[University Campus, Main Cafeteria Kitchen, Day 3 Post-Skyfall, Approximate Dawn]
The world looked different now.
Not better. Just different.
Everything the Night Vision touched came back in grey, sharp and flat at once, like the world had been photocopied and handed back to him with no explanation. He could see the individual motes of dust drifting in the air where he had opened the closet door. He could see the grain of the tile floor. He could see the blood.
There was a lot of blood.
It covered the kitchen floor in wide, dried streaks, tracking from the prep station to the industrial sinks and back again, like someone had been dragged and had put up a fight and lost both arguments. The counters had it too. Splattered arcs of it, dark as engine oil in the grey filter of his new vision, climbing the cabinet doors and the exhaust hood above the stoves. The stench hit him a full second after the visual did. Iron and copper up front, the clean sharp bite of it, then underneath that something heavier and sweet-rotten, the smell of things that had been opened that were never meant to be opened.
Three students were on the floor against the far wall. One teacher, face down, hands still curled around the strap of a bag she had never gotten to leave with.
Ren walked carefully and did not look at them any longer than he had to.
He moved past the prep station, stepping over a toppled pot, and stopped at the narrow window cut into the wall separating the kitchen from the dining hall.
Three of them.
[Mutated Student (Lvl 3)]
[Mutated Student (Lvl 2)]
[Mutated Student (Lvl 2)]
They were crouched around something on the floor near the far row of tables. A security guard, based on the uniform, or what remained of it. The sounds they were making were wet and rhythmic and patient.
'Okay,' Ren thought. 'Three. That's three. I have a bread knife and some newly acquired rat agility. This is fine.'
Then the Level 3 looked up.
Ren had known Brad since freshman orientation. Brad was the kind of person who had peaked so early and so thoroughly that his entire identity had calcified around it by the time he was nineteen. Six foot three, shoulders built like load-bearing walls, the varsity jacket from the university football team he wore even in summer, Newton U in cracking blue letters across the back. Dark brown hair kept short the way athletes keep it, because a haircut is an inconvenience and Brad did not do inconveniences. His face, before all of this, had been the kind of conventionally decent-looking that ugly people resent and pretty people find boring, with a jaw that sat square and permanent and eyes that always seemed to be calculating whether you were worth the effort of a comment.
The mutation had taken the left side of that face.
The cheekbone had collapsed inward, or outward, or in some direction that cheekbones were not architecturally designed to go, leaving a wet hollow where the skin had torn and not healed right. His jaw hung at an angle, the left hinge gone completely, tendons visible in the gap like suspension cables on a damaged bridge. The varsity jacket was split at both shoulders, the seams blown out by whatever the mutation had done to the mass of him. His hands, on the floor, were wrong in the knuckles, joints thickened and reversed.
But his right eye.
His right eye was exactly the same.
Mean and immediate and already recognizing Ren from across the room with the specific satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for a target.
'I know that smell. I know that face. Small. Weak. Mine.'
Brad roared.
It came out of the broken jaw like metal tearing, not a human sound, nothing close to a human sound, and Ren was already moving before the noise finished, his hand sweeping the counter beside him and closing around the handle of a boning knife, long-bladed and cold.
Brad crossed the dining hall fast. Too fast for that size, the mutation had done something ugly and efficient to his legs, and his footsteps hit the floor like dropped weight.
Ren ducked left. The fist came over his shoulder and hit the edge of the counter hard enough to dent the stainless steel.
He drove the boning knife into Brad's shoulder.
Felt it hit the scapula and stop dead.
'Oh no.'
"Crap," he said out loud.
Brad's arm wrapped around him before he could let go of the knife. The grip was absolute, the kind of grip that doesn't negotiate, and Ren's feet left the floor by a couple of inches as Brad dragged him in close. The smell hit him like a physical thing, rotten meat and something chemical underneath, a wrongness in the air Brad was breathing out of the hanging ruins of his jaw.
[Strength Check Failed.]
'Yeah, obviously.'
He couldn't break it. Couldn't twist out of it. Brad's arm was a locked bar across his back, and the more Ren pushed the tighter it got.
So he stopped pushing and drove his knee up instead.
It did not hurt Brad. Nothing behind those mean yellow eyes suggested Brad even fully processed the impact. But the mechanics of it worked, the force of it rocked his centre of gravity backward, and his grip stuttered for half a second.
Ren hit the floor. He landed hard on his palms and one knee, and his right hand immediately found the base of the industrial stove and the heavy black shape sitting on the back burner.
Cast iron. The good thick kind, heavy enough to require both hands under normal circumstances.
Brad lunged.
Ren came up swinging.
The CLANG of it rang off every surface in the kitchen, a sound with real weight behind it, and Brad's head snapped sideways at a angle that skulls did not naturally achieve while still attached to living things. He dropped. Six foot three and all of that wrong dense mass, he hit the kitchen floor like something thrown from a height.
He was twitching.
Ren hit him again.
And again, the cast iron coming down with both hands, the impact travelling up his wrists and into his elbows.
Smash.
Smash.
The twitching stopped.
[Target Neutralized.]
[Level Up! You are Level 2.]
Ren sat back on his heels. His chest was heaving. Both hands were black with blood up to the wrists, and the cast iron skillet had a dent in it now that had not been there before. He waited for something to show up in his chest. Guilt. Grief. Some recognition of the fact that Brad had been, technically, a person he knew.
Nothing came.
What came instead was the notification.
[High Quality Biomass Detected.]
He looked at Brad's shoulder, where the boning knife was still buried to the hilt. The muscle visible around the blade was dense, the kind of build that Brad had spent years assembling in the campus gym.
Ren gripped the handle and pulled.
The knife came free with a wet resistance that would have bothered him three days ago. A thick chunk of deltoid muscle came with it, hanging off the blade.
"You were always a jerk," Ren said.
He ate the meat.
It tasted sharp and sour, citrus-wrong, lemon rind and something metallic underneath. His stomach took it without complaint. The [Gluttony] passive sat quietly in the background and let it happen.
[Gluttony Activated.]
[Consumed: Mutated Student (Lvl 3).]
[Strength +3]
[New Skill: Dash.]
The power arrived the way the rat's agility had arrived, sudden and total, heat pouring through muscle from the inside out. His arms felt different. Not just strong, dense, like something had been poured into the spaces between things and allowed to set. He stood up to his full height and felt the floor differently under his feet.
The other two had stopped eating the guard.
They were staring at him.
They were not moving.
Something old and animal in their expressions had picked up on the calculus of the moment, the dead Level 3 on the floor, the smell of Brad's blood on this small standing figure, the flat hungry expression on a face that was not afraid of them.
Ren picked the boning knife up off the floor, wiped the flat of the blade against his jeans, and smiled, his teeth dark with blood, his Night Vision painting the whole dining hall in perfect grey clarity.
He takes his first step toward them.