Seven survivors. Three children. One basement full of mutant rats.

Ethan charged through the pharmacy door with his crowbar raised and his ERROR interface blazing with data. The first Blight Rat leaped straight at his face — he sidestepped, reading its trajectory from the panel's predictive overlay, and brought the crowbar down on its spine. The impact sent a wet crunch through his arm. The rat crumpled.

``` [BLIGHT RAT DEFEATED] XP: +8 ```

The second and third came together, flanking from either side of the toppled shelves. Their stats blinked in his vision: Level 2, both of them, 30 HP each, blind spots directly behind their oversized heads.

"Light!" Ethan shouted.

Maya reacted instantly. Three flashlights — held by her and two other survivors — converged on the rats' faces. The creatures shrieked, rearing back, pawing at their eyes. Three seconds of blindness, exactly as the panel had promised.

Ethan used every one of those seconds.

Crowbar to the skull of the left rat. Pivot. Crowbar to the jaw of the right. The left went down. The right stumbled — half its HP bar drained — and lunged blindly. He caught it across the snout with a backhand swing that sent teeth scattering across the pharmacy floor.

More were coming. He could hear them in the basement — claws on concrete, the high-pitched chittering of pack coordination.

"How many more?" Maya asked from behind a shelf, pressing gauze against a child's scraped arm with one hand while holding a flashlight with the other.

Ethan knelt, peering into the basement stairwell. The darkness was alive down there — pairs of eyes reflecting his flashlight beam like tiny red stars.

``` [BLIGHT RAT NEST — ESTIMATED PACK: 12-15] THREAT LEVEL: MODERATE (for current level) ENVIRONMENTAL EXPLOIT: Gas main exposed in basement NE corner — ignition would clear nest WARNING: structural damage risk ```

"Twelve to fifteen," he said. "But I have an idea."

---

The idea was terrible. Ethan fully acknowledged that.

He crept down the basement stairs while Maya kept the survivors calm upstairs. His ERROR interface painted the darkness in wireframe — walls, shelves, the nest of Blight Rats clustered in the far corner, and there, exactly where the panel indicated, an exposed gas pipe along the northeast wall.

Not the main line — a secondary feed to what used to be the pharmacy's old heating system. Small enough that rupturing it wouldn't level the building. Probably. His interface gave it a 73% structural survival probability, which felt uncomfortably close to a coin flip.

But twelve to fifteen Blight Rats with a crowbar and three flashlights? Those odds were worse.

He moved carefully, hugging the shadows. The rats hadn't noticed him yet — they were focused on something in the corner. Food, probably. He didn't want to know what.

The gas pipe was rusted, corroded at the joints. He wedged the crowbar behind the weakest fitting and pulled. Metal groaned. A hiss of gas — the smell hit him immediately, sharp and nauseating.

*Move. Now.*

He ran for the stairs. The rats heard him — the chittering rose to a frenzy. He could hear them swarming behind him, claws scrabbling on concrete, gaining fast.

He took the stairs three at a time, burst through the doorway, grabbed a can of hairspray from the nearest display shelf, and turned.

The first rat emerged from the basement. Then the second. Then a flood of them — dark, sleek, wrong-shaped bodies pouring up the stairs like oil.

Ethan flicked a lighter — taken from the QuickStop, the one useful thing from his former life — and held it in front of the hairspray can.

"Everyone get behind the counter. NOW."

Maya pulled the children down. The other survivors scrambled.

He sprayed.

The improvised flamethrower sent a tongue of fire straight into the basement stairwell. The gas down there caught — not an explosion, more like a sudden violent ignition, a *whoomph* that shook the floor and sent a gust of superheated air blasting up the stairs. The rats shrieked. The ones on the stairs caught fire, thrashing, tumbling back into the inferno.

A cascade of XP notifications flooded his vision:

``` [BLIGHT RAT DEFEATED] x11 XP: +88 LEVEL UP! → Level 5 NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: [EXPLOIT WINDOW - RANK 2] → Freeze duration: 0.5s → Can now target SYSTEM OBJECTS (doors, traps, locks) ```

The basement burned. The sprinkler system — ancient, corroded, but still functional — kicked in thirty seconds later, drenching everything.

Ethan sat on the pharmacy floor, soaked, gasping, smelling like burnt rat and wet ceiling tile.

Maya crouched beside him. Her hands glowed faintly gold — the Healer Class manifesting for the first time. She pressed her palm against his bruised shoulder, and warmth spread through the joint like hot water filling a cold pipe. The pain receded.

"You're insane," she said.

"Probably."

"That could have killed all of us."

"Seventy-three percent chance it wouldn't."

She stared at him. "You had *stats* on that?"

"I have stats on everything." He held up his hand, showing her nothing — because only he could see the panel. "My Class is broken. It shows me things. Weak points, probabilities, system code. Like someone forgot to turn off developer mode."

"Developer mode," Maya repeated, like she was tasting the words. "What Class is it?"

"ERROR."

A pause. She looked at him — really looked, the way someone assesses a patient's vitals. Calm. Professional. Not judging.

"Well, ERROR," she said. "Your shoulder was dislocated. I fixed it. You're going to have bruising for days, and you need to eat something or you'll pass out. Also, the children are terrified, so try to look less like you're about to die."

Ethan laughed. It came out ragged, half-hysterical, but genuine. The first genuine laugh since the sky cracked open.

"I'm Ethan, by the way. I said that earlier but I don't think anyone was listening."

"I was listening." Maya stood up, offered her hand. "Maya Chen. Former pre-med. Current only Healer in a five-block radius, apparently."

He took her hand. It was still warm from the healing.

---

Dawn came gray and wrong.

The sky-crack had narrowed but hadn't closed. Through it, something vast and geometric was visible — a structure that shouldn't exist, hanging in the upper atmosphere like an upside-down city. The System, Ethan assumed. Or its local server.

The pharmacy survivors had settled into an uneasy routine. Maya treated the wounded. An older man named Gerald — Class: Builder — had reinforced the barricades. The three children slept in a nest of blankets behind the prescription counter.

Ethan sat by the window, watching the street.

Three blocks north, a column of smoke rose from what used to be City Hall. To the east, he could hear gunfire — actual gunfire, which meant the military or police were engaging something. South, the neighborhood was dark and silent in a way that felt worse than chaos.

His ERROR interface had been busy while he rested. New data had populated across his vision — a minimap of sorts, though crude and glitchy, showing nearby entities as dots. Green for survivors. Red for Rift Beasts. And one new color he hadn't seen before:

Gold.

A gold dot, five blocks east, pulsing steadily.

He focused on it. The panel expanded:

``` [SYSTEM DUNGEON DETECTED] TYPE: Emergence Dungeon (Temporary) LOCATION: Eastgate Shopping Mall LEVEL RANGE: 3-7 FLOORS: 3 REWARDS: Equipment, Skills, Class Items STATUS: UNCLAIMED

⚠ HIDDEN DATA (ERROR ACCESS ONLY): → Floor 2 contains HIDDEN ROOM → Access via false wall, NE corridor → Contents: [REDACTED — LEVEL TOO LOW] → Estimated value: EXTREMELY HIGH ```

A hidden room that only he could see.

Ethan looked at Maya, who was bandaging Gerald's hand with torn bedsheets.

"Hey," he said. "How do you feel about shopping malls?"

She looked up. "Why?"

"There's a dungeon in one. Three floors. Has some gear we could use."

"A *dungeon*." She said it flat, like he'd suggested they go skydiving into a volcano. "You want to go into a dungeon."

"I want to go into a dungeon that has a secret room full of loot that the System doesn't want people to find." He grinned — the kind of grin that said he knew it was crazy and was going to do it anyway. "My broken Class says there's something valuable there. Something the normal rules are trying to hide."

Maya looked at him for a long time. Then she sighed — the kind of sigh that meant she already knew she was going to say yes.

"If I die in a shopping mall, I'm haunting you forever."

"Deal."

His ERROR interface pulsed once — a brief flash at the bottom of his vision:

``` ⚠ SYSTEM INTEGRITY ALERT: LVL 2 ANOMALY APPROACHING RESTRICTED ZONE CORRECTION PROBABILITY: 1.2% ```

The probability had quadrupled since last night.

Ethan didn't know what happened when it reached 100%.

He didn't want to find out.