He woke up on the floor.
Thirty minutes later according to his phone. He took stock slowly. Basement. Concrete floor. Sore back. His mother's canned food still there around him. Him still alive.
Good. First good point of the day.
He didn't move right away. He stayed lying there and listened.
He could still hear things outside. Gunshots. Heavy sounds, like big things moving. Tremors by intervals, not strong, just enough to slightly vibrate the shelves. His connection was at one bar. A notification came from his internet provider: one of the relay antennas 400 meters away had been damaged, restoration in progress.
400 meters. He figured out pretty easily why the antenna had been damaged.
His system spammed him a series of messages the moment he tried to sit up.
System update attempt. Failed.
System update attempt. Failed.
System update attempt. Failed.
It kept going. In a loop. Small white notifications appearing and disappearing in his field of vision without stopping.
System update attempt. Failed.
System update attempt. Failed.
Macon watched that for a good minute.
Then he told himself that maybe him, he was a mistake from the start. An anomaly. His bugged system, his updates that didn't work, his 101% that shouldn't mathematically exist. Maybe he was just some kind of system reject, someone who should never have received anything but got it anyway because of a girl with empty eyes in a Paris street.
He stayed there feeling sorry for himself for two three minutes.
Then he told himself it was useless to think about that now and checked the news.
In his main city, in his Paris apartment, there had been incidents too. No towers, no dungeons, just monsters that had come from the neighboring areas. But police and specialized units had responded. Civilian casualties were there but the situation was roughly handled. In France the army had reacted faster than expected, military strikes on monsters around dungeons had started in several cities.
In Chevreuse it was calmer according to local news. Military were starting to secure the perimeter.
Macon listened five more minutes. Gunshots outside were decreasing. Heavy sounds too.
He got up. He took the kitchen knife he had put on a shelf before going back upstairs the last time. One of his mother's chef knives, long blade, wooden handle. Not a weapon. But it was all he had.
He went up the stairs slowly.
The basement door to the hallway had claw marks.
Deep ones. Wide. Six, seven gashes in the wood, some going all the way to the metal of the hinge. Something had tried to get in there while he was unconscious below.
Macon looked at that for a moment.
He hadn't heard anything for a good minute now. No more close gunshots. No more rumbling. Just silence.
Maybe it was over.
Maybe.
He opened the basement door. He entered the hallway. Checked the front door, still blocked by the chair and the cabinet. Checked the back door. Closed.
He moved to a living room window and looked outside from a corner.
The street looked empty. An overturned car further down. A house with a damaged front. But no visible monsters.
He waited another minute.
Still nothing.
He removed the chair from the front door. Pushed the cabinet aside. Turned the lock.
He opened the door ten centimeters.
Outside air. Smell of smoke from far away. Nothing else.
He opened a bit more.
Made one step onto the porch.
Looked left.
Empty street, the damage, the late afternoon light on all of it.
He turned around to check the other side.
And he saw the monster.
Five legs.
That was the first thing he noted. Five legs, not four, the fifth in the central axis of the body like a natural lance. Gray fur with dried blood on it in several places, right side especially. Teeth sticking out of its mouth even when closed. Yellow eyes, three of them, two normal and a third one at the top of its skull.
It was four meters away.
It was looking at Macon.
Macon looked at the monster.
The monster wasn't charging. It wasn't moving much. It was just there, standing, watching Macon with that eye on top of its skull like it was evaluating something.
Above its head.
20%
Macon noted that. Right in the middle of his absolute terror, the analytical part of his brain noted that Death Sight worked on monsters too.
The monster decided the evaluation was done.
It jumped.