I open the kitchen drawers.
First drawer: takeout menus, a pen with no cap, a rubber band that has lost all structural integrity, and a phone charger that is not the one that works. Useless.
Second drawer: one chef's knife, one butter knife, one fork, and a peeler that has seen better decades.
I pick up the chef's knife.
It is not a good knife. It is a knife that came with the apartment, meaning it was purchased in bulk at some point by someone who was not thinking about quality and was thinking about filling the drawer. I have used it to cut frozen pizza, and at some point, an apple that was harder than expected. It has never been sharpened. The handle is slightly loose.
But it is the best option I have.
I hold it in my right hand and watch the corner of my vision, and five seconds later, the system delivers:
Weapon Added: Chef's Knife (Uncommon) Weapon Bench: 1/1
The knife disappears.
Not dropped, not thrown — gone, between one breath and the next, like it decided it was done existing in my hand and left. I stare at my palm. The absence of it is very specific. The weight is gone, but the memory of the weight is still there, a phantom impression in my grip.
I think about the knife. Not hard — I don't concentrate on it, don't scrunch my eyes or hold my breath. I just reach for it, the way you reach for a word that's sitting right there at the edge of your tongue, the way you reach for the shape of something you know you know —
It snaps back into my hand so fast I flinch.
Solid. Real. The loose handle, the dull edge, the exact weight of it. All of it exactly as it was, exactly as I held it. I turn it over once, then dismiss it — gone again — and summon it back. Gone. Back. I do this three more times, standing in my kitchen while the city makes terrible sounds outside my window, just to be sure, just to confirm that this is a thing my body now knows how to do.
It is. Every time, exactly right.
I think about the dream. The sword in my hands, the heft of it, the hum. The way it didn't feel like something I was carrying. The way it felt like something that had been waiting.
Okay, I say out loud to no one.
Okay.
Then something hits the hallway.
I hear it before anything else — a wet skittering sound like too many small feet moving too fast, and then a crash from two doors down that is heavy enough to mean something large went into the wall. Not fell against it. Went into it, with intent or momentum or both.
I cross to my door. Open it three inches and look outside.
The hallway of my building has beige walls, industrial carpet the color of casual brown, and one fluorescent light at the far end that has been flickering since I moved in, and which the building has never sent anyone to fix. It is an ordinary hallway, and it currently contains something that is the opposite of ordinary.
Dog-sized, roughly. That's where the familiarity ends.
The legs bend the wrong direction — not like an animal's backward knee, genuinely wrong, jointed in places legs shouldn't be jointed, which gives it a movement that my eyes keep trying to reparse as something they recognize and failing. Too many eyes, clustered in a mass where a face should be, glistening and separate and independently tracking. And the mouth — the mouth seems to occupy the center of its body, which shouldn't be anatomically possible, and yet, here we are.
It is the least elegant thing I have ever seen.
It hasn't found me yet. It's occupied with something further down the hall — a door it's working on, shoulder against it, that low, wet sound coming from somewhere in the mass of it.
I do the math quickly. The stairwell is at the end of the hall. The thing is between me and the stairwell. I can wait in my apartment with my uncommon knife and crackers, or I can move.
I summon the knife. Step into the hallway.
It finds me immediately.
No hesitation, no buildup — the cluster of eyes swings toward me like a single instrument and the thing moves, and I get maybe a half-second of watching it come before my body makes the decision my brain hasn't finished making yet and throws me sideways into the wall.
The claws rake the space I was standing in.
I feel the air of it on my face.
My shoulder hits the doorframe of 4C and I bounce off it and stumble and the thing is already rotating, legs churning in that wrong-jointed scramble that keeps making my eyes try to reinterpret what they're seeing — it's a dog, it's a crab, it's neither, stop trying — and it comes at me again before I've finished recovering from the first pass.
I get the knife up.
No technique. No stance. I just get it between me and the thing, and when the mouth — the body-mouth, the weird-mouth, the one in the center of its mass—snaps forward, the blade catches the edge of it, and the beast recoils with a sound like a wet hinge.
It backs up two steps.
I back up two steps.
We look at each other.
My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my ears. My hand on the knife is shaking, and my back is against the wall of the hallway, which means I have nowhere to back up to anymore. The flickering fluorescent at the end of the hall strobes once and holds, casting everything in the particular bad light of a place that was never meant for anything like this.
The thing lowers itself. That's the tell — the entire body drops half an inch, weight shifting forward, and I learn right then that it does that before it charges.
I go left.
Not far enough.
The claw catches my forearm — the right one, knife arm — and opens a line of fire from elbow to wrist that makes me suck a breath through my teeth so hard it sounds like a word. The knife stays in my hand, barely, more because my fingers have locked from the pain than because I chose to hold it. I hit the opposite wall and my vision whites at the edges for a single second.
At the top left of my vision, a health bar I didn't know was there drops by a visible chunk.
I stare at it.
The beast wheels around. It's faster when it's confident, the mouth opens in the center of it, wet and wide, and something inside that mouth makes a sound I cannot describe except to say that it is the sound of something that expects to finish what it started.
My arm is on fire, still holding my cheap chef's knife. A health bar I am watching, and I am not going to let it drop again.
It comes.
This time, I don't go sideways.
I go forward.
It's the only move the walls leave me with, and it's the only move it isn't expecting because nothing that isn't trying to die moves toward the thing trying to kill it. For one stuttered moment, I am inside its reach, too close for the claws, and I drive the knife into the side of its mass with everything I have.
The beast screams. Not a sound that should come from something that doesn't have a throat in the normal location, but it comes anyway, high and wet, and it throws itself sideways and takes me with it — my hand is still on the knife, stupid, I should let go, I don't let go — and we both go into the wall of the hallway hard enough to crack the drywall.
I lose the knife.
It gets pulled free when the beast wrenches away from the wall, spins, and the knife is somewhere behind it now, and there's a distance between us that closes fast — it's limping, the right side of its mass moving wrong, but fast, still fast.
I reach.
The knife snaps back into my grip.
The beast is mid-lunge when it arrives. I don't swing. No room, no angle, no time for anything with form or intent — I just raise my arm and the knife goes into the thing's face-cluster, the mass of eyes, and we both hit the floor of the hallway.
It writhes on top of me.
I hold on.
The claws find my side, my shoulder, dragging and scrabbling, and every hit registers in the health bar in my peripheral vision and every time it drops my grip tightens, and I keep the knife working because there is nothing else, there is no technique here, there is just the knife going in until the thing underneath me stops having opinions about it.
It stops moving.
I don't.
I stay there for three more seconds, knife raised, breathing through my nose, waiting for it to be a trick. It isn't a trick. The claws go slack. The mouth closes slowly, like a door swinging.
The hallway goes quiet.
I get up.
My legs are fine, which surprises me. My arm is not fine, which doesn't. The line the claw opened is bleeding in a steady, serious way, and my shirt sleeve is already gone. My side, where the claws caught me, is a collection of hot lines that haven't decided yet how bad they are. I do a fast check — nothing's deep enough to be an emergency. Everything hurts.
The health bar in my vision sits lower than I want it. Not critical but definitely not comfortable.
I stand over the dead thing and breathe.
It looks worse stopped than it did moving. It's just wrong. Quietly, completely wrong, in the specific way of something that shouldn't have been put together the way it was.
I look at the knife in my hand.
Then I look at the wall at the far end of the hallway.
I throw the knife.
Underhand, easy, almost like I meant for it to be casual, and the knife crosses the twelve feet of hallway and buries itself in the drywall to the handle.
I stare at it.
Something about that is right. Not the result — I'm not thinking about results right now. The motion. The way the release felt. The way the throw arrived.
The close-range work felt like drowning. That felt like breathing.
I summon the knife back. It snaps into my grip, clean.
I crouch next to the dead thing and look at the foreleg. The claw is intact — long, curved, hooked slightly inward, built for catching and holding and not letting go. I close my hand around it.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Chime.
Weapon Can Not Be Added: Fractured Beast Claw (Uncommon) Bench full. Additional weapon slots unlock at Level 2.
I stand.
My hands are shaking — both of them, fine tremor, the body's honest report on what just happened. I don't try to stop it. I let it run through, let the adrenaline do its accounting, and after a few seconds, it settles on its own.
Somewhere below, the building is not quiet. Sounds rising through the floors.
I look at my arm.
I need something to wrap it with. I think about the shirt I woke up in, still on my back. I think about the stairs. I think about the voice that said twenty-four hours like twenty-four hours was generous.
Everyone starts somewhere.
I go find the stairs.