By the fourth body, I've stopped counting.
Not the bodies — I can't stop counting those, they're everywhere, they're part of the landscape now, they're as much a feature of this street as the overturned cars and the broken glass and the smoke. I've stopped counting the weapons. That's the thing I notice about myself two blocks into this — I pick up each one without cataloguing it anymore, the hold, the chime, the bench updating, and then I'm already looking for the next one.
The hunting knife came from a man near a bus stop. The machete from a woman in running clothes who made it further than most people before something caught her — I can tell from where she fell, the distance from the nearest building, she was running hard and almost made the intersection. The military-surplus fixed blade from a man in cargo pants who had two more weapons on him that my bench is already full of, and I take the blade and leave the rest.
Each five-second count feels slightly different now.
Not mechanically — the system doesn't notice or care, the chime sounds the same every time, the bench updates without ceremony. But I notice. I'm holding something that was in someone else's hand this morning. Someone who woke up today and got a class and got a weapon and went out into this and it still wasn't enough. The system gave them something and it still wasn't enough.
I don't say this out loud. I don't say it to Darian, who is walking beside me. I don't say it to Cole, who is a step behind.
Weapon Bench: 9/10
One slot. Nine weapons, eight people minimum whose hands these passed through before mine. I keep walking.
"Police station," Darian says. "Three blocks north."
I look at him.
"Weapons locker," he says. "Maybe other survivors. Defensible if we need to stop."
The logic is clean. I've been thinking it myself for the last half block — the police station is a known quantity, it's built to be hard to get into, it has resources. The logic was always going to get us there eventually.
"Lead," I say.
The station is three blocks north and one block of that is bad — a stretch where three different beast packs have overlapping territory and we have to move through the edge of it, fast and quiet, which means I'm throwing twice in thirty seconds and Darian puts a pack beast down with his bare hands in a way that I file away under things D-Rank Brawler can apparently do and don't stop to examine.
The station's front doors are barricaded from the inside. I knock because it's faster than forcing it.
A voice through the door: "Class and rank."
Darian and I exchange a look.
"Weapon Mancer," I say. "SSS."
Silence. Longer than expected.
The barricade moves.
Seven people inside. Five officers in varying states of intact uniform, two civilians who came in off the street in the first hour and haven't left since. The officer who opens the door is mid-thirties, composed in the specific way of someone who trained for crisis and is now discovering that training and reality are related but not identical. Her name tag says REYES. She got C-Rank Enforcer, which she tells me before I ask, because apparently that's the greeting now. The others are D-ranks mostly, one E. They've been comparing notes on the forum already.
The one in charge is standing at the far end of the lobby.
B-Rank. Tactical Commander — the highest class in the building and he knows it, in the way you know something and decide to use it as a load-bearing wall. His name is Sergeant Walsh and he has the posture of someone who has decided that authority is the most useful thing he can offer right now and is offering it at full volume. He's organized the survivors into positions. He has a plan. The plan has problems I can see from the doorway but I'm not here to run his station.
He looks at me the way people have been looking at me since the forum.
Not awe. The first response is always recalibration, and under the recalibration, for some of them, something that looks like relief. Like finding a structural wall in a building you weren't sure would hold.
I don't know how to feel about being someone's structural wall. I'm not ready to be that. I'm a person who spent this morning learning that chef's knives have a worse throw arc than basically everything else.
"We have a system," Walsh says. "Everyone pulls their weight. You'd be on the front —"
"Weapons locker," I say.
He stops.
"I need access to the weapons locker. That's all I need from this building."
"I can't just —"
"It's going to benefit everyone here when I leave with a better bench." I say it without heat. Just the math. "The locker helps me more than any position in your system does. So does that work or not?"
Walsh looks at Reyes. Reyes looks at the forum post still open on her phone — the same post, the same four documented SSS holders, the same three letters at the top of the alphabet — and then she looks at Walsh with an expression that says let him have the locker.
Walsh steps aside.
The weapons locker is in the back of the station past two offices and a break room that still has coffee in the pot, which I note and ignore because there isn't time. The locker is a serious cabinet, floor to ceiling, locked ten minutes ago and open now, and I stand in front of it and work through it systematically.
Two service pistols. Four seconds each.
Chime. Chime.
A shotgun. Four seconds.
Chime.
A tactical rifle. Four seconds.
Chime.
Two tasers. Four seconds each — chime, chime — though I'm not sure how useful a taser is as a throwing weapon, which is a thought I have and set aside because the bench doesn't care about my plans, it cares about the hold.
A set of three tactical batons, collapsible, better grade than the security baton from the street. Four seconds each. Chime. Chime. Chime.
Weapon Bench: 18/20 Active Slots: 3 Hold Timer: 3 seconds
The level hits and the three slots open simultaneously and for a moment I just stand in the weapon locker with my eyes closed feeling the bench expand into the new space. Three weapons available at once. Three simultaneous. The pressure of the full bench spreading into the new room like something that was held too tight finally allowed to breathe.
Three seconds to add a weapon now. Not five. The timer is dropping as the class develops and I feel that too — the connection between me and the bench getting shorter, the gap between intention and execution narrowing.
I open my eyes.
Reyes is in the doorway. She's been watching.
"Does it always look like that?" she asks.
"Like what?"
"Like you just plugged into something."
I think about it. "I don't know what it looks like from the outside."
She nods once. Doesn't push further. That's a good quality in a person.
The glass comes in from the front of the station before I make it back to the lobby.
Not one beast. A pack — mid-tier, bigger than the street scouts, moving with the specific coordination of animals that have learned to hit entrances in groups. I hear them testing the front and the side simultaneously, which means they've been watching the building, which means they have more patience than the things I've fought until now.
The front window goes. Then the door.
I'm in the lobby when the first one comes through.
Three active slots. This is the first time I've had three and I use all of them immediately — rifle in my hands, hatchet at my left, crowbar at my right, all three summoned together for the first time, and the weight of three simultaneous weapons is not what I expected. Not heavy. Dense. Like the bench is paying attention.
The rifle. I know how rifles work. I know the concept — sight, aim, trigger, the mechanical sequence of it. What I don't have is the muscle memory, the trained index, the ten thousand repetitions that turn concept into reflex. I raise it, find the front sight, and fire.
The shot goes wide and the sound in the enclosed lobby is enormous — a physical event, a pressure wave that hits my ears and keeps going, ringing out through my skull and into my teeth. I blink against it.
Forget it. Not the tool for this.
I throw it.
Both hands, the rifle horizontal, a discus throw adapted badly and it doesn't matter because the class adjusts the trajectory mid-flight and the rifle hits the lead beast in the face with the stock and the beast staggers and the two behind it pile into it and the entrance becomes a problem for them instead of for me.
Hatchet next — one hand, hard, the arc tight, and it takes the second beast in the neck joint and drops it. Crowbar — I throw it at the wall to the right of the entrance and it ricochets off the brick and catches the third beast at an angle I didn't calculate, just felt, the throw arriving at a place I was aiming for before I knew I was aiming there.
The bench retrieves. I'm already pulling more.
The fight moves fast and loud and not elegant. More beasts come through the window. Darian hits two of them with his hands and his elbows and I don't have time to watch how but the sounds are unambiguous. Cole uses the fire poker once and it works and then he uses the wall to put distance between himself and everything else, which is the right call.
I cycle through seven weapons in four minutes. Throwing, retrieving, throwing again, the sequence still rough but building — I can feel the pattern forming underneath the chaos, the beginning of something that will be technique once I've done it enough times. Lead, follow, close. Long first, then fast, then heavy. It's not there yet. It's approaching.
The lobby clears.
I'm breathing hard. The health bar in my vision has taken two hits — nothing critical, the class's passive buffs absorbing more than my body alone would, but visible. Lower than I want. I do a fast check on Darian — upright, bleeding from one forearm, operational. Cole against the wall, unhurt, fire poker still in his hands with the look of a man who has just discovered something about himself.
Then I see Walsh.
He's near the far door. He went down during the fight — I don't know when, the chaos had too many pieces moving at once, but he's on the floor and Reyes is next to him and the way she's sitting tells me before I cross the room that the information isn't going to change.
I walk over.
His weapon is on the floor two feet away. A service revolver, personal piece, not from the locker. I pick it up.
Three seconds.
Chime.
Weapon Added: .357 Revolver (Common)
I stand up. Reyes is watching me. She doesn't say anything about it. She understands what I'm doing — I can see that she understands — and she doesn't say anything because there's nothing to say that makes it different.
Darian watches me from across the lobby. He doesn't say anything either.
We don't stay.
Too many entry points now with the front gone. The station served its purpose and the purpose is complete and staying past the purpose is how you become the next person whose weapon someone else picks up.
Reyes decides to stay — she has people here, she has a position, she has her own math to do. I don't argue with her math. I tell her the forum's information about wave patterns, what I know of it, which isn't much but is more than she had. She nods. She'll use it or she won't.
We go back out the side door into the street.
I pull up the bench in my vision and look at the list. Eighteen entries. Eighteen weapons. The chef's knife still at the top, still there, still flying worse than anything else in the list.
All these weapons. All these people.
I'll use every one of them well, I think. That's what I can do. That's the only thing I can do that means anything.
I put the bench away and look at the street ahead.
"North," I say.
We move.