"Two hours," Alice says.
We're on the third level of a parking structure six blocks east of the transit hub — concrete, solid, a single ramp in and out with sight lines on three approaches. She found it. She also found the two hours.
"Second wave," she says. "Larger beasts. Fewer but coordinated — they move in hunting groups, not packs. They test before they rush." She pauses. "It's already forming in the Lattice. I can see the pattern compressing."
"Two hours is enough time to be ready," Darian says.
It's enough time to keep building the bench.
I spend the two hours moving through the structure's lower levels where abandoned cars have left a scattered inventory — a tire iron, a jack handle, a folding utility knife from a roadside emergency kit, a telescoping window scraper that probably isn't worth a bench slot but I hold it anyway. I find a sporting goods bag someone left in a trunk that contains a hunting knife, a fixed-blade camp knife, and a hatchet that is slightly better than the construction hatchet already on my bench. I hold them all.
I'm deliberate now in a way I wasn't at the construction site. At the construction site I grabbed everything I could reach. Now I think before I hold: What does this throw like? How heavy is it? What range does it work at? I'm building a toolkit, not just a collection, and the distinction matters.
The chef's knife is still on the bench.
It throws badly. It always has. The balance is wrong for it, the weight distributed toward the handle, the arc dropping faster than anything else I carry. I know this. I keep it anyway, and I don't examine why too carefully, but it has to do with this morning — the kitchen drawer, the last quarter box of crackers, the first thing I held for five seconds in my life. Some things you keep not because they're useful but because putting them down would mean something you're not ready for it to mean.
Weapon Bench: 22/25
Three slots. I look at the city around me through the open side of the parking structure and think about what I want in those three slots and what the second wave is going to need from me.
It comes exactly when she said.
That's the thing I note first — the precision of it. Alice said two hours and the Lattice delivered two hours to the minute, and I file that under she's not guessing, she's reading in a place where it joins the two beast avoidances and the ricochet explanation and starts to build a picture.
The beasts are different.
The scouts this morning came fast and direct — loud, obvious, more aggression than strategy. The wave two beasts come quiet. Four of them on the ramp approach, and I know they're there before I see them because Alice says now and goes still, and then Darian says ramp without looking at it, and then I hear the thing that distinguishes these from the earlier packs: they stop before they enter.
Testing the entrance. Checking for the ambush they assume is there because they would set one.
They're right that it's there. They're wrong about where.
I'm on the second level, directly above the ramp mouth, with the crowbar in my right hand and the hatchet at my left and the rebar standing against the wall where I can reach it in a second. When the first beast comes through I drop the crowbar straight down — not thrown, dropped, weight and gravity doing the work — and it hits the first beast across the back of the neck and staggers it, and then I throw the hatchet at the second one through the ramp entrance and Darian is already moving down the ramp stairs and into the third.
The fourth comes from the side ramp. Alice said there was only one approach and she was right, which means this one was already in the structure, which means it's been here longer than us.
It's the largest thing I've faced since the carapace beast in the stairwell — not as large, but larger than anything on the street today, built differently than the scouts, lower center of gravity and armored across the shoulders in a way that the joints at the neck are set back and harder to reach.
I learn things fast because I have to.
The rifle as a thrown weapon works on the legs. I found that at the police station — the length of it, thrown horizontally with rotation, catches at ankle height and disrupts the gait. I throw the rifle. The beast stumbles. Darian is already on the second beast behind me somewhere and I don't have attention to spare for him so I trust that he's handling it and put everything into what's in front of me.
The neck joint. Back and high — I need something with reach. The rebar.
I get to it in two steps, summon it, and throw it like a spear — not like a rebar rod, like a spear, the class adjusting the physics of it in the air to match the intention — and it finds the neck joint from fifteen feet and goes in.
The beast sits down. Slowly. Like it's confused.
Then it goes over.
I stand over it breathing hard, rebar summoned back to hand, health bar sitting lower than before but still functional. I do a quick scan — Darian is upright, one beast down beside him, the fourth one nowhere visible. I look at Alice.
She's on the far side of the level. The fourth beast is on the floor. There's a thin blade in her hand — not summoned, not Lattice-class, just a blade, held like someone who knows how to hold a blade — and she's watching me with the expression she uses when she's noting something for later.
I note it for later too.
Cole got hit.
Not badly — one claw across the shoulder that went through his jacket and the top layer of skin beneath, painful and messy and not life-threatening. He's upright. He's pressing his hand to it and his face is white but his eyes are tracking. Functional.
The other person who had been with us — who had been with us since the building this morning, who had kept up through the station and the streets and three blocks of bad city — didn't make it through the wave's arrival. The first beast through the ramp hit the corner where she was waiting and she didn't have time to get clear.
I find the weapon she was carrying. A small folding knife, E-Rank class equipment, the kind the system hands out to people it doesn't know what else to give. I hold it for three seconds.
Chime.
Weapon Added: Folding Knife (Common)
Darian watches me add it. Doesn't say anything.
After the wave clears I check the beasts for salvageable pieces. The armored one's shoulder plates have a shard that matches the density of the carapace shard from the building. I hold it.
Weapon Added: Wave Beast Shoulder Plate (Uncommon)
Weapon Bench: 25/25 — FULL Level 3 reached. New ability: Weapon Recall — dismissed weapons return 40% faster.
The full bench lands different than the level-up did. The level-up was a current, a charge, something moving through me and gone. The full bench is a weight — not heavy, exactly, but present in a way that twenty-five wasn't when it was twenty-three, when there were empty slots. Twenty-five weapons and I can feel all of them in the space just outside my body, waiting.
It feels like a problem and an achievement at the same time.
The bench is full. I need it to not be full. Which means leveling, which means more of what today has already been, which means the city outside is not just a disaster anymore — it's the next part of the work.
I look at the ramp. I look at the sky through the open side of the structure, the fractures still there, the light still bleeding through them in cold columns. I look at the twenty-plus hours still on the countdown.
Plenty of time to die. Enough time to get ready.
We leave Cole with the supplies we have, a weapon he can hold, and the knowledge of the structure's layout. He's hurt enough that moving is the wrong call and he knows it. He doesn't argue. He sits down against the concrete wall with the weapon in his lap and looks at us with eyes that are doing the math on whether we're coming back.
I don't make him a promise I don't know I can keep.
"Stay down," I say. "Stay quiet."
He nods.
I look back once at the top of the ramp.
Then I face forward.