The alert came at 3:17 in the morning. Not a guild alert. His phone, Yuna's contact, a message of two words: GET UP. He was dressed and out the door in four minutes, the Hollow Hound already running at full alert before he was fully conscious of why, the borrowed senses reading something in the city's ambient pressure that his sleeping mind hadn't registered but his body apparently had. The street outside his building was wrong. Not visually, not immediately, but the Acoustic Mapping skill was returning a profile that didn't match three in the morning in the eastern district. Too much vibration in the ground. The wrong kind, not traffic, not transit, something lower and more total, the vibration of something large happening some distance away. He looked north. The sky above the northern di
