The System Gave Me A Dead God

Chapter 4: Nerve

Ezra didn't go home.

Home meant a landlord who'd already texted twice about rent, and neighbors who'd notice a Guild containment van parked outside, and six hours that would spend themselves whether he used them or not. He stood on that plaza with Rourke's card in one hand and a dead god's voice in the other and did the only math that made sense to him.

If he waited, they came for him.

If he moved first, at least it was his choice.

"Fine," he said, and turned back toward the stairwell. "We do this now."

*Good,* Vaelgrith said. *Then let's be honest with each other before you get yourself killed doing it. You have no Abilities. No Stats. No training worth mentioning. Whatever gets you through that tunnel tonight isn't going to come from me.*

"Thought you were supposed to be helping."

*I'm supposed to be finishing something. You're the tool. Tools that break before the job's done are useless to me, so understand this clearly: I will not carry you through this fight. You survive on your own nerve tonight, or you don't survive at all.*

It should have scared him more than it did. Ezra found, climbing back down through the same gap he'd fallen through hours earlier, that he'd run out of room to be scared of new things. He'd used it all up on Rourke's stare and the six-hour countdown and the sound of something in the dark that hunted by ear.

The stairwell down to Sublevel 4 was quiet. Too quiet, the kind of quiet that had a held breath in it.

[Target 1: Last known position — 40m, bearing unchanged since disengagement.]

"It's been sitting there for three hours?"

*Waiting,* Vaelgrith said. *It knows you'll be back. Things that have survived three centuries hiding from the Nine's own enemies don't win by chasing. They win by being patient.*

Ezra pulled his phone out, killed the screen glow before it could give him away, and kept it clutched in his fist anyway, more out of habit than any plan for what a flashlight app was going to do against something that could scream loud enough to bring a ceiling down.

He moved slow through the rubble, testing each step before he put weight on it, the way three years of Underlevel courier runs had taught him to move through unstable ground. It was the only skill he had that actually mattered down here, and for the first time in his life it felt like it might be enough to matter.

Forty meters closed to thirty. Thirty to twenty.

At fifteen meters he heard it breathing.

*Stop,* Vaelgrith said, sharp enough that Ezra actually obeyed before he'd finished processing the word. *It's not where the System says it is. It moved.*

"Moved where—"

The System panel flared red before he finished the sentence.

[Warning: Target 1 — Proximity Critical.]

Something came out of the dark above him, not from the tunnel floor where he'd been watching but from a gap in the collapsed ceiling he'd walked directly underneath, and Ezra threw himself sideways on instinct alone, no time to think it through, just the animal certainty that standing still meant dying. He hit the rubble hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs and rolled, and the thing that had been aiming for the space where his head used to be crashed into the tunnel floor instead, close enough that he felt the impact through his ribs.

He got his first real look at it in the dim emergency light bleeding down from the stairwell. Not quite human, not quite anything else, limbs too long and jointed wrong, a face that had healed shut over where eyes should have been, replaced by something like gill-slits along both temples that flared open and shut as it turned its head, hunting him by sound and air pressure and whatever else three centuries of hiding had taught it to hunt with.

It didn't look weak. It looked like something that had survived being hunted by the Nine's own enemies for three hundred years, and Ezra had exactly zero Abilities, zero Stats, and one working set of lungs to face it with.

*Now,* Vaelgrith said, *would be an excellent time to remember every stupid trick you've ever used to survive a job you weren't equipped for.*

Ezra's hand closed around a length of rebar half-buried in the rubble beside him, cold and rough and heavier than it looked, and he came up swinging before he'd fully decided to, aiming not for the creature's body but for the rubble pile behind it, driving the bar down hard enough to send a chunk of broken concrete skidding across the floor with a scrape loud enough to hurt his own ears.

The creature's head snapped toward the sound, gill-slits flaring wide, and for exactly one second it wasn't tracking him at all.

One second was all Ezra had ever needed to make a delivery deadline nobody thought he'd hit.

He drove the rebar forward with everything three years of hauling crates through collapsed tunnels had put in his arms, and felt it connect with something that gave way wetter and easier than concrete ever had, and the creature's scream tore through the tunnel loud enough to bring dust raining down from the ceiling above them both.

[Critical Hit — Target 1 Staggered]

[Advisory: Window closing. Finish it.]

Ezra didn't need the System to tell him that. He was already pulling the bar back for a second swing before the first scream had finished echoing, hands shaking, lungs burning, entirely, completely certain for the first time in three years that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.