"What the hell is going on?" Aurora muttered, her breath ragged as we pushed forward.

  But we couldn't get out. The exits were gone. Not physically, not in the way a door vanishes or a hallway suddenly ceases to exist, but in the way that mattered—the way that meant survival. The changed students—zombies, no other word for them—had flooded the gates, twitching and staggering, eyes glowing like silver fireflies. More of them outside. Probably everywhere. The building wasn't a safe haven. It was a feeding ground.

  The lecture hall had transformed into a vision of hell in minutes. Professor Langley lay sprawled across his desk, entrails glistening as they spilled onto his lecture notes, the equations he'd been explaining now obscured by dark arterial spray. The front row of students—the eager ones, the ones who'd arrived early for good seats—were mostly gone, torn apart or transformed. Emily Chen, the girl who always answered questions first, now jerked and twitched in the corner, her jaw working rhythmically as she chewed on what looked like a finger. Her favorite yellow sweater was soaked crimson.

  The screams. God, the screams. High-pitched wails of terror mixed with the guttural moans of the changed. Someone was sobbing for their mother, the plea cutting off in a wet gurgle. The sharp crack of a breaking bone punctuated the cacophony like a percussion instrument in this symphony of slaughter.

  The smell hit me in waves—copper and waste and something else, something wrong. The metallic scent of blood mingled with the stench of voided bowels as death claimed its victims. Beneath it all, a strange, electric odor like ozone after lightning.

  My thoughts scattered like leaves in a hurricane. 'What's happening? Mom's in Boston, is she safe? That thing used to be Jason from my study group. Why are their eyes silver? Is this everywhere? Am I dreaming? Am I dying? Stats? Classes? Like a game? What's real anymore?'

  Glass shattered as someone—something—was thrown through the window. Shards rained down, slicing into exposed skin. A girl near us screamed as a piece embedded in her cheek. She pulled it out and the wound leaked silver instead of red.

  Another student—dark hair, green NYU sweatshirt, can't remember his name—made a break for the side exit. He almost made it before three of them descended on him. I watched, paralyzed, as they tore into him like a pack of wolves. His arm came free with a wet pop, still reaching for the door as his body went down under a flurry of broken-nailed fingers and snapping teeth. His blood painted an arc across the whiteboard.

  "Move!" Aurora grabbed my arm, dragging me between overturned desks as my brain short-circuited from the carnage.

  We stumbled over a fallen student—alive or dead, I couldn't tell and didn't stop to check. My foot slipped in something wet and warm. I didn't look down. Couldn't.

  My mind raced, pulling at threads of information, desperate to stitch together some kind of plan. 'New class system. Silver eyes mean transformed. Game mechanics in reality. Evolved zombies? If video games taught me anything—headshots? No weapons. Math won't save us. Think. Think. THINK.'

  We backed into the corner of the lecture hall, the staggered seats creating a kind of barricade. Bodies slumped across rows, some twitching as the transformation took them, others still with death. Dark fluid pooled beneath the seats, dripping down to form rivulets between rows.

  They were changing—that much was clear. The ones who collapsed first had started convulsing, their skin fracturing like broken porcelain, their veins darkening into something alien. One moment, students. The next, snarling husks of what they used to be, tearing into those who hadn't been fast enough. Every bite, every scratch—more of them fell, twisting, their eyes snapping open in eerie unison, glowing with the same unearthly silver hue. It spread like a wildfire with no smoke, no flames—just hunger. And it was closing in.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  I turned, scanning the room, my breathing sharp and shallow. There were no weapons. No exits that weren't already blocked. No backup. Just overturned desks, scattered books, a professor bleeding out near the whiteboard. His eyes tracked us weakly—still human, still conscious enough to register fear.

  'Think. Think. THINK.'

  'We're going to die here. We're going to die and become like them. Or be eaten by them. Is there a difference? The window? Too high. The doors? Blocked. Under the desks? They'd find us. Oh god, that's Amanda being torn apart. I sat next to her yesterday. Borrowed her pen. Now her jaw is being ripped off. Silver light pouring from the wound like liquid mercury.'

  The screen.

  The damn system screen that had popped up just before this 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—one of the teaching assistants, now crawling over desks with impossible speed, fingers elongated into claw-like appendages.

  "What?!" She whipped around, eyes wide, panicked, but still sharp. Still her.

  "Your class! Activate it!"

  Three of the silver-eyed things converged on us, sensing the corner we'd backed ourselves into. One dragged itself forward despite missing its lower half, intestines leaving a glistening trail behind it. Another moved in sudden, jerky bursts, like stop-motion animation missing frames. The third—God, the third had been Rob, my roommate freshman year. His face was half gone, silver light pouring from the wound like he was leaking moonlight.

  Aurora hesitated. Not because she didn't believe me, but because nothing about this moment made sense. The world had gone from astrophysics lectures to a full-fledged apocalypse in under sixty seconds, and now I was yelling at her to activate some mysterious system like we were in a game. It was insane. It was stupid.

  But the zombies were real.

  And they were here.

  I saw the moment she decided to trust me—just a flicker in her eyes before she exhaled sharply and shut them.

  Behind her, three of them lunged.

  'Do something!' My brain screamed at me. 'Your class! You have one too!'

  I closed my eyes for a split second, desperately grasping at whatever power might have been granted to me. Something cold and ethereal shimmered into existence between my fingers—a quill, translucent and crystalline, its tip dripping with what looked like liquid starlight. I had no idea what to do with it. Write what? Where? The quill trembled in my grip, then dissolved like mist as my concentration fractured under the weight of terror.

  I barely had time to throw up a desk between us, shoving it forward with every bit of strength I had. The impact rattled my arms, but it only stalled them for half a second. They snarled, clawing over it like animals, fingers digging into the wood.

  I braced for impact.

  My vision tunneled. Sound compressed into a distant echo. Time seemed to stretch like taffy, each millisecond an eternity as I watched death approach on silver eyes and broken limbs.

  'Mom. Dad. I'm sorry. I should have called more. Told you I loved you. Now I'll never—'

  Then the light came.

  It wasn't blinding, wasn't the kind of light that made you turn away. It was silver, pure, radiating out like a pulse, spreading across the floor in rippling waves. It shimmered—moonlight given form, fluid and cutting and impossibly sharp.

  And then—

  Schlkk.

  The zombies froze. Not dramatically, not in some cinematic moment of realization. They just—stopped.

  And then they fell apart.

  Rob's body separated at the waist, the clean cut cauterized by silver fire. The wound didn't bleed—it glowed briefly then dimmed to ash. The half-bodied thing split lengthwise, both pieces twitching independently before going still. The third collapsed in geometric sections, like someone had solved a lethal puzzle box.

  Around us, more of them fell—not all, but those closest to the silvery wave Aurora had somehow generated. Their dismembered parts littered the lecture hall floor, creating grotesque still-lifes among the existing carnage.

  Aurora stood in the center of it all, body tense, shoulders rising and falling with every breath. Her right hand was wrapped around something that hadn't been there a second ago.

  A sword.

  It gleamed under the flickering classroom lights, silver like the glow in her eyes, humming softly like it knew it belonged to her. The blade was more than metal—it seemed woven from solidified moonbeams, edges impossibly sharp, the hilt curved to fit her hand perfectly.

  She exhaled, gaze locked onto the weapon in her hands, fingers tightening around the hilt. She turned it slightly, the metal catching the light.

  "A sword," she muttered, almost to herself. Then she smirked. "Fits me well."