The notification is still there.
I pull it back up and read it a third time, standing at the window with the wrong-colored sky in front of me, and the city has stopped moving below. I read it slowly this time, like slower is going to change what it says.
Weapon Mancer. I don't know what that is. Not a class I've ever heard of, not in any game I've played, not in any context that would explain why it's appearing in my actual vision on an actual Tuesday morning in my actual life.
SSS Rank. I don't know what that means either. I don't know how many letters the ranking system runs, don't know where SSS sits relative to anything else, don't know if that's good or bad or neutral.
Summon and wield any weapon held for five or more seconds. That one I understand as a sentence. As a real thing, as a thing that applies to me, a person who is currently standing in a nearly empty apartment — I understand it the way you understand a word in a foreign language you've only just encountered. The meaning is there, but it hasn't landed yet.
I look at my hands. Both present. Both empty.
I look around the apartment. Mattress. Charger at its specific angle against the baseboard. Two plates and crackers.
No weapons. I have never owned a weapon. I have never been a person for whom weapon ownership was on the table as a concept. I am a person who has a notification floating in his vision assigning him a class called Weapon Mancer, and I own zero weapons, and the first objective is to survive a test that has not yet been defined.
I look back at the clouds.
They're darker than they were sixty seconds ago. More uniform. The color is completely wrong now.
Then the sound.
It isn't loud. That's the thing — it isn't the volume that registers first. It's the frequency. Something below hearing, something the body catches before the ears do, a vibration that starts with your teeth and moves down the spine like a message being delivered to the skeleton directly. I grab the window frame without deciding to. My knuckles tense in my grip.
Then the first crack appears in the sky.
One line. Hairline thin, running east to west across my entire field of view like someone drew it with a ruler, like someone on the other side pressed a thumbnail into a surface and scored it. It doesn't spread immediately. It just sits there, a line across the sky like the sky is a surface that could be drawn on.
I stare at it.
Then the second crack.
Then the third, branching off the second at an angle, and a fourth off the third, and then they're multiplying — not fast, not slow, at the particular deliberate pace of something that isn't in a hurry because it doesn't need to be. The sky fractures the way a windshield fractures when a rock hits center and the damage moves outward in every direction at once, unhurried, inevitable, the cracks finding each other and branching and finding each other again until the entire sky above my city is a web of lines.
And through the cracks — light.
Not sunlight. Not anything I have a word for. Something older than sunlight, colder, a light that has no color in any part of the spectrum I can name and no source I can locate and no business being in the sky above my apartment building on what was supposed to be an ordinary Tuesday. It bleeds through the fractures and sits in them like it was already there, waiting for the opening.
I watch it. My brain hasn't caught up to my eyes yet.
The sky is cracking, I think. The sky is cracking open and there is light coming through it that shouldn't exist, and I have a notification in my vision that appeared before the sky started cracking and said survive the test.
I let that sit for a moment.
Okay, I think.
Okay.
Then a voice.
No source. Not from outside the window, not from my phone on the counter, not from any direction I can turn toward to face it. It comes from everywhere and more specifically from nowhere — from the room, from the air inside the room, from somewhere inside my chest where it resonates like a second heartbeat that has decided, just now, to start making words.
Not loud. Not commanding. Just enormous, in the way that things are enormous when they aren't trying to be:
"To all who inhabit this world. You have been selected for integration into the Eternal Lattice. Those who survive the next twenty-four hours shall transcend into the Realm of Enchantment. The test begins now."
Silence.
A full beat of it. The kind that follows something that can't be recalled. The kind the world takes before it decides what to do next.
Then, three blocks east, someone starts screaming.
Then someone else. Then more, layering on top of each other, coming from below my window and further east and somewhere to the north, and then the car alarms start — three, four, half a dozen triggering in sequence like a chain of dominoes tipping over one by one. And then under all of it, threading through it, a sound that isn't screaming and isn't any alarm I know. Lower than both. Wetter than both. Something that does not come from a human throat or any machine I've ever heard.
I don't move from the window.
The cracked sky bleeds its impossible light. The city below makes sounds it has never made before. I stand at the window and watch.
Twenty-four hours, I think. Survive.
I look at the notification still sitting patient at the edge of my vision. Weapon Bench: 0/1. I look at my hands.
I need a weapon.
My phone turns on by itself.
It was off — fully off, not sleeping, off — and it turns on. The screen lights up, and the emergency broadcast overrides everything, no notification, no prompt, just the feed opening directly to a news desk and a live camera that isn't entirely steady.
The anchor gets ten seconds.
The suit is right, the posture is right, the expression is the particular practiced neutral of someone who has trained to sit in front of a camera and deliver bad news without becoming part of the story. Ten seconds of that.
Then something off-screen falls. Someone shouts — not the anchor, someone behind the camera. The frame shifts. The anchor's eyes move and don't come back, and when they look down at whatever is in front of them and start reading again, the voice is no longer neutral at all; it is just a person talking as fast as they can to as many people as they can reach while they still can:
"—the sky has opened, and beasts are flying out. I repeat — beasts are flying out of the sky. Authorities are — we are being told — please, whatever you — do whatever you can to survive. Please just survive. We are — I repeat, beasts are —"
Feed cuts.
Static, two seconds.
Then the screen goes dark. Not off — dark, the way screens go dark when the signal is gone, and the device is still on and doesn't know what else to show.
I look at it for a moment.
Then I look up.
Two blocks north, something large drops through one of the cracks.
It falls without slowing — not gliding, not flying, dropping the way things drop when they've been released. When it hits the street, the impact carries through the city, through the building, through the floor, up through the soles of my feet, and into my legs. A block of sound and force that my body receives before my ears catch up to it.
Further east, another one.
Further south, a third.
The screaming below has changed. That's the thing I notice — not that there's more of it, but that it's changed character. It isn't panic anymore. Panic is still arguing with what it's seeing, still contains a question, still believes on some level that there's an explanation that will resolve this. What I'm hearing now is what comes after that. The thing the body does when it stops arguing and starts simply responding.
I look at the city. I look at the fractured sky, the light bleeding through it, the shapes still falling.
I look at the notification sitting patient at the edge of my vision — Weapon Bench: 0/1 — and I think about the dream I woke up from less than half an hour ago. The sword was already in my hands. The weight of it, the hum, the way my arms didn't strain at all. The throw, both hands, everything behind it, the letting go. The line I delivered like a man who had never once been uncertain about a single thing.
I look at my empty apartment.
The mattress on the floor. The charger is at its special angle.
I look at the sky one more time. Through the cracks, the light. Through the light, shapes moving that weren't there a minute ago.
And the question that has been sitting at the back of everything since the alarm went off and the dream dissolved.
Was that a dream —
— or a vision?
I pick up my phone off the counter. I walk into the kitchen.
I need to find something to hold for five seconds.