The fountain cracked first.

  A sound like a gunshot, and the concrete basin split along a seam that hadn't existed ten seconds ago. Water surged through the gap, pooling on the path, and the pool darkened to something that wasn't water anymore. Thick. Iridescent. It smelled like hot copper and something underneath that had no name. Moving against gravity, climbing the edges of the crack like it was looking for a way up.

  Jack was running before the first shape pushed through.

  The couple on the blanket was closest. The woman had her phone out, filming the fountain, because of course she was. Jack grabbed the man's arm and hauled him sideways and the man swore and dropped his beer and the woman said "What the fuck" and Jack said "Move" and shoved them both toward the tree line. They stumbled. They went.

  Behind them, the dark pool birthed something.

  It came through wet. Gray-skinned, low to the ground, built like a dog that had been taken apart and reassembled by someone who'd only heard dogs described. Four legs but jointed wrong, bending outward at angles that made the eye slide off. A head that was mostly mouth. No eyes that Jack could see. The thing dragged itself onto the path, shook mana-slick fluid from its back, and oriented on the nearest sound.

  The woman with the stroller.

  She hadn't moved. She was standing on the gravel loop exactly where she'd been when the sky changed, one hand on the stroller, the other still holding her phone to her ear. Her mouth was open but nothing was coming out. The baby was screaming.

  Jack covered thirty yards in a dead sprint that left his lungs burning and his hamstrings on fire. Ten years of Vanguard conditioning told his legs to eat that distance in under two seconds. His legs told his conditioning to go to hell. He got there in six, which was enough because the creature was still orienting, pulling itself free of the spawn pool, trying to learn how to use a body it hadn't owned fifteen seconds ago.

  He hit it from the side with the knife. The blade went into the thing's neck where a dog's throat would be, if dogs had necks made of something between cartilage and wet rubber. The creature shrieked, a sound that had no business coming out of a living thing, and whipped its head around. Jack's grip slipped. The knife stayed in. His hand came away slick with fluid that wasn't blood.

  The stroller was right there. He grabbed it and pushed it toward the woman. "Run. Trees. Now." She ran. He turned back to the creature.

  It had pulled the knife out with its mouth and was chewing on it. Four inches of drop-point steel, the blade he'd sharpened at his kitchen table twelve hours ago, being worked between rows of teeth that went back further than the head should have allowed. The creature dropped the ruined knife, crouched, and lunged.

  Jack sidestepped. Barely. The thing's jaws clipped his hip and the pain was white and instant. He grabbed a fistful of loose skin behind its head and pulled it off-balance, using its own momentum the way he'd been trained to use a Skitterer's charge. Except Skitterers weighed three hundred pounds and had predictable attack patterns and he'd fought them with forty points of Strength behind every grip. This creature weighed maybe sixty and moved like water through a broken pipe and his fingers could barely hold on.

  It twisted free. Jack kicked it, a graceless stomp that connected with the thing's ribcage and earned him another half-second. He scanned the ground. The ruined knife. A chunk of fountain concrete. A park bench bolted to a slab.

  The concrete chunk was closest. He picked it up, heavy as a cinder block, and when the creature lunged again he brought it down on the back of its skull with both hands and everything his pre-system body could generate. The chunk shattered. The creature dropped. Its legs kicked twice, spasmed, and went still.

  Jack stood over it, breathing in ragged pulls that tasted like copper. His hip was bleeding and his right hand wouldn't stop shaking. The whole fight had taken maybe twenty seconds.

  In the first timeline, he'd watched six people die to a single one of these things in the first hour. He'd learned later they were called Grubhounds, Tier 0 spawn-pool predators, barely worth experience once you had a class. For an unawakened human with no system access, they were a coin flip between living and dying.

  Two more spawn points were opening across the park. Dark pools forming, one in the drainage grate near the east path, one in the shadow beneath a cluster of playground equipment. The shadows there had gone liquid and wrong, deeper than the structures above them could account for.

  "Everyone off the concrete!" Jack shouted it loud enough that his voice cracked. "Get away from water. Puddles, drains, fountains, anything wet. Get to the grass, get to the trees, stay off the paths."

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Some people listened. The teenagers bolted for the tree line, two of them dragging the third who'd frozen in place. The man who'd been reading the paperback stood up from his bench and walked, with eerie composure, toward the east exit. He didn't make it. The drainage grate spawn was faster than the fountain's.

  Jack got there too late. The creature was already on the man's leg, teeth sunk into his calf, shaking him the way a terrier shakes a rat. The man wasn't screaming. He was making a sound worse than screaming, a low continuous moan that meant shock was already setting in.

  Jack grabbed the thing by its hindquarters and wrenched it sideways. Skin tore. The man's or the creature's, he didn't stop to check. He swung the Grubhound into the iron bench frame, once, twice, and on the second impact the creature went limp. He dropped it and went to the man.

  The calf was bad. Deep punctures, muscle visible. The man's eyes were glassy. Jack pulled off his flannel shirt, wrapped it around the wound, and tied it tight enough that the man gasped. "Keep pressure on this. Don't take it off. What's your name?"

  "Marvin," the man said. His voice was thin and far away.

  "Marvin. You're going to be fine. But you have to move." Jack pulled him up. Marvin weighed more than he looked. Jack got him vertical and pointed him at the tree line. "Walk. Don't stop."

  The third spawn point was active now. Two Grubhounds pulling themselves from the shadow beneath the playground slide. A mother had her child in her arms, backing away, tripping over the rubber matting. Jack sprinted toward them and his hip screamed and his lungs told him he'd been sprinting too much in a body that hadn't run a mile in years. He ignored all of it.

  Somewhere behind him, someone was shouting about the blue boxes. Asking what to press, what to accept. A voice Jack didn't recognize yelled, "I picked one! I picked the first one!"

  Jack killed the two playground Grubhounds with a piece of rebar he pulled from a construction barrier at the park's edge. It took longer than the first. His arms were shaking by the end of it. The mother and child were gone, fled to wherever people flee when the world stops making sense.

  He leaned on the rebar and counted. Four dead. Three spawn points closed. The dark pools were already evaporating, leaving stains on the concrete that looked like oil slicks in shapes that hurt to focus on. The park was mostly empty now. The people who could run had run. The people who couldn't were clustered in a loose, terrified knot near the tree line on the south side.

  Jack walked toward them. He was bleeding from his hip, from a scrape on his forearm he didn't remember getting, from a split knuckle on his left hand. His undershirt was soaked with sweat. He had no knife, no shirt, and thirty inches of steel bar.

  Twelve people. The couple from the blanket. The three teenagers. Marvin, sitting against a tree with Jack's flannel pressed to his leg. A woman in scrubs who was already helping Marvin, which meant she was medical, which meant Jack had just gotten very lucky. A heavyset man in a delivery uniform holding a tire iron he'd gotten from somewhere. Two women who looked like they'd been jogging together, matching shoes, matching terror. A man in his fifties with wire-rimmed glasses and a laptop bag still over his shoulder, standing perfectly still, staring at something in front of his face that nobody else could see.

  And a woman standing slightly apart from the rest. Mid-thirties. Dark hair pulled back. Arms at her sides, not crossed, not clasped. Her blue box hung in front of her untouched. She wasn't watching the dead Grubhound or the fountain or the people around her. She was watching Jack.

  "Is everyone here?" The words came out steadier than he'd expected. "Anyone still out in the open?"

  One of the teenagers pointed toward the east path. "There was a guy over there. Older. He went down when the---when the thing came out of the drain."

  "That's Marvin. He's here." Jack looked at the group. They looked back at him the way drowning people look at a piece of floating wood. "Listen to me. I know none of this makes sense. But more of those things are coming and we have maybe twenty minutes before the next wave, and I need you to do exactly what I say."

  The man in the delivery uniform said, "Who the hell are you?"

  "The guy who just killed four of those things. That's who I am right now." His hip chose that moment to remind him it was still open, a hot pulse that made his vision swim for half a second. He locked his knees and kept talking. Pointed at the blue boxes hovering in front of each of them. "Those prompts are going to offer you a class. Do not accept the first option. Scroll. Look at everything. If you can't figure out what the options mean, ask me before you pick."

  "How do you know what---"

  "I play a lot of games," Jack said. The lie came out flat and fast. "This looks like a system integration event. RPG mechanics. If I'm right, class selection is permanent and the default option is always the worst one. Don't take it."

  The man with the laptop bag hadn't moved. His finger was hovering in the air in front of him, tapping at something invisible. "Too late," he said quietly. "I already picked one."

  "Which one?"

  "The first. It said Laborer." The man's voice was hollow. "It gave me... enhanced carrying capacity. That's it. That's the whole thing."

  Nobody spoke. The man looked at his hands like they belonged to someone else. Jack knew that look. He'd seen it on thousands of faces in the last life, people who'd panic-selected and spent the rest of their shortened lives carrying supplies for people with real classes.

  "That's why you wait," Jack said. He kept his voice even. No blame. There'd be time for grief later, or there wouldn't. "Everyone else, hold off. I'll walk you through the options when we're safe."

  The delivery driver lowered his tire iron an inch. One of the joggers was crying. Marvin had his eyes closed. The woman in scrubs was tying off Jack's flannel with a proper knot and not looking up.

  The dark-haired woman hadn't spoken once through any of it. Her expression wasn't gratitude. Jack filed it and moved on because there wasn't time to worry about one person's face when the next wave was twenty minutes out.

  Then something shifted behind Jack's eyes. A pressure he'd never felt before, different from the mana wave, deeper, more specific. Something had turned its attention to him individually. Not a monster. Not a threat. A process. The system was looking at him, and whatever it found was taking longer than it should have.