The world returned to me on Sunday, not with a gentle dawn, but with the sharp, clinical glare of noon.
I had slept through the morning, a deep, dreamless plunge into nothingness that felt less like rest and more like a system shutdown and reboot. The two days since the warehouse had been a blur of forced inactivity, a maddening pantomime of recovery. My body, however, had used the time. The raw, screaming agony of the System's training had subsided, replaced by a low, constant hum of latent power. It was the feeling of a high-performance engine idling, waiting for the signal to roar to life.
I slid out of bed. The movement was silent, a fluid, economic motion that still felt alien. My bare feet made no sound on the polished wood floor. There was a new grammar to my body, a language of coiled muscle and predatory potential that I was only just beginning to learn.
