Running. Just running.
That was David's entire world—the slap of his worn sneakers on concrete, the burn in his lungs, the animal panic screaming through every nerve. He was nineteen. Nineteen-year-olds worried about grades, about girls, about what club to join. They didn't run for their lives from talking nightmares made of shadow and glass.
I can't even reinforce my knuckles, the thought hammered in time with his heartbeat. I'm a guy with a sketchbook and bad eyesight. Why me? Why should I throw my life away?
He burst through a set of double doors, skidding into a brightly lit hallway. Laughter and the murmur of voices drifted from an open door down the corridor. A night class. Of course. The University lecturers were so incompetent that students had to run compulsory night sessions for overflowing first-year courses. The sound of normal life was a siren's call.
He stumbled toward the open door, a desperate refugee seeking sanctuary in the mundane. He peered inside.
It was a scene of beautiful, ignorant normalcy. About forty students were scattered around the large tutorial room. Some had their heads buried in thick Introduction to Philosophy texts. A group was animatedly debating by the whiteboard. A couple in the back row were sharing earbuds, fingers entwined. Someone had brought a speaker, and low Afrobeat thumped under the academic hum. They were alive, present, real in a way David suddenly wasn't.
He turned to leave, to lead the horror away from them.
It was standing in the hallway behind him.
Axum. The Philosophobia. It hadn't chased him; it had herded him. Its form, a humanoid silhouette of layered darkness and jagged, internal mirrors, absorbed the hallway light. Its smooth, reflective face showed only the distorted, terrified reflection of David himself. The two pinpricks of hunger in its depths fixed on him, then slid past him to the classroom full of fresh, thinking minds.
The dread that washed over David wasn't just fear for himself. It was colder. Heavier.
Before he could think, before he could even shout a proper warning, his body moved on pure instinct. He slammed the tutorial room door open wide and bellowed into the warm, lit space.
"LEAVE! EVERYONE, GET OUT NOW!"
Heads turned. Annoyance. Confusion. A final year student at the front frowned, adjusting his glasses. "This agbero, what is the meaning of—"
The air behind David congealed.
A tendril of solidified shadow, cold and impossibly strong, whipped out from Axum's form. It wrapped around David's chest and yanked.
He was airborne. The world became a blur of fluorescent lights and startled faces. He crashed through two clustered desks, wood splintering, papers exploding into a snowstorm of notes. He slammed into the lecturer's table at the front of the room, the impact driving the air from his lungs in a sickening whump. He lay sprawled amidst the wreckage, pain blossoming across his back, the coppery taste of blood in his mouth.
Silence, for a heartbeat. Then chaos. Screams. Chairs scraping. A stampede for the door.
None made it. The doorway wasn't there anymore. In its place was a wall of shifting, liquid darkness that swallowed the exit whole. The windows, once showing the night campus, now reflected only the terrified faces of the students trapped inside. They were caged. Panic, pure and illogical, began to boil in the room. It was a scent, and Axum drank it in, its glass-like chest giving a subtle, satisfied pulse.
It glided into the room, its form unsettlingly silent. It stepped over splintered wood, ignoring the crying students huddled against the walls. It stopped before the wreckage of the lecturer's desk, looking down at David.
Its voice was not a sound, but a vibration injected directly into the mind, smooth and relentlessly logical. "Why are you hypocrites?"
David groaned, pushing himself up on shaking arms. He spat blood onto the tiled floor. Every eye in the room was on him—the crazy boy who'd burst in, the boy now bleeding in front of a monster.
He looked up at Axum, a grim, pained smile touching his lips. "That," he coughed, "would be a question for a Vanguard. I'm not one."
He forced himself to his feet, his body protesting. He stood, swaying slightly, between the Phobia and the cowering students.
Axum's head tilted. "I am Axum. The Fear of Philosophy. The Dread of the Question Without Answer. And you, David Osayi… I am drawn to you. You look past the surface. You question the canvas of reality itself. I will break that worldview. Yours, and those of the sanctimonious Vanguards who slaughter my kin."
It gestured with a shadow-wreathed hand at the trapped students. Their cries grew quieter, not from calm, but from a creeping uncertainty. Their faces slackened, eyes glazing as they stared into the mirrored facets of Axum's body. They saw their own failures, their deepest insecurities—failed exams, parental disappointment, social rejection—reflected back and amplified. The Philosophical Dissonance Field was already working, feeding on their cognitive distress.
"So," Axum continued, its focus returning to David. "Answer. Humans exterminate lesser species for sustenance, for territory, for simple convenience. They feel no remorse. Why, then, do your Vanguards hunt us for doing the same? Is our hunger less valid? Is our survival less sacred?"
The trap was sprung. It was a perfect, logical circle. To fight it was to admit hypocrisy. To accept it was to surrender.
David stared at the creature. He felt the fear of the students like a physical pressure. He felt his own aching body, his useless, unresponsive faith. He thought of his father's disappointed voice, of the blank page where his power should be.
And then he laughed. A short, breathless, slightly hysterical chuckle.
"Sigh… So this is my new normal now. Hah." He shook his head, wiping blood from his chin. "I should have just ignored that bookworm when he approached me in the library ." He pointed a trembling, defiant finger at Axum. "I told you. I don't have your answers. I'm not a Vanguard. But it looks like I'm… more than just a student now."
He took a shaky breath, his eyes hardening. He shifted his weight, raising his fists in a clumsy, street-fight stance. No grace, no training. Just a desperate willingness to get hit.
"But I promise you," David said, his voice dropping, gaining a raw, gravelly certainty. "Even if it kills me… no one dies here today. If this is going to be my last day on earth, I truly hope there's a heaven like my mom always preached."
He met his own bloody, determined reflection in Axum's chest.
"AND I HOPE THERE'S A HELL, TOO… BECAUSE I'M GOING TO SEND YOU STRAIGHT TO IT!"
The declaration hung in the fear-thick air. It wasn't an answer to the philosophical trap. It was a rejection of the entire game. It was faith, not in a doctrine, but in a choice. The choice to protect.
For a fraction of a second, Axum seemed to pause, its logical processes struggling with the illogical, emotional fury of the response.
David didn't wait for it to compute.
He bent, grabbed the leg of a shattered wooden chair, and with every ounce of strength left in his battered body, he hurled it.
It wasn't reinforced. It wasn't graceful. It was a piece of junk thrown by a desperate kid.
THWACK!
The chair leg struck Axum directly in the center of its smooth, mirror-like face.
The sound wasn't of breaking glass, but of shattering logic.
The fight—David Osayi's first real stand—had begun.