The crackers were gone.

  Nina had finished them with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that if the world was ending, she was at least going to end it full. She folded the empty wrapper into a neat square, looked around for somewhere to put it, found nothing appropriate, and tucked it into her jacket pocket with the same seriousness she applied to everything else.

  Kaal watched her do this and felt something loosen in his chest. Something he hadn't known was tight.

  The section door was still wedged shut. Outside it, the mall made sounds — distant crashes, a car alarm that had been going for so long it had become wallpaper, the occasional thud of something that moved wrong hitting something that didn't move at all. But in here, the three fluorescent lights buzzed on, indifferent and steady, and the air smelled of dry food and cardboard and the faint chemical sweetness of packaged biscuits.

  Three survivors. One wedged door. An impossible amount of supplies.

  Kaal leaned back in his chair, turned his water bottle between his palms, and looked at the girl sitting cross-legged on the floor and the older one standing at the far end of the counter.

  "By the way," he said. "What are your names?"

  Nina shot to her feet immediately, like she'd been waiting for permission.

  "I'm Nina." She placed one hand flat on her chest, a gesture so theatrical it had clearly been practiced. Then she pointed at Katherine with the same hand. "And that's my sister. Katherine."

  Kaal looked at Katherine. Then back at Nina. Then at the age gap — Katherine somewhere in her early twenties, Nina somewhere in the territory of six or seven. He ran the math twice.

  "She's not your mother?"

  "No," Nina said, with the particular tone children use when adults have said something technically correct but fundamentally obtuse.

  Kaal turned to Katherine. "Sorry. I assumed —"

  "It's fine," Katherine said. She had her arms crossed, her shoulder against the shelving unit, her eyes on the door. She didn't look at him when she said it. Two words, completely closed, the kind of fine that means the subject is now over.

  *Total ice-queen,* Kaal thought, with something close to amusement. *Fitting, maybe.*

  He let the silence settle for a moment. Outside, something heavy fell — a ceiling panel, maybe, or a display stand — and the floor vibrated faintly under their feet. Nina looked at the door. Katherine's jaw tightened. Then everything went quiet again, and they all exhaled at the same time without meaning to.

  "Did you two awaken?" Kaal asked.

  Nina tilted her head. "Is that what it's called?"

  "The blue screen," Katherine said, still watching the door. "It appeared the moment everything started." A pause. "Yes."

  "Nina?"

  "I saw it too," Nina said. She sat back down on the floor, cross-legged again, like she'd decided that was simply her chair now. "It was very blue."

  "Very technical," Kaal said.

  Nina nodded seriously, missing the tone entirely.

  He hesitated for a moment — not because he thought it was dangerous to ask, but because he'd already decided it mattered. If these two had abilities that could hurt him, he needed to know. If they had abilities that could help, he needed to know that too. And there was a third reason, one he hadn't quite articulated to himself yet: he wanted to understand what he'd actually saved.

  "What did you awaken?" he asked. "If you don't mind."

  Katherine's eyes finally moved from the door to him. That careful look again — weighing something.

  "Ice Talent," she said, after a pause that was exactly long enough to make him understand it was a choice, not a reflex. "Rank A."

  He nodded. Kept his expression neutral.

  "Potential Stimulation," Nina said cheerfully from the floor. "Rank S." She said it the way she'd said her name — with full confidence, no idea it was remarkable. "What does Rank S mean? The screen said S but I don't know what that is."

  "It means you're very strong," Kaal said.

  "Oh." She thought about this. "Okay."

  He almost smiled.

  They both looked at him. He'd asked the question; the answer was expected in return. Fair.

  "Heal," he said. "Rank C."

  Which was true. Heal was exactly what he'd awakened. He just — left out the part about what it had become afterward. He told himself this was practical. Giving out information in the first hour of the apocalypse, to people he'd known for less than twenty minutes, was not wisdom. It was a very fast way to become a resource instead of a person.

  Katherine's eyes stayed on him for a beat longer than he expected.

  "Hm," she said.

  That was all. But somehow it landed like a full sentence.

  And then — because he'd been doing the math since she'd said *Ice Talent, Rank A*, because the number had been sitting at the edge of his thoughts waiting to fully arrive —

  He laughed.

  It came out louder than intended. The full kind, the kind from earlier in the park, surprised out of him by the sheer absurdity of the arithmetic.

  *He'd saved them.*

  He'd scooped them up and carried them to safety like something small and fragile, and Katherine controlled ice at Rank A, and Nina had Rank S potential stimulation, and they were — they were *monsters.* Both of them. In a world that had just become a proving ground for exactly that kind of power, he'd found the two people who needed his help least.

  "Brother." Nina was staring at him with the deeply serious expression of someone conducting a psychiatric evaluation. "Have you gone mad?"

  Katherine was watching him with an entirely different expression — not concern, more like she was filing something away.

  "Ahem." He pressed a fist to his mouth and coughed. "No. I was just thinking —"

  "You were laughing," Nina said. "Very loudly."

  "I was wondering," he said, which was technically accurate, "if you two actually needed saving in the first place."

  Katherine's expression didn't change. "We were out of mana. I'd blocked the playground entrance with an ice wall — twice — and then we ran. By the time we reached the road we had nothing left." She paused. "The car would have hit us."

  "So yes," Kaal said. "You needed saving."

  "This time," she said.

  He looked at her. She looked back at him with the steady patience of someone who doesn't feel the need to elaborate.

  *Fair,* he thought.

  "But with just Heal," she said, "how are you strong enough to throw zombies across aisles?"

  There it was. He'd expected it.

  "I can push my body to its full potential," he said. "Without worrying about injury, there's no reason to hold back." He paused. "And my stats scaled significantly during the Awakening."

  Katherine studied him the way you study a lock you're not sure you have the key for. Not hostile. Not warm. Just — precise. Whatever conclusion she reached, she didn't share it. She nodded once, very slightly, and looked back at the door.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Kaal looked down at his hands, keeping his expression idle.

  And quietly, without a word, without any external sign of it at all —

  He activated Copy.

  -----

  The system was silent about it. No flash of light, no dramatic chime. Just the particular sensation of understanding something new — like turning your head and suddenly seeing a shape in a pattern you'd been staring at for a minute, the shape having been there the whole time.

  ```━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━COPY — Activated

  Target: Katherine ? Ice Talent [Rank A] — Copying... ? Copy successful

  ABSOLUTE LIMITLESS BODY: Evaluating... ? Ice Talent [Rank A]   ↓ EVOLVED ? Absolute Freeze [Rank SSS]━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Target: Nina ? Potential Stimulation [Rank S] — Copying... ? Copy successful

  ABSOLUTE LIMITLESS BODY: Evaluating... ? Host already at peak physical condition ? Growth-type talent: redundant ? Talent discarded━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━```

  Kaal processed this without moving.

  *So that's the shape of it.* Talents he copied became skills — external acquisitions, not innate ones. And the Absolute Limitless Body filtered everything through itself, keeping what could be improved, discarding what couldn't. His body was already at its ceiling. Nina's talent would have pushed him toward a ceiling he'd already reached.

  He found this interesting in a way that felt almost detached — the clean logic of it. Like reading a well-designed system and appreciating the elegance.

  Then he thought: *Absolute Freeze, Rank SSS. What does that mean in practice?*

  He reached out — not physically — and touched the mana pooling around his hand, shaped it the way the new skill seemed to want to be shaped. Then he picked up a small orange from the display beside him, as though simply examining it. Turned it over once. Set it on the counter.

  Focused.

  The orange frosted over. Then crystallized. Then became, in the space of two seconds, a solid geometric object the color of amber, every cell suspended mid-motion.

  He set it back down beside the other produce.

  Katherine was on her phone again — or trying to be. Pressing call. Waiting. Pressing again. Her face told him nothing, but her thumb, pressing the same button for the fourth time in thirty seconds, told him something.

  Nina was reorganizing a stack of canned goods by size, which she had apparently decided was a productive use of the current moment.

  Kaal looked at the frozen orange sitting among the normal fruit. Nobody had noticed.

  He turned his attention inward. The new skill — Absolute Freeze. He knew it worked at close range. But what was its ceiling?

  *How far does it reach?*

  He tried the obvious answer first: visual range. He looked at a shelf twenty meters away and focused. A faint crystalline formation spread across the shelf's edge — workable, but limited. *Sight alone isn't it.* He could feel that the ability wanted to extend further, like a word on the tip of your tongue, the answer right there but requiring a different approach.

  He closed his eyes.

  And reached.

  Not physically. With something else — the mana that the status screen had been tracking, the invisible medium that everything now seemed to operate through. He felt it around him, in him, extending outward from his position in every direction like water spreading from a dropped stone. He followed it past the counter, past the section door, out through the walls of the dry goods section and into the main mall corridors —

  *Oh.*

  It kept going.

  Past the mall's outer walls, into the street, across the intersection —

  "About a kilometer," he murmured, without meaning to say it aloud.

  -----

  ```━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ New Skill Unlocked

  MANA SENSE [Rank S] · Passive awareness of mana within detection range · Range scales with mana pool━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━```

  -----

  He opened his eyes. The sensation remained — a vast, three-dimensional map of the space around him, overlaid on his ordinary sight like a transparency. He could feel the zombie in the corridor two sections over. The cluster of three near the parking structure entrance. The larger concentration beyond the eastern wall, moving slowly, drawn by some combination of sound and whatever instinct the Awakening had installed in them.

  The range was extraordinary.

  And then — because the natural next question, for someone who had just discovered they could sense a kilometer in every direction, is *what happens if I try to act at the edge of that kilometer* —

  He tried to freeze something at the limit of his range. Not a person. Not anything significant. A point on the road outside, at the far edge of what he could sense.

  He felt the skill engage. Felt it reach —

  The mana left him all at once.

  It wasn't like the car alarm going off. It was like someone cutting a rope that had been holding something heavy. Everything at once, no warning, and then the absence where the mana had been filled immediately with —

  Pain.

  Behind his eyes, behind his temples, behind his teeth — a pressure building and building and building, the kind that doesn't give you anything to push against, that has no direction, that is simply everywhere inside your skull at the same time. He grabbed the edge of the counter. His knees went.

  "*Shit* — *shit* — *shit* —"

  He heard himself saying it from somewhere that felt distant, his voice thin and strange through the roaring in his ears. The floor came up to meet him and he let it, one hand still on the counter, forehead almost touching the tiles, breathing through his teeth.

  And then —

  Cool.

  Not like ice. Like the moment a fever breaks — a spreading, liquid calm that moved outward from the center of his skull in every direction, chasing the pain, replacing it with something that was almost the absence of feeling. Clean. Still.

  The headache was gone.

  Not fading. Gone.

  He breathed.

  -----

  ```━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABSOLUTE LIMITLESS BODY: Active

  Threat detected: Mana depletion cascade Compensating...

  Passive Skill Acquired: CALM MIND [Rank S] · Prevents mental deterioration  from mana overload or depletion

  Passive Skill Acquired: MANA REGENERATION [Rank SS] · Continuously restores mana · Rate scales with maximum pool━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━```

  -----

  He was still on the floor, one hand on the counter, breathing carefully, when the smile started.

  He couldn't help it. He pressed his lips together. It didn't work. The smile won.

  *I never want to feel that again,* he thought. *And I will never have to.*

  Because now he had Mana Regeneration. And Calm Mind. Which meant the headache — which had just been the worst thing he'd felt since the universe-crossing — would be the last one he'd ever have to endure. The Absolute Limitless Body had, once again, looked at the thing that could hurt him and quietly removed it from the universe.

  He was still processing this, on the floor, smiling at the ceiling like a man who has just found a loophole in physics —

  "Brother."

  He turned his head.

  Nina was standing over him. She had not, apparently, been frightened — she'd come closer. Her small hands were clasped together in front of her, brow furrowed, studying his face with the careful attention of someone performing a medical assessment they had not been trained for.

  "You were screaming," she said. "While holding your head." She tilted her head. "And then you stopped. And you smiled." She tilted it the other way. "Are you alright?"

  "I'm fine," he said. "I was testing something."

  "Does your head hurt?"

  "Not anymore."

  She reached out and touched his forehead with two fingers, lightly, the way children touch things they're not sure about. Then she removed her hand and straightened up. Apparently satisfied.

  "Okay," she said, and went back to her canned goods.

  Kaal sat up slowly. Leaned his back against the counter. From this angle he could see Katherine across the section — she hadn't moved toward him, but she hadn't looked away either. She was standing exactly one meter back, arms still crossed, watching him with those careful eyes that gave nothing away.

  He looked back at her steadily.

  "I'm fine," he said again. "No need to worry."

  "I'm not worried," she said.

  "You moved back," he said.

  She held his gaze. "I maintain distance when I'm assessing a situation."

  "Fair," he said.

  Something shifted, almost imperceptibly, at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. Something smaller. The suggestion that a smile existed somewhere in her and was choosing, for now, to stay there.

  She looked away first.

  Kaal pulled himself back into the chair, opened his status screen, and looked at the numbers quietly for a moment. The mana had already begun refilling. Slowly, but steadily — a river finding its level again.

  Outside, Katherine's phone buzzed. She glanced at it. Pressed call. Waited.

  Nothing.

  She pressed call again.

  Still nothing.

  She lowered the phone and looked at the blank screen for a moment with an expression that was the most unguarded he'd seen from her — not grief exactly, but the face of someone doing math they already know the answer to and hating the answer anyway.

  The towers were down. Whoever she was trying to reach —

  He didn't ask.

  Some things you let people hold for themselves, at least until they choose to put them down.

  Nina had finished reorganizing the canned goods by size and had now moved on to organizing them by color. She was doing this with complete seriousness, moving a green can of peas next to another green can, correcting a misplaced red tin with gentle precision.

  The fluorescent lights hummed.

  Outside the wedged door, distant footsteps — not human — moved past and continued on.

  The three of them sat in their silence and let it be what it was: not comfortable, exactly, but shared. The specific quiet of people who have decided, without discussing it, that they are in this together at least for now.

  Kaal looked at the frozen orange still sitting among the produce, untouched, unnoticed.

  He looked at the status screen. The skills. The numbers climbing back toward where they'd been.

  He looked at Nina, who had begun humming something tuneless while she worked.

  He looked at Katherine, who was reading something on her phone — no signal, but perhaps old messages, or photos, or something that didn't need a tower — her thumb still for once, her face very still.

  *We survive first,* he thought again. *Then everything else.*

  He pulled his knees up, rested his arms across them, and watched the door.

  And waited for the world to show him what it would ask of him next.

  -----

  The orange stayed frozen until morning.

  Nobody touched it.

  Katherine noticed it before anyone else did — but she said nothing, only looked at Kaal for a moment with those assessing eyes, and then looked away.

  She had already begun to suspect.