The silence stretched, thick and suffocating, as forty pairs of eyes locked onto the reinforced steel. The frantic thumping had stopped, replaced by a slow, deliberate dragging sound against the exterior of the door. Then came a wet, metallic scratch like fingernails tearing against the paint.
Julian staggered back a step, his face completely draining of color. The righteous anger that had just filled his posture vanished, leaving him looking hollowed out. He looked at the door, then back at Ryker, his mouth opening slightly but no sound coming out.
"Step away from the door," Ryker said, his voice cutting through the gym's paralyzed atmosphere. He didn't shout, but the absolute lack of panic in his tone made the varsity player by the bar instantly scramble backward, nearly tripping over his own sneakers.
The girl who had been arguing with Julian let out a ragged, trembling breath, her eyes wide. "Did... did they get him?"
"Yes," Ryker said plainly, finally standing up from the bleachers. His knees felt a little weak, and his stomach was churning, but his mind remained strangely focused on the immediate surroundings. He walked over to Julian, grabbing his friend by the shoulder and pulling him a few feet further back into the safety of the court. "If it's making that sound, the guy outside is gone. We need to stop focusing on who's outside and look at what we actually have in here."
"Ry, I... I almost opened it," Julian whispered, his hands still trembling as he stared at the security bar. "If I had just lifted it a second sooner—"
"But you didn't," Ryker interrupted, his voice dropping so only Julian could hear. "Drop it. Thinking about it right now is just going to get you killed. Look around."
Ryker scanned the interior of the gym. The initial panic was settling into a grim, desperate realization. A few students were crying silently, while others were huddled around the few windows that were too high to see out of without a ladder. The heavy steel doors were holding, but the eerie twilight bleeding through the glass panes at the very top of the walls was deepening, painting the hardwood court in long, unnatural shadows.
"Hey," the varsity player called out, his voice shaking as he looked toward Ryker and Julian. "You guys... what do we do now? If those things are right outside, we can't stay by the doors forever."
"What the hell actually are those things?" a guy from the soccer team demanded, his voice cracking as he paced back and forth near the baseline. "Did the professor have a seizure or something? Like, some kind of crazy medical emergency?"
"A medical emergency doesn't make you bite a chunk out of someone's shoulder!" the girl from the bleachers snapped back, her voice rising into hysteria. "You heard the noises outside! That wasn't human. It's like... I don't know, a chemical spill? A terrorist attack?"
"With a second sun in the sky?" another student chimed in, frantically waving a dead phone in the air. "The grid is completely down! No service, no internet, nothing. This isn't just a campus problem."
The questions started bouncing off the walls, a rapid-fire chorus of rising panic as everyone desperately tried to rationalize the madness. Julian looked at Ryker, his eyes pleading for some kind of logical explanation. "Ry... you were right there in the hall. You didn't run right away. What did you see?"
The gym went completely quiet as a dozen nearby students turned to look at Ryker, waiting for his answer.
Ryker stood near the free-throw line, his hands slipped calmly into his pockets to hide the slight tremor in his fingers. His mind replaying the exact sequence of the professor's collapse and sudden awakening.
"It wasn't a seizure," Ryker said, his voice flat and steady against the echoing silence of the room. "And it's not a chemical spill. I watched the professor from the second he fell. His heart stopped completely. He wasn't breathing. But when he woke up twenty minutes later, his skin was already turning gray, like cellular decay was setting in at an impossible speed."
He paused, looking directly at the varsity player by the door. "He didn't display any human awareness or pain. The only instinct he had left was aggression specifically, the urge to bite and transmit whatever changed him. It's a pathogen, or a mutation. If you want a plain answer... they're living corpses. They're zombies."
The word hung in the humid air of the gym like a lead weight.
For a second, nobody moved. Then, a girl near the back let out a sharp, breathless laugh that sounded dangerously close to sobbing. "Zombies? Are you kidding me right now? Like a movie? That's not real, that doesn't happen in real life!"
"Are you insane?!" the soccer player yelled, stepping toward Ryker. "You're trying to tell us the walking dead are outside our gym right now? This is real life, man! Wake up!"
"Then you go open that door and check on the guy who just stopped screaming," Ryker replied calmly, not flinching as the guy got closer. "Tell me if he looks like he needs a doctor or an undertaker."
The soccer player stopped dead in his tracks, his face twisting in a mix of anger and absolute, paralyzing terror. The harsh reality of Ryker's words began to sink into the room, and the dynamic shifted entirely; the panic didn't dissolve—it hardened into a cold, suffocating dread as forty college students realized their ordinary lives were officially gone.
Julian let out a short, nervous laugh, shaking his head as he stepped into Ryker's personal space. "Okay, look, Ry... I know you've read every apocalypse webnovel on the internet and watched literally every horror movie since the eighties, but we can't just jump straight to zombies. You're letting your geek obsession get to your head, man. This is real life, not one of your stories. It's probably just some crazy new rabies strain or an airborne nerve agent from the lab block."
There was a subtle, familiar trace of arrogance in Julian's voice the casual confidence of a varsity athlete who was used to being the smartest, strongest guy in the room. The soccer player immediately nodded in agreement, clearly relieved by Julian's skepticism. "Yeah, exactly! He's just trying to freak us out."
Ryker didn't flinch, nor did he let the slight condescension get under his skin. He kept his posture rigid, his hands shoved deep into his pockets so no one could see the subtle shaking of his fingers as he forced himself to stay grounded.
"I am calm, Julian," Ryker said, his voice dropping into a sharp, chilling precision that cut right through his friend's athletic swagger. "And yes, I've watched enough movies to know that in a crisis, the crowd always sits around waiting for a rescue that never shows up. But think about it rationally. If this were a localized gas leak or a nerve agent, everyone in this room would be choking or unconscious right now. We all blacked out at the exact same second, all over campus—probably all over the city, given the highway noise. And when we woke up, only a select few stayed down before turning violent."
He stepped past Julian, ensuring his voice carried to the top rows of the bleachers. "You saw the professor's eyes, Jules. They were milky. The blood pooling in his skin was already turning dark. That doesn't happen with rabies. Something fundamentally altered the biology of the people who didn't survive the blackout. If we sit here like sitting ducks waiting for the military or the police, we are banking our lives on a system that might have collapsed twenty minutes ago."
The room went dead silent. The logic was too clean, too terrifyingly grounded to dismiss as just a geek's fantasy.
Julian stared at Ryker, his athletic confidence completely evaporating as the denial faded from his face, replaced by a heavy, stark realization. "So... what are you saying, Ry? If we can't just wait here for help, what do we do?"
Ryker didn't answer immediately. He turned back toward the center of the court, his eyes automatically tracking the high windows where the dead twilight pulsed.
"We stop waiting," Ryker said, his voice quiet but carrying clearly through the silent gym. "We arm ourselves with whatever we can find in the equipment lockers, and we start treating this place like a fortress, not a waiting room."
Before anyone could move to argue or agree, a sudden, blinding flash of light cut through the high windows, illuminating the gym in a harsh, artificial glare.
It wasn't from the second sun.
A translucent, universal blue interface screen materialized in the exact center of the basketball court, floating five feet off the ground. It was massive easily the size of the scoreboard and its soft light reflected in forty pairs of wide, stunned eyes.
A mechanical chime, synchronized and perfectly audible to every soul in the room, echoed off the high rafters.
[Global Initialization Phase: Complete.]
[Tutorial Zone #14: Sector University established.]
[Current Alive Count: 1,402 / 12,500]
[First Objective will unlock in: 10 Hours 00 seconds.]
The students scrambled backward, a few screaming as they fell over the bleachers, staring at the floating text like it was a ghost.
"What... what the hell is that?" the varsity player stammered, pointing a shaking finger at the blue light. "Is that... a screen?"
Julian looked at the text, his breath catching in his throat as his eyes darted from the interface to Ryker. The dismissal he had shown just moments ago vanished, replaced by a deep, hollow dread. "Ry... the stories you read. This... this looks like..."
"A system," Ryker murmured, his eyes locked on the timer ticking down.
As the initial shock of the giant scoreboard-sized screen settled, whispers began to ripple through the bleachers. The horror of the door was briefly eclipsed by a bizarre, dawning realization.
"Wait..." the soccer player muttered, squinting at the glowing blue light, then looking down at his own hands. "When I passed out... right before everything went dark, I thought I was hallucinating. I saw words. It said my soul compatibility was forty-two percent."
"You saw it too?" the girl from the bleachers asked, her voice hitching. "I thought my brain was short-circuiting from the panic. Mine said fifty-five percent compatibility. It said 'Integration Stable'."
"Mine was thirty-one!" another guy shouted from the top row, leaning forward. "It called me a 'Grade-D Adaptor' or something. What does that even mean?"
Like a contagion, the numbers started breaking out across the gym. Everyone was suddenly comparing the secret prompts they had seen right before the blackout.
"Thirty-eight percent here."
"Forty-five!"
Julian slowly turned his head toward Ryker, his expression a mix of awe and lingering fear. "Ry... I saw it too. Just as my knees gave out in the hall. A blue screen flashed. It said seventy-two percent compatibility. It said my potential was exceptionally high." He paused, looking at his quiet friend. "What did yours say? You read this kind of stuff all the time, you've gotta be way higher than us."
A dozen nearby students paused their murmuring, their eyes shifting back to Ryker, waiting to hear what the resident "expert" had scored.
Ryker stood perfectly still under the massive blue glow of the public screen, his hands remaining steady in his pockets. He thought about the prompt that had flashed before his eyes. It hadn't been standard blue. It had been an aggressive, bleeding crimson.
0.00%.
He had formed his own theories about what that number meant, a dark, half-formed thought locked safely behind his calm expression. He didn't know if it meant he was utterly defenseless, or if it meant something entirely different. But he had no intention of sharing that theory with anyone else. Not yet.
"I didn't get a percentage," Ryker said smoothly, his voice completely flat, giving them absolutely nothing to read. "My screen glitched out before the countdown finished. Must have been a system error."
Julian blinked, a flash of sympathy crossing his face. "Oh. Damn, man. Sucks. But hey, we'll figure it out."