Four hours.
Alice reads it in the Lattice — the third wave is building but it's not compressing yet, the beasts in the surrounding blocks are in a holding pattern, and she gives us four hours with the same precision she's given everything else. Four hours before the next thing requires my full attention.
I use all of them.
The parking structure three blocks west has an open level — Level 4, exposed to sky on the east side, wide enough to move in, walls on the other three sides as target surfaces. I set up there while Darian sleeps in the booth with Alice watching the street and I start from the beginning.
Chef's knife. I throw it at a painted line on the wall thirty feet away. It hits six inches low and to the left.
I summon it back.
Throw it again. Five inches low. Four inches left.
Again. Three inches low.
Again.
I throw the chef's knife at the same point on the wall fifty-three times. By the end of it I'm hitting within an inch of where I'm aiming, and I understand something I didn't understand at the start — the knife doesn't fly straight, it never will, the balance is too far back. But the class compensates in a consistent direction, always the same correction, and once I know the correction I can account for it. Aim an inch high and right and the knife arrives where I want it.
The hatchet is different. The hatchet is honest — it goes where I throw it, close to true, the class amplifying without correcting because the balance is already good. Forty throws at the same target and the last ten are within a centimeter of each other.
The rebar. I throw it like a spear, underhand, and it pins itself in the wall so deep the first time that I have to wait for the recall to pull it free. Heavy. Accurate. The reach is the best in my bench — I can get it across the full width of this level, sixty feet, and it arrives with enough force to matter against armored targets.
I throw the rebar at the wall forty times until the motion is automatic.
The rifle as a missile. The crowbar for the ricochet. The revolver — lighter than it looks, better distance than the pistols, the cylinder adding spin that the class uses to stabilize the arc. I work through every weapon in the bench, every throwing profile, building the map of each one in my arms the way you build the muscle memory of anything — badly at first, then less badly, then with something that starts to feel like intention.
At some point I pick up the sword.
It's from the hub — one of the survivors had it, one of the ones with a class that gave them a melee weapon, and it ended up on the ground near the fallen defenders. I held it for three seconds and added it and haven't touched it since because there are thirty better options for throwing.
I hold it now with both hands the way I held the sword in the dream.
And I try to move.
What comes out is not what the dream showed me. In the dream the movement was fluid and exact, each step placed with the certainty of something I'd done a thousand times. Here I plant my feet wrong — I can feel it, some part of me knows it's wrong without knowing what right looks like — and my grip is off, and when I try to bring the blade through a swing the mechanics of it are immediately, visibly, embarrassingly the mechanics of someone who has never done this.
I try again.
Same problem, different angle. I look like a person who has seen swords in movies and is now discovering that movies are not instruction manuals.
I throw it.
It pins in the wall sixty feet away, true, deep, the class delivering it exactly where I aimed without the half-second of correction the knife needed.
I summon it back and try to swing it again.
Still wrong.
The class gave me throwing, I think. The rest I have to earn.
I stand there holding the sword and feeling the gap between the dream and the parking structure and it bothers me more than the cracked ribs bothered me, more than the health bar dropping at the hub bothered me. Because the dream felt true. The dream felt like something the dream was showing me about myself, and here in the parking structure trying to swing a sword and looking like someone's embarrassing older brother at a Renaissance fair, I can't reconcile the two things.
The class amplifies what's already there. Alice said that. Intent plus the Lattice filling the gap.
What if the gap is too large?
I throw the sword again. It arrives exactly where I meant it.
I file the question somewhere I can find it later and keep moving.
She's been there for a while before I acknowledge it.
Alice, on the far side of the level, sitting on the hood of an abandoned car with the expression she uses when she's watching something without wanting it to know she's watching. She's been there for maybe twenty minutes. I let her watch. I don't need the observation to stop — I need the practice more than I need the privacy.
When I stop for water she speaks.
"Your throws have improved thirty percent since this morning," she says. "By feel, not measurement. But I'm confident."
"What's the ceiling?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen a Weapon Mancer develop before." She pauses. "What I can tell you is that the class amplification is compensating less than it was. In the first throws I saw, it was correcting — taking what you intended and adjusting it to make it work. Now it's amplifying. Taking what you intend and making it more."
I think about that. The difference between correction and amplification. Between the class fixing your mistakes and the class accelerating your accuracy.
"Melee," I say.
"Is going to take time." Not unkindly. Like she's reading a map and telling me what the terrain says. "The Realm has combatants who have been training their class skills for years. When you arrive, that gap is going to be visible. You should plan for it."
"How do I close it?"
"The same way you closed the throwing gap. Repetition until the muscle memory is there." She looks at me. "The difference is throwing felt natural from the start. Melee won't. You're going to have to want to get better at something that doesn't want to come naturally."
I look at the sword in my hand.
"The class doesn't enhance your body," she continues. "It enhances your connection to weapons. The throws work because the weapon is in motion — the class can work with momentum and intention simultaneously. Melee works because the weapon is in contact — the class can work with pressure and positioning but only if the positioning is right. Your positioning is never right."
"Yet," I say.
She looks at me. Something in her expression shifts — not much, barely visible. "Yet," she agrees.
Darian comes up the ramp an hour before Alice's window closes.
He's moving better. Not well — the ribs are still doing what cracked ribs do, and his left arm is favoring, and there's a tightness around his eyes that isn't going away — but he's moving like himself again, which is different from moving like someone managing damage.
He watches me throw for a while. I'm on the second cycle of the full bench now, running each weapon twice through the target sequence, and he watches without commenting the way he watches everything, the continuous background calculation running.
Then: "Can I see the bench list?"
I share it — the system displays to permitted users as a clean readout, twenty-five entries with class ratings. He scrolls through it with both thumbs, slowly, his expression doing the thing where he knows what he's looking at and is revising a number upward.
He hands it back without saying what the number is.
"What do you need next?" he asks.
I look at the bench. Twenty-five weapons, range from zero to sixty feet, weight from the folding knife to the rebar. "Reach," I say. "Something I can throw hard at distance and have it mean something against large targets. Everything I have drops off past sixty feet."
He nods. "Javelin."
I look at him.
"Track and field," he says. "University sports complex. Six blocks north." He says it like he's been holding it and was waiting for the question. "Competition javelins are eight hundred grams, two and a half meters. They're designed to travel. The class will like them."
I think about the rebar thrown like a spear. The way it arrived.
"Lead," I say.
Six blocks north and two beast encounters that I handle in passing — I'm throwing faster than this morning, the bench cycling without the gap between intention and execution that was there at the start, the retrieval happening automatically while I'm still tracking the target.
The sports complex lobby is empty and large and smells like a gymnasium. The track equipment is in a storage room off the main corridor — pole vault poles, shot puts, discus, and in the far corner, racked along the wall, the javelins.
I take one down. Carbon fiber shaft, metal tip, exactly the weight Darian described.
I hold it.
One second. Two. Three.
Chime.
Weapon Added: Competition Javelin (Uncommon)
I walk to the far end of the lobby. The wall is forty meters away — I estimate it, don't measure it, and it doesn't matter because what I want to know isn't the distance, it's the feeling.
I throw it.
The javelin leaves my hand and the class meets it and for a second it's just a shape in the air crossing the lobby, and then it hits the opposite wall and goes in so deep that when I walk across to look at it, the tip has gone through the drywall and into the concrete backing behind it.
I stand and look at it.
The retrieval pulls it free and it snaps back to my hand.
I look at Darian.
He looks at the hole in the wall.
Now we're talking, I think.