"Why now?" Luc said.
He was still standing in the middle of the street, hand on the pommel, the forge noise behind him and the town moving around him like he wasn't there.
Determine causality independently.
"That's not an answer."
Correct.
He hadn't had a weapon before. Now he did.
Condition met.
He kept this in mind. Action triggers access. Noted.
Swordsman Path, the System said, as if reading the pause.
The information came in fragments rather than all at once — less like a manual, more like something being decided in real time:
Function: structured progression in blade efficiency, precision, control.
Task: 100 swings. Daily.
Duration: 20 days. Continuity required.
Failure penalty: progress reset.
"So if I miss a day—"
Back to zero.
He stood with that for a moment. No grace period. No catch-up mechanic. Just: do it every day, or don't bother starting.
He didn't accept it yet.
He wanted to test the logic first — see if the system rewarded the swing count blindly or tracked something more. Quality over quantity. Technique over repetition. He had no basis for the theory yet, but he'd learned in the last several hours that this system didn't give anything away for free, and something about the flatness of 100 swings felt like a floor, not a ceiling.
I'll test it first, he thought.
He started walking back toward the lodge.
***
The street was quieter than it had been an hour ago.
He noticed it gradually — the way you noticed a sound stopping rather than starting. Less foot traffic. A stall vendor packing up his display with slightly more urgency than the hour warranted. Two women at the end of the street walking fast, heads down, not talking.
He slowed.
A man bumped past him without apology, moving in the opposite direction. Then another. Then a family — mother pulling a child by the wrist, the child stumbling to keep pace, neither of them looking at anything except forward.
Then the siren hit.
It wasn't a bell. It was something lower and continuous, coming from somewhere near the wall — a sound that didn't need translation, that carried its meaning in its frequency alone. Every remaining person on the street stopped for exactly one second, the collective pause of people receiving information they'd hoped not to receive.
Then they ran.
"What's happening?" Luc caught the arm of a man moving past him.
The man barely slowed. "Monster horde! Get inside!"
He pulled free and kept moving.
Luc stayed where he was, watching the street empty. Doors were closing. Shutters being pulled. The siren continued its single sustained note, unwavering, and above the rooftops the birds had all lifted at once and were moving south in a dark irregular mass.
He found the guards near the east-side post — four of them, already in formation, weapons out, eyes on the sky.
"What's the situation?" he said.
The nearest one looked at him. Looked at the short sword on his hip. Looked at his face, and whatever he found there made the guard's expression do something specific.
"Get inside," he said.
"I can help—"
"You'll get in the way." Not cruel. Not dismissive. Factual, the way a wall was factual. "We don't know how strong you are. You go down, we split attention pulling you back. Don't drag us down."
Luc almost said something. Something stupid. He could feel it sitting right behind his teeth — some version of you don't know what I've already survived today that would have sounded exactly as unconvincing as it deserved to.
He closed his mouth.
He didn't like it. That didn't make it wrong. He had a sword he'd owned for twenty minutes and a Swordsman Path he hadn't started and two stats above one. The guard wasn't insulting him. The guard was doing arithmetic.
He stepped back.
The shadow hit the ground before the sound did — a dark shape moving fast across the cobblestones, there and gone, something passing overhead at speed. He looked up.
Three of them. Maybe four — hard to count, the way they moved, banking and cutting between the angles of the buildings. Roughly bird-shaped, the way the Veld-hound had been roughly dog-shaped. Wide wingspan, hides like dark leather, and something wrong about the neck — too long, too flexible, the head moving independently of the body's direction like it was tracking separately from the rest of it.
The guards moved. Someone shouted an order. An arrow went up.
And then, from the alley to his left, a scream.
Not a crowd sound. Not the ambient noise of panic. A single voice — high, sharp, and then gone.
He turned.
The alley was narrow, barely wide enough for two people side by side. One of the creatures had been here — he could see the evidence of it in the first few meters. Claw marks gouged into the stonework. A basket overturned, its contents scattered. A dark smear along the base of the wall that he didn't look at for long.
At the far end, maybe twenty-five meters in, a woman sat slumped against the wall. Not standing. Sitting — the involuntary way, the way bodies went when they stopped having a choice about it. One arm was pressed against her side. Her breathing was visible from where he stood, the sharp uneven rise and fall of someone managing pain.
In front of her, a child — small, maybe five or six — pressed flat against her, face buried, not moving.
Above the alley mouth, the creature was climbing.
It had taken flight again after the first strike, wings beating in a slow rising circle, and now it was up there — thirty, maybe forty meters. It wasn't circling randomly. It was lining up. The neck had begun to extend forward, the head orienting downward, tracking. The descent would be fast and it would be precise and the woman on the ground was not going to be able to move out of the way.
The child still hadn't looked up.
Luc looked at the distance. Looked at the creature completing its arc, the wings beginning to fold for the dive.
He knew exactly how this ended if he got it wrong.
He drew the sword.
The grip felt wrong in his hand — slightly off-balance, the weight distributing toward the blade in a way his wrist wasn't prepared for. He'd never drawn a sword in his life before thirty seconds ago. His fingers adjusted without fixing the problem, just redistributing it.
But it would have to be enough.