Day Twenty Five started at three in the morning when Michael was deep in sleep and something outside was loud enough to wake him up.
He lay still for a second listening. It wasn't the usual groaning from outside or the distant shuffling from the lower floors, this was closer and more deliberate like it had some kind of intent behind it. He sat up and looked at the perimeter panel by the door and it was pulsing red.
He crossed to it and checked the pulse. There were two signatures at ground level circling the building entrance slowly like they had nowhere else to be.
They seemed like standard Rotters by their size, not the big ones from Floor 3 which were still down there minding their own terrible business. Just two Rotters that had found the building and apparently liked it enough to stay.
Normally that wasn't a problem. Rotters wandered and lost interest and moved on eventually. These weren't moving on.
He watched them for ten minutes and they stayed exactly where they were and that was when he pushed the pulse wider and felt his stomach drop a little.
It was seven not two. Seven signatures spread around the building entrance and the alley along the east side, all of them were moving in a slow and patient manner.
He was still looking at that when Sera appeared from the bedroom doorway with her hair loose and the axe already in her hand because she slept with it now which was honestly fair.
"The panel woke me," she said quietly.
"Seven Rotters are at the ground level."
"Okay? So what's the problem?"
"They're nig moving."
She went to the viewport and looked down at the street and went still i went still it seemed to have caught her full attention, "Something drew them here."
Michael looked at the generator humming in the corner of the living room and it clicked immediately. The sound was quiet, barely anything, but it was consistent and mechanical and completely unlike anything else in a dead city at night. One Rotter wanders close enough to hear it and stops and its shuffling draws another one and so on until you have seven circling your building at three in the morning.
He bought the sound dampening upgrade from the shop immediately and applied it and the generator dropped to almost nothing but the damage was already done. Seven signatures still sitting right where they were.
"Dampening it now doesn't help with the ones already here," Sera said, reading his face.
"No but it stops more from coming." He looked at the pulse again. "We need to clear them tonight before this turns into something bigger."
She looked at him. "Seven Rotters on the ground floor in the dark is very dangerous."
"We've handled more than that up here."
"Up here we know the layout and have a door to fall back to."
"We'd still have the door. We're coming back up after."
She held his gaze for a moment doing that thing where she was reading further into him than was entirely comfortable and then she looked at the axe in her hand and nodded.
"Just us?" she asked.
He thought about Shin's leg and Maya's table leg enthusiasm and Dr. Kang who was a physician first and a fighter a distant second.
"Just us," he said.
---
The stairwell at three in the morning was a different experience to the stairwell in daylight.
The darkness was heavier somehow and the flashlight beam made everything beyond its edge feel uncertain in a way that Michael's brain had not fully adapted to despite twenty five days of practice. He kept the pulse running and tracked all seven signatures as they went down, watching them shift in real time and updating Sera in quiet words as they moved.
The ground floor lobby had six signatures outside now, one just inside the entrance which had been glass doors once and was now just an open gap to the street. He stopped at the stairwell door and looked through the panel.
The lobby was wrecked, furniture overturned and the front desk on its side and broken glass scattered across the floor that was going to be a noise problem. Against the lighter darkness of the entrance gap he could see one silhouette moving in that familiar shuffle, back turned, unaware.
"One inside," he said quietly. "Six outside or just at the entrance."
Sera looked through the panel beside him and assessed it in about three seconds. "Inside one first then we take the outside ones before they come in."
He nodded and they went through the door.
The inside Rotter went down before it finished turning and they pushed toward the entrance and the outside ones heard the sound and started coming through and from there it stopped being a plan and started being a situation.
Two came through together and Michael took one and Sera took the other and they fell back a step to reset and then three more were coming through the gap at once which was not ideal spacing.
What followed was not elegant. It was dark and loud enough to make him wince and at one point a Rotter got close enough that he felt its weight against his shoulder before he got it down and he spent a genuinely unpleasant second checking his arm before confirming it had been the shoulder and not the neck.
He let out a breath and finished the last one on the ground with a swing that had slightly more feeling in it than strictly necessary.
[+30 SP x7.]
[Ding! Area Clear — Ground Floor Lobby. +150 SP bonus.]
[Total SP: 780.]
The lobby went still. Nothing new on the pulse. The street outside was empty in the way streets were empty now and the only sounds were their breathing and glass crunching under their feet.
Michael stood there for a second and then opened the shop.
[Reinforced Entrance Gate — 240 SP.]
He bought the materials and placed the blueprint and watched the gate assemble itself across the entrance gap, solid steel panels locking into the floor and ceiling with a deep sound that echoed through the whole lobby.
The building was sealed.
Sera looked at the gate. Looked at him. "You were going to do that anyway."
"Eventually."
"You used the Rotters as the excuse to come down here tonight."
"The sound dampening should have been first, that was a genuine mistake."
"But the gate."
"The gate was always next."
She gave him the look that had somewhere along the way stopped being suspicious and started being something else that he wasn't going to name yet and then she turned toward the stairwell.
He followed her up.
[Bond Event — Back to Back: Sera. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 4 — Sera.]