[University District, Cafeteria Supply Closet, Day 3 Post-Skyfall, Approximate Dawn]
Ren was starving.
Not the kind of starving you feel after skipping lunch. The kind that settles into your bones and starts chewing on them from the inside.
Three days. Three whole days since the sky decided it was done being blue.
The closet smelled like mold and old rice and something sour he couldn't identify. He had been smelling it so long it had become background noise, the way an alarm becomes background noise when you stop caring whether you live or die. The darkness was absolute, just a pale trembling ghost of fingers when he held his hand up in front of his face. The bread knife in his right hand had a sticky handle. His palm was sweating. Or bleeding. Hard to tell at this point.
Thump.
He pressed himself flat against the shelf. A can of something rolled off and hit the floor with a sound that felt like a gunshot.
'Shit shit shit shit'
The thumping beyond the door didn't stop. Slow, heavy, methodical. Whatever was out there moved like something that had never needed to rush, because nothing alive had ever successfully run from it.
Thirty seconds. A minute. The thumps faded.
He exhaled, then immediately winced, because even breathing required energy he didn't have.
His stomach cramped again. He pressed his free hand flat against it like he could physically push the hunger back down. It didn't work. It never worked.
Three days with nothing except two granola bars from somebody's abandoned bag on day one. He had eaten the second one yesterday morning and spent the rest of the day regretting it.
'I should've rationed. Should've been smarter. Should've done a thousand things.'
A notification had appeared on the first day. Blue, floating, cheerful in the way only automated things can be cheerful during a global catastrophe.
[Global System Online.]
[Survivors: 3,402,118,922]
He had swiped it away like spam. Still wasn't sure that had been the right call.
Everybody came out of the first twenty-four hours with something. He had heard them through the walls, through the vents, through the general screaming cacophony of a world in the middle of dying. Fire users. Ice users. People who had woken up able to bench press cars. One guy in the engineering hall, apparently, could speak to birds, which everybody agreed was useless, but at least it was something.
Ren had checked his status on day two, mostly out of desperation.
[Name: Ren]
[Class: Civilian]
[Level: 1]
[Skill: Gluttony (F-Rank)]
[Description: You can eat anything without getting sick.]
He had sat with that for a very long time.
'F-Rank,' he had thought, reading it again. 'F. As in failing. As in the system itself looked at me and went: this one gets the participation ribbon.'
Gluttony. The power to eat things and not die from it.
"Useless," he had said out loud, to nobody.
Today, three days in, his throat was dry enough to crack and the hunger had stopped feeling like hunger and started feeling personal, like his own body had decided to betray him first before the monsters outside got the chance.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Ren went completely still.
The sound came from the vent near the ceiling. Metal on metal, something with claws. He tracked it by ear alone, eyes fixed on the darkness above as the scratching got louder, closer, right overhead.
The grate came off. A flat metal clang against the floor, and something dropped.
It hit a sack of flour with a heavy, wet thud.
His first thought was 'rat.' His second thought, when his eyes adjusted enough to catch the shape of it in the thin thread of light under the door, was 'that is DEFINITELY not a rat.'
A rat does not weigh as much as a housecat. A rat does not have fur peeling off in patches like old wallpaper. A rat does not have eyes glowing the specific sick yellow of a dying fluorescent tube.
[Mutated Sewer Rat (Lvl 2)]
Blue text hung helpfully over the thing as it turned its head toward him.
It hissed.
'Right,' Ren thought. 'Right, okay.'
It jumped.
He swung the knife, blind, and screamed, which was embarrassing, except there was nobody left alive to hear it. The rat hit his forearm and its teeth sank through skin and stopped hard against the bone underneath. The pain that shot up his arm was the bright, nauseating kind that doesn't let you think, that whites everything out.
He stabbed it.
He stabbed it again.
Black blood hit his face, hot and thin, and it burned where it landed, actual chemical burn, acid-warm. He stabbed it a third time and a fourth until the thing stopped moving and went limp and heavy on his arm.
He pried its jaw open with shaking fingers and fell back against the shelves. The metal edge caught him hard between the shoulder blades. He was breathing like he had sprinted a full kilometer, ragged and too loud in the dark.
Blood soaked down his forearm, dripping off his fingers onto the concrete floor. The dizziness hit next, the specific swimming quality of blood loss stacked on top of three days of starvation, and he was very acutely aware that he might pass out right here.
[Warning: Health Critical.]
[Starvation Imminent.]
Then the hunger spoke.
Eat.
He had experienced hunger before. Student-budget hunger, forgot-to-eat-because-of-deadlines hunger. This was not that. This was a voice sitting directly behind his eyes, single syllable, no argument welcome.
Eat.
He looked at the rat.
It was still warm. He could feel the residual heat of it through his grip on its leg. It smelled like sewage and iron and something darker underneath, a rot-smell of mutation, of something that had been wrong for days before it died.
Ren did not want to eat it.
Ren did not want to die more.
He lifted the leg to his mouth. Bit down.
Rubber. Dirt. Copper. Something thick and chemical coating the back of his throat. He gagged, his whole body rejecting it on principle, and he swallowed anyway, jaw locked, eyes squeezed shut.
The [Gluttony (F-Rank)] skill did exactly one thing.
He did not throw up.
Then the fire started.
Heat poured through him like he had swallowed a lit match, racing from his stomach outward through every vein. His arm stopped hurting. He blinked, and the bite marks on his forearm were sealing, skin closing over itself in slow, visible increments, right in front of his eyes.
[Gluttony Activated.]
[Consumed: Mutated Sewer Rat.]
[Agility +1]
[New Passive: Night Vision]
The closet was not dark anymore.
Everything was grey, sharp-edged, every shelf and can and fallen grate outlined in perfect clarity, the way the world looks through a camera with the contrast cranked all the way up. He could see the blood on his hands. He could see the rat, half-eaten, limp against the flour sack. He could see his own reflection in the flat metal side of a mixing bowl on the bottom shelf.
He looked insane.
He picked the knife back up off the floor. His grip was steady now, steadier than it had been in three days. The thumping beyond the door had returned, slow and rhythmic, that same patient unhurried gait.
His stomach growled.
He stood up, pressed his ear to the cold metal door for one second, and wrapped his fingers around the handle.