"Leon…" the professor finally said, quietly, eyes fixed on the gymnasium. "What do we do now?"
Leon didn't answer at once.
Because when he lifted his gaze and truly registered what stood in front of the building, his mind had to switch, hard, from move to analyze, and that transition never came without tension.
A mass of zombies swarmed the gym's massive metal doors.
Not a scattered handful. Not a wandering pack.
A crush, well over eighty bodies, packed so tightly some were practically tripping over each other, slamming fists, shoulders, and foreheads into the metal. Every few seconds the doors answered with a dull, resonant boom that rolled across the campus like an alarm bell.
They weren't drifting.
They weren't aimless.
They were focused.
Leon narrowed his eyes, watching the pattern, how they pressed the same spot almost in unison, like something on the other side was pulling them with a force they couldn't ignore. In that moment, the loose observations in his head snapped into place.
"They…" he murmured, half to himself. "They can sense the living."
It wasn't a theory backed by research or some neat system description. It was field logic, based on how the zombies reacted to screams, movement, people, even before they had visual contact.
"If they're hammering here," he added, eyes still on the doors, "then there are people inside. I can't think of another reason."
He turned and looked at the group behind him.
Faces drawn tight with exhaustion and grime. Eyes full of hope and fear. They were seeing the same thing he was, except they didn't have his stats, his experience, or that thin edge of madness that let him keep moving forward.
And then the real problem surfaced.
Leon knew the zombies weren't a true threat to him in a straight fight, one-on-one or in smaller clusters, they didn't stand a chance. But eighty bodies compressed into one place wasn't about strength or speed.
It was about the statistics of error.
One stumble. One wrong step. One hand catching the wrong angle. One nail scraping skin or coat.
And everything ended.
Even a shallow scratch from a zombie meant a death sentence.
Leon's brow tightened as he searched for an answer that didn't involve charging straight into the swarm,
When something hissed through the air.
An arrow struck clean into a zombie's forehead. The creature didn't even have time to twitch before its body crumpled onto the asphalt.
A second arrow followed almost immediately, punching into another skull with the same precise finality.
Leon jerked his gaze upward, instinctively searching for the archer, but he couldn't spot them, because the distance was absurd, and the angle suggested a position far beyond what an average person could reliably shoot from.
"Damn…" he muttered. "That's… terrifyingly accurate."
Before he could fully process it, more zombies began to drop. The uniform pounding against the doors broke apart. Heads turned. Bodies shifted. The swarm's rhythm fractured as their attention scattered in different directions.
Leon decided.
"You stay here," he snapped to the people behind him, leaving no room for argument. "Don't move."
He didn't wait for an answer.
He vanished.
Literally.
To the people watching, Leon simply ceased to be where he'd been, then, a fraction of a second later, he was already at the edge of the zombie crush, only to disappear again, moving at full speed with no effort saved. Time mattered now. Precision mattered. Endurance could come later.
His sword worked like a machine.
Heads fell in rapid succession. Bodies collapsed. Leon slipped between them like a flash, never lingering, aware that every extra second inside that mass raised the odds of contact.
In five seconds, more than ten zombies were dead.
Then, from the far side of the swarm, a massive impact detonated through the air.
Leon sprang back on instinct, twisting toward the sound, and saw a bald, towering man with a gigantic hammer bury the weapon into the asphalt. The blow crushed several zombies at once. The force was so extreme the ground caved into a shallow crater, and bodies flew aside like rag dolls.
But one zombie didn't get thrown.
It stood behind the man at a bad angle, too close, too quiet, positioned where the bald brute couldn't possibly see it in time.
Leon saw it.
And he was gone.
He appeared behind the man at the exact moment the zombie lifted its arms. One short cut was enough. The monster's head dropped and rolled several meters across the ground.
The bald man spun, heart practically in his throat. He stared at Leon, then at the corpse beside him, then back at Leon like he was trying to understand reality again.
"What the fuck…" he rasped. "What is with that speed…?"
Only then did it sink in, without that boy who'd appeared out of nowhere, he'd be on the ground with his throat torn open.
And that realization stayed.
The bald man, Marek Domański, opened his mouth to say something, to throw out at least a rough thanks, but the boy who'd just saved his life was already gone from his vision, ripped out of the moment like he'd never been there.
A second later, somewhere farther off, there was the dry sound of a cut, and another heavy body hit the asphalt.
"Marek… Marek Domański," he muttered under his breath, as if introducing himself to the air made any sense now. Then he watched the falling zombies with a mix of disbelief and faint unease, because even he, for all his strength, couldn't track the way that boy moved.
Marek shook his head like he could knock the thought loose.
He tightened his grip on the hammer, drew back, and smashed into the packed crowd again, another brutal impact, more bodies broken, fresh cracks in the asphalt and fresh blood sprayed across the ground.
And then, in the middle of the chaos, Leon heard a woman's voice, calm, melodic.
"Ice spears."
No shout. No strain. Just a command, like she was speaking to something that had obeyed her for years.
The air above the square trembled.
Ten ice spears formed almost simultaneously, slender, sharp, half-transparent, and shot out in different directions, each one locking onto a separate target.
Every strike was perfect.
Each spear drove into a skull, piercing bone and freezing everything inside instantly. Zombies fell without blood spray, their bodies stiffening in unnatural poses as a thin glaze of ice crawled over them. When they hit the ground, the frost cracked softly.
Valeria, standing a few steps back, lifted an eyebrow, watching with clear interest.
"Oh…" she murmured to herself. "That's a pretty big mana pool for this level. And the control's… not bad."
Leon glanced toward the woman who'd just joined the fight, and for a fraction of a second his movements slowed, not because he wanted them to, but because it was hard not to notice.
Long, ice-blue hair flowed down her back in a smooth wave. Her body was distinctly feminine, almost sculpted to draw attention, and her face held a cold, nearly arrogant expression that made one thing painfully clear:
She had no intention of apologizing for how far she stood above the rest of the world.
For an instant, a comparison flickered through Leon's mind, unpleasantly out of place, and he shot a quick look toward Valeria. A small prick of amused resignation hit him, because after meeting her, judging any other woman's looks felt pointless.
The thought vanished as quickly as it came.
His body didn't slow.
Leon returned to the rhythm of the fight, blade harvesting again, because there were still too many zombies, far too many for anyone to afford a lapse. But he noticed something else.
The distant arrows that had first broken the swarm were now focusing more and more toward the area where the ice woman was operating.
Over eighty zombies was a number that would've felt heavy even to Leon.
He could've killed them alone, yes, but it would've cost time, energy, and raised the risk of a fatal mistake. Here, with four people whose combat ability was outright frightening, everything changed.
Leon.
The archer.
The ice mage.
And the bald man with the hammer.
They moved almost instinctively. No shouted plans. No assigned roles. And yet their attacks fitted together so cleanly that in under a minute and a half, the square in front of the gym became a sea of corpses.
Blood ran across the asphalt in dark sheets, pooling into several wide puddles. The sight, nearly a hundred dead bodies scattered without order, would've shattered the mind of anyone who'd been worrying about quizzes and deadlines yesterday.
When the last zombie dropped, a short, heavy silence fell.
The three of them, Leon, Marek leaning on his massive hammer, and the ice woman, finally stood within each other's line of sight, surrounded by bodies and steaming blood, watching one another with careful restraint.
Because each of them understood something perfectly.
Mutated animals and zombies weren't the only things in this world that could kill them.
And out of all of them, the woman with ice magic watched the hardest, keeping the most distance, already judging whether the people in front of her were temporary allies…
Or future threats.