June 12, 2028 – 12:15 a.m. – Casa de Esperanza, Room 703
Ayesha crossed to the far window and ripped the blackout curtains aside.
Beyond the glass, Manila was unrecognizable. The power grid had collapsed entirely — the city that never truly slept was swallowed in absolute darkness, lit only by the cold silver of moonlight pressing down over the Intramuros walls. In the distance, columns of black smoke were already rising. From somewhere below came the faint, aimless sounds of things that used to be people. But what held Ayesha's attention was the rusted iron framework bolted to the outer wall of Casa de Esperanza, running all the way down to the alley below.
The fire escape. Old, corroded, and in desperate need of maintenance.
It was still there.
"Rhea," she said, turning around. "I need you to go first. Help Lira down. Move carefully and don't stop for anything." She picked the steel lamp base back up off the floor. It was heavy and unbalanced and a terrible excuse for a weapon, but it had worked once already. She would make it work again. "I'll be right behind you."
Rhea looked at the window, then at the seven floors of darkness beneath it, then back at Ayesha. For a moment it seemed like she might argue. Then she pressed her lips together and nodded, because for all her dry remarks and sharp edges, Rhea was practical when it counted.
She climbed through first, stepping onto the rusted grating with both hands gripping the rail. Ayesha helped Lira through next, steadying her by the wrist, mindful of the bandaged ankle. Lira hissed in pain but didn't make more noise than that. Good.
Ayesha was swinging her own leg over the sill when a sound from behind her made every nerve in her body fire at once.
CRASH.
She twisted back. The heavy wooden door of Room 703 buckled inward — a jagged, bone-white scythe punching clean through the wood like it was cardboard, dragging a long split across the entire panel. A wet, guttural hiss pressed through the gap, low and vibrating, and the scythe began to wrench sideways, tearing the frame apart.
Ayesha threw herself through the window and pulled it shut behind her.
She gripped the handrail and didn't look back up.
"Move. Now."
The descent was slow in all the ways that mattered. The iron groaned and shuddered under their combined weight with every step, each sound making Ayesha's chest tighten. Lira moved carefully, one step at a time, jaw clenched against the pain radiating from her ankle. Rhea stayed just below her, hands ready to catch, whispering something under her breath that might have been a prayer or might have been a string of quiet curses — Ayesha couldn't tell and didn't ask.
When they reached the sixth floor landing, Ayesha activated Keen Hearing for a brief three-second burst, just enough to get a read on what was behind them.
[Mana: 9/14]
The sound of Room 703's door giving way entirely. A wet, excited screech. Then the clicking of bone-legs moving rapidly across carpet. The creature had breached the room and was already searching.
She severed the connection and kept moving.
They were passing the fifth floor window when the shadow slammed against the glass from the inside.
Lira let out a short, frightened cry and grabbed the railing with both hands. A male student in a blood-soaked uniform was clawing at the glass, jaw snapping in a blind, frenzied rhythm, dead eyes fixed on the three of them through the pane. The window was already beginning to crack under the force of his pounding.
Ayesha didn't hesitate. She stepped past Lira, raised the steel base, and drove it through the weakest point of the cracking glass. The pane shattered outward. Before the zombie could lunge through the opening, she brought the weapon down on his skull in one clean, brutal strike.
He dropped back into the dark room and didn't move again.
"Keep going," Ayesha said, already moving.
They reached the fourth floor landing, and Rhea stepped to the edge to take the next set of stairs down and stopped dead.
"Ayesha."
Her voice had no dry edge left in it. Just two flat syllables.
Ayesha pushed forward and looked over the railing. Her stomach dropped. The iron staircase connecting the fourth floor to the third was simply gone — the rusted bolts had sheared off at some point, leaving nothing below them but empty air and a three-story drop into the alleyway, where shadows shuffled aimlessly through the darkness among overturned trash bins and crushed delivery crates.
They were trapped.
"We're going to die here." Lira's voice came out barely above a whisper. She was sitting down on the grating, all the strength gone from her legs. "We can't go down and we can't go back up—"
A screech tore through the night from above them.
Ayesha's head snapped up. Something was crawling out of Room 703's window on the seventh floor. Even from this distance, the shape of it was wrong in a way that made her instincts scream — the backward-bent spine, the four bone-scythes gripping the brick wall, the way it moved downward with a fluid, unhurried certainty, like a spider descending toward something it had already caught.
It found her eyes and held them.
Ayesha turned to the fourth-floor window directly beside the landing. Through the glass, the dark outlines of computer desks and bookshelves stretched across a room that appeared, from what she could see, to be empty. She activated Keen Hearing one final time, pushing every bit of her focus through the glass.
[Mana: 8/14]
Silence inside. No dragging footsteps. No wet breathing. No movement at all.
She raised the steel base and drove it through the glass, cleared the jagged edges with a kick, and grabbed Lira by the arm. "Inside. Both of you. Now."
Rhea got Lira through the frame while Ayesha watched the Bone-Crawler reach the fifth floor above them — bone-legs skittering down the brickwork with a speed that made her throat tighten. She waited until the last possible second, then threw herself through the window and rolled hard onto the carpeted floor of the study lounge.
The room was dark, lit only by the moonlight spilling through the broken window, long shadows falling across rows of empty desks and dusty bookshelves. Rhea had already pulled Lira behind the large curved reception desk near the entrance. Ayesha pushed herself to her feet, lamp base raised, and put her back to the wall.
For a moment, the only sounds were their own ragged breathing and the distant, muffled chaos of the building outside.
From the hallway beyond the study lounge's double doors, a heavy thud landed against the floor. Slow. Deliberate. Then another. The doorknob began to turn with the unhurried patience of something that already knew it had them.
A thin line of dark liquid began pooling beneath the gap at the bottom of the door, eating silently through the carpet fibers where it touched.
Ayesha tightened her grip on the lamp base and positioned herself between the door and her friends.
She had no plan yet.
She was working on it.