"Ugh!"
Elric moved swiftly through the dimly lit campus corridor, his figure flickering like a blur under the shattered fluorescent lights that still sputtered with occasional sparks of dying electricity. The hallway stretched before him like a tunnel, walls marked with strange dark stains that hadn't been there before the apocalypse.
In his arms, slung over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, was none other than Jenna—the so-called "queen" of the university track team, the girl who had vanished moments earlier in the chaos of the confrontation with Liam.
Her body was surprisingly light despite her athletic build, her muscles toned from years of competitive running. She hung limply across his shoulder, occasionally making small sounds of distress but otherwise unconscious or too shocked to properly resist.
He wasn't carrying her out of heroism. No—Elric had his reasons, calculated and deliberate.
The System had already whispered its cold mechanical notice into his mind, the familiar digital voice that had become his constant companion since the apocalypse began:
"Target meets the criteria for potential companion integration."
"Beauty Rating: 89/100"
"Compatibility Index: 78%"
"Recommendation: Acquire and integrate."
Jenna. Daughter of the mayor of Crescent City, the sprawling metropolis that Hudson University sat on the outskirts of. Arrogant, spoiled, untouchable—at least she used to be, back when society's rules still meant something. Before the world ended. Before survival became the only currency that mattered.
Even before the outbreak, everyone knew her name. She had the kind of beauty that turned heads wherever she walked—long blonde hair that caught the light like spun gold, legs that seemed to go on forever, a face that belonged on magazine covers. And she knew it, too. Her confidence bordered on arrogance, her dismissive attitude toward anyone she deemed beneath her legendary across campus.
She had the kind of temper that made people look away just as fast as they'd turned to admire her. More than one student had horror stories about being on the receiving end of her sharp tongue, her cutting remarks delivered with a smile that never reached her eyes.
Elric didn't care much for her personality—spoiled rich girls had never been his type. But the System's hint was reason enough to keep her alive, to bring her with him despite the risks and complications.
Now that monsters roamed the streets and a heavy fog blanketed the city—a different kind of mist than the toxic black fog that had come first, this one somehow worse, somehow alive—Elric knew one thing with absolute certainty: he needed allies.
Not friends. Not companions in the old sense. But people who could be useful, who could help him survive, who the System had verified as compatible with whatever strange game it was playing.
And the System was never wrong about compatibility. In the five days since the apocalypse began, every prediction it had made had proven accurate. Every warning had saved his life. Every opportunity it highlighted had paid dividends.
If Jenna fit the requirements, she was too valuable to leave behind—no matter how much he personally disliked dealing with entitled rich kids.
"Ahhh!"
Jenna screamed on his shoulder, the sound muffled against his back. She thrashed weakly, her fists pounding against his shoulders and back, but she had no leverage in her position. Her legs kicked uselessly in the air.
She had just witnessed Elric stab a man—seen the blood spray, heard Liam's screams of agony, watched a finger tumble across concrete. And now she was being carried away.
Terror flooded her system. Her heart hammered so hard she thought it might burst. Every instinct screamed at her to escape, to run, but where could she go? Into the toxic fog? Back to Liam's group?
Before long, her panic broke into a whimper—high and desperate, almost childlike—and then silence as her body simply shut down from the overwhelming stress.
Jenna fainted, her body going completely limp across his shoulder.
Elric exhaled, feeling the change in her weight distribution. "Good," he muttered under his breath, adjusting his grip. "Less noise."
He kept running, his legs burning with accumulated fatigue. His breath came heavy and ragged, each inhale scraping through his throat like sandpaper. The strain of consecutive teleports made his muscles tremble—using Spatial Shift cost stamina, and he'd burned through several jumps in quick succession during the confrontation and escape.
His vision swam slightly at the edges, dark spots appearing and disappearing as his body protested the abuse.
Even still, driven by pure determination and the knowledge that stopping meant death, in less than two minutes he reached the back entrance of Oakridge Faculty Apartments—a sturdy brick building that used to house university staff, built in the 1960s with the kind of solid construction that modern buildings lacked.
The structure had weathered the apocalypse better than most. Its windows were intact, its walls showed no signs of the strange corruption that had claimed other buildings. It looked almost normal, like you could walk inside and find professors grading papers and drinking coffee.
He was just about to enter, his hand reaching for the door handle, when something in the shadows caught his eye.
A shape moved. Slow. Deliberate. Crawling with an alien gait that made his skin prickle with instinctive revulsion.
Elric froze, his entire body going still, even his breathing quieting to near silence. Jenna's weight on his shoulder suddenly felt much heavier.
From the far end of the courtyard, emerging from the red mist like a nightmare made flesh, something appeared—a mutant spider.
It was massive, over three feet tall at the shoulder, its body covered in chitinous plates that gleamed wetly in the dim light. Eight crimson legs, each as thick as a broom handle, twitched and flexed as it moved. Its multiple eyes reflected what little light penetrated the fog, glowing faintly like dying embers.
Its fangs—curved like scimitars, easily the length of Elric's fingers—glistened with saliva or venom, droplets falling to hiss against the pavement below.
The monster hissed, a sound like steam escaping from a broken pipe mixed with something organic and wrong. It was stringing thick white silk across the cracked pavement, webbing up a section of the street with methodical precision, creating a trap for anything unfortunate enough to wander through.
Elric's skin crawled, every hair on his body standing on end. His rational mind knew it was just a mutated creature, a victim of whatever had caused the apocalypse. But his primal brain saw only a predator, something that existed solely to hunt and feed.
"Jesus… they're mutating faster than I thought."
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