Leon stayed quiet for a long moment after Valeria's words. He understood what she meant, and somewhere deep down he knew she was right, but you couldn't rip out a lifetime of conditioning in a few days. The idea that humans were on top. That the world should bend around them, not the other way around.
Even so, he also knew something far more immediate.
I don't get to philosophize right now.
Survival came first, and getting to the men's dorm he could still see between the buildings. It looked close. It wasn't. Not with the screaming, the chaos, and a campus that was becoming less and less recognizable as any place he'd ever known.
He stepped forward. Then another.
And hesitated when movement on the left side of the square caught his eye.
A girl, probably a student. Pretty, in a normal-world way, was sprinting like her life depended on it, face twisted with terror. Behind her ran a small brown dog.
Or rather… something that had been a dog.
It moved too fast, its paws striking the ground like springs.
Leon knew, even before it happened, that she wouldn't make it.
The creature caught her within seconds. It slammed into her without hesitation, knocking her down hard. The girl let out a short, panicked scream, throwing her arms up on instinct as the beast opened its jaws, ready to bite her in half.
Leon didn't think.
His body moved on its own, driven by something beyond stats. The world blurred for a fraction of a second as he accelerated, and then he was there, beside the beast in one fluid instant.
The mutated hound caught him in the corner of its eye. Its head turned a few centimeters.
That was all it got.
Leon's sword cut through it in a clean, brutal arc, splitting its body in half. Blood sprayed wide, splattering the girl's clothes and the ground beneath them.
The animal collapsed, dead.
The girl stared at Leon with wide eyes, lips trembling in mute shock, trying to breathe like her lungs had forgotten how. Leon didn't even look at her. He was already scanning the campus, sharp, cautious, searching for the next threat, as if what he'd done had been nothing but reflex. Not heroism.
A cold system window appeared in front of him.
[Essence Record - Kill Confirmed]
[Target: Mutated Hound (LVL 9)]
[Reward: +2 VIT | +3 AGI]
The girl kept staring, trying to make sense of what she'd just seen, because her mind was still a step behind reality, still stuck on the fact that a boy had appeared out of nowhere and cut something in half with a single motion.
Then the smell hit her.
The warmth of sticky gore soaking into her clothes.
She flinched and shoved the dead body away with shaking hands, crawling backward on her knees as if even touching it might infect her. Only then did she look up again.
Leon didn't notice.
His gaze was already jumping from danger to danger, and a thought was forming in his head, one he didn't like.
Even with Agility at a level most people could only dream of. Even with forty points making him several times faster than anyone pre-apocalypse… that dog had still reacted. Barely. Instinctively. But it had turned its head.
That was enough to make something heavy twist in Leon's stomach.
It meant the monsters, at least some of them, could keep up a little. That his advantage wasn't absolute.
Just temporary.
"Get up," he snapped at the girl without looking at her. "Fast. And follow me if you want to live."
He didn't wait for an answer.
Another movement caught his attention, only a few meters away. A student was stumbling backward, tripping over his own feet. Above him hovered a massive wasp the size of a watermelon, its stinger thrust forward like a spear aimed straight at the student's torso.
The girl scrambled upright and ran after Leon in blind panic.
Leon accelerated again.
He appeared behind the creature almost instantly and drove his sword into its back with a vicious thrust, punching through. Then he ripped the blade downward, splitting the body in two.
Blood exploded outward.
The wasp dropped in two halves, innards spilling onto the asphalt, twitching for a fraction of a second. The student stared, mouth hanging open, nausea rising as his brain tried to process what he'd just seen.
System text blinked up for Leon.
[Essence Record - Kill Confirmed]
[Target: Mutated Insect (LVL 8)]
[Reward: +2 VIT | +1 STR]
[Level Up: LVL 5 → LVL 6]
[Stat Points Gained: +4]
Leon didn't even register the level-up.
There was no thrill. No satisfaction. Just cold focus. Before the last letters faded, he was already moving again, sword in hand, eyes sweeping the campus like a radar.
The girl he'd saved glanced at the bisected wasp and then, trembling, ran after him without a word, as if her instincts knew that if she lost sight of him, she'd vanish into the same chaos as everyone else.
The boy Leon had just saved pushed himself up a beat later, tore his eyes away from the corpse with effort, and sprinted after them, never looking back.
Leon ran and thought at the same time.
The dorm was close.
All he had to do was turn, get inside, sprint upstairs, find his room, grab his phone, call his parents, his sister. Hear a voice. Know they were alive.
That's why I came here.
The thought kept returning like a splinter under a nail, sharp and stubborn, but every time he tried to focus on it, he heard screams. Saw people running. And knew, with sick clarity, that right now it wasn't the most important thing.
Right now, the most important thing was that these people survived the next fifteen minutes.
"Gym…" he muttered, cutting sharply between buildings.
The gym had one main entrance and no windows zombies could break through. Thick walls. Real shelter. If there was any place to gather people and seal them away from this hell, temporarily, it was there.
Leon didn't know how most of them had survived the night in this kind of chaos, but if they were still breathing, it meant not everything was lost.
On the way, he tried to save as many people as he could, drawing monsters away, cutting them down with fast, efficient swings.
Zombies about to corner someone at a wall. Strange insects diving at lone students. Mutated dogs chasing the slowest runners.
More than fifteen people ended up in a loose pack behind him, sometimes without even knowing who was leading, only seeing the back of a boy in a long coat carving a path forward, killing anything that got too close.
At one point Leon glanced over his shoulder and only then realized how big the group had become.
He stopped abruptly and threw up a hand.
People nearly collided, stumbling into each other...
...and then Leon saw what was ahead, and his stomach clenched.
Five students were sprinting toward them, faces warped with panic, eyes wide. Behind them came a pack of more than ten zombies, tripping and snarling, drawn by the noise like dogs to meat. The students didn't even dare to look back. They just ran like every second was their last.
Then they rounded a corner.
And slammed straight into another group, five zombies coming the other way, blocking the path.
One of the students couldn't stop in time. He hit a corpse full speed, and the zombie's hands shot out on instinct, raking claws across his arm, shoulder, and neck. Fabric tore. Skin split.
The boy didn't even feel it, adrenaline drowned everything. For a fraction of a second he didn't register what had happened at all. He just bounced off the dead body and spun around, trying to run back the way they'd come.
The other four reacted the same way, stumbling backward in chaos. One nearly slipped on blood-slick asphalt, saved only because someone caught his backpack.
And then all five looked behind them.
The zombies chasing them were already there.
Everywhere.
No corridor. No open space. Just the building walls boxing them in, dead bodies in front, and another wave closing from behind like the jaws of a trap.
Someone let out a thin, broken sound.
Someone else dropped a bag like it suddenly meant nothing at all.
And then something inside them snapped.
They started wailing. One dropped to his knees, clutching his head. Another burst into loud, ugly sobs, babbling nonsense. A moment later the screams tore out of all of them at once, high, shrill, desperate.
"HELP!"
"PLEASE!"
"NO, NO, NO, !"
Their voices carried too far, echoing off concrete, ringing across the campus like an alarm siren.
And Leon felt the worst part immediately, like ice sliding down his spine.
In this world, screaming wasn't a request for rescue.
It was bait.