away. His mother might still be the silent name in the viewer list, watching her son spend his last inventory trash against a canyon boss that could erase him for leaning wrong. He should stop. Repair. Refill junk. Do quests. Group.

Apologize to the boars, the recruiter, Biscuit, every efficient person he had dismissed because they understood the game before he did. He stood. The fight was no longer impossible. It was awful. It was long. It demanded a deathless chain against a monster whose health barely cared at twenty stacks and whose every movement could delete him. It required counting before the cue, jumping into danger instead of away, striking for contact and movement at the same time, and landing ready to hit before the rhythm died.

Hard, he could work with. Meno drew the Common II sword and walked toward the cave mouth.

"One. Two," he said, before the elemental was even in sight, training the count back into his teeth.