Speedrunning the apocalypse

CHAPTER 4 - First Blood, First Loot

"Maya Reed," Kira said, before I had fully decided which direction we needed to move in. "University library. Old records section, basement. It's the most structurally sound part of the building, and she'll have thought of that before anyone else did."

"You're sure she's there."

"I know her. She doesn't panic. She organizes." She looked at me sideways. "Can you get us there without going through the eastern grid."

"Yes."

"How do you know the eastern grid is a problem."

"Because that's where the second wave is going to hit," I said. "Within the hour. We want to be indoors before that."

She held my gaze for three full seconds — not the look of someone deciding whether to trust me, the look of someone who had already filed trust as a separate question from usefulness and was currently only interested in the second one. "Okay," she said, and started walking in the direction I'd pointed, which was not the direction most people would have chosen.

Adrian fell in on her other side easily, like he'd known her longer than an hour. That was Adrian. He collected people the way other men collected grudges.

Three blocks from the university, my Foreshadow passive caught something.

Not the formal ability — that would not activate until the assessment chamber made it official. This was bleed-through, the faint directional awareness of a class the System had already decided I had before it told me about it. There was a gate at the edge of the parking structure on our left. Off the main grid. The kind that wouldn't show on any map for days, because nobody knew where to look yet.

I knew exactly where to look. I had cleared this same gate on Day 3 the first time around and walked out with nothing, because I hadn't known about the loading dock at the back of the level, where the drop table spawned a locked supply crate. I'd learned about it from a dead operator's notes in Month 2. He'd found it on Day 19.

I was finding it now.

"Two minutes," I told Kira. "Stay with Adrian."

"There's a gate in there," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"You knew that before you looked."

"Two minutes," I said, and went in before she could finish building whatever she was building.

The parking level resolved the way I remembered it — stripped of cars, ceiling too high, shadows falling from angles that didn't match the light sources. Four crawlers on a patrol loop, the exact pattern I'd memorized a lifetime ago.

I dropped the first two clean, moving through the gap in the loop at the precise second I remembered it opening.

The third came from the wrong direction.

Not the flanking pattern I had spent five years memorizing. It came from behind a support column that should not have had anything behind it, fast and low, and for one full second I had nothing — no memory to reach for, no notes, no five years of certainty. Just a body that had to decide in real time whether to move left or right with no data to base the decision on.

I moved left. It was luck as much as instinct, and I knew it was luck even as I felt the crawler's claws rake across my ribs instead of my throat, a line of fire opening up my side that the memory I'd been running on had never once warned me about.

I put it down anyway, breathing harder than four crawlers should have made me breathe.

I stood there for a second longer than I needed to, my hand pressed against my ribs, staring at a dead crawler that had come from a direction it was not supposed to come from.

The fourth one I finished without incident. Then I went straight to the loading dock, found the crate exactly where it had always been, and opened it on a notification that hit differently from everything else that morning — a small click in my chest, like something settling into place.

FIRST CLEAR. UNREGISTERED INSTANCE. REWARD: STAT SHARD, VITALITY PLUS THREE, COMMON TIER.

The shard dissolved into my palm the moment I closed my hand around it. Three points of vitality on a body with no class yet to make efficient use of them. The first deliberate withdrawal from a bank only I knew existed.

I came out of the parking structure two minutes and six seconds after I'd gone in, my side still burning under my jacket where I was doing my best not to let it show.

Kira noticed anyway. Of course she noticed.

"Four minutes," she said. "And you're favoring your left side."

"The crawlers took longer than expected."

"You said two minutes. You also said you knew exactly what was in there." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Something didn't go the way you thought it would."

I didn't answer, because there was no version of the answer that didn't confirm exactly what she was already building toward.

She held my gaze for a moment, then, unexpectedly, let it go — not because she'd stopped caring, but because three blocks north the System pushed a region-wide pulse into every operator's vision at once, and even Kira's patience had a shorter fuse than usual with the world actively falling apart around it.

EVALUATION CENTERS NOW OPEN. REPORT FOR CLASS ASSIGNMENT WITHIN 72 HOURS.

She read it, then looked back at me, and something in her expression had shifted since the parking structure — not suspicion exactly, something closer to a woman quietly recalculating how much of her evidence file needed a footnote.

"You already knew that was coming too," she said. "But you didn't know what was waiting in there. Did you."

I thought about the crawler that came from the wrong direction, about a plan built on five years of certainty that had just proven, in the space of one second, that it was not going to hold its shape the way I needed it to.

"No," I said. "I didn't."

It was the first true thing I'd told her all morning, and from the way she nodded slowly and started walking again, I understood that it had landed harder than any of the lies had.