MY DEVOURER SYSTEM

005. Countdown

The storage room was exactly where Isolde said it would be. A service door under the west training hall, unmarked except for a keypad that hadn't been updated since before Ren enrolled. Her code worked on the first try. He tried not to think too hard about how she'd known it.

Inside was smaller than he'd pictured. Metal shelving. Dim emergency lighting. A smell like ozone and old dust. Crates of mismatched gear — a cracked training blade, a scorched gauntlet, a forgotten uniform jacket still creased from a locker. In the back corner, a single unlabeled bin.

Ren's Aether Sense caught it before his eyes did. Three faint signatures, dull and low, humming behind the metal.

Three. Not the dozen he'd been hoping for.

He crouched and opened the bin anyway. Three cores, all small, all the flat gray color he was starting to recognize as barely worth the trouble. Scraps left over after someone stronger had already picked through a dungeon's real loot.

<Core Detected — Quality: Low>

<Consuming will reduce Deficiency Penalty by approximately 4 hours per core>

Twelve hours, if he ate all three. His countdown sat at a little over thirteen. It wasn't nothing. It also wasn't a solution. Just a smaller, later version of the same problem.

"This can't be all that ever ends up down here," he muttered.

*<Confirmed. Location has been recently cleared.>*

Ren went still. "Recently, how recently?"

The System didn't elaborate. It never did unless the answer served some purpose he hadn't asked for yet. He didn't need it to. Someone had gotten here first. The dust on the shelves hadn't settled evenly. There was a boot print near the door that wasn't his.

He ate two of the three cores where he crouched, saving the last one for reasons he didn't fully understand yet. The countdown ticked backward, buying him time instead of answers. Then he heard footsteps outside. Unhurried.

Ren killed the light on his wrist display and pressed himself into the shadow between two shelving units. Heart working harder than the situation should have justified. He was getting better at controlling the hunger. Not yet good at controlling fear.

The door opened.

The upperclassman who stepped through wore his uniform like he'd stopped caring what it looked like on him years ago. Sleeves shoved up. Seat insignia scuffed past legibility. He didn't turn on the light either. Didn't need to. He walked straight to the corner Ren had just left and crouched to check the bin.

Empty, apart from the one core Ren hadn't taken.

"Huh." He picked it up, turned it over once, pocketed it without much interest. "Somebody beat me to it."

Ren didn't move. Didn't breathe more than he had to.

The upperclassman straightened and swept the room with his gaze. Not urgent. Thorough. His eyes passed over the shadow where Ren was standing and kept moving.

Then he stopped.

He didn't turn back. Didn't say anything. His shoulders went a fraction more still, listening for a sound he wasn't sure he'd actually heard. The air in the room felt thinner than it should have, though nothing had visibly changed.

Ren didn't breathe. Didn't let himself think the word *hunger*, in case some part of the System was listening closely enough to make it true.

Three seconds passed. The upperclassman huffed out something between a laugh and a sigh, shook his head, muttered something about needing more sleep.

He left without checking the shadows again. But he left slower than he'd come in, muttering on his way out about Corbin owing him for this trip.

Ren counted to sixty before he moved.

*Corbin owing him.* Worth remembering. Whoever that was, Corbin answered to him — one more rung on this ladder above the one Ren had spent two years being humiliated by. He filed the name away, along with the empty bin, the disturbed dust, and the dread of a supply he'd been counting on turning out to already be gone.

*<Deficiency Penalty in 21:14:52>*

Twenty-one hours. Not the clean reset he needed. He'd bought himself time, not safety. And now he had one more thing to worry about — a room full of scraps that someone above Corbin was already picking clean on a schedule Ren didn't know and couldn't predict.

Whatever was feeding this Academy's quiet hierarchy of favors and unwritten permissions, it ran on more than credits and reputation. Ren hadn't figured out yet how deep it went, or how much of it would eventually have his name attached to it.

He slipped out of the storage room the way he'd come, into a hallway gone quiet with the late hour. Twenty-one hours. He started running the numbers on how far that would actually stretch, and how many more empty bins he could afford to find before the math stopped working in his favor. It wasn't a comforting set of numbers. He ran them anyway, because not knowing was worse than knowing something bad.