June 12, 2028 – 12:00 a.m. – Casa de Esperanza, Room 703
Ayesha Villacruz was not a night owl.
Unlike Lucian and Ivan, who could survive on three hours of sleep and a shared bag of chips while arguing about game builds until sunrise, she kept a schedule. A real one. Written down, color-coded, and followed without exception — including a bedtime that Ivan had once photographed and sent to their group chat as evidence of what he called "psychological damage from being too responsible."
She had not found it funny.
But tonight the schedule had done its job. By eleven she was asleep, genuinely and deeply asleep, the kind that only came after a full week of Psychology midterms, two group presentations, and the slow grinding weight of Manila's summer pressing down on the city like it had something to prove.
Then the light came, and none of that mattered anymore.
It didn't start with a sound. It started with brilliance — blinding, absolute, a white so total it burned straight through her curtains and through her closed eyelids and filled her skull from the inside out. Ayesha gasped and jolted upright, hands flying to her face, but there was nothing to block. The light was everywhere at once. It felt like the sky had swallowed itself.
Then a hum followed. Low and bone-deep, the kind that moved through concrete and skin without asking permission, rattling her teeth and sending a sharp wave of nausea up through her chest.
And then it stopped. All of it. The light, the hum, the familiar drone of the air conditioning unit — gone in the same instant, replaced by a darkness so complete and a silence so heavy it made her ears ring.
"What was that," she said quietly.
"Ayesha?" Lira's voice came from the next bed — small, already trembling. "Did a transformer blow up? My eyes hurt."
Lira Navarro was many things. Soft-spoken, gentle, the kind of person who named her desk succulent and talked to it when she thought no one was listening. She was also, Ayesha had come to learn over months of shared living, quietly tougher than she appeared. Right now though, she just sounded scared.
"Don't rub them," Ayesha said, keeping her voice measured. She was a Psychology student. She understood panic contagion in closed groups better than most people ever would, and she was not going to be the one who lit that fuse. "Let them adjust."
From across the room, Rhea sat up against the pale moonlight pressing through the curtain edges — tall, sharp-shouldered, curly hair loose around her face. "That wasn't a transformer." Even now, even rattled, that dry edge in her voice held. "The backup generators should've kicked in already. Everything's completely dead."
Ayesha swung her legs over the bed, bare feet touching cold linoleum, and was about to stand when a wet, rattling gasp came from the far corner of the room.
Then a heavy thud.
She went still.
Sarah.
Their fourth roommate was a third-year Nursing student who remembered everyone's coffee order and left sticky notes on the bathroom mirror that said things like You've got this!! — always two exclamation points, never one. She'd collapsed with a fever two days ago, the kind that climbed fast enough to make Ayesha quietly take her temperature twice. By yesterday she had stopped responding entirely.
Ayesha had assumed it was a bad virus.
"Sarah?" she called softly. "Are you alright?"
No answer. Just that wet, drowning sound again — like lungs struggling to pull air through something they weren't built for.
Lira reached for her phone and swept the flashlight beam across the room.
Then she screamed.
Sarah was not in her bed. She was on the floor, crawling, her skin gone a bruised gray-purple that had nothing to do with the light. The veins along her throat had darkened to black, rising thick beneath the surface. Her eyes, when the beam found them, were milky white and completely empty — whatever had lived behind them was gone. Dark blood trailed from her nose, from her mouth, dripping onto the linoleum as she dragged herself forward with slow, mechanical purpose.
Straight toward Lira.
"What is WRONG with her?!" Rhea had her back against the wall, voice stripped raw. "Sarah, stop—"
The thing that used to be their friend lunged. Its fingers closed around Lira's ankle like a trap, nails breaking skin, grip absolute and senseless. Lira screamed and kicked but the hold didn't give. The creature dragged itself upward, jaw snapping for her calf, and that was all Ayesha needed to see.
She crossed to her desk in two strides and wrapped both hands around the heavy steel base of her reading lamp. She ripped it upward, cord tearing from the dead socket.
"Let go of her."
She swung.
CRACK. The steel connected with the back of Sarah's skull — dense, final, a sound she knew she would carry somewhere quiet in her memory for a long time. The grip on Lira's ankle loosened, but the creature didn't fall. It turned its head slowly, neck clicking with each horrible degree of rotation, until those empty eyes found Ayesha's face.
It hissed and lunged.
Ayesha planted her feet and swung again, aiming for the temple this time. The impact was devastating. Black blood sprayed across the wall, across her cheek, across the front of her shirt. Sarah's body went rigid for one terrible second, then dropped and did not move again.
Silence fell over the room.
Ayesha stood over the body, chest heaving, knuckles white around the lamp base. The smell of blood was immediate and everywhere. A wave of nausea rose fast — because she knew, despite everything, that what was on the floor had been a person three days ago. Had been someone who left sticky notes and remembered coffee orders.
She swallowed it down. Filed it somewhere behind everything else she still had to do.
That wasn't Sarah anymore. It was going to kill Lira. Those were the only two sentences that mattered right now.
She breathed. Once. Twice. The nausea retreated enough to function.
Lira was curled against the wall, clutching her bleeding ankle and crying quietly. Rhea stood frozen, staring at the body with an expression caught somewhere between disbelief and the edge of a breakdown she hadn't committed to yet. Ayesha opened her mouth to speak — and stopped.
A light was coming from the body. Faint, bluish-white, pulsing from the ruin of the creature's skull like a slow heartbeat. It coalesced steadily, thickened, and solidified into a small glowing book hovering just above the floor.
Ayesha stared at it.
She had watched Lucian grind for loot drops across a dozen different games over two years. She knew exactly what she was looking at.
She reached out. The moment her fingertips made contact, the book dissolved into cold silver light and shot directly into her forehead. She stumbled back a step, and a translucent blue panel materialized in the air in front of her eyes.
[Ayesha Villacruz] [Class: N/A]
[Age: 21]
[Strength: 9]
[Agility: 10]
[Mind: 14]
[Perception: 12]
[Vitality: 13]
[Skill(s): Conquer (S) — Passive | Keen Hearing (F) — Active]
[Conquer (S) — Passive]
Radiates an invisible aura of absolute authority. Suppresses panic and emotional instability in nearby allies. Imposes subconscious pressure of submission on weaker entities. Effect scales with the user's mental clarity.
[Keen Hearing (F) — Active]
Enhances auditory perception, allowing the user to isolate and amplify sounds within a specific radius.
Cost: 2 Mana per minute.
She read it twice. Stats, levels, skills — the laws of reality had been rewritten somewhere between eleven p.m. and midnight, and this panel was the receipt.
Her eyes settled on Conquer (S). She didn't fully understand the rankings yet. But even as she read it, she became aware of something she hadn't consciously registered until now — a warmth sitting in her chest that had been there since the light fell. A steadiness she had assumed was adrenaline and was now reconsidering entirely. That hadn't come from the skill book. It had been there already, before any of this, and the panel had simply given it a name.
She dismissed the panel with a thought and it vanished.
"Ayesha." Rhea's voice came out stripped down to almost nothing. "What do we do."
"We survive," Ayesha said.
Her voice landed differently than it normally did. There was a weight to it — quiet, magnetic, something that settled over both of them before they realized it was happening. Conquer pulsed once in her chest, warm and certain.
She walked to the heavy wooden door and pressed her ear flat against it. She needed to know what was outside before she made a single decision. She closed her eyes and activated Keen Hearing.
Her perception exploded outward.
The room's silence was ripped away and replaced by everything happening in the building at once. Dozens of wet, dragging footsteps in the corridor directly outside — a mass of slow, hungry movement pressing against the other side of the door. Further down the hall, muffled screaming from students still locked in their rooms, followed by the sound of doors splintering and giving way. She pushed further — sixth floor, fifth, the courtyard below. They were everywhere. The whole building was crawling with them.
She was about to cut the connection when something else caught her attention.
Buried beneath all of it — almost invisible in the chaos — a set of footsteps that didn't belong. Light, deliberate, unhurried. Moving through the fourth floor corridor below with a precision that had nothing to do with the shambling dead. They moved around the zombies, not through them, navigating the chaos like someone who had already mapped every threat before taking a single step.
She held that thread for one moment, trying to place it.
Then something else arrived from the stairwell and every other thought was immediately displaced.
Sharp. Metallic. Rhythmic. The clicking of something with too many limbs, moving upward along the concrete walls at a speed that turned her blood cold.
Coming directly for the seventh floor.
Ayesha severed the connection.
[Mana: 10/14]
She opened her eyes. "Rhea," she said, and the quiet command in her voice had both girls looking at her instantly. "Help Lira up. We're not staying in this room."
She was already moving toward the window.
Whatever those careful footsteps belonged to — that question could wait.
Something else had just made itself the priority.