"What the hell is going on?" Aurora gasped, her breath ragged as we pushed forward.
But we couldn't get out.
The exits were gone. Not physically—the doors still existed. But silver-eyed things blocked every escape route, twitching and staggering like broken marionettes. More gathered outside the windows, pressing against glass with inhuman persistence.
The building wasn't a safe haven.
It was a feeding ground.
The lecture hall had transformed into hell in minutes. Professor Langley lay sprawled across his desk, equations on the whiteboard now painted with arterial spray. His entrails glistened under fluorescent lights, spilling onto lecture notes that would never be finished.
The front row students—the eager ones who'd arrived early for good seats—were mostly gone. Torn apart or transformed. Emily Chen, who always raised her hand first, now jerked and twitched in the corner. Her jaw worked rhythmically.
She was chewing something that looked like a finger.
Her favorite yellow sweater was soaked crimson.
The screams cut through me like physical blows. High-pitched wails of terror mixed with guttural moans from the changed. Someone sobbed for their mother—the plea cutting off in a wet gurgle.
Bones cracked like percussion instruments.
A symphony of slaughter.
The smell hit me in waves. Copper and waste and something else. Something wrong. Blood mixed with the stench of voided bowels as death claimed its victims.
Beneath it all, an electric odor. Like ozone after lightning.
My thoughts scattered like leaves in a hurricane. 'What's happening? Mom's in Boston—is she safe? That thing used to be Jason from my study group. Why are their eyes silver? Is this everywhere? Am I dreaming? Stats? Classes? Like a game?'
'What's real anymore?'
Glass exploded inward as something crashed through the window. Shards rained down, slicing exposed skin. A girl near us screamed as a piece embedded in her cheek.
She pulled it out.
Silver leaked from the wound instead of red.
Another student—dark hair, green NYU sweatshirt—made a break for the side exit. He almost made it. Three of them descended on him like wolves.
I watched, paralyzed, as they tore him apart.
His arm came free with a wet pop. Still reaching for the door as his body went down under broken nails and snapping teeth. Blood painted an arc across the whiteboard.
"Move!" Aurora grabbed my arm, dragging me between overturned desks.
My brain short-circuited from the carnage.
We stumbled over a fallen student. Alive or dead—I couldn't tell, didn't stop to check. My foot slipped in something wet and warm.
I didn't look down.
Couldn't.
My mind raced, pulling at threads of information. Desperate to stitch together some kind of plan. 'New class system. Silver eyes mean transformed. Game mechanics in reality. If video games taught me anything—headshots? No weapons. Math won't save us.'
'Think. Think. THINK.'
We backed into the lecture hall's corner. Staggered seats created a makeshift barricade. Bodies slumped across rows—some twitching as transformation took them, others still with death.
Dark fluid pooled beneath seats. Dripping down to form rivulets between rows.
They were changing. That much was clear.
The ones who'd collapsed first had started convulsing. Skin fracturing like broken porcelain. Veins darkening into something alien. One moment, students. The next, snarling husks tearing into those who hadn't been fast enough.
Every bite. Every scratch. More fell, twisting, eyes snapping open in eerie unison.
The same unearthly silver glow.
It spread like wildfire. No smoke, no flames. Just hunger.
And it was closing in.
I scanned the room, breathing sharp and shallow. No weapons. No clear exits. No backup. Just overturned desks, scattered books, a professor bleeding out near the whiteboard.
His eyes tracked us weakly. Still human. Still conscious enough to register fear.
'We're going to die here. We're going to die and become like them. Or be eaten by them. Is there a difference?'
'The window? Too high. The doors? Blocked. Under the desks? They'd find us.'
'Oh god, that's Amanda being torn apart. I sat next to her yesterday. Borrowed her pen. Now her jaw is being ripped off. Silver light pouring from the wound like liquid mercury.'
The screen.
The damn system screen that had appeared before this nightmare began.
It had mentioned a class.
"Aurora, activate!" I snapped, gripping her arm as I pulled her back from a lunging zombie.
The thing wore a blood-spattered lab coat. One of the teaching assistants, now crawling over desks with impossible speed. Fingers elongated into claw-like appendages.
"What?!" She whipped around, eyes wide but still sharp.
Still her.
"Your class! Activate it!"
Three silver-eyed things converged on us. Sensing the corner we'd backed ourselves into. One dragged itself forward despite missing its lower half, intestines leaving a glistening trail behind it.
Another moved in jerky bursts. Like stop-motion animation missing frames.
The third—God, the third had been Rob. My roommate freshman year. His face was half gone, silver light pouring from the wound like he was leaking moonlight.
Aurora hesitated. Not because she didn't believe me. Nothing about this moment made sense. The world had gone from astrophysics lectures to full-scale apocalypse in under sixty seconds.
And now I was yelling at her to activate some mysterious system like we were in a game.
It was insane.
It was stupid.
But the zombies were real.
And they were here.
I saw the moment she decided to trust me. Just a flicker in her eyes before she exhaled sharply and shut them.
Behind her, three of them lunged.
'Do something!' My brain screamed. 'Your class! You have one too!'
I closed my eyes for a split second. Desperately grasping at whatever power might have been granted to me. Something cold and ethereal shimmered into existence between my fingers.
A quill. Translucent and crystalline. Its tip dripped with what looked like liquid starlight.
I had no idea what to do with it. Write what? Where?
The quill trembled in my grip, then dissolved like mist. My concentration fractured under the weight of terror.
I barely had time to throw up a desk between us. Shoving it forward with every bit of strength I had. The impact rattled my arms, but it only stalled them for half a second.
They snarled, clawing over it like animals. Fingers digging into wood.
I braced for impact.
My vision tunneled. Sound compressed into a distant echo. Time stretched like taffy—each millisecond an eternity as I watched death approach on silver eyes and broken limbs.
'Mom. Dad. I'm sorry. I should have called more. Told you I loved you. Now I'll never—'
Then the light came.
It wasn't blinding. Wasn't the kind of light that made you turn away. It was silver, pure, radiating out like a pulse. Spreading across the floor in rippling waves.
It shimmered—moonlight given form.
Fluid and cutting and impossibly sharp.
And then—
Schlkk.
The zombies froze. Not dramatically. Not in some cinematic moment of realization.
They just stopped.
And then they fell apart.
Rob's body separated at the waist. The clean cut cauterized by silver fire. The wound didn't bleed—it glowed briefly, then dimmed to ash. The half-bodied thing split lengthwise, both pieces twitching independently before going still.
The third collapsed in geometric sections. Like someone had solved a lethal puzzle box.
Around us, more of them fell. Not all, but those closest to the silvery wave Aurora had somehow generated. Their dismembered parts littered the lecture hall floor.
Grotesque still-lifes among the existing carnage.
Aurora stood in the center of it all. Body tense, shoulders rising and falling with every breath. Her right hand was wrapped around something that hadn't been there a second ago.
A sword.
It gleamed under flickering classroom lights. Silver like the glow in her eyes, humming softly like it knew it belonged to her. The blade was more than metal—it seemed woven from solidified moonbeams.
Edges impossibly sharp. The hilt curved to fit her hand perfectly.
She exhaled, gaze locked onto the weapon in her hands. Fingers tightened around the hilt. She turned it slightly, metal catching the light.
"A sword," she muttered, almost to herself.
Then she smirked.
"Fits me perfectly."