Klaus woke into the same forest he always woke into, already braced for the usual — claws, fangs, something with too many teeth crashing through the underbrush toward him. Instead, there was nothing. Just stillness. Sunlight filtering soft and gold through the canopy, birdsong drifting somewhere far off, the kind of serenity that should have felt like a mercy.
It didn't. It felt like a held breath.
He turned slowly, scanning the treeline, and found the source a moment later — high above him, nestled where the branches thinned toward open sky. His first thought was bear, some enormous shape blotting out the light. Then his eyes adjusted, and the shape resolved into something far worse. Not a bear. A spider, if the word "spider" could stretch to cover something whose legs disappeared upward until they seemed to scrape the clouds themselves, its body suspended so high it looked less like a creature and more like a landmark.
He didn't get the chance to decide whether to run.
A wave of dark energy rolled through the forest like a held note finally released, and it hit him before he'd even finished registering it existed. He felt it in his cells first — a wrongness, a rot, spreading outward like his whole body was being quietly reassigned into something that used to be alive. There was no pain exactly. Just an ending, patient and total, working its way through him until there was nothing left to end.
He woke with a small, sharp gasp, blinking up at the mobile spinning lazily above his crib.
Back again. No spider. No forest. Just soft light and the particular boredom of being, once more, a baby.
Before the relief could properly settle, he heard it — the sound he'd come to dread more than any dream-death in the last three months. The door creaking open, revealing his mother's face lit up with far too much enthusiasm for whatever time it currently was. She scooped him up, and he let himself go limp in her arms, the universal baby signal for I am not participating in this.
She carried him to the one place guaranteed to make every day feel identical to the last: daycare. The most tediously boring institution he had ever had the misfortune of attending twice in one lifetime.
He'd learned to cope. In his usual corner, tucked half-behind a shelf where no one paid him much attention, he ran through his side quests — small, repetitive, humiliatingly easy tasks the system doled out like table scraps. But easy or not, the stat points added up. He checked the tally with something close to pride.
Fifty stat points banked. Slow progress was still progress.
His mother deposited him in the classroom a moment later, and he looked up just in time to find a familiar mop of red hair settled right beside him — close enough that he could practically feel the chaos radiating off her. Rosie. His self-appointed, thoroughly unwanted shadow. He wasn't sure what cosmic joke kept seating them together, but he'd stopped questioning it around the third coincidence.
He allowed himself one long, put-upon breath, then settled in to endure the rest of the morning like the professional baby he'd become.
When break time rolled around, he slipped into his usual corner and began his private routine — small weighted movements, arms raised and lowered, a exercise so minor it would have looked like nothing to anyone watching. The system, in its infinite lack of mercy, had upped the difficulty since last time; what used to be an easy set now dragged at muscles barely built for holding a spoon. He pushed through it anyway, and just as he finished, the familiar chime confirmed the quest complete.
That was when he noticed the noise.
The classroom had shifted into something closer to a riot — the teacher nowhere in sight, and in the middle of it, three boys had cornered Rosie. One had a fistful of her hair, yanking hard enough to make her wince. Another scribbled something across the cover of her book with a crayon, laughing. The third leaned in close, delivering his insult with the smug confidence only a child repeating something he'd overheard from an adult could manage.
"Everybody look — her dad's just the gardener. That's probably why she smells like dirt."
It wasn't clever. It didn't need to be. Rosie's face had gone tight and red, her small hands balled into fists at her sides, caught somewhere between crying and fighting back.
Klaus's first instinct was to stay put and watch. Not out of cruelty — out of curiosity. He wanted to see what she'd do with it, whether the girl who'd knocked him flat in a park without an ounce of hesitation had it in her to knock these three down just as easily.
She didn't. She just stood there, shaking, swallowing it.
That settled it.
He crossed the room at a pace far too steady for a baby his age, wedged himself neatly between Rosie and the boy still holding her hair, and let a fraction of the killing intent he'd spent months accumulating — clawed, bitten, and killed for, over and over in a forest none of them would ever see — bleed out into the room.
It wasn't much. A sliver, really. But it was more than enough for three toddlers who'd never felt anything like it in their short lives.
All three went white, then crumpled, dissolving into loud, frightened tears just as the teacher finally hurried back through the door, stopping short at the sight of her classroom in chaos and three boys sobbing on the floor for reasons she would never fully understand.
Klaus, for his part, had already turned his back on the whole scene, offering Rosie the closest thing his face could manage to an unbothered shrug.
She stared at him for a long moment — stunned, red-eyed, hair still mussed from where it had been pulled — and then, against every reasonable expectation, she smiled and reached for his hand anyway.
He let her take it. Just this once, he decided, he wouldn't pull away.