A single-counter decrement of mass V emits V unit tokens in the base machine, or ⌈V/b⌉ block tokens in base b. Each block removes up to b units at once.
Full blocks (dark) each subtract b; a final remainder block (light) subtracts what is left. The count of tokens is exactly ⌈V/b⌉. This is the counting-dominated speedup, and it composes with macro order to give a factor of about bk.