"Four minutes," Alice says.
I look at her. She's been reading the Lattice continuously for the last hour, her eyes doing that slightly unfocused thing where she's looking at something the rest of us can't see. She doesn't look scared. She looks like someone reading a weather system that's about to make a decision.
"Third wave," she says. "It's targeting survivor concentrations. Anything above a certain density of integrated people is a priority target." She pauses. "It's designed to reduce the population before the Herald arrives."
"How long until the Herald after this?"
"Six hours. Maybe seven."
Darian straightens off the wall. His ribs are still unhappy — I can hear it in the breath he takes to straighten — but his eyes are clear and his hands are at his sides in the way that means he's already decided what he's doing.
I pull up the bench.
Twenty-five weapons. Every slot full. I run through the list the way I've been running it all day — not out of anxiety, out of familiarity, the way you check a tool before you use it. The chef's knife at the top where it's always been. The javelin two entries from the bottom, still trailing the particular satisfaction of the lobby throw. The dead officer's revolver. The soldier's fixed blade. The machete from the woman who almost made the intersection.
All of them. All the people.
I summon the javelin.
The weight of it is exactly right. Eight hundred grams and two and a half meters of competition carbon fiber, designed to travel, designed to arrive. I hold it and feel the class settle around it like a hand finding a familiar grip.
Alright, I think. Let's see what I've learned.
They come from the east first.
Small ones — fast, low, the advance harassment, and I recognize the pattern from wave two and from Alice's description simultaneously. These aren't the main force. They're the pressure that's supposed to occupy me while the main force sets up. I know this. I deal with them anyway because they're between me and the sightline I need.
Three throws. Hatchet, blade, javelin — I pull the javelin back immediately when the fast-movers scatter, it's too much weapon for this range. The hatchet is better here. The hatchet is honest.
Then the mid-tier comes around the corner of the building to the south.
Armored, the volcanic black carapace I know from the stairwell, but bigger and moving with a deliberateness that the stairwell beast didn't have. Not just big — coordinated. It's not leading the wave. It's responding to something. I watch it come and I watch the fast-movers reconfigure around it and I watch the whole thing move like it has a nervous system larger than any individual beast.
Something is directing this.
"Alice." I don't look away from the wave. "There's a coordinator."
"Yes." She's already on it. "Holding back. Southeast, behind the wave line. I can see it in the Lattice — the command structure is running through it. The pattern breaks if it goes down."
"How far back?"
"Two hundred feet. Maybe more."
The wave is between me and two hundred feet southeast. Twenty beasts, stacked, the fast-movers disrupting any approach I try to make through them. Going through this is going through forever — clear one and two more orient to fill the gap, the coordinator adjusting the pressure in real time, running this engagement the way a chess player runs a board.
I'm not going through it.
I look up.
The building to my left is six stories. Fire escape on the north face, second landing visible from where I'm standing. I look at Darian. "Keep them occupied."
He looks at the wave. He looks at me. "Define occupied."
"Alive and in their attention."
"That's the same thing."
"So yes."
He cracks his knuckles — I have no idea how that helps his ribs and I don't ask — and moves toward the wave's left flank with the specific energy of a D-Rank Brawler who has decided that occupied is a fine job description. Alice moves to the far side of the street, reading, tracking, the blade she won't explain already in her hand.
I go up the fire escape.
Third landing is high enough. I come around the exterior of the stairwell and find the southeast sightline and there it is.
The coordinator is not what I expected.
It's not the largest thing in the wave. It's not armored the way the mid-tier beasts are armored. It's mid-sized, pale against the dark pavement, and it's completely still — standing at the back of its formation with something that reads almost like attention, the head moving in small precise increments, tracking. Adjusting. The wave below me shifts every time the head moves and the correlation is immediate and clear.
Two hundred feet. Maybe two-ten.
The javelin's competition spec is designed for eighty meters — that's the world record distance and it's the competition standard, not the limit. The class doesn't care about competition standards.
I summon it into my right hand.
Below me, Darian has engaged the left flank in the way only someone whose class is literally brawler can engage a flank — directly, physically, with what sounds like a structural argument being made against a beast's ribcage. The fast-movers have reoriented toward him and Alice, which means the coordinator's attention is redistributed, which means it's not looking at the roofline.
I find the line.
Not calculated — felt. The angle, the release point, the arc. I've thrown at forty meters, at sixty, at the lobby wall. This is different. This is the class trusting me to know what I'm doing, which is not the same as me knowing what I'm doing, but the gap between those two things has been closing all day and right now it feels small enough to cross.
I throw the javelin.
Everything behind it. Hips, legs, the full rotation, the release at the exact point where the arm is out and the weight transfers and the weapon takes over from the throw. The javelin leaves my hand and the class meets it and it is in the air for two seconds that feel like nothing and everything and it arrives.
The coordinator goes down.
Not dead immediately — I can see it from the roofline, the way it goes sideways, the javelin through the side of its neck, the movements of something that has received critical information and is still processing it. But the commands stop. I can see that too, in the way the wave below changes — not breaks, not immediately, but shifts from coordinated pressure to confused momentum, the mid-tier beasts losing their formation, the fast-movers splitting from the pattern into individual trajectories.
Animal behavior. Manageable behavior.
I summon the javelin back and come down the fire escape.
The next twenty minutes are work.
Not a fight — work. The difference is that in a fight you're reacting, you're responding to what the other thing is doing. This is work because the other things have stopped doing anything directed and we're just moving through what's left, methodically, Darian taking the left, me cycling through the bench on the right, Alice reading the positions of the ones that have scattered and redirecting us toward them.
I use everything.
All twenty-five weapons, across the engagement — not because I need all twenty-five, but because I choose to, because these are the last minutes before something larger arrives and I want to know every weapon in this bench under pressure before that happens. The construction hatchet goes where I aim it every time, no correction needed — it is my most honest weapon, the one the class amplifies without adjusting. The military blade at close range hits harder than its size suggests because the class is doing something to the impact that I don't understand mechanically but can feel in the contact. The rebar goes through armored carapace at this point. We've had that conversation enough times that it's settled.
And then one of the mid-tier beasts — the last armored one, the biggest thing left from the wave — turns toward me as I summon the sword.
Not the rebar. The sword from the hub. The one I can't swing.
It's in my hand and the beast is thirty feet away and I don't have time to dismiss it and reach for something else and I don't have time to think. I throw it.
End over end. Not a javelin throw, not a hatchet throw — the sword tumbles through the air in a slow rotation that looks nothing like I intended and arrives into the beast's flank and goes in deep, the length of it, the blade finding the gap between the carapace plates and going through it.
The beast goes down.
I stare at it.
The sword in its flank. The entry point. The way it went in.
Swords as throwing weapons. I file it, clearly labeled, in the place where I keep the things I'm going to think about later and act on in the Realm. In the Realm I'm going to need actual swords. Legendary ones if I can find them. And apparently what I'm going to do with legendary swords is throw them, which is not what legend typically intends but is going to be what I do anyway.
I summon the sword back.
Alice: "That's the last of them."
The level hits while I'm standing over the last downed beast with the sword still in my hand.
It comes differently this time — not just the current, not just the charge. Something opening, the way a room opens when someone takes a wall out. New space where there wasn't space.
Level 4 reached. Weapon Bench expanded: 25/35 Active Slots: 4 Hold Timer: 2 seconds New ability: Weapon Sense — passive detection of weapons within 30 meters.
Four active slots. Ten empty bench slots. Two seconds to add a weapon.
And then the Weapon Sense arrives and the city changes.
It's not sight. It's not exactly feeling. It's somewhere between the two — a field of awareness that extends thirty meters in every direction from where I'm standing, and in that field I can feel every weapon that exists. My bench, yes, always — but also the weapons outside my bench, the ones nearby that I haven't added. A knife in an abandoned car three cars south. Something heavy in a shopfront to the north. What was a weapons cache in a broken doorway to the east that I walked past twenty minutes ago without knowing it was there.
The city is full of things I can reach.
The city was always full of things I can reach. Now I know where they are.
I stand on the street and feel the field of it spreading out from me in every direction and for a moment I just let it be what it is — enormous, specific, mine.
Darian is watching my face. "What just happened?"
"Weapon Sense." I look around — not with my eyes. "I can feel where the weapons are."
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "How many?"
I count what the field is telling me right now, in this one block of street. Fourteen. Fourteen weapons within thirty meters, most of them on the ground or in vehicles, some of them already on my bench.
"Enough," I say.
We find a rooftop three blocks north where the sightline is clear in every direction and Alice can read the Lattice without obstruction. The city below us is quieter than it's been since this morning — the particular quiet of an exam that's mostly over, waiting for the final question.
Alice reads continuously, eyes unfocused, the Lattice moving through her like weather she's learned to stand in.
Darian is doing the thing where he inventories his bruises without acknowledging he's doing it — pressing his fingers to his ribs with an expression that gives nothing away, moving methodically down to the forearm and back up.
I look at my bench. Twenty-five weapons. Ten empty slots. The ten empty slots feel different now that the Sense is active — not missing, exactly, but present as absence, a shape I'm about to fill.
Six hours, Alice said.
I think about the dream. The sword already in my hands, the weight of it, the hum. In the dream the throw was inevitable — not performed, not decided, just the natural completion of everything that led up to it. I don't have that sword. I don't have anything close to that sword yet.
But I'm starting to understand how it felt to hold it. I'm starting to earn the understanding of it.
Six hours.
I look at the ten empty slots.
Plenty of time.