Leon stepped over the apartment's threshold slowly, almost noiselessly. He closed the door behind him and stood still for several long seconds, listening, sword angled slightly upward, ready to react to the smallest sound.
The silence was thick. Broken only by the soft hum of a refrigerator and the distant noise of the city, muffled through concrete walls.
He moved.
Methodical now, room by room, step by step. He checked behind doors, in alcoves, under the table, in the bathroom, then the small bedroom. Everywhere looked the same: clutter, clothes tossed aside, a chair knocked over, cabinets left open, as if someone had been desperately searching for something, or fleeing in a hurry.
Nothing moved.
No breathing. No shadows shifting. No silhouettes.
Only then did something click, and his gaze stalled on the front door.
"So…" he murmured. "It was them."
The two zombies on the stairwell. The residents of this apartment. People who'd sat here not long ago, eating dinner, talking about something painfully unimportant, then ran out into the hallway and never came back.
The thought didn't shock him anymore. It settled into him as a quiet, heavy sadness, deep enough that it didn't even demand an immediate reaction.
Once he was sure he hadn't missed anything, Leon locked the front door and scanned the entryway for something to barricade it. He ended up at a narrow wardrobe pressed against the wall. With effort, he dragged it across the floor until the wood creaked softly, wedging it against the door and sealing the entrance.
Only then did he let himself really look around.
The apartment was small, ordinary, living room with a kitchenette, a tiny bedroom, a bathroom. Simple furniture, no particular personality. The kind of quiet normality that had been standard a few hours ago.
Now it felt almost alien.
Leon walked into the living room and finally dropped onto the couch, heavy, as if his bones had decided they were done. He set his backpack on the floor. A long breath poured out of him, slow and ragged, like his body was only now allowing itself to understand how exhausted it was.
Everything hit him at once: the bus, blood, zombies, screaming, the woman in the pharmacy, the dog, the fights, the choices.
He leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling, at a small water stain near the corner, breathing slowly, trying not to think.
And failing.
He sighed again, deeper this time, then forced himself up, as if sitting still was suddenly too dangerous. He rested both hands on the sword, its tip lightly denting the floor panels, and lowered his head.
He remembered the first system message.
The one that had started it all.
"Status?" he said aloud, uncertain, but clear enough that the world could answer.
The air in front of him trembled, as if it thickened for a heartbeat. Then a familiar, semi-transparent window unfolded in midair, perfectly aligned with his gaze.
There was nothing fairy-tale "magical" about it.
It looked like a game interface.
Leon read slowly, line by line.
[STATUS WINDOW]
Name: Leon
Level: 3
Race: Human
Age: 21
Class: None
Title: None
Mana: 100 / 100
Strength (STR): 16 (+3)
Agility (AGI): 20 (+2)
Vitality (VIT): 17 (+1)
Intelligence (INT): 10
Free Stat Points: 8
[Equipment]
• Iron Short Sword (Normal Grade)
• Adaptive Combat Gloves (Normal Grade)
[Skills]
Active Skills:
• Darkness Manipulation (Phase One Skill) – Tier: Novice
Passive Skills:
• Cold Mind (Unclassified Skill) – Tier: Novice
Leon stared at the status window for a long moment, until the numbers stopped being abstract symbols and started to mean something. His eyes latched onto the three lines that mattered most.
Agility: 20.
Strength: 16.
Vitality: 17.
"Twenty…" he murmured.
Images from the past few hours replayed instantly: stepping ahead of a zombie's reaction on the stairs, slipping into their blind spots, landing clean head strikes, the lack of real danger where he'd expected desperate struggle.
"So…" he said under his breath.
He remembered those first system pop-ups, back on the bus, then the later kill notifications, the numbers climbing by one, sometimes several at a time.
A healthy, average twenty-one-year-old guy.
Someone like him, before today.
"Ten," he said out loud, like it was obvious. "I must've started with ten in everything."
He looked back at Agility.
Twenty.
"So I'm… twice as fast as the average person." His voice held no disbelief now, only cold calculation. "That explains why they looked like they were moving in slow motion."
His gaze dropped to Strength.
Sixteen.
"And that…" he added after a beat, "is like… one and a half people."
That fit too. The force of his blows. How easily the sword sank into skull. The fact he'd nearly split the mutant in half, something that would've sounded insane yesterday.
Only then did the parentheses catch his attention.
(+3) on Strength.
(+2) on Agility.
(+1) on Vitality.
"Wait…" he murmured, leaning closer.
He'd gotten so caught up in analysis that he forgot his own body, and the sword he'd been leaning on slipped from his hands. It hit the floor with a loud clack, louder than he wanted.
Leon crouched instinctively to grab it,
And froze mid-motion when he caught something in the corner of his eye.
Strength: 13.
The parentheses were gone.
"What the, " he whispered.
He straightened fast, locking onto the status window. His heart jumped, not from panic, but from sudden understanding still forming in his mind.
His Strength had dropped by exactly three points.
Exactly what the parentheses had shown.
He glanced down at the [Equipment] section.
The sword was still listed.
"So…" His brows drew together. "It's not enough that I own it."
He picked the sword up.
Instantly, a familiar message appeared.
[Equipment Equipped: Iron Short Sword]
[Strength +3]
The numbers returned.
Strength: 16 (+3)
Leon stood in absolute silence for several seconds. Then he exhaled slowly, feeling the puzzle pieces finally click into place.
"Ah," he said quietly. "So bonuses only work when the item is actually equipped."
Not just possessed.
"That makes sense," he added, weighing the sword in his hand. "Otherwise someone could carry a hundred items and stack bonuses from all of them."
He looked at the gloves on his hands, then back at the equipment list, then at his free stat points. He pulled the gloves off and checked again, watching Agility and Vitality drop, confirming his theory about the numbers in parentheses.
He nodded once, as if closing the case with himself.
"So the parentheses," he muttered, "are exactly how many stats I'm getting from equipped gear."
Simple. Logical. You just had to know where to look.
His eyes moved down to [Skills] and stopped at the clean split, active and passive, like the system assumed the user would understand it instinctively.
"Passive…" he thought. So they probably work all the time. No need to toggle them.
That tracked, especially with how Cold Mind had already saved him from falling apart more than once.
Then his eyes drifted up to his only active skill.
Darkness Manipulation.
Leon narrowed his eyes.
"…Shit." He smacked his forehead with an open palm. "I completely forgot about that."
He focused on the name, and after a second the description expanded automatically, letters sliding into place like the system had been waiting for the right amount of attention.
[Description: You can manipulate the basic form of darkness, an energy existing between light and absence. Allows limited shaping, suppression, and redirection of shadows and low-density dark energy. Effectiveness scales with Intelligence, Mana, and user imagination.]
Leon read it once. Then again.
"…between light and the lack of it," he repeated under his breath. "Yeah. Super helpful."
He scratched the back of his head, frustration mixing with genuine confusion.
"So what, I'm supposed to mold shadow like clay?" he muttered. "And what the hell does 'low-density' even mean?"
He didn't get to settle on any real conclusion before something else hit him, a sour, unpleasant smell that seemed to register only now. Leon wrinkled his nose and glanced around the room.
"What reeks in here…?"
He stopped mid-thought.
Looked down.
At his clothes, stiff with dried blood. Human blood. Zombie blood. That purple gunk from the wasp. The darker, almost black stuff from the mutant. His gloves, pants, shoes, everything soaked in the stink of fighting and death.
"…Oh," he said after a beat, grimacing. "That's probably me."
For a brief second, he found it absurd that in the middle of the apocalypse, his biggest problem in this exact moment was the fact that he smelled horrible.
Then his gaze drifted toward the bathroom door.
"Water," he muttered. "It's still running."
That was enough.
He grabbed the sword and headed for the bathroom, closing the apartment door behind him again on the way, like it would somehow make a difference. He set the weapon carefully against the wall within arm's reach, then started undressing, slowly, with a sigh of relief, like every piece of clothing he removed peeled off a layer of the day's weight.
He stepped into the shower and turned the water on.
Cold at first.
He twisted the knob further.
Warm water flowed.
Leon blinked, and a sincere, almost childlike, smile of relief broke across his face.
"…It works."
He stepped under the stream and let the hot water wash blood, sweat, and fear off his skin. Red and brown streaks swirled into the drain, and the tension in his muscles gradually began to loosen. He rested his forehead against cool tile and closed his eyes.
This might be one of the last showers like this, he thought, not panicked, just quietly realistic. Power, water… it'll probably be gone in a few days.
But as long as it lasted, he let himself have the luxury.
In a world that had just collapsed, a hot shower was a small, ridiculous victory.
After thirty minutes, the hot water finally died.
Leon stayed under the dwindling stream for a little longer anyway, palms pressed to the tile, exhaling with deep relief, like it was only now sinking in that, for a brief stretch of time, nothing was attacking him, nothing was screaming, nothing was trying to kill him.
He shut the water off, grabbed a towel, dried his hair and shoulders, pulled on boxers, and draped a second towel around his neck. For a moment he felt absurdly… normal. Like it was just an ordinary evening after a hard day, not the end of the world.
He stepped out into the kitchenette, adjusting the towel with one hand. And he even let out a soft, unconscious whistle, because his mind held one simple thought:
Food. Something warm. Something that could trick his brain for a minute and let him forget blood, swords, and system windows.
He took two steps.
Then stopped so abruptly it felt like he'd slammed into an invisible wall.
The sound died in his throat.
His eyes widened in pure, disbelieving shock as he looked toward the living room, right there beside the couch where he'd been sitting earlier.
A u nconscious woman lay on the floor.
And spread behind her across the apartment panels were long, black, feathered wings, so wide they nearly brushed the walls, so impossibly large they didn't belong in a cramped, ordinary apartment where silence had ruled only moments ago.
Leon didn't move.
His heart hit his ribs a beat late, and his mind scrambled for anything logical, hallucination, exhaustion, some effect of a skill, anything, but none of it held, because the wings were too real.
"What the fuck…?!" he blurted, his voice thick with sheer disbelief.