A perfect serve is a cut ball: it hooks from kill to kill

Slice is not a tin and not a rack slot. It is what a perfect serve DOES —
the toss ritual's 45 ms window, or a pull that stops inside perfectBand.
Every other weapon is handed to you; this one is a technique, and it hands
the plain ball a real route to the DOUBLE/TRIPLE KILL ladder that until now
only a bomb or a lucky line-up could reach. Banking your specials stops
meaning playing worse in the meantime.

Only a kill hooks, so a wound ends the chain and no brute, steward or boss
ever extends one. It is a crowd skill shot, which is the half of the arsenal
the tins do not cover.

The pull had to learn a third state to say this. Quality SATURATES at
pullFull, so an overpull and a perfect pull drew an identical band: the game
was asking you to hit a window it never showed you. The band now goes chalk
white inside it and the mark on the target grows a second ring — the fill
says where the ball lands, the ring says it will not stop there.

The chain path is deliberately NOT previewed. It is a scallop laid over the
exact patch of court you need to read, it solves the shot before you take
it, and the bodies walk — any chain drawn at pull time is a lie by the time
the ball arrives, which is the one thing the band exists not to be.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

config.js

@@ -237,6 +237,18 @@ export const TUNE = {
   meleeCrowdR: 3.4, // m — the radius that counts as "on top of you" for that scaling (> meleeRange,
                     // so the swish speeds up as they close in, not only once they are already on you)
   zPierce: 0.75,    // pace a ball keeps after a splatter — hot balls plow through lined-up pairs
+  // ---- SLICE. Not a tin and not a rack slot: it is what a PERFECT serve DOES. Cut the ball and it
+  // hooks off each body it kills onto the next one instead of plowing straight on. Every other
+  // weapon is something you are handed; this one is a technique, which is why it is earned on the
+  // timing window (the toss ritual's 45 ms, or a pull that STOPS inside perfectBand) rather than
+  // won out of a barrel. Only a KILL hooks — a wound ends the chain — so it is a crowd skill shot
+  // that does nothing to a brute, a steward or a boss, and it hands the plain ball a real route to
+  // the DOUBLE/TRIPLE KILL ladder that until now only a bomb or a lucky line-up could reach.
+  sliceHops: 2,     // extra bodies one perfect serve hooks to. 2 => TRIPLE KILL is the ceiling
+  sliceR: 6.5,      // m the hook reaches for the next body. Wider reads as the game aiming for you;
+                    // much narrower and a spread-out crowd never chains at all
+  sliceTurn: 11,    // rad/s the ball swings onto the next one, and THE knob for how it looks: past
+                    // ~30 it snaps like a ricochet, under ~6 it sails wide before finishing the turn
   // The schedule calls the DUEL, not the tin: weapons are only ever won, but a duel comes round
   // on its own so there is always a chance at one. Fires off the next hand-cleared wave.
   duelFirst: 2,     // game after which the first scheduled sudden-death duel is called