In a dark room, a man groggily opened his blue eyes. He sleepily looks around at his shared dorm room noticing his dormmate has already left for class.
"Luckily I don't have any class on Fridays, but it's time to get up anyway" the man mumbles to himself as he stretches. Blinded temporarily as the curtains were pulled back he could now see the peaceful world below him. Young adults bustling about as they go to classes or the library in Silver Oak University.
He could also see himself in the reflection of the window. A twenty two year old guy, five feet nine inches, roughly 150 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair. This is Sylas Redstone.
After stretching for a couple minutes, Sylas took the next thirty minutes to get ready for the day . As he's getting ready to walk out the door he hears a DING and a blue screen pops into his vision.
[Welcome, Earth, to the System Integration. You have been chosen to be integrated into the system allowing you to experience a new world. Integration starts in 5 minutes. Please enjoy your new life and survive.]
'What the hell is this? Am I still dreaming? Sometimes I dream about the video games or books I'm bingeing but it doesn't usually feel this realistic.'
Sylas read the message a couple more times, noticing that it followed his vision so it was always directly in front of his eyes, before trying to touch the screen and failing to do so. After watching his hand go through the screen more than once he thought 'How am I supposed to get rid of this message' and the message disappeared.
"Oh, it must be able to sense my intention and closed itself. Well, this was an interesting lucid dream, but I should be waking up soon so let's go ahead and speed this up"
Quickly, Sylas reached across his chest and pinched his other arm, immediately feeling pain but remaining standing there and not waking up in bed. He went to other ways of causing himself pain in hopes of waking up but nothing was working.
Dejected, he sat on the edge of his bed and thought "System" to play around with the lucid dream since he can't wake up. A new blue window appeared with several rows of information. Only two of the rows were available as the rest were just multiple Xs.
[Tutorials]
[Stats]
He tried to open stats but received the message [Please wait 1:05 until Integration has started to view stats] with the timer going down each second as he read. Opening the Tutorials menu showed Sylas several more options to choose from including Leveling, Classes, Mana, Stats, Integration, and several more.
Intending the Stats Tutorial to open, the blue window was replaced with another showing a video of the System menu, which then zoomed into the Stats option and is now showing a list of statistics with text under them.
[Stats are the system's way of quantifying an individual's capabilities. The quantifications shown will be based on the user's race. For example, a peak human's strength is represented as a 1 while the weakest human's strength is a 1. The system only shows relevant stats such as Strength, Vitality, Dexterity, Agility, Intelligence, and class specific stats. The system will not quantify how much you smell. Bathe often.]
As Sylas was getting over the ridiculousness of the ending of the system message he felt his body heat up as a strange force seeped through his pores and circulated throughout him. It felt like he was getting stronger but the feeling of warmth and extra strength went away as quickly as it came.
That was when there was a panicked scream from outside his dorm window. He went over to see what was happening and the scene was horrid. In the second that it took to move to the window there were several more screams with the intensity increasing as time went on.
The scene below his window was almost normal at first. There were still a decent amount of people in view, but some of them were running, almost sprinting, away while some were just shambling along.
A scream was heard and when Sylas located where it came from he saw a couple hugging, but when the girl pulled her head away from the guy Sylas could see a bright red liquid falling from her chin and more of the liquid on the guy's neck. Before he could think any further the guy fell to the ground and the girl dropped on top of him looking like she was kissing him all over.
Sylas realized the bright red liquid was blood and felt sick. Taking a closer look he could see that the girl had shriveled skin and looking around he saw that all those that were shambling along, now towards the couple, also had shriveled skin that was an unhealthy color of grey.
As the others got to the couple and started to take bites out of the guy, Sylas had to turn away because he felt he was going to throw up.
"Zombies? Is that what this dream is?"
Sylas sat on the edge of his bed for a moment before he had a sudden bone chilling thought.
'Wait! What if this isn't a dream? I couldn't wake myself. Why would I feel sick over a dream person getting eaten? I've played plenty of zombie games.'
As the horror soaked into him that this could be reality and the entire world, or at least his university, is experiencing an apocalypse, he shouted "Samantha!"
He felt a primal fear, but not for himself, for his wife. Samantha Redstone. She was his childhood sweetheart, the woman that he had loved since they were five years old, his reason for existing, his whole world.
Samantha was also at Silver Oak University studying to become a nurse. She was brilliant and had finished most of her associates degree by the time they had finished high school, went on to quickly finish her bachelor's in nursing by the time she should have been finishing sophomore year at Silver Oak, and was now completing her master's degree while Sylas was finishing his bachelors.
Sylas was brought back to reality by the sounds of screams from outside his window. He thought about where Samantha would be right now and looked at the digital clock on his nightstand but it wasn't on. Looking around he noticed that no lights were on in his dorm.
"The power? Crap! What time is it then?"
He saw something flash in the top right of his vision and noticed that the system was answering his question by emphasizing a digital clock that he didn't know if it was always there or just was placed now, but he saw it was now 9:03 AM.
"She should have just finished her class. I have to go to her."
Luckily, Sylas wasn't a deadbeat husband and knew where all of Samantha's classes were, or at least knew where the buildings were, because he would walk with her to and from classes as long as he was available. He was getting ready that morning to meet her outside the medical building to escort her to her next class.
Being woken from thought once again by screams he looked around the dorm. He needed a weapon to be able to protect himself if the situation got too bad outside and he couldn't sneak or run away from what he was now certainly calling the zombies. His gaze stopped on his roommate's side of the dorm on a baseball bat mentally thanking his roommate for being an athlete.
Grabbing the bat, Sylas went over to the door of the dorm room and took a deep breath. He slowly opened the door looking out into the hallway. His room was at the end of the hallway. The hallway had two windows, one on each end, that shed a bright light that quickly got dimmer by the time it got to the middle of the hallway where the stairs were. The power was out in the hallway so there were no artificial lights making the middle of the hallway incredibly dark.
Sylas didn't see anyone so he quietly left his room and almost closed the door before thinking that if the power was out then the card reader that unlocked his door with the student ID might not work. He grabbed a blanket off his bed and threw it in the door jam so it couldn't close all the way before slowly walking towards the stairs bat in hand.
Cautiously creeping towards the stairs, Sylas couldn't hear anything through any of the doors so far. Silver Oak University was known for its modern and well-built buildings so he couldn't think of a time where he had heard much through the doors anyway. The window was the only area that noise seemed to seep through.
Pulled from his train of thought as he reached the stairs, Sylas reached out to open the door to the stairway when he heard a muffled "AHHHH" from behind him. As he turned around to look, the door directly across from the stairs opened which allowed the scream to be full volume as he saw a guy running and stumbling out of the room.
He didn't recognize the guy as he pushed past Sylas, but he saw the reason for the panic. With its arms draped around the guy, a zombie was biting into the man's shoulder from behind as he was being pulled along. The man ran into the stairwell where Sylas saw through the extremely dim light that he ran into the handrail in the middle of the third floor stairwell and toppled over it. Sylas heard a jumble of metallic echos as the pair fell and then a sickening smack as they met the floor.
After listening to the silence for a moment, Sylas gathered the courage to walk down the stairs. He stayed on the outer edge as he navigated through the pitch blackness of the windowless terrain hoping to avoid any blood from the previous fall and listening for minute sounds of movement but all he could hear was his own heartbeat thumping loudly in his ears.
A minute of careful movement later, he opened the door to the first floor letting light flood in. Against his better judgement he looked back towards where he thought the duo would've landed and saw them. Blood flowed from the head of the man who had landed on top of the zombie but Sylas couldn't see any life in his eyes. The zombie's eyes followed Sylas as he bent over to puke but the zombie had broken its spine and was paralyzed under the man's body so it couldn't move.
Sylas hurriedly went to the front door of the dorm to take a look outside. There was gore in many places with the zombies having a feast. There were also a couple of bloody handprints on the glass doors from people trying to get into the building but being locked out because of the power outage. He couldn't see anyone alive and running around anymore. He made a mental plan of what path to take the medical building, grabbed pillows from the couches in the shared area to prop the doors open so that he or others could get back into the building, and was ready to head out into the new world to find his wife. He pushed open a door and took a deep breath.
For Samantha.