The couch is against the door.
The coffee table is against the couch. Two chairs are stacked on the coffee table. The bookshelf — empty, this person owned no books, which feels like a detail about them I'll never get to know now — is angled across the whole assembly at forty-five degrees.
It won't stop anything. Darian said so while we were building it. I agreed. We built it anyway because standing in a stranger's apartment on the sixth floor while the city makes sounds like the city has never made before, it turns out your hands need something to do.
So we built the barricade.
Now I'm sitting on the floor with my back against the wall and my bench open in my vision, running the cycle.
Knife. Gone. Knife. Gone. Claw. Gone. Claw. The summon is cleaner than it was an hour ago — less gap between the thought and the arrival, the snap of it more automatic, settling into my grip like it's been doing this for years and is only now being allowed to show it. My arm still burns where the wrap is. My ribs have filed a formal complaint about the carapace fight that I'm currently tabling. The soreness throughout the rest of me is there but less than it should be, less than the math of getting thrown into two different walls would normally produce.
I notice that. File it under things the class is doing that I don't fully understand yet and move on.
Shard. Gone. Shard. Three weapons. Not enough. The bench says 1/1 still, because bench capacity and weapon slots are different things I'm still working out, and what I know is that three is not the number I need it to be. I can feel that the way you feel the shape of a sentence before you find the words for it.
Darian is watching me from across the room. He has been watching me with the expression of someone running a continuous background calculation.
The two survivors — the Scout, whose name is Priya, and the other one, a soft-spoken guy named Cole who found a first aid kit in the bathroom and used it on my arm without being asked — are on opposite sides of the room. Priya at the window, watching the street below with the focused quiet of someone whose class is actually activating. Cole on the couch, phone in both hands, tilted at an angle that suggests he's been trying to find a signal since we got in here.
He sits up suddenly.
"I have something," he says.
Not calls. The voice network is gone. But data, barely — intermittent, more off than on, the kind of connection that makes every page load feel like a negotiation. He found it by accident, he says, trying to reach someone and getting redirected somewhere he didn't recognize. A forum. Not on any platform he'd seen before — different structure, different architecture, text-heavy the way old message boards were text-heavy, and when Priya crosses the room to look over his shoulder, her face changes.
"This is in the Lattice," she says.
We all look at her.
"The Lattice has its own network. My class packet mentioned it." She reads faster than Cole can scroll. "Other worlds. People who've been through this before. This is — some of these posts are recent, some are from years ago, some are from —" She stops. "Some of these worlds integrated decades ago. They're still posting."
Cole hands the phone to Darian, who reads and passes it to me.
The forum is chaos the way a disaster hotline is chaos — volume, overlap, people posting the same questions in different languages, half of it unhelpful, but underneath all of it a layer of posts from people who've been through a Fracture and came out the other side and came back to say so. Those posts you can identify by tone. The panic is gone. What's left is information delivered with the particular directness of people who know what you need and don't have patience for anything else.
I read fast. So does everyone else in the room, Cole reading over my shoulder.
The 24 hours is real. Non-negotiable, hard-coded into the integration process. The countdown is accurate.
The Realm of Enchantment is real. Not a metaphor. A place.
Survival rate in first Fractures averages around thirty percent. That number sits in the room for a moment after I read it. Nobody says anything about it. We're all doing the same math about the city outside, the people running in the streets, the fires in three directions.
Classes are permanent. Whatever you got, you have. There's no reroll, no reclassification, no appeal process.
Rank is ceiling, not floor. Even a high-rank class starts weak. Even SSS starts with nothing but potential and whatever the class hands you at the beginning, and the gap between what you are at Level 1 and what you're supposed to become is a gap that only time and use closes.
And then:
Darian reads the next part first. He stops scrolling. Reads it again without moving. Then he looks up at me with an expression I don't have a word for — not awe, not fear, the specific look of someone who has just received information that rearranges the structure of a decision they'd already made.
He hands me the phone.
SSS-class designations are theoretical. In six thousand years of Lattice integrations, documented SSS holders number four total across all integrated worlds.
All four became what the Realm classifies as Apex-tier. Two are dead. One is missing — last confirmed sighting was in a Fracture on a world that integrated two hundred years ago, no verified contact since. One is alive, active, and controls a faction that runs approximately a third of the Realm's governance.
If your Fracture has produced an SSS-class individual: stay close to them or stay completely out of their way. There is no functional middle position. An SSS class at Level 1 is still an SSS class. The ceiling is not like anything else in the system. Act accordingly.
I read it once.
I read it twice.
I read it a third time.
The phone is still in my hands. The apartment is quiet in the specific way of people who are waiting to see what happens on someone else's face.
I don't say anything for a while.
I put the phone down on the floor next to me and I look at the wall and I think about the dream. The sword already in my hands before the fight started. The throw — both hands, everything behind it, the sword leaving my grip like that was always what it was for. The crowd. The line I delivered flat, like a man who had written his own forecast.
I thought it was ego.
That's the honest version. I woke up from that dream and it felt good and I held onto it for maybe thirty seconds before I let it go because it was a dream, because the ceiling of my apartment is cracked plaster and the charger only works at one specific angle and I've been eating crackers for breakfast for two months. Men who own nothing don't get to keep their power fantasies without a certain amount of self-awareness about what they're doing.
So I let it go. Filed it under things the brain does when you don't give it anything better to do. Moved on.
But the system gave me SSS before I knew what SSS was. The notification appeared in my vision before the sky cracked open. The dream came before any of it.
Was that a dream — or a vision?
I've been asking it since this morning. I keep coming back to it the way your tongue finds a loose tooth — not because you want it to move, just because the nerve is there and your body keeps checking. The question is the same as it was at the window. The answer isn't here yet.
What is here is this: somewhere in the Realm, a person with this class controls a third of the governing structure of an entire world. And three other people had it across six thousand years of this system running, and all four of them became something the Realm built a category for.
Four people.
Now five.
I look at my hands. The wrap on my forearm. The callus already forming where the knife handle sits, one afternoon old, the body already adapting to what it's being asked to do.
Darian's voice comes from across the room.
"Do you know how to fight?"
I look up. "Not really."
"Do you know how to use any of those weapons?"
"I'm figuring it out."
He nods. Slow. The nod of someone receiving exactly the information they expected and deciding what to do with it anyway. "So we have the rarest class in six thousand years of this system," he says, "and he's figuring it out."
"Yeah."
A beat. The apartment settles around it.
"Okay," Darian says. "Okay."
And that's it. He doesn't push further, doesn't ask me to qualify it, doesn't ask for reassurance that figuring it out will be enough. He just takes the information and folds it into whatever structure he's been building in his head since the moment he clocked my rank in the hallway.
That's the thing about him, I'm realizing. He doesn't need things to be better than they are. He just needs to know what they actually are.
Cole asks the question the rest of us have been orbiting. "So what do we do?"
I look at my bench. Knife, claw, shard — three entries, the level threshold indicator sitting at the edge of the readout like something I'm almost close enough to touch. I think about what the forum said. Ceiling. Potential. The gap between Level 1 and what the class is supposed to become is a gap that only use closes.
I need weapons. More of them, better of them, held and added and accumulated until the bench becomes something that matches what the system apparently thinks I'm supposed to be. I need levels. I need the threshold to tip and the next slot to open and the next one after that, and the only way any of that happens is out there, in the city that's coming apart, fighting things I've never seen with techniques I'm inventing in real time.
"We move," I say. "I need more weapons."
We prep fast. Priya checks the window one more time — the street below has two beasts visible, both moving east, neither looking up. Cole finds a fire poker in the apartment's decorative fireplace and holds it with the seriousness of a person who has decided this is his weapon now. Darian picks the fire extinguisher back up. Not as a weapon this time — as a tool. He's already thought of something I haven't yet.
At the door, I run the cycle one more time.
Knife. It snaps into my grip — immediate, no gap, the handle settling exactly right. Gone. Claw — longer, the hook of it familiar now, the weight distributed differently than the knife. Gone. Shard — broad, the one sharp edge facing correctly, my grip already knowing how to hold it without thinking. Gone.
Three weapons. Not enough.
Time to fix that.
I look at the stairwell door. Behind it, the city. Somewhere in the city, twenty hours left on a countdown that doesn't care about any of us. Somewhere in the Realm, a person with my class controls a third of a world.
Somewhere between here and there is everything I don't know yet and everything I'm going to have to learn before I get to find out which way this goes.
Time to go shopping, I think.
I open the door.