We rounded the corner into the lobby and there they stood – six figures gathered near the entrance, tense and watchful.

  "Nate?!" A familiar voice called out, a mixture of disbelief and hope.

  Jake. My best friend stood there, alive against all odds. His clothes were torn and dirty, his face marked with cuts and exhaustion, but his eyes held the same determination I remembered. In his hand, a baseball bat crackled with what appeared to be electrical energy.

  "Jake," I said, my voice catching slightly as relief washed over me. Even in this nightmare, some connections remained.

  "You're alive," Jake said, lowering his electrified bat. His eyes were wide with shock, his NYU hoodie torn and stained with what I hoped wasn't blood. "When everyone started turning in class, I thought—"

  "We made it out," I said quickly. "Barely."

  One of the survivors behind him, a tall woman with close-cropped hair, stepped forward cautiously. "You know them?"

  "This is Nate, my best friend," Jake explained, still looking at me like he couldn't believe I was real. "And Aurora. We were supposed to meet up for lunch when... when it happened."

  Aurora remained vigilant, her hand resting on her sword as she assessed the group. "Who are they?" she asked, nodding toward the four strangers.

  "We found each other in the chaos," Jake said. "Safety in numbers, right?"

  The woman introduced herself as Mei, a nursing student. The others were Carlos, who mumbled something about engineering; Dina, who kept adjusting her cracked glasses; and Eli, a freshman who looked too shocked to speak.

  "Is it true about the others?" Jake asked, his voice hollow. "About what happens if you don't get a class?"

  I nodded grimly. "If the System doesn't assign you a class, you turn. You become one of those... things."

  "We've been running since morning," Mei said. "The campus, the streets... everything just went insane all at once."

  "We heard this building was safe," Jake added. "Someone said all the zombies here had been taken out. We thought maybe there was a military presence or something..."

  Aurora let out a small, bitter laugh. "No military. Just us."

  A heavy silence fell over the group. Jake stared at us, disbelief written across his face.

  "What do you mean 'just you'?" Carlos asked, his voice tinged with suspicion.

  I exchanged a glance with Aurora. "We cleared the building," I said simply. "All of it."

  "That's impossible," Mei said, shaking her head. "We passed by earlier and saw dozens of those things inside. That was only a couple hours ago."

  "Fifty-seven," Aurora corrected, her voice matter-of-fact. "Three evolved. The ones with the silver cracks across their skin."

  Jake's eyes widened as he took in this information. The bat in his hand sparked in response to his shock. "How? What class did you get? I got Storm Channeler, and I can barely handle one of the normal ones."

  I could see the others tensing, reassessing us with new eyes.

  "I'm a Lunar Knight," Aurora said, her hand still on her sword hilt. "Four stars."

  "And I'm an Astral Equationist," I added. "Five stars."

  The effect was immediate. Mei took an involuntary step back. Carlos muttered something under his breath. Dina's hands trembled as she pushed her glasses up.

  "Five stars?" Jake whispered. "I didn't even know that was possible. Mine's just three."

  Eli, who had been silent until now, spoke up. "We saw someone like you earlier. A girl who could control fire. She said she had four stars. She saved us from a group of them, but then more came and she told us to run."

  I felt a surge of hope. "There are others like us out there. People fighting back."

  "But how did you get so strong so quickly?" Jake asked, gripping his bat tighter. "I've been channeling lightning for hours and I'm still barely keeping up."

  "We had to adapt fast," Aurora said simply. "It was fight or die."

  I nodded. "There's something about killing them that makes us stronger. The System calls it experience points. We've been leveling up."

  Jake looked at his crackling bat, then back at us. "So what you're saying is, the more we fight, the stronger we get?"

  "Exactly," I said. "But it's dangerous. Really dangerous."

  "No kidding," Carlos muttered.

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  "You can stay here," Aurora offered unexpectedly. "We've secured the building. It's safe, at least for now."

  The group exchanged glances, hope kindling in their exhausted faces.

  "There's food in the cafeteria," I added. "And the water still works, somehow."

  Jake stepped forward and, without warning, pulled me into a tight hug. "It's only been a few hours," he said, his voice breaking slightly. "How is the world already so different?"

  I returned the embrace, grateful for this connection amid the chaos. "I don't know," I admitted. "But we'll figure it out together."

  As we led the group inside, I could feel their eyes on us – watching Aurora and me with a mixture of awe and uncertainty. In just one day, we had become something different.

  Something powerful.

  Night was falling on the second day of this new world, and with it, the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.

  We found a place to sleep on the fourth floor, a classroom with intact windows and doors that could be barricaded.

  Carlos set up some alarms for zombies and other survivors so that we would wake up if anybody other than us came close.

  Jake and the others collapsed almost immediately, their bodies surrendering to exhaustion. But sleep eluded me like a particularly stubborn equation.

  I made my way to the roof instead. The cool night air carried the scent of smoke and something else, something alien that hadn't existed in our world this morning. Standing at the edge, I surveyed what remained of New York.

  My enhanced stats had sharpened my vision considerably. Where once I might have seen just vague shapes and distant lights, I now perceived details with unnerving clarity. Fires dotted the cityscape like fallen stars. The streets below crawled with silver-eyed figures, wandering with terrible purpose. In the distance, a building simply... floated, torn free from its foundation by forces that defied conventional physics.

  I stretched my senses outward, feeling for the lunar energy signatures that now defined my world. "No stronger zombies nearby," I murmured, the assessment bringing little comfort.

  "Couldn't sleep?" Aurora's voice came from behind me, soft but clear.

  I didn't turn as she walked up beside me. "How could I?" The question wasn't really a question.

  "Same," she replied simply, settling herself on the ledge, legs dangling over forty stories of empty air with the casual confidence of someone whose Agility stat made such positions trivial.

  "Things changed so much, so fast," I said after a long silence, watching as somewhere in the distance, a flash of light erupted and then vanished.

  Another class user, perhaps.

  Another battle.

  "Yeah," she nodded, her face illuminated by the strange silver moonlight that seemed brighter than it should be. "This is just the first day too."

  The weight of that thought settled heavily between us.

  "We killed zombies, became stronger," I said, the words tasting bitter in my mouth. I paused, then forced myself to acknowledge the rest. "...And killed humans."

  "Nate," Aurora began, but I couldn't stop now.

  "We killed humans," I repeated, a harsh laugh escaping me. "For our survival."

  "We had to," she said, her voice steady even as her hand betrayed her. "And they wanted us to."

  I looked at her then, really looked, and saw what I'd been too wrapped up in my own guilt to notice – the minute tremor in her fingers as they curled around the edge of the roof, the tightness around her eyes. The Lunar Knight, so deadly and graceful in battle, carrying the same burden I was.

  I breathed out slowly. Right. Aurora didn't want it either.

  "We can't be bogged down by this guilt," Aurora said finally, her voice firmer than before. "We did... what was right."

  I noticed she wasn't looking at me as she spoke. Her eyes were fixed on some distant point in the city, though I suspected she wasn't seeing it at all. She wasn't talking to me – she was talking to herself. Affirming a truth she needed to believe to keep moving forward.

  The silver glow of the moon caught the edge of her sword, still sheathed but never far from her hand now. Strange how quickly we adapt to our new necessities.

  "We need to plan properly," I said, drawing her attention back to the present.

  She turned to me, one eyebrow raised. "So you want to plan now?"

  "As you said, we have to move forward," I replied, finding a strange comfort in focusing on logistics instead of morality. My Intelligence stat made patterns clearer, problems more solvable. It was easier than dwelling on what we'd become.

  "Good," Aurora nodded, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with a hand that no longer trembled. "So what are you thinking?"

  "We are strong enough that survival is fine," I said, sorting through possibilities like equations. "But surviving isn't enough. We need to understand what's happening."

  "The military will be responding," Aurora said, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees. "If they haven't been overrun already."

  I shook my head. "I've been thinking about that. The System seems designed to render conventional forces ineffective. Otherwise, why give some people abilities like ours?"

  Aurora considered this, her brow furrowing. "You think it's deliberate? That whatever caused Moonfall wanted to neutralize organized resistance?"

  "Look at the pattern," I gestured toward the city below. "Normal humans either turn or receive weak classes. Military personnel would be armed but still essentially normal. Against evolved zombies..."

  "They wouldn't stand a chance," Aurora finished. "Not without high-star classes of their own."

  "Exactly. And what are the odds that the highest-level classes were randomly distributed to military personnel?"

  Aurora's eyes narrowed. "So we're on our own."

  "For now." I turned away from the edge, pacing as I thought. "Tomorrow, we should try to reach your grandmother's place in Queens. It's defensible, has supplies. After that, we need information."

  "Good thinking," Aurora agreed. "We also need to find others like us. High-level classes. There have to be more."

  "And we need to keep leveling up," I added, her voice dropping slightly. "If today was any indication, things will only get harder."

  We continued planning for over an hour, mapping out routes through the city, identifying potential resource locations, discussing how to train Jake and the others without putting them at too much risk. The familiar rhythm of problem-solving calmed us both, I think. It gave structure to the chaos, direction to our fear.

  By the time we finished, the moon had risen fully overhead, casting the broken city in an eerie silver glow. I felt exhaustion settling into my bones, my enhanced Constitution no match for the physical and emotional toll of the day.

  "We should get some rest," Aurora said, standing and stretching. "Tomorrow will be long."

  I nodded, taking one last look at the cityscape before turning toward the roof access door.

  Tomorrow would indeed be long, but at least we had a plan. It wasn't much, but it was something to hold onto in a world that had shattered around us.

  As we made our way back downstairs, I found myself wondering what New York would look like a week from now. A month. If we survived that long.

  My last thought before finally surrendering to sleep was not of the System or our plan or even the people we'd lost. It was of the moon, hanging in the sky like a silent observer, watching as humanity stumbled through the game it had created for us.

  And for the first time, I wondered if it was laughing.