The five beasts hissed at once, and the sound bounced off the damp brick walls like steam escaping a cracked boiler.
I stopped ten paces from the coal heap, canvas shoes planted in the red rubble, the knife hanging at my thigh. My left arm swung loose. My knees weren't shaking, which surprised me. My stomach, on the other hand, had clenched into a hard, sour knot.
The rats didn't wait for an invitation.
With a dry rattle of black quills, three of them launched off the coal at once. They came in dark arcs through the gloom, red eyes flashing, bone-spiked tails whipping behind them, jaws gaping over two rows of yellow teeth strung with green-tinged spit.
For any ordinary kid from District 9, three eighty-pound vermin coming at your face at thirty miles an hour was the last thing you'd ever see. You'd blink, panic, swing wild, and be dead before your second step.
I didn't blink.
Time went thick and slow, like syrup. My new sense drew each rat's path as a thin, glowing line: the lead rat's hind leg pushing off the coal, the middle one leaning right to clear its packmate's tail, a single drop of saliva spinning off a front tooth.
Throat. Chest. Left thigh.
"Too slow," I muttered, and it unsettled me a little how calm I sounded.
I didn't jump back. I stepped in.
My weight slid onto my left foot and my center of gravity dropped beneath the lead rat's arc. It passed six inches over my shoulder, quills brushing my hair. I swung the knife up in a sharp diagonal.
SLASH.
The blade opened the soft skin under its jaw and kept going. Purple-black blood sprayed across the brick, warm where it spattered my wrist. The rat hit the floor with a wet thud, twitched twice, and went still.
I was already twisting my hips. The middle rat's jaws snapped shut on the air where my chest had been, close enough that I felt the breath of it. I whipped my left elbow around in a tight, short arc.
BANG.
It caught the rat in mid-air with a sound like a sledgehammer on a sack of wet grain. My bone density drove straight through its skull plate. The rat hit a brick pillar fifteen feet away hard enough to crack the masonry and slid to the base without moving.
The third rat landed beside my shoe, spun, and lunged for my calf, tail lashing at my ankle like a spear. I didn't bother with the knife. I lifted my foot and stamped down on its neck.
CRUNCH.
The tail slapped uselessly against my trouser leg, leaving a faint white scratch on the cloth. Then it hung limp.
Three seconds. Three dead rats.
There was no time to feel anything about it, because the fourth, the biggest, was already launching off the coal toward my face with its quills flared like an iron brush. I jabbed the knife at its chest.
CLANG.
Orange sparks sprayed across the dark. The blade hit the thick, calcified quill plate and stopped dead, and the shock of it jarred up my wrist into my elbow. Then the cheap iron snapped at the crossguard with a sharp, almost cheerful ping, and the tip spun off into the shadows.
"Well, crap," I said, looking at the stump in my hand. "Four credits, gone."
The big rat landed four feet away and glared at me with its one good eye, coiling to spring.
I dropped the hilt in the mud, made a fist with my bare right hand, and pulled my shoulder back.
Years of punch drills in the shelter courtyard. Years of knuckles split open on a training post, with Dugan's tired sigh somewhere in the back of my mind. I knew the form by heart. Feet shoulder-width. Weight from the back heel. Hips first, shoulders after, force through the elbow and out the front two knuckles. And all that time, no matter how perfect the form was, my sealed body had never managed to push more than twenty pounds into the impact pad.
Now there was no seal.
As the rat leaped, I drove my fist straight forward.
BOOM.
It didn't land like a fist hitting flesh. It landed like a piston firing inside an iron pipe.
The quills that had just broken my knife turned to black dust under my knuckles. The shockwave ran straight through the rat's ribs and launched the eighty-pound carcass thirty feet into an iron door, where it left a deep dent before sliding off into the sludge trough.
Silence, apart from the ragged breathing of the last creature on the coal heap.
I lowered my arm and looked at my knuckles. A little red where they'd struck the quills. No cuts. Not a drop of blood. My bones had treated needle-sharp spikes like straw.
"Four down," I whispered.
A deep, rumbling growl rolled down from the top of the heap.
The goblin stood up slowly on its short, bandy legs. It tossed the gnawed goat bone aside, and the bone clicked across the concrete. It looked at the four dead rats scattered over the floor, then turned its pointed ears toward me, and its face twisted into something halfway between confusion and pure fury.
It couldn't make sense of it. Four of its hounds, dead in ten seconds, at the hands of a scrawny kid in rags.
I almost felt sorry for it. Almost.
It screeched, a sound that went down every pipe in the chamber, and snatched up its weapon, the rusted steel axle-rod wrapped in iron wire. It hefted the hundred-pound bar over its head with both leathery, three-fingered hands and stepped down off the coal.
[TARGET LOCK: GOBLIN-CLASS QI BEAST (F-RANK HIGH-GRADE)]
[THREAT EVALUATION: REALM 1 LEVEL 5]
I ignored the prompt. My eyes stayed on the goblin's hips. Hips told you where a body was going before the arms did.
It didn't sneak. It charged straight down the center, feet stamping up clouds of red dust, and as it ran, a muddy orange glow oozed out of its skin and wrapped itself around the axle. Fire Qi, mixed with feral vitality, my sense told me. It was crude, and it was leaking half its energy into the air as waste. It still put a hundred pounds of iron behind a Level 5 swing, which was enough to flatten a safe.
At six feet, it swung the bar horizontally with everything it had.
WHOOOSH.
The bar came straight for my ribs. I wasn't stupid enough to block it. My bones were dense, but taking that hit would be a fast way to find out exactly how quickly I could heal, and I didn't want to pay for that information yet. I dropped onto my right knee, grit biting through my trousers, and the bar passed two inches over my head. The draft of it blew my hair back and carried a hot smell of singed iron and sour sweat.
The swing dragged its left shoulder out of line, and the soft, unarmored skin under its armpit lay open.
I came up off my knee and drove my left palm into it.
PAK.
Not a killing blow. But three hundred pounds of force hit the nerve cluster under the shoulder joint, and the goblin squealed. Its left hand lost the axle, and it staggered two steps sideways.
"Get back here," I growled.
Before it could recover, I stepped inside its reach, so close my chest almost brushed its shoulder and I could smell the burnt-hair stink of its hide. Its red eyes went wide. It tried to pull the bar back and use it as a short club, but there was no room. I was already inside its guard.
I took a deep, steady breath.
For the first time since the Celestial System had woken up in my room, I reached deliberately into the center of my chest, to that warm, harmonized place where Creation and Destruction lay twined together.
I didn't have a technique. I didn't know how to cast anything. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I took that raw Primordial Essence and flooded it down my right arm, locking elbow, shoulder, and hips into one unbroken line.
My fist drew back three inches from the goblin's breastbone.
Every repetition. Every hour of effort that nobody had ever seen. All of it, folded into three inches of air.
"This one's for every zero," I said quietly.
BOOM.
This time there was no impact to speak of. The Essence didn't stop at the goblin's body; it went off inside it. The orange Qi around its skin was torn away like tissue in a storm. Its leathery chest caved in three inches, and its ribs broke into pieces that tore through everything behind them. The goblin left its feet and flew twenty feet backward into the red brick wall, blasting a five-foot crater in the masonry. Bricks and bent girders rained down on top of it.
The axle clanged across the concrete and rolled into the trough with a dull splash.
Then quiet. Dust drifting down through the stale air. Under the rubble, the goblin lay still, its energy winking out like a candle dropped in water.
I stood there, arm still extended, fist still clenched.
Steam was rising off my forearm. My pulse was steady at fifty. My chest wasn't even heaving.
And then the strangest thing happened. My legs started to shake.
I sat down on a chunk of fallen brick before they could give out. My hands trembled. My breath came fast and shallow, the knot in my stomach finally let go, and for a few seconds I just sat there shaking, trying to remember how to be a person.
The goblin had been eating. That was all it had been doing when I walked in: sitting on a heap of coal with a goat bone, its dogs waiting for scraps. It hadn't wanted anything from me.
I'd walked in anyway. It had been Realm 1, Level 5, and I'd needed it to be.
"Okay," I said to the dark, and my voice wobbled. "Okay. That's... okay."
It didn't make it any less necessary. But it did make it real. I let myself sit with that for another thirty seconds, until my hands were still.
Then the Celestial System screen flared open three feet from my face, washing the drifting dust in gold-and-black light, and a bright chime rang out like coins pouring into an iron chest.
[COMBAT ENGAGEMENT CONCLUDED]
[TARGETS ELIMINATED:]
4x Void Rats (F-Rank Zero-Grade)
1x Goblin-Class Qi Beast (F-Rank High-Grade)
[RAW QI ABSORBED:]
Void Rats: 4 × 2.5 Qi Units = 10 Qi Units
Goblin-Class Qi Beast: 1 × 40 Qi Units = 40 Qi Units
[BASE QI TOTAL: 50 QI UNITS]
[TALENT TRIGGERED: PRIMORDIAL ECHO (10X MULTIPLIER)]
[50 QI UNITS × 10 = 500 SYSTEM POINTS BANKED]
[BONUS REWARD: FIRST BLOOD — ROYAL TRIAL]
[Slaying a higher-grade Qi beast prior to official path awakening unlocks maximum system store conversion rate.]
[BONUS POINTS AWARDED: +500 CELESTIAL POINTS]
[CURRENT CELESTIAL SYSTEM BANK BALANCE: 1,000 POINTS]
I stared at the number.
One thousand points. A few minutes of work in a ruined furnace. A man on the docks would have needed a lifetime of kills to scrape that much together. The four basic manuals together cost fifty-five. I could buy every one of them eighteen times over and still have change.
I let out a long, shaky breath, and a grin crept onto my face in spite of everything. It felt strange and tight, like a muscle I'd never used.
Somewhere back there, a boy named Adrian was supposed to report for the labor draft in a couple of hours. I thought about what Chen would say if I told him I'd earned a fortune in a sewer. I knew exactly what he'd say. Eat something first.
"One thousand points," I whispered, brushing a speck of brick dust off my sleeve. "Let's go shopping."