The campus courtyard was a sea of the dead.
Hundreds of them.
Hopping.
Stiff-limbed, gray-skinned, and dressed in the university's official student uniform.
A jiangshi outbreak.
Right during the lunch rush.
From his vantage point in the Dean's office, Li Wei watched the horde advance.
Except it wasn't Li Wei.
Not really.
The panicked idiot was gone, safely quarantined in the back of his own mind.
In his place was the cold, calm, calculating god.
Yang Mode was online.
**
His golden eyes, swirling with the faint light of pure data, scanned the courtyard.
He saw not a mob, but a pattern.
A terrifyingly precise pattern.
The jiangshi weren't just hopping randomly.
They moved in perfect geometric formations.
Phalanxes of the undead.
Their trajectory was optimized, their approach calculated to intersect with the student cafeteria's main entrance at the point of maximum population density.
"Interesting," Yang Mode murmured, his voice a flat, emotionless hum.
"They're optimizing for maximum chaos coefficient."
**
Feng Yue landed beside him on the office balcony, a whirlwind of crimson silk and phoenix fire.
"We have to stop them," she said, her voice tight with urgency. "There are thousands of mortals in that cafeteria."
Yang Mode didn't look at her.
His gaze was fixed on the undead army below.
"The optimal solution is not to stop them," he stated calmly. "It is to de-rez them."
He raised a hand.
The air around his fingers crackled.
Golden light, brighter than before, began to weave itself into existence.
It formed lines.
Angles.
Equations.
Floating, shimmering matrices of pure, weaponized mathematics.
He pushed his hand forward.
The equations shot down into the courtyard like divine artillery.
A complex formula for exponential decay slammed into the front rank of jiangshi.
They didn't explode.
They didn't scream.
They just... dissolved.
They pixelated out of existence, their forms breaking down into glittering motes of light that vanished with a soft fizz.
Another equation, this one a beautiful, terrifying fractal, branched out, touching dozens of zombies at once.
Each one it touched simply ceased to be.
Erased from reality's source code.
**
Feng Yue watched in awe.
This was the power she had been sent to find.
The power to rewrite the world.
She shook herself from her stupor. She had a role to play.
With a cry, she leaped from the balcony.
Wings of pure phoenix fire erupted from her back, carrying her high above the courtyard.
She was a goddess of war, a comet of righteous fury.
She swooped down, unleashing streams of sacred flame that turned ranks of the undead to ash.
Her fire was passion.
His math was logic.
Together, they were a symphony of destruction.
**
Down below, the mortals were reacting exactly as you'd expect.
They were livestreaming it.
Phones were out everywhere.
Students, safe inside the cafeteria, pressed their faces against the glass, their screens held high.
"YO, THE COSPLAY BATTLE IS INSANE TODAY!"
"That Phoenix girl is so hot, literally!"
"Dude, is that the math nerd, Li Wei? Since when did he get so badass?"
"#UniversityApocalypse" was already trending.
Someone had even started a betting pool on who would win.
The odds were currently favoring the hot girl with the fire wings.
**
But the jiangshi were learning.
Yang Mode saw it instantly.
His equations would dissolve one formation, and the horde would immediately recalculate, shifting into a new pattern designed to counter his attack.
They were adapting.
Evolving.
He unleashed a complex theorem of non-Euclidean geometry.
It should have wiped out an entire flank.
But the jiangshi hopped in a pattern that created a localized distortion in spacetime, causing his equation to pass right through them.
"Their tactical response is improving," Yang Mode noted, a flicker of something almost like interest in his voice. "The controlling intelligence is learning my methodology."
He prepared a new formula.
Something more complex.
Something that would account for their adaptive capabilities.
He focused on the front lines, on the faces of the undead.
He needed more data.
He zoomed his vision in, his Equation Eyes piercing through the chaos.
He saw the gray skin.
The vacant eyes.
The familiar, university-branded hoodie on one of the jiangshi.
It had a small logo on the sleeve.
The logo for the university's Advanced Calculus study group.
His study group.
**
The world stopped.
Yang Mode's calculations froze.
His perfect, logical mind, a fortress of pure reason, suddenly encountered a variable it could not process.
That wasn't just a jiangshi.
That was Wang.
The guy who always brought snacks to their study sessions.
He looked to the left.
Another familiar face.
Lin.
She had cheated off his paper during the midterm. He had let her.
And there.
And there.
And there.
His study group partners.
His classmates.
People he knew.
People he had shared notes with.
People he had... almost considered friends.
**
Emotion.
It was a glitch.
A bug in the system.
A messy, illogical, and utterly inefficient variable.
He had always been able to quarantine it.
To isolate the pathetic, screaming panic of Yin Mode and operate with pure, clean logic.
But this... this was different.
This wasn't Yin's fear.
This was his.
A cold, sharp, cracking pain that splintered his perfect fortress of reason.
His hands, which had been steady as stone, began to tremble.
The glowing equations floating around him flickered and died.
Emotion detected, a part of his mind screamed. Beginning quarantine protocol.
But there was nothing to quarantine.
The emotion wasn't coming from the idiot.
It was coming from him.
For the first time in his existence, Yang Mode felt something.
And it hurt.
**
The jiangshi horde, sensing his hesitation, surged forward.
Feng Yue cried out a warning from above, but he didn't hear her.
He just stared at the faces of the dead.
His dead.
The zombie leader, at the very front of the horde, stopped.
It was different from the others.
It moved with a purpose. An intelligence.
It slowly, deliberately, reached up to the yellow talisman hanging from its forehead.
A talisman that sealed its identity and bound it to its master.
With a single, fluid motion, it tore the paper from its skin.
The face beneath was pale and gaunt.
But it was a face Yang Mode knew better than any other.
A face he saw every morning in the mirror of his own dorm room.
It was Chen.
His roommate.
The arrogant young master.
The zombie's lips, blue and cracked, pulled back into a grotesque smile.
It spoke.
Not in a guttural moan, but in perfect, clear Mandarin.
A voice that was both familiar and utterly alien.
"Brother Wei," Zombie Chen said, his voice echoing with a chilling, dead clarity.
"Join us."
"The math is so much clearer when you're dead."
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