The System Gave Me A Dead God

Chapter 5: What It Costs

The second swing never landed the way Ezra meant it to.

He brought the rebar down aiming for the creature's skull and felt his own arm move wrong halfway through the motion, faster than he'd told it to, angle correcting itself mid-swing like something had reached in and adjusted his aim for him.

The bar caught the creature square between the gill-slits instead, and it went down without another sound, folding in on itself the way the god's corpse had, stone and glass instead of blood.

Ezra stood over it, chest heaving, rebar still gripped in both hands, and didn't remember deciding to correct his swing at all.

"Did you do that."

*I suggested a better angle,* Vaelgrith said. *You're welcome.*

"I didn't feel you suggest anything. I felt my arm move on its own."

The voice didn't answer right away, and the silence told Ezra more than an answer would have.

[Target 1 of 9: Eliminated]

[Ability Transfer: Initiating]

[Skill Acquired: Pressure Sense]

The words hung in front of him a beat longer than the others had, and something under Ezra's sternum turned over, not pain, more like a held note finally resolving. He staggered, caught himself on the rubble, and for a second the tunnel doubled in his vision, two images layered on top of each other, the collapsed Underlevel he was standing in and, underneath it, something else. A different room. Different light. A hand that wasn't his, closing around a throat that wasn't there anymore.

He blinked and it was gone.

"What was that."

*Nothing that concerns you.*

"It felt like a memory."

*It was.* A pause, longer than Vaelgrith usually gave him. *Mine. They surface sometimes, when the binding tightens. It will happen more, not less, the further you get into this.*

Ezra's hands were shaking again, worse than they had been during the fight. He looked down at himself, half expecting to find something visibly different, a mark, a glow, anything that would explain the way his own skin felt too tight over his bones right now.

There was nothing to see. Just dust, and blood that wasn't his drying on the rebar, and the quiet certainty that something inside him had shifted position and wasn't going to shift back.

[Skill: Pressure Sense — Passive]

[You can now detect changes in air pressure and displacement within a 10-meter radius, including movement you cannot see or hear.]

It should have felt like winning. Three years of being the worst Awakened in Meridian City, and he'd just taken his first kill and walked away with an actual Ability, something with a name and a description and numbers attached, the exact thing he'd wanted since the day his Status panel first loaded up a joke instead of a Rank.

Instead he felt like he'd borrowed something he was going to have to pay back with interest he hadn't agreed to yet.

"How much time did I lose," he said. "During the fight. It felt like I blacked out for a second there at the end."

*Three seconds,* Vaelgrith said. *This time.*

"This time."

*I'd advise you not to make a habit of asking that question after every kill. You won't like the trend.*

Ezra sat down hard on a piece of collapsed rail, rebar still in one hand, and let himself feel, for exactly as long as it took to catch his breath, how much he wanted to be angry about that answer and how little energy he had left to spend on it.

Twenty-nine days left, by his count, though the System hadn't ticked the number down yet, still sitting stubborn on the panel above the ruined tunnel.

[Time Remaining: 29 Days, 21 Hours]

There it went.

He pushed himself back to his feet. Somewhere above him, six hours had probably already turned into five, and Rourke's containment team was probably already deciding what shape their sweep of Sublevel 4 was going to take, and Ezra Kade, three years the weakest man in the city, had just discovered that surviving the next twenty-nine days was going to mean choosing, over and over, between staying who he was and getting strong enough to stay alive at all.

He didn't know yet that those were supposed to be the same choice.

*Get moving,* Vaelgrith said. *You have somewhere to be before that Investigator decides patience is a virtue she doesn't have time for.*

Ezra climbed back toward the surface with a new Skill he hadn't asked for, three seconds of his own life he wasn't going to get back, and the first real proof that the voice in his head hadn't been lying about any of it.

The city was waiting for him when he came up, exactly as loud and exactly as indifferent as it had been six hours ago. Nobody up there knew yet that the weakest man in Meridian City had just stopped being weak.

Ezra intended to keep it that way for as long as he possibly could.