The stairwell descended far deeper than any of them remembered. The girls moved in silence, each footstep echoing off the concrete walls, swallowed by the darkness below. There was no telling how many levels there were—no way to know what waited at the bottom. Their only light came from a cracked emergency lantern Henriette had found hanging by the stairwell door, its flickering red glow just enough to see by.
Katharina led the way, weapon in hand, her knuckles white.
Behind her, Jocelyn kept glancing over her shoulder, paranoid something would come crawling down the stairs after them. Elvira moved in the middle, silent as ever. Her presence had an odd gravity to it—subtle but undeniable. Seraphina stuck close to Monika, who'd stopped crying but hadn't spoken since the fight upstairs.
Henriette brought up the rear, constantly scanning the shadows.
Finally, after what felt like hours but was likely just minutes, they found the exit.
A plain steel door at the end of the stairwell opened with a low groan into a narrow maintenance corridor. This part of Sankt Viktoria Akademie für Mädchen felt ancient—older than the rest of the school. The walls were lined with faded pipes and exposed wiring, some long dead, others faintly buzzing with unreliable power.
And then the corridor widened, opening into a familiar space.
A massive wooden door stood ahead, partially ajar—its edge marked with red smears and torn paper. Beyond it was the school's grand library.
The room was vast and eerily beautiful in the half-light. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves loomed like towers, their spines dust-covered but untouched. Stained-glass windows cast colored shapes onto the marble floor, though now the glass was cracked in many places. The great chandelier above hung crooked, one side dipped as if the ceiling had sagged under the weight of the disaster.
They had made it.
A haven, for now.
And they weren't alone.
Near the back of the library, huddled behind overturned tables and old study desks, were four other girls. They looked exhausted—dirty, bruised, one with a bloody bandage wrapped around her thigh. They jumped at the sound of the door creaking open.
"Wait—don't move!" one of them shouted, brandishing a sharpened ruler.
Katharina raised her hands. "We're not infected. We just came from the dorms."
The tension broke slowly. The girl with the bandage slumped back down, and the others lowered their improvised weapons.
"They're clean," one of them whispered. "They're just like us."
They didn't exchange names.
No one asked.
There wasn't time for introductions anymore—only survival.
The group joined the makeshift barricade near the back corner of the library. The air smelled of dust and old paper, mixed with sweat and fear. Books had been torn from shelves to reinforce windows and block doors. Some desks had been turned into beds. It was clear these girls had been here a while.
"How long have you been down here?" Monika asked softly.
"Since the second night," one of the survivors replied. "We tried hiding in the chapel, but it didn't hold. Too many of them. We ran down here after... after they got Annika."
No one asked who Annika was.
Jocelyn sat down beside a pile of alchemy textbooks and shut her eyes for a moment. "Do any of you know what's happening outside the school?"
The girls shook their heads.
"No signal. No internet. It's been dead since the second day," one of them said. "We think the city's gone. There were sirens. Explosions in the distance. Then nothing."
A heavy silence settled over them.
Elvira moved toward the center of the library, her hand brushing lightly against the spines of a row of books. She paused at one shelf, eyes scanning titles like she was searching for something specific. Katharina noticed her linger on an old leather-bound volume titled Vergessene Linien der Menschheit. Forgotten Lines of Humanity.
She didn't take it down.
Not yet.
Henriette paced restlessly. "We can't just stay here. It's too open. If those freaks find this place…"
"They will," Katharina said grimly. "It's only a matter of time."
"But we don't even know where to go," Seraphina whispered. "Out there could be worse than in here."
"We'll figure something out," Katharina replied, but even she didn't believe it fully.
They were trapped in a school of horrors, surrounded by classmates turned monsters, unsure of how far the infection had spread. The adults were gone. The world they'd known was dead or dying. Only the rustle of pages and the groans of distant creatures remained.
Still, they had each other—for now.
And in the quiet heart of a ruined library, the girls began to plan again.