Students scrambled backward, knocking over chairs in a desperate, clattering rush to escape. Notebooks scattered like fallen leaves. Bags were abandoned in the aisles. Others simply stood paralyzed, their minds unable to process the visceral horror unfolding at the front of the room.
The thing that had been a girl jerked upright with impossible, sickening speed. Bones cracked as joints bent in ways they were never designed for. Her head twitched at unnatural angles, resembling a marionette controlled by a drunk puppeteer. Her silver eyes swept the room before locking onto the nearest student, a guy in a baseball cap who had been scrolling through his phone only seconds before.
She lunged.
The speed defied human capability. One moment she was crouched between the seats, and the next she was airborne, her fingers extended like porcelain claws. Blood splattered across the linoleum in a violent, arterial spray. The guy's scream cut off in a wet gurgle. Red painted the whiteboard behind him in abstract patterns that would have been beautiful if they were not so horrifying.
The membrane of civility ruptured completely. Panic exploded outward like a supernova. It was raw, animal terror that swept through the room faster than thought. Students screamed, shoved, and trampled each other in a blind desperation to reach the exits. The orderly world of academic schedules and assignment deadlines disintegrated in seconds.
The transformed were not just attacking. They were feeding.
They tore into flesh with inhuman strength, silver light leaking from their mouths as they consumed what had once been their classmates. With each victim, more transformed. Eyes flared silver as the infection, or perhaps evolution, spread through the rows.
"Move!" Aurora's voice cut through the chaos like a blade.
Her hand closed around my wrist with bruising force. The human contact jolted me back into my body, breaking the horrified trance that had held me frozen. We ran. We stumbled over abandoned backpacks and overturned chairs, pushing through the mass of panicked bodies surging toward exits that suddenly seemed impossibly far away.
But we could not move fast enough.
The room had become a storm of movement. The air filled with the metallic scent of blood and something else, something alien and electric. It smelled like ozone after a lightning strike, but it was wrong. It was a charge that made my teeth ache. Professor Langley lay motionless near his podium, his chalk still clutched in one hand as a red pool spread beneath him. His eyes stared at nothing, reflecting the flickering fluorescent lights.
As we fought toward the door, pushing against the tide of panicked students, one thought crystallized in my mind with terrible clarity. This was not a glitch or a dream. This was selection. The game had begun, and we were all playing whether we wanted to or not.
"What the hell is going on?" Aurora gasped, her breath ragged.
We reached the back, but the exits were gone. The doors still existed physically, but silver-eyed things blocked every escape route, twitching and staggering like broken toys. More gathered outside the windows, pressing against the glass with inhuman persistence. The building was no longer a sanctuary. It was a feeding ground.
The front row students, the eager ones who had arrived early for good seats, were mostly gone. Emily Chen, who always raised her hand first, now jerked in the corner. Her jaw worked rhythmically. She was chewing something that looked like a finger. Her favorite yellow sweater was soaked a heavy, deep crimson.
The screams cut through me like physical blows. High-pitched wails of terror mixed with the guttural moans of the changed. Someone sobbed for their mother, but the plea cut off in a wet gurgle. Bones cracked like percussion instruments in a symphony of slaughter.
My thoughts scattered. My mom was in Boston. Was she safe? That thing used to be Jason from my study group. Why were their eyes silver? Was this everywhere? My mind raced, pulling at threads of information, desperate to stitch together a plan. I thought of the screen. The system screen that had appeared before the 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. It was one of the teaching assistants, now crawling over desks with impossible speed. Its fingers had elongated into claw-like appendages.
"What?" She whipped around, her eyes wide but still sharp.
"Your class! Activate it!"
Three silver-eyed things converged on us, sensing the corner we had backed ourselves into. One dragged itself forward despite missing its lower half, leaving a glistening trail behind it. Another moved in jerky bursts, like stop-motion animation missing frames. The third had been Rob, my roommate from freshman year. His face was half gone, and silver light poured from the wound like he was leaking moonlight.
Aurora hesitated for a split second. Nothing about this moment made sense, but the monsters were real. I saw the moment she decided to trust me. She exhaled sharply and shut her eyes.
Behind her, the three things lunged.
"Do something!" my brain screamed. "You have a class too!"
I closed my eyes, desperately grasping at whatever power might have been granted to me. Something cold and ethereal shimmered into existence between my fingers. It was a quill, translucent and crystalline, its tip dripping with what looked like liquid starlight.
I had no idea what to do with it. I tried to focus, to think of an equation or a command, but the weight of the terror was too much. The quill trembled in my grip and then dissolved into mist. My concentration fractured.
I barely had time to shove a desk between us. The impact rattled my arms, but it only stalled them for a heartbeat. They snarled, clawing over the wood. I braced for the end. My vision tunneled. Time stretched as I watched death approach on silver eyes.
Then the light came.
It was silver and pure, radiating out from Aurora like a pulse. It shimmered across the floor in rippling waves of moonlight given form. It was fluid, cutting, and impossibly sharp.
The zombies froze. They did not scream. They simply fell apart.
Rob's body separated at the waist. The clean cut cauterized by silver fire. The wound did not bleed, it glowed briefly and then dimmed to ash. The half-bodied thing split lengthwise. The third collapsed in geometric sections, like a lethal puzzle box being solved. Around us, more of them fell, at least those closest to the silvery wave Aurora had generated.
Aurora stood in the center of the carnage, her shoulders rising and falling with every ragged breath. Her right hand was wrapped around something new. It was a sword. It gleamed under the flickering lights, humming softly as if it recognized her. The blade seemed woven from solidified moonbeams.
She exhaled, her gaze locked onto the weapon. Her fingers tightened around the hilt. She turned it slightly, watching the metal catch the light.
"A sword," she muttered. A small, dangerous smirk touched her lips. "Fits me perfectly."