The door came apart at the handle and the first of them spilled through the gap into the room. It moved low and fast across the wrecked floor, grey hide stretched over a frame that bent the wrong way at every joint.
Students nearest the front lost whatever nerve had kept them in their seats. They went over their own desks in a rush, and the scramble pulled the creature's head toward the thickest knot of movement.
A second shape pushed through the broken door behind the first, then a third, until the gap became a steady source of them. The room that had felt crowded with thirty students now felt small in a different way, with the exits turned into throats.
Mark forgot the thing on the floor the moment he saw a use for the person next to him. He came at Nox with both hands out, reaching past his shoulder for the gun instead of the broken door.
"Give it here, give it to me," Mark said, dragging at the weapon with the whole weight of his panic behind it.
Nox turned his shoulder into the grab and kept the barrel angled away from both of them. They stayed locked together for a breath while the creature chose which movement in the room was worth crossing the floor for.
The creature came three steps closer while they fought over the grip, drawn by two bodies straining against each other. Its head swung between the crowd at the wall and the pair by the desk, weighing which meat sat within easier reach.
Mark made the only choice his fear left any room for, and it was not a brave one. He shoved Nox hard toward the thing coming across the tiles and threw himself back into the crowd at the wall.
The push carried Nox two steps before he caught a desk and stopped short of the creature's reach. He brought the gun up level, set the front sight on the center of Mark's chest, and put one round into him.
That single shot flattened every other noise in the room and left a thin ringing under it. Mark folded around the hole in his shirt, dropping hard between the desks without a last clever word for it.
The class had wanted a show out of Nox all morning, and now it had one that nobody could laugh at. A girl at the front began screaming and would not stop, while two others dragged her toward the far wall.
The rest went quiet in the particular way of people who have just met the real shape of someone they thought they knew.
Nox did not look at the body longer than it took to be sure the account had closed. Mark had spent years making a project of him, and the whole debt came due in one second of noise.
Somewhere in the silence the girl who had laughed at the orange drink that morning made a small broken sound. It did not move him, because her fear arrived years too late to be worth anything to him now.
The creature reached the first fallen student and tore into the soft parts of him. The sound of it explained the teeth better than any screen could have.
He made himself watch the way it worked instead of turning from it. It planted its back legs before each pull, keeping its head low once it started, which left a gap between one bite and the next.
Its eyes sat forward on the skull, which meant it saw ahead well and to the sides poorly. Anything that stayed off its centerline and struck late would own the opening, which was the only one he could afford.
A message opened at the edge of his vision while the thing was still busy feeding. He read it without lowering the gun, in case the meal ended sooner than he wanted it to.
[ First Player bonus unlocked. ]
[ Allocate 10 starter points. ]
Ten points waited behind a body that had never once been enough for the rooms it had to survive. He pushed four into Strength, three into Agility, then the last three into Endurance, and felt the shift move through him as the screen closed.
His grip settled harder around the weapon, and his legs felt ready to answer a command faster than they had a minute before. It was not power in any real sense yet, but it was the first thing his own body had handed him instead of surrendering.
He flexed his free hand once and watched the fingers close harder than they ever had before. The trade was simple, and he understood it at once, because the System paid in the exact currency the school had spent years denying him.
He turned the gun a quarter and checked the load with his thumb. The magazine had come to school with eight rounds, and Mark had just spent the first. That left seven for a building that would try to take every one.
Ms. Joy pushed herself up from behind the desk she had used for cover the whole time.
"Nox, you have to do something, you have to protect the others," she said, aiming a shaking hand at the creature as if the order still carried weight.
He looked at her, and then at the students who had watched Mark work on him for years without finding their voices. The room had never spent a thing to keep him breathing, and it held no claim on the advantage his points had bought.
This room had heard him ask for help exactly once, an hour ago, over a cup of juice. It had answered with laughter then, and nothing about the math had changed just because the stakes had.
"No," he said, and moved back toward the cracked windows while the creature raised its head at the new voice.
The glass along the outer wall had split through during the Merge, and one bent frame hung open above the yard. He climbed onto the sill, measured the drop to the churned ground two floors down, and went out before the thing behind him could close the gap.
Behind him a chair went over as the creature committed to the space he had just left. Its claws found the sill a moment after his weight cleared it, close enough that he felt the wall shudder.
The fall drove straight up through his shins, and he rode it down into a crouch instead of standing against it. His new Endurance turned what should have been a shattered ankle into a jolt he could still move on.
He came up along the base of the building with the wall against his shoulder and his eyes on the corner ahead. The classroom noise climbed higher behind him as more creatures poured through the ruined door toward the people trapped past it.
He put the corner of the wing between his back and the room, leaving the screaming where it was. Whatever the class lived through now, it would live on the same help it had once given him, which came to nothing.
The yard between the two wings had buckled into ridges of torn turf and split pipe. Pale stone walls cut across the old ground at angles no builder had chosen, and a nameless tower stood where the sports field used to run flat.
He crossed it low with the gun held down along his thigh, keeping the seven rounds for something that could not be solved another way.
A screen opened against his vision as he reached the shadow of the east wing wall. He set his back to the brick and read it while his breath came back down. Nothing that he could see moved along the buckled fence line behind him.
[ Dungeon scan complete. ]
[ Hostile signatures detected: 214. ]
[ Intelligent commander present: 1. ]
He read the count twice and finally understood the shape of the day the floor had torn open. More than two hundred of them stood between the yard and whatever a commander was worth.
A commander meant the pack had an order to it, which meant a throat worth cutting somewhere near the center of the building.
The number should have driven him toward any wall with a working lock on it. Instead it settled into something nearer a map than a threat, because every signature on it was EXP the school had never once let him earn.
He kept his back off the windows' line and started counting the east-wing doors from memory. The building had thrown him out once already this morning, and now it had left the only way in standing wide.
The nearest door hung off one hinge, and past it the corridor ran darker than the morning should have allowed. Something in there had already learned to wait, because the noise of the pack did not reach as far as the first bend.