The kitchen had kept his lock and most of his stock, which counted as good news twice in one day. They ate standing around the steel counter while he watched the corridor through the broken door glass.
Twice while they ate, grey shapes crossed the far end of the border corridor without turning in. The East Warren's patrols ran on schedules now, which meant something in the building kept time. Order was new, and new order always meant a landlord taking inventory.
Restocking took ten minutes and cost him more of the painkillers than he liked. His shoulder had stiffened overnight, the hip burned when he pivoted, and the forearm had started announcing weather.
"Known risks," he said, setting the empty tin down, "a foraging patrol works the border corridor, eight strong, no Stalkers with it. F-rank, throat seams, they hunt by sound first."
"You want us to clear it," Kendra said, cracking her knuckles once.
"I want you to clear it while I watch," he said, "you four fight and I hold the flank. I step in for exactly one reason."
He let the reason sit a moment so it would be remembered. Four faces waited through the pause, and none of the four enjoyed it. Good lessons cost a little discomfort up front, in his experience of receiving them.
"A mistake that's about to kill somebody gets interrupted," he said, "and everything else gets survived. The building will be your teacher, not me."
"That's the whole lesson," Vasa said, unfolding her arms slowly.
"That's the whole lesson," he agreed, "and the building doesn't grade on effort, so I won't either."
They met the patrol where the border corridor widened into an old study hall. Eight grey shapes worked through the overturned tables, and the party's thin screens flagged each one as the System took attendance.
Kendra opened the fight the way she opened everything, square-on and planted. The first Gobdog broke its charge against her hardened shoulder, and Yeda's pipe met its throat before it recovered.
The second and third came in together, so the fight began teaching on schedule. Kendra hardened everything at once, arms, chest, spine, and the armor bought her exactly four seconds before her knees buckled under the cost.
"Contact points only," Nox said from the flank, not moving, "armor what gets hit. The rest of you is luggage."
She adjusted mid-fight, letting the grey wash off her forearms while her legs stayed flesh and quick. The next hit met stone where it landed, nothing where it did not, and she stayed standing after it.
Vasa's frost took the fourth one's feet, then the fifth's, clean and practiced. By the sixth her lips had gone the color of her own ice, and the line she drew came out thin as breath.
"It pulls from you," he said, watching her shiver, "heat, water, something. Find your floor before a fight finds it for you."
"Noted," she said through her teeth, and rationed the seventh line instead of painting it.
Emilia had gone to work on the doorway with the seed pouch she carried, feeding shoots into the frame. Green rope narrowed the study hall's second exit, but her face went grey doing it, and the dead tables gave her nothing to build with.
"Your power eats you without material," he said, "so carry more seed and map the planters. A dead room makes you a bystander."
"I noticed that yesterday," she said, breathing hard, holding the green in place anyway.
Yeda fought the way she had the first time, early, low, and exactly where the pipe did most. She took the sixth kill and the seventh, reading gaps like a native speaker.
The eighth Gobdog took it upon itself to teach her lesson personally. It shouldered through a table instead of around it, faster than her read, and its claws came up while her swing was still loading.
Nox made himself move on the second claw rather than the first. His knife took the creature through the eye at a flat throw, and it dropped at her feet with her swing still unfinished.
"That was mine," she said, breathing fast, eyes on the body.
"It was about to be," he said, retrieving the knife, "and your timing is the best in this party. Your body is still F-rank and human."
"Fight things one mistake wide," he added, "never two."
She took the correction the way Kendra took hits, square and without waste. He marked again how cheap she was to teach and how expensive she was going to make somebody's day eventually.
[ Skirmish complete. Party EXP distributed by contribution. ]
[ Nox: +100. (1,200 total.) ]
[ Party status ]
[ Kendra: Level 3 ]
[ Vasa: Level 2 ]
[ Emilia: Level 2 ]
[ Yeda: Level 3 ]
The girls' screens lit with their first levels, and the room went briefly strange with private arithmetic. Kendra flexed her hand, feeling whatever a level put into a person the first time.
Vasa pressed a palm to the floor and drew a test line of frost, measuring it against her old ceiling. Even Emilia straightened under the change, the grey gone from her face a shade early.
"Yeda's third," Vasa said, reading the party line twice, "with no trait, level with Kendra. The pipe outscored two Awakenings."
"The System pays for output," he said, cutting cores loose, "not for potential. Remember which one it counts."
They rested in the study hall's inner room while he rewrapped the forearm out of habit. Vasa watched the wrapping with the same eyes she had put on the contract.
"State the known risks," she said, keeping it under the others' sorting, "because you favor the hip on every left pivot. The shoulder's worse than yesterday."
"You moved wrong twice in that fight," she added, "so your output is our known risk now."
He considered lying and priced it against the auditor who would catch the lie. Concealment had been free his whole life, and the contract had quietly changed its cost.
"Claw wounds, both partly open," he said, "plus a burn on the ribs. I'm at maybe eighty percent, and my eighty is still the strongest thing in this corridor."
"That, I believe," she said, "but the clause covers you too. State it before fights from now on."
The second fight found them before dark, and it stated its own risks. An East Warren patrol came down the border corridor hunting the noise of the first one, and it had brought supervision.
[ Warren Overseer: Rank E. Weak seam: nape ridge. Escorts: 2 Stalkers, 4 Gobdogs. ]
"Known risks," he said fast, watching the formation spread, "the big one is Alpha-class, and the dark-spined pair flank. You four take the Gobdogs at the door funnel."
"The Overseer and the Stalkers are mine," he added, drawing the knife.
"Alone," Kendra said, already hardening.
"Alone is where my math works," he said, and went to meet the escort.
The Stalkers came the way Stalkers came, wide and paired, running the walls of the study hall. He fought them through the furniture, using table lines the way he had used the galley, and took the first through the throat when it committed a half-stride early.
Its partner learned from the first death and nearly had him for it. Claws opened his forearm wrap along the old line, so he gave it the bleeding arm, gagged it on the grip, and finished it against a table edge.
The Overseer watched its escort die and came in without hurry, bigger than the Alpha's memory. He met it moving, because standing still against E-rank weight was a door he had already closed.
It herded him toward the wall the way its kind herded everything. He let the herding work until the wall was one stride off, then went up the shelving instead of along it, and the nape ridge passed below him at knife height.
Steel went into the nape seam with the whole drop behind it. The Overseer ran itself into the wall it had been building toward, and he rode the crash down with the grip held in both hands.
It took a long time dying, and he made himself watch the whole account settle. Across the room the door funnel had held, four Gobdogs down, his party bleeding but standing.
[ Enemies defeated: Warren Overseer, 2 Stalkers, 4 Gobdogs. ]
[ EXP +900. (2,100 total.) ]
[ Level 6 reached. Level 7 reached. ]
[ 10 assignable points available. ]
He put four into Strength, four into Agility, two into Endurance, and felt the room get slower around him. Level 7 sat in his bones like a better fact, and the wounds kept bleeding straight through it.
The forearm needed rewrapping a second time, which made the day's third dressing. He did it standing, because sitting down in enemy territory was a habit worth never forming.
The girls had watched the last minute of the Overseer's death in silence. Whatever the phones had recorded in the gym, this had been closer, and the arithmetic of what they had signed with was now a witnessed thing.
"That's what the contract buys," Vasa said finally, to nobody in particular.
"That's what it buys," Kendra said, and went back to cutting her cores free.
"There's supposed to be a safe zone west," Emilia said, packing her seed pouch, "teachers, barricades, real numbers of people. My year group ran that way on the first day."
The horns started up while the study hall was still being looted. Three long notes rolled through the building's bones from the east, deep enough to feel through the floor, and every screen in the party lit at once.
[ The East Warren has declared a purge. ]
[ All unclaimed rooms and corridors in adjacent sectors will be cleared of prey. ]
[ Purge line advances in: 6 hours. ]
The map painted the purge as a red tide with a timetable, scheduled to wash every space that no commander owned. Their kitchen sat in its path, the study hall sat in its path, and the only unclaimed ground beyond it ran west.
Five packs went onto five backs inside two minutes, cores wrapped, water split. Nobody argued with the map, because the map had stopped being an abstraction the day it grew colors. Emilia took one last look east, toward rooms she had marked with green, and shouldered her share.
"Known risks," he said, reading the tide's edge, "in six hours everything we're standing in becomes hunting ground. We move west, now, toward whatever's left of the school that still thinks it's a school."