The city was unrecognizable.
Lucian had walked these streets his entire life. He knew which pavement slabs were uneven, which corner shop left its lights on all night, which building had the dog that barked at everything. He knew this place the way you know somewhere you never thought to memorize because you assumed it would always be there.
It wasn't there anymore.
Buildings had come apart at their foundations, leaning into each other like exhausted men. Cars were overturned, some still burning with no one watching. Shop fronts were caved in, glass everywhere, contents spilled across the road — food, clothing, electronics, none of it mattering to anyone now. Power lines hung low across the street like tripwires.
And the bodies.
Not hung. Not displayed. Just left where they had fallen. Dozens of them across two blocks alone, in doorways and gutters and the middle of the road. People who had been going somewhere when the world changed its mind about them.
Lucian walked through it without slowing.
He didn't look away from the bodies but he didn't dwell on them either. They existed. He registered them. He kept walking.
Somewhere at the back of his mind a voice that sounded like the version of him from yesterday tried to say something about the tragedy of it all.
He told it to get in line. The line was very long.
The living, whoever remained, had found holes to crawl into and were staying there. No movement in the windows. No voices. Just wind and the distant sound of things collapsing somewhere he couldn't see.
He wasn't sure he counted as safe either. But that wasn't his problem.
He was three blocks from the first address when he heard it.
A sound like wet leather dragging across stone.
He stopped.
Crouched behind an overturned car were two of them. Small — barely waist height — with grey-green skin pulled too tight over too many joints, wide yellow eyes, and mouths full of teeth that didn't line up correctly. They were hunched over something on the ground that Lucian chose not to examine too closely.
One of them noticed him first.
It shrieked — a high, piercing sound — and launched itself at him with both clawed hands extended.
Lucian sidestepped it cleanly.
The imp hit the ground, scrambled upright, and lunged again.
This time Lucian caught it by the ankle mid-leap and slammed it into the asphalt. Once. Then again, because he felt like it.
"Stay," he said pleasantly.
It did not stay. It kept making noise.
He crouched over it.
[Creature detected: Imp — Lv 5][Nullification active. Combat output reduced.]
Level five. He pressed two fingers against the imp's collarbone and felt the structure of it — bones arranged differently, tissue denser in strange places, joints that bent at angles that shouldn't work. He wanted to understand what he was going to be killing. Properly understand. Where things were. What mattered.
He started with the shoulder joint.
The imp screamed.
"Fascinating," Lucian said, in the tone of someone who has just learned something mildly interesting about a houseplant.
He worked methodically through the rest of it. Not with cruelty exactly — more with the focused attention of someone taking notes. How the joints connected. Where the dense tissue clustered. What made it stop thrashing when he found the nerve bundle at the base of its neck.
When he was done the imp was still breathing but had stopped having opinions about anything.
The second imp had been creeping up behind him — building courage, claws extended, certain its prey was distracted.
Then it saw what was left of its kin.
It stopped.
Lucian stood and looked at it.
The imp looked at the first imp.
Then at Lucian.
Then it turned and ran — fast, genuinely fast, low to the ground in a scrambling sideways gait that was harder to track than anything moving in a straight line.
Lucian reached down, picked up a chunk of broken concrete the size of his fist, and threw it without thinking.
It caught the imp at the base of the skull from forty feet away.
The imp dropped and didn't move.
Lucian stared at his own hand. He hadn't aimed. Hadn't calculated. Just threw it and the rock went exactly where it needed to go with a force that had no business coming from a fifteen year old who had spent most of yesterday losing a boss fight.
He laughed. Short and genuine, the sound slightly too light for the street he was standing on.
"Okay," he said to no one. "That's new."
Then he reached down, grabbed the second imp by the ankle, and lifted it.
He swung it once experimentally.
Good weight. Decent balance. Acceptable aerodynamics.
He kept walking.
The next two imps came out of a collapsed shopfront half a block later. He put them both down without breaking stride — one with an elbow to the skull, one with three pounds of dead imp swung at considerable velocity. Neither fight lasted more than four seconds.
Level five against level thirty-plus wasn't a fight. It was a scheduling conflict.
He dropped what remained of his improvised weapon outside a gutted pharmacy, rolled his shoulder, and checked the address in his memory.
Close now.
The anticipation had settled into something cold and quiet and purposeful, sitting in his chest right next to the thing that used to be grief and had become something with sharper edges.
He found it on a wider street, set back from the road.
A building that had once been a community hall — wide entrance, high ceilings visible through the open doors — now covered in symbols painted across every surface in something dark that wasn't paint. Candles lined the approach in careful rows. An idol three times the size of the courtyard one sat just inside, freshly tended, watching the street with painted eyes.
At the entrance stood a man in his thirties. Arms crossed. The relaxed posture of someone who'd stood at this door before and found it uneventful.
Lucian stopped.
This wasn't a house.
This was the cult center.
The boy had lied to him.
He smiled — wider than usual, the particular smile that arrived when something added to the list rather than shortening it. He'd have to go back and have a separate conversation with that one. That was fine. He was building a schedule.
The man at the door looked him over.
"Hey kid. What are you doing here?"
Lucian looked past him at the idol. Then he put his hands together in an exaggerated prayer pose, eyes turned theatrically toward the sky, chin tilted up with great solemnity.
"I want to meet your god, you know."
The man's expression softened toward recruitment. "Ah — a new devotee. Our benevolent god welcomes all who seek—"
"Yes." Lucian lowered his hands and looked at the man with polite attentiveness. "I want to meet him and shove his devotees up his ass."
A pause.
The man's face cycled through confusion, comprehension, and fury in approximately two seconds.
"BLASPHEMER—"
Fire erupted up both his arms, roaring from wrist to elbow, lighting up the entrance in furious orange. His expression was the specific outrage of a man who considers himself righteous and has just been given permission to act on it.
[Awakened Human detected.][Level: 6.][Ability: Fireball — Basic.]
Lucian looked at the fire.
Then at the man's face.
Then his smile settled into something that made the man's righteous fury stutter — just slightly — into something that wasn't entirely sure of itself anymore.
"My dear level six lamb," Lucian said warmly, tilting his head like a teacher addressing a particularly hopeful student.
"Let me teach you the dumb ways to die."