Sunny killed his first Nightmare Creature when he was thirteen.
It was a Dormant-rank beast, a thing like a dog with too many joints and skin that looked like wet bark. Anvil's soldiers had captured it alive somewhere in the ash fields beyond Bastion's walls and brought it back in a reinforced cage. They left it in a sealed room in the lower keep, and Anvil left Sunny in the room with it.
The creature had claws, teeth, and a body mass roughly three times his own. He had his knife.
It took him nine minutes. The first three were spent avoiding the thing's lunges while he mapped its movement patterns, because every living thing had patterns, even Nightmare Creatures, and patterns were just another kind of lock waiting for the right key. The next four were spent provoking it into overcommitting to a charge, which left its hindquarters exposed as it pivoted. The final two were spent on the kill itself, which was messier than the anatomy diagrams had implied it would be.
The creature's blood was black and smelled like copper and ammonia. It soaked into his clothes and dried on his skin in a crust that itched for hours afterward.
When it was over, Sunny sat on the floor of the sealed room and waited for the door to open. His hands were steady. His breathing was even. The knife was clean, because he'd wiped it on the creature's hide out of reflex, the way you clean a tool after using it.
Anvil entered, looked at the corpse, looked at Sunny, and said nothing for a long time.
Then: "You waited."
Sunny nodded. The creature had been fast and aggressive, but it was also mindless in its aggression, which meant that the longer Sunny delayed engagement, the more information he gathered about its attack patterns, and the less risk he assumed when he finally struck. Patience was not the same thing as hesitation. Patience was the decision to act later because later would be more efficient.
Anvil had taught him that distinction. Sunny wasn't sure when.
"Good," Anvil said, and left.
The soul shard that formed from the creature's remains was small and dull, barely a flicker of essence trapped in cloudy crystal. Sunny looked at it for a while, turning it over in his fingers. He knew what soul shards were and what they did: concentrated essence that could be absorbed to strengthen the soul cores of the Awakened, or traded as currency in the Dream Realm's economy. They were the foundation of human survival in this world.
But Sunny was not Awakened. He hadn't even undergone his First Nightmare. The shard was useless to him in every practical sense.
He kept it anyway, tucked into the pocket of his coat, because it was the first thing he had ever earned in the Dream Realm that Anvil hadn't given him.
The seventh kill was the one that almost went wrong.
It was a creature with no eyes and a body shaped like a flattened centipede, low to the ground and fast in a way that felt wrong for something its size. Its segmented carapace was the color of dried bone, and the soldiers who brought it in had welded the cage shut rather than trust the lock, which told Sunny more about the creature's capabilities than any briefing could have.
Anvil didn't stay for this one. He closed the door and left, and for the first time, Sunny was entirely alone with a nightmare creature that wanted to kill him.
The creature didn't charge. It pressed itself flat against the stone floor and moved along the wall with a low, scraping sound that Sunny felt in his teeth, and its lack of eyes meant that it was navigating by something other than sight. Sound, possibly, or vibration, or some sense that the anatomy texts hadn't covered because the anatomy texts dealt with known classifications and this thing didn't match any of them.
Sunny stood still and controlled his breathing. The creature completed one circuit of the room and began a second, tighter this time, spiraling inward. It was mapping him the same way he was mapping it, and the realization produced a sensation he hadn't expected: professional respect. This creature was doing exactly what Sunny would have done if their positions were reversed.
He stepped left. The creature adjusted instantly, redirecting its spiral to compensate, and Sunny understood. It was tracking vibration through the floor., which meant that every footstep he took would give it more information
He stopped moving entirely. The creature paused, its antennae sweeping the air in slow arcs. For a long moment, neither of them did anything.
Then Sunny threw his knife.
Not at the creature. At the far wall, where the blade hit stone and rang with a sharp metallic sound that bounced off every surface in the sealed room. The creature lunged toward the noise with a speed that blurred the air around it, and in the half-second it took to cross the room, Sunny was already behind it.
He'd palmed his second knife from the sheath strapped to his left forearm, the one Anvil's instructors had given him the week before precisely for situations where his primary weapon was unavailable. The blade went into the gap between the creature's third and fourth segments, where the carapace plates overlapped and the connective tissue beneath was soft enough to part under a sharp edge.
The creature's body coiled around the wound like a fist closing, and its segments clamped down on Sunny's hand with a force that ground the bones of his fingers together. He didn't let go. He twisted the blade instead, because the anatomy of segmented creatures meant that the nerve clusters were bundled along the ventral line, and severing them at the right point would cause the segments to release involuntarily.
The segments released. Sunny pulled his hand free and stepped back, and the creature thrashed in a diminishing circle on the floor until it stopped.
His right hand was a mess. Two fingers were dislocated, the skin across his knuckles was torn, and the bones felt like they'd been rearranged in ways that wouldn't reassemble cleanly. He set the dislocations himself, because Anvil's instructors had covered field medicine in the third year and waiting for help was a luxury that real operations wouldn't provide.
The pain was significant. He filed it away and waited for the door to open.
When Anvil came in and saw the blood on the floor and the knife embedded in the far wall and the dead creature curled like a corkscrew near the center of the room, his eyes tracked the story backward. Sunny could see him reconstructing the sequence: the thrown knife, the misdirection, the gap in the armor, the injured hand.
"It was faster than I expected," Sunny said.
Anvil looked at his swollen, bleeding hand.
"Faster than you prepared for," he corrected. "Those are different things. One is observation. The other is failure."
Sunny absorbed the distinction. He'd been careless in how he positioned his hand during the stab, leaving his fingers inside the creature's striking radius when they should have been clear. The plan had worked, but the execution had been sloppy, and sloppy executions accumulated into habits that would eventually kill him against something more dangerous.
"Adapt faster," Anvil said. "A plan that requires everything to go right is not a plan. It's a hope."
He left without asking whether Sunny needed medical attention for his hand. Lira arrived an hour later with bandages and a poultice that smelled like pine sap, and she wrapped his fingers with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this many times before, though never for him.
"You should have used the wall," she said.
Sunny looked at her. "What?"
"The room is sealed. The walls are stone. If you'd driven the creature against the wall instead of meeting it in open space, it couldn't have coiled. Its body needs room to contract."
She tied off the bandage and collected her supplies.
"The room is part of the weapon too."
It was the longest thing she had ever said to him, and it was also the most useful combat advice he'd received from anyone other than Anvil. He thought about it for the rest of the evening, turning it over the way he'd turned over the first soul shard, and by the time he fell asleep, he'd redesigned his approach to enclosed-space fighting from the ground up.
That evening, Anvil came to the training room and talked about the nature of threat assessment.
He stood by the narrow window, as he always did, with his hands clasped behind his back and his grey eyes fixed on the middle distance where Bastion's outer walls met the grey horizon of the ash fields. The light of the Dream Realm's sun was low and amber, and it carved his profile into something that looked less like a face and more like an engraving on a coin.
"Most people evaluate threats by what they see," he said. "A creature with large claws appears more dangerous than one with small claws. A man with a sword appears more dangerous than a man without one. This is instinct, and instinct is useful for animals, because animals face the same kinds of threats repeatedly and simple heuristics serve them well enough."
Sunny sat cross-legged on the stone floor and listened. These sessions had a rhythm he'd learned to follow without prompting. Anvil would speak for a while, usually in this same measured cadence, and then he would ask a question that was designed to test whether Sunny had been listening.
"But instinct fails against novelty," Anvil continued. "The creature you fought today had no eyes, no obvious weapons, and a body designed for defense rather than attack. If you had relied on instinct, you would have assessed it as less dangerous than the first creature I gave you. You would have been wrong."
"I assessed it as more dangerous," Sunny said. "The soldiers welded the cage."
Anvil's mouth moved by a fraction. On another man, it might have been a smile.
"The soldiers welded the cage because they were afraid of it, and they were afraid of it because it killed two of them during capture. Those soldiers were Awakened. Enhanced strength, enhanced reflexes, combat Memories. And an eyeless thing the size of a large dog killed two of them before the rest subdued it."
He turned from the window.
"What does that tell you?"
Sunny thought about it. "That the creature's offensive capability was inversely proportional to its apparent threat level. The soldiers underestimated it because it didn't look dangerous, and the gap between their assessment and the reality is what killed them."
"Correct. And what is the general principle?"
"The most dangerous threats are the ones that don't look like threats."
Anvil held his gaze for a moment.
"Remember that," he said. "Not just for Nightmare creatures."
He left, and Sunny sat alone in the training room and wondered whether the lesson had been about Nightmare Creatures at all, or whether Anvil had been teaching him something about the kind of weapon he was supposed to become: the kind that didn't look like one.
Over the following months, the creature kills became routine. Anvil supplied a steady progression of increasingly dangerous opponents, always Dormant-rank but with different body types, different attack patterns, different environmental advantages. Sunny fought them in sealed rooms and open courtyards and narrow corridors and, once, in a flooded chamber where the water reached his waist and something with too many limbs tried to pull him under.
He learned to kill quickly, cleanly, and without unnecessary risk. He learned to read the body language of creatures that didn't have bodies shaped like anything he recognized. He learned that the most dangerous moment in any fight was not the attack or the defense but the transition between the two, when your weight was committed and your balance was uncertain.
The flooded chamber was the nineteenth kill, and it was the first one that taught him something about himself that the previous eighteen hadn't.
The creature was amphibious, built for water in a way that made the flooded room its territory rather than its prison. It had a body like a thick, boneless rope, the color of tarnished silver, and it moved through the chest-deep water without creating a ripple. Sunny couldn't see it and couldn't hear it, and the water neutralized his biggest advantage, the ability to read a creature's approach from its body language, because the creature had no body language he could interpret through the murk.
The first strike came from below. Something wrapped around his left ankle and pulled, and Sunny went under so fast that the breath he'd been holding exited his mouth in a burst of bubbles. The water was cold and dark and thick with sediment that turned visibility to nothing, and the thing on his ankle was tightening with a slow, patient constriction that suggested it had all the time in the world.
He didn't panic. Panic was a cascade of physiological responses that impaired decision-making, and Anvil had trained the cascade out of him through systematic exposure during his eleventh year, when the instructors had placed him in increasingly stressful scenarios and required him to solve problems while his body screamed at him to run. What remained after the training was a kind of cold clarity, a state where the fear existed but couldn't reach the part of his brain that chose what to do next.
He bent double underwater, found the thing around his ankle by touch, and traced its body with his free hand until he located what he was looking for: a ridge along its dorsal surface where the muscle fibers converged and the tissue was thinnest. The anatomy texts hadn't covered this specific species, but the general principles of segmented aquatic predators still applied, and the general principle was that constricting creatures needed to breathe, and the respiratory structures were always vulnerable.
He drove his knife into the ridge and twisted. The constriction released. Sunny kicked free and surfaced, gasping, and the creature surfaced behind him in a violent eruption of water that sprayed across the entire room.
The fight lasted another four minutes after that. Sunny won it by getting out of the water entirely, climbing onto a stone ledge near the ceiling that the creature couldn't reach, and waiting until it surfaced to breathe. When it did, he dropped onto it from above and opened it from the dorsal ridge to the tail with a single cut that used gravity as his primary force multiplier.
He sat on the ledge afterward, soaking wet and breathing hard, with creature blood mixing into the floodwater below him and turning it the color of ink. The soul shard formed on the surface of the water and floated there, bobbing gently, and Sunny watched it for a while before climbing down to collect it.
What he noticed, sitting on that ledge, was that his heartbeat had returned to resting within ninety seconds of the kill. After the first creature, the dog-thing with the bark skin, it had taken his heart almost ten minutes to settle. After the seventh, the eyeless centipede, it had taken five. After the nineteenth, ninety seconds.
His body was learning that killing was routine. His adrenal system was calibrating itself to the work, the way any system calibrates to repeated inputs, reducing the intensity of its response because the stimulus no longer qualified as novel. This was, from a performance standpoint, exactly what Anvil wanted. A weapon that trembled after every use was unreliable, and Anvil did not invest in unreliable instruments.
But Sunny sat on the ledge and looked at the blood in the water and noticed something that the performance standpoint didn't account for. He noticed that he wasn't bothered by the fact that he wasn't bothered.
After the first kill, he'd felt the absence of horror as something sharp, a gap where a reaction should have been. It had nagged at him for days, the way a missing tooth nags at the tongue. After the seventh, the gap was still there, but he'd stopped probing it. After the nineteenth, he had to actively search for the gap to confirm it still existed, and when he found it, he felt nothing in particular about finding it.
The progression was the thing that should have alarmed him. Not the killing, but the way the killing had become transparent, invisible, as seamlessly integrated into his daily life as eating or sleeping. He was thirteen years old and he had killed nineteen living things and the most remarkable thing about it was how unremarkable it had become.
He should have been alarmed. He recognized, in the abstract, that a thirteen-year-old who felt nothing about killing should probably feel something about feeling nothing. The recognition was there. The feeling that should have accompanied it was not.
He climbed down from the ledge, collected the soul shard, and went back to his room to change his clothes.
Lira found him in the corridor outside the east wing's washroom, standing in front of the narrow window that looked out over Bastion's second ring. His hair was still wet from scrubbing the creature blood out of it, and he was holding the pouch of soul shards in one hand, turning it over, listening to the way they clinked against each other.
She stopped a few paces away and watched him with that expression she always wore, the one that was carefully assembled from professional blankness and something else that Sunny could never quite identify. She was carrying the evening food tray, balanced on one hand the way the Awakened carried things, without visible effort.
"You're dripping on the floor," she said.
Sunny looked down. She was right. A thin trail of water ran from the washroom to where he stood, and the puddle forming around his bare feet was spreading toward the carpet runner that lined the center of the corridor. The carpet was old and faded, and he'd never seen anyone clean or replace it, but it was the only soft thing in the entire east wing and Lira seemed to take its condition personally.
"Sorry," he said.
He stepped off the carpet and onto the bare stone, where the water could drain into the seams between the blocks without ruining anything. Lira set the tray on the small table by the wall, the way she always did, and then she didn't leave.
This was unusual. Lira's presence in the east wing followed a pattern as regular as everything else in Sunny's life: she arrived with food, she departed, she returned for the tray. During surveillance exercises she walked three paces ahead and never looked back. She spoke when spoken to and sometimes when not, but only to deliver practical information, and she never lingered.
She was lingering now.
"How many is that?" she asked.
It took Sunny a moment to realize she was looking at the pouch.
"Nineteen."
She nodded, as though nineteen were a number that confirmed something she'd already calculated. Then she reached into her pocket and set something on the tray beside the food. It was a small leather case, the kind used for needles or lockpicks, and it was worn in a way that suggested years of use rather than recent acquisition.
"For the shards," she said. "The pouch will wear through eventually, and if you lose them on the stairs, I'm the one who has to sweep them up."
Sunny looked at the case. It was practical and well-made, with interior loops stitched in at intervals that would hold each shard individually, preventing them from knocking against each other. It was the kind of thing someone would have to go looking for, because it wasn't standard military issue and it wasn't the kind of item Anvil's supply chain would produce on request.
"Where did you get this?" he asked.
"The market. Third ring."
"You went to the market for this?"
Lira's expression didn't change. "I go to the market every week. I needed new bandage cord. The case was next to the cord. I bought both. Don't make it into something it isn't."
She picked up the empty tray from the previous meal and walked away.
Sunny stood in the corridor and looked at the case for a long time. It fit the shards perfectly. The interior loops were spaced at exact