New Quest!

  The crash from below silenced all conversation in the lecture hall, cutting through the air like a gunshot. It wasn't the dull thud of stumbling zombies or the clatter of falling debris—this was deliberate, powerful. Like something testing the building's structure with calculated precision. The sound reverberated through the floor, vibrating the chairs, rattling the windows in their frames.

  A heartbeat of silence followed, then another crash—louder, closer.

  Mills was the first to respond, moving to the makeshift command center they'd established at the professor's desk. Her fingers flew across the jury-rigged monitoring system, face illuminated by the blue glow of laptop screens. "Perimeter sensors just went off. All of them. Simultaneously." Her voice remained steady, but the muscle twitching in her jaw betrayed her fear.

  "That's not possible," said the young Engineer, adjusting her makeshift sling, wincing as blood seeped through the fabric. Sweat beaded on her forehead, her complexion ashen from pain and blood loss. "I set them to trigger independently. For all of them to activate at once—"

  Another crash, louder this time, so powerful the floor beneath us vibrated like a struck drum. Dust rained from ceiling tiles. A hairline crack raced across the far wall. Someone whimpered in the back of the room.

  "Whatever's down there," Aurora said, her sword materializing in her hand with a sound like silk tearing across steel, "it's not a regular zombie." The blade cast rippling patterns of silver light across her face, highlighting the determination in her eyes and the tightness in her jaw. Blood from earlier battles had dried in her hair, flaking onto her shoulders like macabre dandruff.

  As if responding to her words—as if summoned by them—a notification appeared before all of us. Floating blue text materialized in the air, casting an eerie glow across our faces, illuminating our expressions of mounting dread:

  System Quest Activated: The Evolved One

  Objective: Defeat the Evolved Lunar Sentinel

  Reward: Significant Experience

  Failure: Death

  Time Limit: None

  "A System Quest?" The Archivist adjusted his glasses nervously, the frames sitting crookedly on his blood-spattered face. His hands trembled so violently that his fingertips blurred. "Forced upon us?"

  "That's... not good," I said, studying the message, the blue glow reflecting in my eyes. My mouth had gone bone-dry, tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. "The System is deliberately throwing something at us. Testing us."

  "Like lab rats," someone muttered behind me.

  The Security Officer moved to the window, her movements stiff from a shoulder injury that had soaked half her uniform in crimson. She peered cautiously through a gap in the barricade, pressing her eye against splintered plywood. "I can't see anything down there, but—"

  She never finished her sentence.

  The window exploded inward with a deafening crash, a hailstorm of glass and splintered wood that glittered like deadly diamonds in the artificial light. The Security Officer flew backward as if hit by a truck, her body slamming into the far wall with a sickening crack that spoke of shattered vertebrae. Blood sprayed from her mouth in a fine mist as she crumpled to the floor, limbs twisted at impossible angles, eyes fixed and unseeing.

  In the jagged opening stood... something.

  My first thought was that it wasn't a zombie—not in the way we'd encountered them so far. This was something else entirely, something that made my lizard brain shriek in primal terror. It stood nearly eight feet tall, its body a grotesque fusion of human and something alien. The basic humanoid structure remained, but the proportions were wrong—limbs too long and jointed in extra places, torso too wide and rippling with unnatural musculature, neck elongated beyond natural limits and swiveling with the fluid grace of a serpent.

  Its skin had the same porcelain-like quality of the other zombies, but thicker, more armored, with jagged lunar crystal growths protruding from its shoulders, spine, and forearms like organic weapons. Where the regular zombies had cracked, this thing's skin was seamless, almost polished, interrupted only by veins of silver that pulsed with internal light—a heartbeat that followed no human rhythm. The air around it shimmered with heat distortion, carrying a metallic, ozone scent that burned my nostrils.

  But it was the eyes that truly distinguished it. Not just glowing silver, but complex—multifaceted like an insect's, reflecting the room in dozens of mirrored fragments. Those eyes didn't just see; they analyzed, dissected, calculated. Intelligence burned behind them—not human intelligence, but something older, colder, utterly alien.

  "What the fuck is that?" someone whispered behind me, their voice fracturing with terror.

  The creature tilted its head, regarding us with what seemed like cold calculation. A strange chittering sound emanated from somewhere in its throat, like insects scurrying over dry leaves. Then it moved.

  I'd thought Aurora was fast. This thing made her look like she was wading through molasses.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  It crossed the room in a blur, nothing more than a silver streak leaving afterimages on my retinas. It slammed into the barricade at the main door with the force of a wrecking ball, scattering desks and chairs like they were made of paper. The makeshift wall we'd spent hours constructing disintegrated in seconds. Three students who had been reinforcing that section were caught in the impact—two went down immediately, their bodies torn apart by the force alone, ribcages exploding outward, entrails slithering across the floor like obscene snakes. The third, a boy with a shock of red hair whose name I didn't know, was grabbed mid-flight by one elongated arm, fingers closing around his torso like a vice.

  The creature held him aloft, studying him with those fractured silver eyes, turning him slowly as if examining a curious specimen. The boy kicked and struggled, his screams piercing the shocked silence, high and thin like a wounded animal. Blood trickled from his nose, ears, mouth—internal hemorrhaging from the pressure of that monstrous grip.

  "Let him go!" Aurora shouted, lunging forward with her sword raised, silver light trailing behind the blade like a comet's tail. Her face was transformed by determination and rage, a warrior's mask that hid her fear.

  The creature's head snapped toward her with unnatural speed—a movement so fast it should have broken its neck. It made no sound, no expression, but something in its posture shifted—recognition, perhaps. Or assessment. The crystalline growths on its body flared brighter in response to her approach, pulsing with internal energy.

  It flicked its wrist almost casually, and the boy in its grip simply... came apart.

  Not torn or ripped—separated, as if the very bonds holding his molecules together had been undone. He disintegrated like wet sand, flesh and bone liquefying and separating in layers. Blood and viscera rained down in a fine crimson mist as the creature dropped what remained of the body—nothing more than a slurry of organic material that splattered across the floor with a sound like wet cement hitting pavement.

  The stench hit us a second later—copper and offal and the sharp, chemical smell of voided bowels. Someone behind me vomited. Someone else began to pray in frantic whispers.

  Aurora didn't hesitate, didn't slow. Her blade flashed in a silver arc aimed at the thing's neck—a strike that had decapitated countless zombies before. The air itself seemed to part before her blade, keening with a high, crystalline note.

  The sword hit. And stopped.

  The crystalline growths on the creature's skin flared with light where the blade made contact, a sudden nova of silver energy that forced me to shield my eyes. Aurora's eyes widened in shock as her momentum died, her weapon caught as if embedded in stone. For an instant, they were frozen in tableau—warrior and monster, connected by the silver blade that had, until now, cut through everything it touched.

  The creature moved again, one arm shooting out to grab Aurora by the throat, fingers elongating in mid-strike like tentacles of bone and sinew. But she was ready this time, her enhanced reflexes allowing her to twist away from the grasp, abandoning her sword in the process. She rolled backward across blood-slick floor, putting distance between herself and the monster, her movements fluid and precise despite the terror in her eyes.

  "Nate!" she shouted, her voice raw with urgency. "Gravity!"

  I didn't need to be told twice. My quill materialized in my hand with a thought, crystalline and pulsing, its tip dripping with cosmic ink that left glowing parabolas in the air as I moved it. The world fractured around me into equations and variables, reality's code unveiling itself to my perception. I identified the gravity variables surrounding the creature and rewrote them—not by ten times this time, but by fifty. This thing was clearly stronger than anything we'd faced, and I needed to match force with force.

  The changes took hold with a sound like thunder contained underwater. The floor beneath the creature cratered as invisible force pressed down upon it. Concrete cracked and splintered, dust billowing up as the pressure intensified. Tiles shattered, rebar bent, and the very foundation of the building groaned in protest at the localized singularity I'd created.

  For a moment, it seemed to work. The creature sank to one knee, its movements slowing under the tremendous weight. Its crystalline growths dimmed slightly, as if the effort of resisting was draining its power. Hope flared in my chest, bright and desperate.

  But then, with a sound like grinding stone, it began to stand.

  The concrete beneath its feet continued to crack and splinter, fragments floating upward in defiance of the very gravitational field I'd created. The creature rose against the crushing gravity through sheer physical might, its limbs trembling but straightening, its posture adjusting to distribute the impossible weight. It wasn't countering my ability—it was simply too strong to be contained by it.

  "It's resisting," I gasped, sweat pouring down my face as I poured more power into the gravity well, pushing it to sixty times, then seventy. My nose began to bleed, warm copper sliding over my lips. My vision tunneled, darkening at the edges as the strain of reality manipulation threatened to overwhelm me. "Its raw strength is off the charts!"

  The creature took one lumbering step forward, then another, each footfall leaving craters in the concrete. It fought through the extreme gravitational field with brute force, each movement slower now but unstoppable, like watching a glacier advance—nothing could halt its progress. Its eyes fixed on me, recognizing the source of its discomfort, multifaceted gaze reflecting my terrified expression a dozen times over.

  Professor Mills acted first, her tactical training overcoming her fear. "Everyone with a combat class, coordinated attack!" she barked, voice cutting through the chaos. "Non-combat classes, fall back and support!"

  The response was immediate. Five survivors with combat-oriented abilities rushed forward, forming a loose semicircle around the creature, their faces set with desperate determination. The young man with crackling energy in his hands—a Storm Channeler, level 3—released a bolt of lightning that struck the creature square in the chest. The classroom flashed stark white for an instant, the discharge momentarily illuminating the creature's skeletal structure beneath the skin—not human bones, but a lattice of crystalline supports and pulsing nodes that resembled no anatomy I recognized.

  A girl with glowing red daggers—weapons that seemed to cut through dimensions rather than merely physical matter—darted in from the side, her blades leaving burning trails in the air like phosphorus. A middle-aged faculty member from the Physics department extended his hands, and visible waves of force rippled outward, distorting the air like heat mirage, compressing the atmosphere into deadly pressure fronts.

  Their attacks connected simultaneously with the creature, creating a thunderous concussion that shook dust from the ceiling and blew out the remaining windows. The combined energies—electrical, thermal, kinetic—created a blinding flash and a shockwave that knocked several survivors off their feet. For a breathless moment, the creature was obscured by smoke and debris.