No, not a well exactly. Not yet. Just the sense of one. A hollow space inside me filled with something dense and strange and waiting.
The monsters came closer.
Twenty feet.
Fifteen.
The crawling one hissed.
"What do I do?" I asked under my breath.
The answer came at once.
"You fight."
"That isn't helpful."
"Aim to kill. The details are yours."
I bared my teeth. "You're very annoying for someone living in my soul."
"And you are very fragile for someone who insisted on killing every monster in the world."
The first creature lunged.
I moved on instinct.
Faster than before.
Not by much, but enough.
I twisted aside and felt claws miss my stomach by inches. The monster hit the ground where I'd been and spun immediately, too fast and too hungry. I stumbled backward, boots scraping on blood-slick stone, and my heel struck something metal.
I looked down just in time to see the corpse of a soldier half-buried against a collapsed wall, armor torn open at the throat, one arm bent beneath him. Beside his body lay a sword.
Not some glowing legendary blade.
Just a sword.
Steel. Worn grip. Blood stained. Still whole.
I snatched it up.
The weight of it shocked me. Heavier than I expected. Real in a way nothing else had been since waking.
The broader monster charged.
I barely got the sword up in time.
Its claws slammed into the flat of the blade and drove me back two full steps, pain ripped through my shoulders and side. The impact rang through my arms. My grip nearly failed.
The third one came in low from the left.
"Your flank," the voice said.
I turned just in time to slash badly across its face.
Not a killing blow.
But enough.
The blade bit through skin and one pale eye in a hot spray of dark blood. The creature screamed and jerked back, thrashing blindly.
I breathed hard, sword raised.
The first monster circled.
The second growled.
The third shrieked and snapped at the air, half-blinded.
"Tell me something useful," I said through my teeth.
"I am."
"No, I mean actually useful."
A pause.
"You are stronger than you were. But still weak."
That almost made me laugh.
The sword felt awkward in my hands. Wrong. I had never trained with one. I had never trained with anything. I was a half-dead boy standing in a ruined street with a stolen blade and some weird spirit in his soul.
The broad-chested creature sprang first.
I met it badly, hacking instead of cutting. The sword struck its shoulder and bit partway in, catching on bone. The force of the impact jolted up my arms and nearly ripped the weapon from my grip. The creature slammed into me anyway, its weight driving me backward.
I crashed into the side of a broken cart.
Its jaws snapped inches from my face.
I shoved with both hands, wrenching the sword free in a spray of blood, and kicked out hard. My boot hit its chest. Not enough to hurt it much, but enough to create space. I slashed again, clumsy and desperate, and this time the blade opened its throat.
Hot blood poured down over my hands.
The creature staggered, coughed wetly, and dropped.
The other two were already on me.
The crawling one launched itself upward with startling speed. I felt claws rake across my forearm as I twisted. Pain flashed white. I drove the pommel of the sword into its skull, shoved it off, then hacked downward with every bit of strength I had.
The blade split its neck halfway through.
It thrashed once, once more, then went still.
The last monster, the half-blinded one, hesitated.
Its good eye fixed on me.
For a second, I thought it might run.
Then something inside me surged.
Cold.
Violent.
The well beneath my ribs opened wider.
A pressure burst outward from me, not visible, not exactly, but I felt it in my bones and in my teeth and in the way the air seemed to tighten. The monster shrank back with a high, panicked whine.
"What is that?" I hissed.
"Use it," the voice said.
I didn't know how.
Didn't know what I was doing.
But the rage was there, the image of my parents, Nate, the lion, the city burning… and when I seized it, that pressure sharpened. Blackness flickered at the edges of my vision, not from faintness this time but from something gathering around me, around my arm, around the blade.
The monster rushed me anyway.
I met it head-on.
The sword cut cleaner this time.
Too clean.
The blade went through its jaw, neck, and deep into the chest with a savage ease it hadn't had a second earlier. The creature split open in a gush of blood and dropped in two collapsing halves at my feet.
I stood there panting over it.
Three bodies.
Three dead monsters.
The sword trembled in my grip.
And then I heard more.
Scratching claws.
Hissing breaths.
Movement in alleys. Behind carts. Across rooftops.
Not one or two.
Many.
Drawn by blood. By noise. By me.
Figures emerged into the street from every direction, beginner-class creatures, maybe five, maybe seven, maybe more. Wrong shapes and hungry eyes. Low snarls. Teeth catching firelight.
They came.
And something inside me cracked wider.
All I could think about was killing them.
All of them.
Not just these ones.
Every monster I had ever seen.
Every monster I ever would.
Every claw.
Every tooth.
Every beast in every forest and every den and every rotten dark hole in the world.
I would kill them all.
The thought became everything.
The pressure inside me roared up. The cold well opened in full, flooding my body with something sharper than strength, stranger than anger. Darkness gathered around the sword like smoke dragged by a storm. The street dimmed at the edges. My heartbeat became a hammer.
The first monster reached me and I cut it down.
The second lost a foreleg, then its head.
The third leapt from a broken wall and I drove the sword up through its throat with enough force to lift it half off the ground.
Blood sprayed over my face.
Another came.
Another.
Another.
I stopped thinking.
My body moved faster than it should have been able to. Not graceful. Not skilled. Just relentless. Every swing of the blade felt heavier and stronger than the one before, driven by a power that was not mine alone. I heard bones split. I heard myself breathing like an animal. Felt hot blood and blacker blood cover my hands and chest and neck.
A creature tried to flee and I chased it three full strides before I cut it down from behind.
That was when something cold hit me beneath all the rage.
A flicker of thought.
It was running.
I killed it anyway.
More shadows moved.
I turned toward them with the sword raised.
"I'll kill all of you," I heard myself snarl. "All of you—"
My knees buckled.
The sword point slammed into the street with a harsh metallic crack.
I dropped hard to one knee beside it, one hand braced on the ground. The world lurched violently. My vision tunneled. The pressure that had been flooding through me vanished all at once, ripped away so fast it felt like being hollowed out.
I sucked in a sharp breath and nearly vomited.
Everything spun.
The street. The bodies. The flames. Nate's shape at the edge of my vision.
I could barely keep the sword upright.
"What—"
"Enough," the voice said, firmer now. "You have emptied yourself."
I gritted my teeth. "What does that mean?"
"It means you are an idiot."
I almost snapped back, but my chest was rising and falling too fast for speech.
Footsteps scraped somewhere in the distance. More monsters. Or people. I couldn't tell.
The voice continued, colder and more measured now.
"The power you used is spirit power. Think of it as a well. The deeper the well, the more power it can hold. Yours is shallow. Pathetically shallow. You forced too much through it at once."
I stayed bent over, fighting for breath.
The explanation resonated with my earlier thoughts.
"Well?" I repeated.
Yes.
"How do I make it deeper?"
"Training. Time. Elixirs, treasures, certain fruits, certain methods." A pause. "You will grow stronger if you survive long enough to do so."
I laughed once under my breath, ugly and tired. "Very inspiring."
"Reality often disappoints."