Street level is different.
That's the first thing. I spent the morning watching the city from a sixth-floor window and I thought I understood the scale of it — the fires, the beasts moving through the streets, the shapes falling through the cracks in the sky. From up there it looked like a problem. Down here it looks like a fact.
The street outside the building's front door is glass and debris and two overturned cars that have been shoved against each other like they were arguing. Something burned here recently — the pharmacy on the corner is still smoking, the front of it black and open, the window gone. The smell is chemical and wrong. A traffic light hangs at an angle from a wire, swinging slightly in air that shouldn't be moving.
I step over glass and keep moving.
There are bodies.
I note them and keep walking. That's the only way to do it — note them, keep walking, don't stop because stopping doesn't help them and stopping might mean joining them. A man in a delivery uniform near the overturned cars. A woman further up the block, her phone still in her hand, screen cracked, displaying nothing. Someone in a doorway that I don't look at closely enough to describe.
I note them. I keep walking.
The horror, I'm finding, is not in the looking. It's in the moving past. It's in the fact that moving past is the right call and I know it and I do it anyway, one foot after the other, because twenty hours is not enough time to do anything else.
Darian moves beside me without commentary. Cole is behind us, fire poker in both hands, head on a swivel. Nobody talks.
Half a block out, a pack of small beasts rounds the corner of a parking garage.
Six of them. Low to the ground, fast, the same wrong-leg scramble as the hallway thing but smaller — dog-sized, built mean, already orienting toward us with that unsettling forward-facing cluster of eyes.
I don't think about it. My hand comes up and the knife is in it and I throw.
It crosses fifteen feet and takes the lead beast through the eye cluster and the thing drops mid-stride and the rest of the pack stutters — one second of confusion, which is enough. Second throw, same hand, the knife back in my grip between blinks and out again. Another one down.
The remaining four scatter.
I watch them go.
The knife is back in my hand. I didn't consciously retrieve it. The bench did it while I was still tracking the scatter pattern. I turn it over once, noting the weight, the balance, the way the throw felt — cleaner than this morning, the release point a fraction earlier, the arc tighter.
Throwing is the thing. I understood that in the hallway but now I'm certain. Not holding, not swinging. The moment of release. That's where everything lives.
Getting there, I think.
Three blocks in, we find the body.
He's young — younger than me, which I notice and then set aside — and he's in civilian clothes that have seen about two hours of apocalypse. The class notification is still visible on his wrist screen, one of those smart displays, screen cracked but readable: E-Rank Scout. Not a combat class. Whatever he saw coming, he tried to face it anyway.
The baton is on the ground two feet from his hand. Collapsible, metal, the kind security guards carry on night shifts at parking garages. Standard issue nothing. The kind of thing that probably felt like enough when the system handed it to him this morning.
I crouch and pick it up.
Four seconds.
Five.
Chime.
Weapon Added: Security Baton (Common) Level 2 reached. Weapon Bench expanded: 2/3 Active Slots: 2 Hold Timer reduced: 4 seconds
The level hits like a current passing through the center of me — not painful, not warm, just present, a charge moving from the top of my head down through my feet and into the ground, and then it's gone and I'm just crouching on a broken street holding a security baton with a bench that's bigger than it was ten seconds ago.
Two active slots. I test it immediately — knife in my right hand, claw in my left, both summoned simultaneously, the weight of both of them real and balanced. I dismiss the claw, throw the knife at a concrete wall twenty feet away, summon the claw again before the knife embeds itself. Both weapons in both hands at the same time, interchangeable, the bench cycling like a system that's starting to understand how I want to use it.
I pick up the knife from the wall.
I don't think about who the baton belonged to. Not yet. There's a version of this where I stop and think about every person whose weapon I'm going to pick up today, and that version of me doesn't make it to the Ascension. The thought goes into the same place as the bodies — noted, moved past, not forgotten, just not right now.
Later. All of it, later.
I stand up. "Keep moving."
Darian hasn't said much since we hit the street, which I'm learning is his version of focused. He talks when he has something to say. When he doesn't, he's watching everything at once — exits, rooflines, the middle distance where beasts appear before you expect them. His D-Rank Brawler class isn't giving him weapons or abilities I can see. What it's giving him is something harder to quantify: he moves through danger the way experienced people move through crowds. Like he's already calculated the space and found his place in it.
Cole is keeping up. That's the whole summary of Cole right now — he's keeping up, he's not panicking, and the fire poker hasn't been tested yet. He's scared in the way a functional person is scared, which means it's in his eyes but not in his feet.
I'm already thinking about the bench.
Knife, claw, shard, baton. Four weapons. Short range, all of them — the longest throw I can get from any of them is maybe thirty feet before the arc starts dropping. I need reach. I need something I can throw hard and far and have it mean something when it arrives. I need variety in weight and size because the things I'm going to face aren't all going to have the same weak points, and right now all four of my weapons are variations on small sharp thing.
I start reading the street differently. Not as a disaster. As an inventory.
Half a block up, the construction site.
The fencing is torn open — something large went through it, recently, the metal peeled back from the frame like paper. The site itself is abandoned, equipment left where it was when the sky cracked and everyone with a survival instinct ran. Scaffolding on two sides of a half-finished building. A materials area with pallets and crates and a rack of tools that nobody locked up because nobody expected to need to lock them up today.
I go in without stopping to discuss it.
The rebar first — a length of it leaning against a concrete support, six feet, roughly an inch in diameter, heavy enough to mean business. I hold it for four seconds.
Chime.Weapon Added: Rebar Rod (Common)
The contractor's hatchet off the tool rack. Four seconds.
Chime.Weapon Added: Construction Hatchet (Common)
The crowbar from the ground near an overturned materials crate. Four seconds.
Chime.Weapon Added: Crowbar (Common)
Weapon Bench: 7/8
Seven weapons. The bench sits in the corner of my vision like a list I'm building and I can feel it — not quite physically, somewhere adjacent to physical, a pressure in the space just outside my body where the weapons live when I'm not holding them. Fuller than it was. Not full enough.
I pick up the crowbar and throw it at the scaffolding across the site.
It covers the distance in under a second and hits the metal support with a clang that rings through the whole site and bounces off the concrete behind it and clatters to the ground. I summon it back.
Harder than it should have gone. Further than the physics of my arm should have sent it.
I knew it was happening with the knife. I can feel it more clearly with something heavier — the class is doing something to the throw that I don't have a mechanical explanation for yet. Like the weapon is agreeing with the direction. Like intent and physics are negotiating and physics is losing.
I throw it again. Same result. Same feeling in my arms after — not fatigue, the opposite of fatigue, a charge in the muscles like they want to do it again.
Darian is watching me from the entrance of the site. His expression is the same expression he's had since I told him my rank — the spreadsheet recalibrating.
"We should keep moving," he says.
"Yeah," I say.
I pick up a length of pipe from the ground near the materials rack and hold it for four seconds.
Chime.Weapon Added: Steel Pipe (Common)
Weapon Bench: 8/8 — Bench full. Expansion unlocks at next level threshold.
We make it to the end of the block and I stop everyone.
I stand at the corner and look at the city in every direction I can see from here.
East: fire, three buildings, the smoke column I can smell from here. A group of beasts moving in the middle distance, too far to count accurately but more than ten. North: a street that looks clear for two blocks and then doesn't. South: the way we came, the building, the pharmacy still smoldering. West: unclear. Something large moved through there recently — the debris pattern is wrong, like something big walked through and the street rearranged itself around the passage.
I count the beasts I can see in one sightline.
Fourteen. Just in one sightline. Just the ones moving.
Twenty hours left on the countdown sitting in the corner of my vision. Twenty hours of this city and everything it's producing and the waves Alice hasn't told me about yet because I haven't met Alice yet.
The bench isn't the hard part, I think.
The hard part is surviving long enough to fill it.
A scout beast rounds the corner on our left flank — small, fast, the leading edge of a pack that hasn't fully appeared yet. I summon the hatchet without looking at it directly, arm up, release.
It drops. The hatchet returns.
"Move," I say.