The Camry had been making a knocking sound for three weeks. Nate told the woman it was her timing chain, showed her where the guides had worn down, explained that if she kept driving it like this the engine would eat itself within a month. She'd nodded along, asked how much, and when he said eighteen hundred she'd gone pale and asked if there was anything cheaper.

  There was always something cheaper. A bottle of thicker oil to quiet the knock. A prayer. Ignorance.

  She drove off with the thicker oil. Nate watched the Camry rattle out of the lot and thought about how many of those he'd see come back on a tow truck. Half, maybe. The other half would just disappear—sold, scrapped, abandoned on the side of some highway when the engine finally seized.

  "Rowe." Dale's voice from the office. "You got a F-150 coming in twenty minutes. Brake job."

  "Yeah."

  Nate wiped his hands on a rag that was already black and walked back into the shop. Three bays, two lifts, one of which had been making a grinding sound for a month. Henderson's Auto Repair, family owned since 1986, which really meant Dale owned it and everyone else just worked there.

  The shop smelled like oil and rubber and the faint chemical bite of brake cleaner. Nate had stopped noticing it years ago. Same way he'd stopped noticing the ache in his knees when he stood too long, the way his left one clicked when he took stairs, the dull stiffness every morning that took twenty minutes to walk off.

  He was twenty-seven. His knees belonged to a man twice his age.

  The F-150 showed up early. Nate put it on the lift, pulled the wheels, and started working. Brake jobs were easy. Mindless. He could do them in his sleep, and sometimes it felt like he did—hours sliding past in a haze of rotors and pads and torque specs.

  He was torquing down the last lug nut when the sky cracked open.

  No sound. No warning. Just a flash of light so bright it turned the world white, and then the pressure hit—a weight behind his eyes, in his temples, at the base of his skull. Like the air itself had become solid.

  The lift died. The lights died. The radio that had been playing classic rock in the corner went silent mid-song.

  Nate grabbed the workbench as his vision swam. Somewhere outside, he heard the crash of metal on metal—cars colliding, engines failing, everything with a circuit board dying at once.

  Then a voice spoke inside his head.

  SYSTEM INITIALIZATION BEGINNING.

  PLEASE STAND BY.

  The world went black.

  He woke up on the concrete floor of the shop.

  The first thing he noticed was the screaming.

  It was coming from outside—not one voice, but dozens, a chorus of panic and terror that cut through the silence where engine noise used to be. The second thing he noticed was that the ache in his knees was gone.

  Not dulled. Not managed. Gone. Like someone had reached into his joints and pulled out six years of accumulated damage. He flexed his left leg, waiting for the click.

  Nothing.

  He stood up slowly, not trusting it. No stiffness. No grinding. His body felt like it had when he was twenty-one, before the surgery he couldn't afford, before he'd had to walk away from the only thing he'd ever been good at.

  That couldn't be right. Damage like his didn't just disappear.

  A crash from outside. More screaming. Something that sounded like a roar.

  Nate moved to the bay door and looked out.

  The sky was wrong.

  Cracks ran through it like shattered glass—massive fissures stretching from horizon to horizon, and through them he could see something else. Other skies. A blood-red expanse in one fracture. A void filled with distant stars in another. A sickly green haze in a third. The blue of Earth's atmosphere was still there, but it was broken now, split open, revealing glimpses of places that shouldn't exist.

  The sky looked like a window into a dozen different worlds, all of them pressing against the glass.

  The street was chaos. Cars sat dead where they'd rolled to a stop, some crashed into poles or each other, drivers stumbling out looking dazed. A plane—a commercial airliner—had come down somewhere to the east, a pillar of black smoke rising from behind the strip mall. People were running, but they weren't running from the crashes.

  They were running from the things hunting them.

  The creature was the size of a large dog, but wrong in every proportion. Too many teeth. Joints that bent the wrong way. It had a man pinned against a dead SUV and was tearing into him while he screamed.

  Nate's stomach lurched. His hands closed into fists.

  A blue screen flickered into existence in front of him, translucent, floating in the air like something out of a video game.

  WELCOME TO THE SYSTEM

  The integration of Earth into the Multiversal Framework has begun.

  All biological damage incurred prior to initialization has been repaired.

  All technology incompatible with the System has been disabled.

  You have been granted a status. You have been granted potential.

  What you do with it is up to you.

  STATUS:

  Name: Nate Rowe

  Stolen story; please report.

  Level: 1

  Grade: F

  Class: None

  Stats:

  Strength: F

  Speed: F

  Durability: F

  Perception: F

  Willpower: F

  Skills: None

  The man by the SUV stopped screaming.

  Nate read the words again. All biological damage incurred prior to initialization has been repaired. His knees. That's why his knees didn't hurt. Whatever this was—whatever had just happened to the world—it had fixed him.

  He didn't know how to feel about that.

  He looked around the shop. His eyes landed on a breaker bar—three feet of solid steel, meant for loosening rusted bolts. He picked it up. It wasn't a weapon, but it was heavy, and right now heavy was better than nothing.

  He walked out into the end of the world.

  The creature was still feeding when Nate got close. It heard him coming—ears swiveling, head snapping up, muzzle dark and wet. A tag floated above it like a name in a video game.

  [Feral Hound — Level 2]

  It lunged.

  Six years since Nate had been in a real fight. Six years of rust and regret and bad knees and worse decisions. But his body remembered. His body had never forgotten.

  He slipped left, letting the hound's jaws snap past his shoulder, and brought the breaker bar down on its spine. The impact shuddered up his arms. The hound hit the asphalt, legs scrambling, trying to rise.

  Nate didn't let it.

  Three more swings. The last one caved in its skull.

  [Feral Hound] defeated.

  Experience gained.

  He stood over the body, breathing hard. Not from exhaustion. From something else—something that felt uncomfortably like excitement. The man by the SUV was dead, throat gone, eyes staring at nothing. Nate didn't know him. Couldn't have saved him.

  But he'd killed the thing that did it.

  His hands were shaking. He told himself it was adrenaline.

  Down the street, a woman had climbed onto the roof of a dead minivan. Two more hounds circled below, snarling, jumping, claws scraping against metal. She was screaming for help. No one was coming.

  Nate ran.

  His knees didn't hurt. His legs felt like springs, like coiled potential, like the body he'd lost and mourned and tried to forget. He closed the distance in seconds and swung the breaker bar into the first hound's ribs before it knew he was there.

  It went down. The second one turned, lunged.

  Nate stepped into it. Not away—into. He met the hound with a knee, his left knee, the one that had ended everything, driving it into the creature's chest as it leaped. The impact was clean. Perfect. The hound folded around his leg and hit the ground wheezing.

  He finished it with the bar.

  [Feral Hound] defeated.

  [Feral Hound] defeated.

  Experience gained.

  Level Up! Level 1 → Level 2

  Something rushed through him at the notification. A warmth spreading through his muscles, his bones, like his body was being rewritten from the inside. It faded after a few seconds, but he felt different. Stronger. Not by much, but enough to notice.

  The woman climbed down from the minivan, shaking.

  "Oh god. Oh god, oh god. What—what are those things? What's happening?"

  "I don't know." Nate scanned the street. More shapes moving in the distance. More screams from other blocks. The cracked sky pulsed overhead, light bleeding through the fissures from whatever lay beyond. "Get inside somewhere. Find other people. Stay off the streets."

  "My phone doesn't work. Nothing works. I can't call anyone, I can't—"

  "I know. Go."

  She ran toward a strip mall where other survivors were gathering, pressing against the glass doors of a grocery store. Safety in numbers. It made sense. It was the smart thing to do.

  Nate looked the other direction.

  A tower had risen from the ground three blocks away. Jet black, maybe a hundred feet tall, like it had always been there and the world had just now decided to show it. Above it, the cracked sky pulsed faintly—the fissures widening and narrowing like something on the other side was breathing. As he watched, another tower punched up from the earth in the distance—he felt the tremor through the soles of his boots.

  A notification appeared:

  TUTORIAL QUEST AVAILABLE

  Enter a System Tower and complete the first floor.

  Reward: Class Selection

  Class. He didn't know what that meant exactly. But the word sat in his chest like a hook, pulling at something he'd tried to bury a long time ago.

  He should go to the grocery store. Find other survivors. Figure out what was happening. Wait for someone with answers—the government, the military, anyone.

  But the tower was right there. And his knees didn't hurt anymore.

  Nate started walking.

  The streets were a graveyard of dead vehicles. He passed a city bus, doors open, passengers fled or dead. A pickup truck wrapped around a telephone pole, the driver slumped over the wheel—breathing, but not waking up. The System had healed bodies, but it hadn't woken everyone at the same time. Some people were still unconscious, helpless, waiting for the hounds to find them.

  He should help. He should wake them up, get them to safety, do something.

  He kept walking toward the tower.

  What was wrong with him?

  A hound emerged from an alley ahead, and Nate killed it without slowing down. Two more swings, clean and efficient. The notification flashed—experience gained—and he barely noticed. His eyes were on the tower.

  It pulled at him. That was the only way to describe it. Like gravity, like hunger, like the feeling he used to get before a fight when the adrenaline hit and everything else fell away. He'd thought he'd forgotten that feeling. Turns out he'd just been waiting for a reason to feel it again.

  That scared him.

  It scared him that people were dying around him and he was walking toward a black tower full of monsters. It scared him that his hands had stopped shaking. It scared him that some part of him—a part he didn't want to look at too closely—was glad this was happening.

  Six years ago, his body had broken, and he'd told himself it was fine. He'd told himself he could live a normal life, work a normal job, be a normal person. And he had. He'd done it. Six years of oil changes and brake jobs and watching fights on TV instead of being in them.

  Six years of pretending he didn't miss it every single day.

  Now the world was ending, and all he could think was: finally.

  What kind of person thought that?

  The tower loomed ahead. The crowd around its base had grown—maybe forty or fifty people now, most of them hanging back, watching, arguing. A few had weapons. Baseball bats, kitchen knives, a golf club. They looked terrified.

  Nate didn't feel terrified. He felt awake. More awake than he'd been in years.

  That was the scariest part.

  He pushed through the crowd. The entrance was a doorway of pure darkness, cut into the black stone like a wound. No light penetrated it. No sound came from inside. It was just... nothing. An absence where a door should be.

  "Hey." A hand on his arm. Young guy, maybe twenty-two, holding a tire iron. Scared eyes, but he hadn't run. "You don't want to go in there alone, man. We should wait. Figure out what's happening first. I can't even my sister right now..."

  Nate looked at him. Then at the doorway. Then at his own hands—calloused, scarred, still faintly greasy from the brake job.

  He thought about the Camry with the bad timing chain. The woman who couldn't afford to fix it. The life he'd been living, day after day, pretending it was enough.

  He thought about his knees. The pop when his left one went. The eight months of hoping he could still make it work. The moment he finally admitted it was over.

  He thought about the hounds, and the way his body had remembered what to do. The way it had felt like coming home.

  "I'm not waiting," he said.

  He pulled his arm free and stepped into the darkness.