The ground under my boots cracked black earth, split into plates like something ancient dried out and gave up. The sky is the color of a bruise — not a fresh one, the kind that's been there long enough you stop noticing it hurts. And across from me, maybe two hundred feet out, something the size of a twelve-story building is staring at me with eyes like furnace doors left open.
I note all of this the way you note bad weather before a commute.
Yeah. That's a problem.
Moving on.
The sword is already in my hands. I don't remember picking it up. I don't remember arriving here, don't remember the walk across this dead flat plain, don't remember anything before this moment standing on this patch of cracked nothing with this monster deciding whether I'm worth charging.
The beast has plates along its shoulders where the scales don't quite meet, gaps at the joints like a suit of armor assembled by someone who ran out of material near the end. Its head is broad and low, eyes forward-facing, which means it's a hunter and it knows it. The tail drags behind it in a slow sweep, scoring lines in the black earth.
It's watching me the way things watch you when they haven't decided yet whether you're prey or not.
I shift my grip on the sword.
I am the prey, I think. Just so we're clear.
It charges.
The ground shakes with it — I feel it in my boots before I hear it, this low rolling percussion that moves up through my legs and felt on the back of my teeth. The beast covers distance the way weather covers distance, fast, total, and not particularly interested in what's in the way.
I don't move.
Not yet.
The sword is two-handed, broad at the base, and I cannot tell you what it's made of because I have never thought to ask. What I can tell you is the weight of it — not heavy, exactly, but present, like it's got opinions about gravity. My arms don't strain. They never strain because I'm inevitable.
The beast's first swing comes from the left — one foreleg the width of a tree trunk, a horizontal arc that would take my head off at the neck if I were still standing where I'd been standing. I'm not. I stepped inside the arc at the last possible second, not because I calculated it but because in this dream I have always known exactly when to move, and I slide along the beast's foreleg with the sword angled into the joint between the plate and the scale, not deep enough to end anything, just enough to get the message across.
I'm here. I'm a problem. Pay attention.
It rears.
Something that size rearing is its own weather event. The air moves wrong. I don't fight the momentum — I ride it backward, controlled fall, and land clean on the black earth with the sword still in both hands, already rotating to find the angle.
Then the tail catches me.
Wide sweep, low, and I don't see it coming until it's already mid-swing, and by then there's nothing to do but take it. It hits me in the ribs like a car door and throws me twenty feet. I clear the ground and hit it again and bounce once — actually bounce, the cracked earth hard as packed clay — and come to rest on my back staring up at the bruise-colored sky.
I lie there for a moment.
Okay, I think. That sucked.
Nothing's broken. I don't overthink it.
I get up.
No drama. No grunt of effort. I roll my neck until it cracks on both sides, check my grip — the sword is still in my hand, and I look at the beast.
The beast looks at me.
It's recalculated. I can see it in the way it's holding its weight now, lower, more careful. It's stopped thinking of me as prey and started thinking of me as a problem.
Good.
I find the line.
I don't swing.
I throw.
Both hands, hips behind it, everything I have committed to the release — the sword leaves my grip the way a breath leaves your lungs when you've been holding it too long. Not with effort. With relief. Like the whole point of holding it was always this moment. Like the grip was just the preparation for letting go.
It crosses the distance between us in less than a breath.
Not flying. Arriving.
The blade takes the beast's head clean off at the neck. There's a fraction of a second where nothing happens — a small silence the size of a held breath — and then the head hits the ground with a sound like a boulder dropped from height, and the body follows after it, slower, top-heavy and confused, like it hasn't received the news yet and is still working through the implications.
Dust rolls out from the impact in a low ring.
I stand in it.
From somewhere behind me, a crowd erupts — women, a group of them, appearing from nowhere, cheering like I just won a championship game in overtime. I don't look back at them. I don't look surprised.
I roll my shoulders. Tilt my head. Deliver the line the way a man reads weather off a forecast he wrote himself — flat, certain, not particularly impressed with his own certainty:
"I'd say I was born for this — but honestly? This is just a Tuesday."
Then the alarm.
I jolt awake, and the dream dissolves the way good dreams always do — fast, incomplete, like trying to hold smoke. It leaves the impression of something large and a feeling in my arms, this phantom tension that hasn't gotten the message that we're back in the real world now. My hands want to be gripping something. There's nothing to grip.
I stare at my ceiling.
Cracked plaster. A water stain shaped like a country that doesn't exist. I'm on a mattress on the floor, which is where I sleep because I have a mattress and I have a floor, and somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing the point in a bed frame. The apartment contains: the mattress, a phone charger that only works pressed hard against the baseboard at a specific angle I found through trial and error and have since memorized, two plates, and a box of crackers that is down to the last quarter.
I'm in my Mid-twenties. No job — two months now, which started as breathing room after something I'd rather not get into, and then quietly became a shape I didn't have a good name for. I'm not exactly broke. I'm not exactly broke. I have enough crackers for today, and the charger works if you know how to hold it. The city outside is grey and ordinary and going about its business without requiring anything from me.
The apartment feels like a waiting room.
I've been sitting in it long enough that I stopped checking the clock.
I get up. Drink water from the tap. Eat crackers standing at the kitchen counter in the thin grey light coming through windows I've never cleaned, looking at nothing in particular, the dream already going soft at the edges.
Then I look out the window.
The city is doing what the city does — low buildings, a street below, something moving at the intersection. Ohh thats a delivery truck, and there is nothing more interesting than that. I think about the dream for a moment. The sword. The throw. The crowd.
That was a good one.
I check my phone. Nothing that needs me. I set it down on the counter.
I look back at the sky.
Something is wrong with it.
I can't say what, exactly. The clouds are too uniform — same texture all the way across, horizon to horizon, no variation, like someone pressed a template down over the whole sky. And the color is off. Not dark like storm-dark. Dark like something behind the clouds is pressing through them and hasn't finished arriving yet. My eyes notice it before my brain catches up with the information, some old animal instinct flagging it and waiting for the rest of me to get on board.
I stand at the window a moment longer than I need to.
Then the text appears.
Not on my phone. Not on any screen I can point to. It appears in my field of vision directly — hovering at the center of it, sharp and clean, like it was always going to be there and I just hadn't looked in the right direction until now.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
Class Assigned: WEAPON MANCER Rank: SSS Core Ability: Summon and wield any weapon held for 5+ seconds. Weapon Bench: 0/1
FIRST OBJECTIVE: Survive the Test.
I read it once.
I read it again.
My eyes go back to SSS. I don't know what SSS means yet. I don't know the ranking system, don't know how many letters it runs or where SSS sits on whatever scale this thing is using. What I do know is that it's the same letter three times, and it's always at the top of every food tier list video I have ever watched.
I try to dismiss the notification. It doesn't go away. It minimizes instead, shrinking to a small persistent flicker at the edge of my vision, settled in like it plans to stay, whether I want it there or not.
I look back out at the sky.
The color is getting worse.
What, I think, is happening.