The campus was restless that morning.
Delta state Polytechnic buzzed with life as students rushed across the polytechnic buildings, arms filled with half-finished or finished report books, rulers sticking out of bags. Voices overlapped in a noisy mix of laughter, complaints, and hurried arguments about deadlines.
Chuka stood at the edge of the crowd, his hand tightening around his own report book. He had barely completed half of his experiment notes the night before. His eyes burned with exhaustion, but his heart thumped with the uneasy rhythm of someone who had run out of excuses.
'If I don't submit this today, the lecturer will have my head… and I don't have any money to settle him' he thought with a sigh.
He walked down the pathway, passing other students comparing their reports and nervously debating what to add or erase. Everything felt normal and usual as well as safe.
And then it wasn't.
It started with silence.
The chatter died so suddenly it was as if someone had pressed a mute button on the world. Chuka looked around, confused, as the sounds of voices fell away. Even the birds perched on the campus fence froze mid-flight, wings stiff in the air before drifting down like broken paper planes.
"What's happening?" a student whispered.
Chuka's gaze snapped to the main engineering gate. The once familiar rusted iron bars were gone. In their place stretched a smooth, gray wall that reached endlessly into the sky. It had no cracks, no seams, no edges, just a solid wall where freedom used to be.
Gasps rippled through the students. Panic spread like wildfire.
"Look at the gate! Someone has blocked it!" a student shouted, pointing with at the engineering gate with a trembling hand.
"What the hell?"
"Who did this?!"
"This has to be a prank…"
A young man beside the gate sprinted forward and slammed his fists against the wall. The thud echoed, low and hollow, but the surface remained unmoved. Others joined in, hitting, scratching, screaming. The wall neither bent nor cracked, it simply stood there, unmoving.
Chuka felt his chest tighten. His eyes darted to his phone. No signal, no bars, no network. He tried calling anyway, his thumb trembling against the screen, but the call didn't even attempt to connect.
Lecturers came running. They shouted for calm and order. But as they reached the wall, something strange happened… the lecturers could walk through it. One stepped halfway across, disappearing beyond. Students tried to follow, but they slammed against the invisible barrier like trapped birds.
It became clear within minutes, staff could leave but students could not.
The panic turned to chaos.
Screams erupted, students shoved against one another, some cried, others fainted. The crowd swelled and broke like a storm tide.
And then…
DONG… DONG… DONG…
A bell rang.
It was no school bell. This one rolled through the campus like thunder, heavy and oppressive, vibrating in the bones of everyone who heard it. The sound swallowed the panic, crushing voices into silence again.
The staff asked questions as they couldn't understand what was going on with the students, but the students were too shaken to answer.
From the center of the engineering field, space twisted. Shadows pooled like ink spreading on paper. Out of that darkness stepped a figure.
An invigilator.
Dressed in black robes, face hidden beneath a hood, he carried no clipboard or pen. Instead, in his skeletal hands lay a report book larger than any human should hold, its cover bound in cracked leather that pulsed faintly as if alive.
He walked slowly, every step clicking against the ground with unbearable weight. Students instinctively drew back, forming a wide circle around him. No one dared breathe.
When he spoke, his voice was not a voice at all. It was the scraping of chalk on a blackboard, the hiss of ink on rough paper, the whisper of a thousand turning pages.
"This," he said, "is your final examination."
No one moved because terror gripped them all, what was happening before them was something they could only watch in fictional movies or anime.
"You are tasked with one rule, and one rule alone," the invigilator continued, lifting the massive book. Its pages fluttered by themselves, rustling with a hollow sound. "Write what has never been written. Fail… and you will vanish."
The words struck like a blade.
Whispers broke out, trembling and frantic. What does that mean? Write what? How?
Chuka clutched his own report book tighter, his palms slick with sweat. He didn't understand what the invigilator meant. He only knew one thing: this was no joke.
All around, report books began to move.
A young lady screamed as the book in her arms flipped open by itself, pages fluttering wildly as ink poured onto them in patterns she had not drawn. Another young man dropped his book in horror when it began to breathe, the cover rising and falling like lungs.
Chuka looked down. His own report book shivered in his hands. Slowly, it opened on its own, pages turning with a will that wasn't his. His name glowed faintly at the top, covered in ink far darker than anything his pen had ever produced.
The invigilator's head tilted ever so slightly, as if satisfied by their terror.
"The exam begins now."
The bell sounded again.
DONG… DONG…
And just like that, the campus of Delta state Polytechnic became a prison of words.
Chuka's hands trembled as his report book demanded to be filled. He had no idea what to write. No idea what "has never been written" meant. He only knew one thing for certain…
If he failed, he would vanish. Which meant death.