New York City dragged itself awake at eight AM. Bleary-eyed and regretting last night's choices.
The streets reeked of burnt coffee and car exhaust. Stale food cart grease mixed with February's bitter air. Steam rose from manholes like the city's own breath, visible in the cold morning light. Taxis honked their morning symphony while pedestrians shuffled past like caffeine-starved zombies.
A businessman in a wrinkled suit clutched his phone like a lifeline. College students stumbled along sidewalks, backpacks slung over shoulders, yesterday's clothes telling stories they'd rather forget. The city's heartbeat pulsed through concrete and steel—millions of lives intersecting for brief moments before spinning away again.
I weaved through the student flood in Washington Square Park. My bag shifted as I dodged the walking dead—freshmen stumbling toward overpriced coffee carts with the desperation of the truly addicted. The arch loomed ahead, framing the sky in perfect contradiction.
Permanence. Change. The eternal story of New York.
I'd walked this path hundreds of times, but today something felt different. The air carried an electric charge that had nothing to do with the weather. Even the pigeons seemed agitated, clustering in unusual patterns around the fountain.
Beyond the arch, steel and glass reached toward heaven. The city demanded attention, pressing into every space like it feared being forgotten. Neon signs flickered their promises. Car horns created urban music. And somewhere beyond the smog-choked horizon, the moon waited.
Hidden. Watching. Patient.
I'd always felt its presence. Ancient. Older than nations, older than gods. A silent guardian that had witnessed empires rise and fall, lovers meet and part, students stress about exams that would matter for maybe five years.
Speaking of which—my impending torture session with Professor Langley.
My phone buzzed, cutting through my cosmic contemplations.
Jake: Yo, Nate, what class you got this semester?
I smirked, already knowing his reaction. Jake had survived exactly one Langley lecture before switching majors.
Me: Astrophysics with Langley.
Three dots appeared instantly.
Jake: Damn, bro. My condolences.
I stifled a laugh, dodging an e-scooter rider who'd declared war on traffic laws. The guy weaved between pedestrians like he was training for some extreme sport. Jake wasn't wrong about Langley. The professor could turn exoplanet mechanics into a two-hour rant about why 17th-century scholars were idiots.
Jake: You bringing a pillow?
Me: Nah, but I might need one.
Jake: Want to grab lunch after? Assuming you survive.
Me: If I'm still conscious, sure.
Jake: RIP to your GPA if you fall asleep again
I grinned, remembering last semester's incident. Langley had actually thrown chalk at me. Good aim, too.
Me: See you at noon. Pray for me.
I pocketed my phone and climbed the Silver Center steps. Warm air hit me, saturated with coffee and stress. Students clustered everywhere—cramming for midterms, debating whether attendance was really necessary, questioning their life choices.
Someone murdered jazz at the lobby piano. The melody limped along, occasionally hitting the right notes by accident. A few people had gathered to watch, probably wondering if they should intervene or call campus security.
The usual chaos of academic life. Familiar. Comforting, even.
I scanned the crowd out of habit. Aurora Reyes leaned against a pillar near the elevators, scrolling her phone. Her deep blue eyes flicked up as I approached, catching the morning light streaming through tall windows.
"Ready for another semester of suffering?" She arched an eyebrow.
Aurora had this way of making everything sound like a challenge. Maybe it came from years of kendo training—always ready for the next fight.
"As ready as I can be."
She tucked rose gold hair behind her ear, a gesture I'd seen countless times but somehow never got tired of watching. "Langley's in a mood today. Heard him ranting to some poor TA about modern scientists not respecting 'the art of discovery.'"
"Let me guess—we're all slaves to technology who've forgotten the beauty of pure observation?"
"Close. Something about how telescopes are making us lazy." She rolled her eyes. "Because apparently, the Hubble Space Telescope is cheating."
"One of those lectures."
"Definitely." She pushed off from the pillar, moving with the fluid grace that made her kendo team captain. "Come on. Let's get good seats before the carnage begins."
We walked into the lecture hall together. Dull conversation filled the space as students filed in, each carrying their own blend of caffeine, anxiety, and resignation. The familiar theater-style seating stretched down toward the podium where Langley would soon begin his assault on our attention spans.
I dropped my bag near the middle—close enough to see the board, far enough to avoid becoming a target for chalk projectiles. Aurora settled beside me, already pulling out her notebook with the efficiency of someone who'd mastered the art of academic survival.
Massive windows lined the walls, letting in pale morning light that made dust motes dance in the air. Outside, the city rumbled on, oblivious to cosmic mysteries. Traffic flowed in predictable patterns. People hurried to jobs they might or might not love. Life continued its relentless march forward.
Three months left. One final semester before graduation. No more all-nighters fueled by energy drinks and desperation. No more wondering if my caffeine intake was approaching lethal levels. No more Professor Langley.
I should've been excited.
Instead, something felt off. Like standing at the edge of an invisible cliff, sensing the drop without seeing it. The feeling had been growing for weeks—a persistent itch between my shoulder blades that I couldn't scratch.
I rubbed my neck and checked the clock. Langley had five minutes before officially beginning his assault on our collective will to live. Students continued filing in, finding seats, preparing for battle.
My gaze drifted to the windows, where endless sky stretched above the city. Clouds drifted past like lazy thoughts. Somewhere up there, invisible in daylight, the moon followed its ancient path.
Even in daylight, I could picture it. The moon, hidden behind blue, waiting for darkness. Patient as only celestial bodies could be.
The universe was vast. Unknowable. We'd barely scratched its surface despite all our telescopes and equations. Every answer revealed ten new questions. Every discovery showed how much we still didn't understand.
The moon had seen it all. Every triumph. Every failure. Every—
A flicker of light filled my vision.
I blinked hard. The light remained.
A screen—translucent, glowing, impossible—hovered in front of me. Blue text floated in the air like some augmented reality display, except I wasn't wearing any gear.
"Moonfall Has Begun. Your Class Has Been Assigned. May Luna's blessings be upon you."
My pulse spiked. The words didn't fade, didn't flicker, didn't reveal themselves as hallucination or trick of the light.
Around me, students shifted nervously. Some rubbed their eyes like I had. Others whispered urgently, gesturing at empty air. A girl two rows down stared straight ahead, mouth slightly open.
Does everyone see this?
The question formed in my mind as my screen flickered. Changed. New text replaced the first message.
Main Class: Astral Equationist (★★★★★)
Five stars glittered next to the words like some cosmic achievement badge.
My brain catalogued the detail without understanding its significance. The rest of me struggled to process the impossible. A video game interface hovering in real space. Reality itself coded, quantified, categorized.
This couldn't be real.
But the screen remained steady, refusing to fade or reveal itself as illusion.
A bloodcurdling scream tore through the room.
Raw. Primal. The kind of sound humans weren't meant to make—like vocal cords being ripped from a throat.
My head snapped toward the noise. A girl in the front row convulsed violently, spine arching at impossible angles that should have snapped bones. Her textbook tumbled to the floor, pages fluttering like dying birds.
She collapsed between the seats.
Her limbs twitched spasmodically, fingers clawing at nothing. Her skin began to change—blanching to porcelain white that looked almost luminous under the fluorescent lights. Cracks spread across her face like fine china dropped on concrete.
Dark veins spread beneath the surface like ink through water. Pulsing. Growing. Racing along arteries that had never been meant to carry whatever now flowed through them.
The room froze in collective shock. That moment when brains refuse to process what eyes are seeing. When reality takes a hard left turn and leaves everyone standing at the intersection, wondering which way to go.
Professor Langley stopped mid-sentence, chalk hovering inches from the blackboard.
Then her eyes snapped open.
They glowed silver. Not metaphorically, not the poetic silver of storm clouds or polished metal—actual light pulsed from where human irises should be. Alien. Wrong. Beautiful in the most terrifying way possible.
Looking into those inhuman eyes, I understood with terrible clarity.
Whatever looked back wasn't human anymore.
The screaming erupted like a dam bursting. Reality fractured around us as more bodies hit the floor—skin paling, cracking, veins darkening as transformation spread through the room like a virus given physical form.
Students scrambled backward, knocking over chairs in their desperation to escape. Notebooks scattered. Bags abandoned. Others stood paralyzed, unable to process the horror unfolding before them.
The thing that had been a girl jerked upright with impossible speed. Bones cracked as joints bent in ways they weren't designed for. Her head twitched at unnatural angles, like a marionette controlled by a drunk puppeteer.
Silver eyes swept the room before locking onto the nearest student—a guy with a baseball cap who'd been scrolling his phone moments before.
She lunged.
Speed that defied human capability. One moment crouched between seats, the next airborne, fingers extended like claws.
Blood splattered across linoleum in violent arterial spray.
The guy's scream cut off in a wet gurgle. Red painted the whiteboard behind him in abstract patterns that would have been beautiful if they weren't so horrifying.
Civility's membrane ruptured completely. Panic exploded outward like a supernova—raw, animal terror that swept through the room faster than thought.
Students screamed, shoved, trampled each other in blind desperation to reach the exits. The orderly world of academic schedules and assignment deadlines disintegrated in seconds.
The transformed weren't just attacking. They were feeding.
Tearing into flesh with inhuman strength, silver light leaking from their mouths as they consumed what had once been classmates. With each victim, more transformed. Eyes flaring silver as infection—or evolution—spread.
"Move!" Aurora's voice cut through chaos like a blade.
Her hand closed around my wrist with bruising force. Human contact jolted me back to my body, breaking the horrified trance that had held me frozen.
We ran.
Stumbling over abandoned backpacks and overturned chairs. Pushing through the mass of panicked bodies surging toward exits that suddenly seemed impossibly far away.
But we couldn't move fast enough.
The room had become a storm of movement. Bodies fleeing. Bodies turning. Bodies falling. The careful order of lecture hall seating dissolved into chaos as furniture became obstacles and classmates became either allies or threats.
The air filled with metallic blood and something else. Something alien and electric. Like ozone after lightning strikes, but wrong—charged with energy that made my teeth ache.
Professor Langley lay motionless near his podium, chalk still clutched in one hand. Red pool spreading beneath him. His eyes stared at nothing, reflecting fluorescent lights that flickered now, damaged by the violence.
As we fought toward the door, pushing against the tide of panicked students, one thought crystallized in my mind with perfect, terrible clarity:
This wasn't a glitch.
This wasn't a dream.
This wasn't even an attack.
This was transformation. Evolution. Selection.
The game had begun.
And we were all playing whether we wanted to or not.